The cabinet initiative announced by the Prime Minister’s Department (PMO) is officially called ‘the committee on promoting inter-religious understanding and harmony’. Unofficially, it has just been dubbed the Small Fry Committee.

Derived from Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Muhyiddin Yassin’s remarks, this nickname is – one would suppose – in keeping with the “small role??? set aside for it.

Muhyiddin has stressed that the “special committee??? (established so that the Prime Minister can make a play at 1Malaysia / Malaysian First), though special, is not a commission with legal standing to enforce or influence policies. And the DPM is quite right on several counts.

One, as he pointed out, committee head Ilani Isahak is merely a “moderate Islamic scholar???; actually she’s a lawyer and Umno politician but then again, this is Malaysia Boleh where a space tourist can be an ‘Angkasawan’. Nonetheless, she is not a minister, sitting MP or senator. So she could well be exactly just what Muhyiddin broadly hints at … quite powerless.

Two, the minister in charge – Koh Tsu Koon – is indeed ineffectual to influence policies much less enforce them. Koh’s track record speaks for itself.

Three, as clarified by the DPM, the non-Muslim quarter (well, one-sixth actually) of the committee has no legal standing. The non-Muslims are represented by the Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and Taoism (MCCBCHST) which can at best only make recommendations.

Muhyiddin is again correct to tacitly imply that MCCBCHST is not a government statutory body which has any force of law behind it. In any case, Malaysia has no codified Christian, Buddhist or Hindu, etc, legislation to speak of.

However in comparison, the committee’s Islamic components such as Jakim, Ikim and the Fatwa Council do have legal standing as well as state machinery backing them as they are agencies in the PMO or in government.

However, since Muhyiddin has asserted that “Islam will not be discussed???, this point is moot.

Four, Muhyiddin forgot to say that the committee has no doctrinal authority either. Christianity is more than 2,000 years old, Islam about 1,400 years, Buddhism 2,500 years and Hinduism dates back to among the earliest human civilizations. Therefore what else is new that the Small Fry Committee can add?

The committee is not the Vatican. It does not comprise any Grand Ayatollahs, or influential clerics or scholars from Al-Azhar or Mecca or Medina. Instead it has Illani, whom Koh characterized as a “very charming personality??? possessing great people skills to put everyone at ease.

Illani’s personal charm may come in useful when she plays hostess later at Seri Perdana. We were earlier informed that one of the committee’s major tasks is to arrange “a formal annual meeting between the PM and religious leaders???. Presumably, the group will – for that one occasion once a year – be served the quintessential Malaysian-first drink teh tarik during their tete-a-tete at the PM’s official residence.

Agama, Bangsa dan Negara

Mark the order – Religion, Race, Country.

Muhyiddin has recently declared he is Malay first. If he prioritizes his Muslim identity as he appears to in this episode championing Islam, might we presume he is Malaysian last?

Perhaps some of the non-Muslim members of the Small Fry Committee had seen themselves as Malaysian first when they agreed to participate in this project under the aegis of the PMO’s National Unity and Integrity Department.

Nonetheless, this department is a small fry department compared to its bigger fry PMO counterpart the Syariah Department. (The really big fish is the police department within the Home Ministry.)

Malaysian first vs. Malaysian last-Religion first teams are simply not playing the same game in the same pitch, hence not governed by the same set of rules.

Koh had told reporters that the committee were going “to sit together to exchange views???. Perkasa raised its objection to this, stating that the religious leaders all sitting down together might “place Islam at par with other religions???. To them, Islam is, of course, one level above.

To set Perkasa’s mind at rest, Muhyiddin could easily have reassured Ibrahim Ali on the ineffectiveness of past playgroups.

Flashback: In January 2006, a group of 10 cabinet ministers submitted a memorandum to then Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi calling for a review of laws affecting the rights of non-Muslims. The group withdrew their memo (drafted with the help of MCA’s religious and legal bureaus) the very next day, thus confirming that they were only playacting.

In July the same year, Abdullah cautioned the NGOs against continuing their roadshows on Article 11 (freedom of religion) while the cabinet issued a directive that media should not report on sensitive issues. There was no Perkasa back in 2006; today the ‘sensitivity’ clamour will be even more vociferous.

Koh made a disclaimer that no active politicians will be involved with the Small Fry Committee to avoid it being politicized. He needn’t have worried. The committee has no clout, political or otherwise. Its lack of real power to meet its own objectives is partly due to the usual Malay (in present context, a word directly interchangeable with Muslim) dominance of the entire affair.

According to previous reports, Hindu Sangam deputy-president Dr M. Bala Tharmalingam was quoted as saying the main inter-faith committee will be represented by five Muslim groups while the non-Muslim body will be represented by MCCBCHST. The ratio of 5:1 looks like our typical quota policy at work.

However, ironically with Muhyiddin saying that Islam will not be discussed, the MCCBCHST will now at least have the floor. And so, the dialogue turns into a monologue, as predicted by certain sceptics. Can a monologue by non-Muslims promote ‘better understanding and harmony’?

Whisper me sweet nothings

One of the great ironies of life in this country is that when a truthful politician is being brutally honest, it throws the public off – as evidenced by the adverse reaction to Muhyiddin’s “small fry??? statement.

Rather than appreciating this forthright appraisal, the hoi polloi prefer deluding themselves with smooth-talking sop like “a place under the Malaysian sun for everyone???.

Truly, how will this exercise in futility yield a better understanding?

Let’s take the Quran for starters. It is cast in stone and its every single word kept intact through one-and-a-half millennia. Anyone reading the Quran in April 2010 would be reading the same text unchanged as someone in 1910 or 1810. Can the verses be interpreted any differently?

On the other hand, are the non-Muslims permitted to explain their Holy Books to Muslims? Try conveying “Hail Mary, mother of God??? to the Muslims. Christian insistence on the use of ‘Allah’ would render the translation something like “Wahai Mariam, ibu kepada Allah???.

The purported threat that Christians are surreptitiously, if not subliminally, trying to subvert a Muslim’s faith is one taken seriously. The Al-Islam magazine reporters are case in point. While the public is angry at them for spitting out the sacrament of the Holy Communion, overlooked is the fact that they were journalists going uncover to investigate whether Malays were present in churches.

Please reflect on the fact that Malays are so protected that they cannot even be seen in a church, and so protective of Islam that some get quite angry when they see a non-Muslim tourist loitering in a mosque compound.

Such is the backdrop to the Small Fry Committee getting together “to promote inter-religious harmony???. But guess who were left out of the party? The pagans, animists, agnostics and atheists had not been invited. Not that this omission really matters.

The crux of the matter is hardly that non-Muslims are required to better understand Islam nor that Muslims be allowed to learn more about other faiths (at the risk of the pastors or priests enlightening them inadvertently breaking the law which protects Muslims from this very kind of exposure).

At the core of it all is that the Islamization push has effectively sorted all of us here into two sides of the divide – ummah and ‘kafir’. Ustaz Mohd Ridhuan Tee Abdullah adds ‘karfi harbi’ for good measure. Please go find out the implications of ‘harbi’ first before commencing on another round of Muhyiddin-bashing.

Muhyiddin may be in-your-face and couldn’t care less that he is offending non-Muslims but at least his blunt approach serves as a timely wake-up call. We should all start looking at the religious impasse with the uncompromising clarity this situation deserves.