YOGA INTO MALAYSIAN FIGHT FOR POWER

YOGA-YOGA INTO A BHAIRAVA, A GOD OF A SORT THE MALAYS HAD FOUGHT




It’s a personality subversion Malays feel they are being made to face by the resurgent non-Malay chauvinism the past decade or so.
Some from the Hindraf, Dap, GERAKAN and PKR continue to bash the Malays, even claiming there really isn’t a Malay community at all, as though the Malays are merely shadows on the inside of their cranium.

The idea is to break the Malays into Javanese, Baewans, Aceher, Minangs and so on. While that may happen in Singapore, in Malaysia there are nine (9) Malay rulers the chauvinists must cause first to disappear.

The hate-Malay hate-Islam campaign has gone mad, leaving in its trail a dead PKR with the charismatic Anwar Ibrahim frozen solid in his track, a failure once again.

Some Chinese and Indians now say everything Malay is Indian or Chinese in origin, which is insane.

The idea is to harass and undermine the collective personality, the same way the colonial masters had done to the conquered.

As long as the name-calling did not take on an overt political nature the Malays do not seem to care. But it did.

The Gerakan and the Hindraf came under recent Malay reactions.

In last week’s episodes a group of 50 Silat (Malay martial arts) organizations convened by Pewaris on Saturday 22 November was to have begun the offensive against GERAKAN Wanita chief.

The gathering decided to march to a police station and lodge a report against Tan. But some people intervened and the march was called off.

When on the same day it was heard the National Fatwa Council had reached a decision to declare Yoga forbidden (haram), it did not cause any close observer to feel distressed.

But the popular reactions quickly sloshed into the wilds, few stopping to ask what the fatwa (legal decision) was really about.

The stampede did not even care to ask how many Malays or Muslims in Malaysia were involved in Yoga? For that matter, how many persons in Malaysia, regardless of race or religion, would be in the habit of performing Yoga?

In the fatwa, mention was purposely made about the fear the Muslims could be influenced by Hindu monism.

What then is the nature of the monism that was meant?

In Islam God is the Real (al-Haqq) and Perfect Being, or The Existent (al-Maujud). We are merely souls (nafs), or personalities.

Perfecting the personality is our existential objective - to become insan al-kamil (perfect man), a servant of God and not by any chance, God.

It ought to have been simple to understand the events as a light force reactions against the Malay- and Islam-bashing using Hindu monistic relief to send the Hindraf offensive scuttling for cover.

It should be remembered Pagar Ruyung (in Minangkabau) was founded in the mid-14th century by Adityawarman, the king who was a Bhairava, a God, by an immaculate address of Tantric rituals.

He depicted himself in stone, as did other Bhairava(s), standing on dozens of human skulls, now “couched in a dark corner of the Jakarta Museum”, said a Minang writer.

Written underneath the skulls was a description of how he slaughtered hundreds of his subjects and drank their blood, stemming the stench of the dead bodies by millions of fragrant flowers.

That is, to the Malay mind and historical experience, Hindu monistic relief. This contrast between Islam and Hinduism in the Malay World never did die.

Adityawarman ruled for several decades but his son and heir seemed to have been king of Minangkabau for about two years and then suddenly vanished without a trace.

In Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai the Hindu god-king insisted on incest and killed his son and heir who secured his two daughters from his lascivious divinity.

A man-God or God-man can do anything. The National Fatwa Council is simply asking is that what you want?

Islam battled against that Hinduism. The religion had not reached into the Malay world wholly by peaceful investments of Sufi teachings as many early historians had wanted us to believe.

Recent studies suggest Samudera-Pasai was overtaken by the early Muslim kingdom of Lemuri, which later became Aceh. Lemuri was founded in the 10th century, dispelling the history in our school textbooks that say Islam arrived in the archipelago not earlier than the 11th century.

The same style of Islamic expansionism felled the great kingdom of Majapahit. It was Muslim Demak that finally put the nail into the coffin of the Hindu-Buddhist empires in Nusantara.

And then, little is known in our schools about the intricate movements of Muslim spiritual persuasions (Tarekat), or of the diplomacy, statecraft and warfare in the Malay theological states.

Sumatra is not our neighbor but essentially a part of the Malay heartland together with Malaya (Tanah Semenanjung) and the Riau islands the British and Dutch sundered in 1824.

In Sumatra Aceh battled against the Portuguese and other Europeans as a part of pan-Islam jihad led by the Ottoman in Istanbul in the early 16th century, and later as a part of the India’s Mughal reform movement under Aurangzeb.

Minangkabau combusted in 1803, leading into the Paderi War (1813-1833), a fight to the finish between Wahabi Islam (of Saudi Arabia) and the rule of Adat (Malay Customs and Traditions).

The Adat some blamed for the accesses in Malay society, causing sexual exploitation of women in some communities and in others, to rampant homosexual practices. These are recorded in a Hikayat or two.

The Paderi War, finally led by Imam Bonjol, left in its wake a legend of puritanical Islam that is still very much alive in the Malay Muslim mind and is recalled whenever Islam is faced with upstarts or moral irregularities.

It is a combat that is meant by the fatwa on Yoga, a puritanical force that should take care of the wayward and the upstarts.

The fatwa is suggesting a revivalism by which the Malays and Muslims can achieve the cohesion and coherence they would need to remove the nuisance and return the Barisan Nasional to power with the two-third majority when comes the time to vote again.

It’s over for Anwar Ibrahim and his experiment with a multiracial party. Most Malays have turned away and more will do that in days to come.----a. ghani ismail, 27 November, 2008