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Who Defines Malay Muslim Issues Today? The Funneling Effects
Over the years, the Malay Muslim (MM) community has seen a myriad of issues surfacing in public discussions. They form a cluster of developmental concerns that can broadly be categorised as, socio-economic, religious, cultural, and inter-communal. These four clusters of issues often overlap and are not mutually exclusive.
Socio-economic issues include underachievement in education, employability and low income. They are often tied to the conditions of the Malay Muslim households and families.
In terms of religious concerns, they include problems with exclusivism, ultra-conservatism, and radicalism. These are tied to issues of religious orientations within the community.
The decline of Malay language and the perceived neglect and support of cultural practices form the cluster of cultural concerns. The reasons are often tied to market forces and a younger generation alienated from its own cultural traditions.
With regards to inter-communal issues, topics of race relations, treatment of minorities within and intra-group contestations (such as sectarianism) are our main observation. These are tied to the perceived marginalisation and need for communal identity.
The old funnel and its relevance
Most of these issues are not new. They have been raised, addressed, and represented by existing Malay Muslim organisations (MMOs), community leaders, and politicians.
Traditionally, these figures funnel the above issues to the government.
The term “funnel” is used because a wide variety of concerns from the wider community are curated by a minority of “elites” who select and influence how these concerns are represented, then shaped in public discourse.
However, with the changes across society, many MMOs and community leaders are struggling with two key challenges:
- Lack of substantive renewal in leadership styles: many organisations are helmed by leaders and boards who have been around for more than two decades. Even when younger members come on board, they have either been socialised into the status quo or they leave. In the end, the old style of leadership is replicated with power concentrated around individuals and not systems.
- Lack of capacity in identifying, diagnosing, and responding to complex challenges today: these organisations are more used to older modes and mindsets of engagement with the wider community when it comes to pertinent issues of the day.
As a result, the continued relevance of MMOs were thrown into question, with many Malay Muslims turning to a new set of social actors who emerged to plug this gap. They are seen as voices that are more genuine and authentic, particularly online.
By “new”, we mean voices that are young, about 18-35 years old, many of whom are coming of age in their socio-political awareness. And they were previously on the periphery of public discourse but now have more mainstream influence given the declining trust in MMOs.
A major catalyst for the emergence of new actors is social media, which pays a key role in shaping public opinion. It provides a platform for non-traditional voices within the community that come from both the Left and Right socio-political-religious spectrum.
Hence, a new funnel has opened up in public discourse: one which captures voices unheard, or unrepresented, by the traditional MMOs and community leaders. This funnelling effect bypasses the process of selection and prioritisation of concerns usually done by MMOs and community leaders.
Two issues are representative of this new funnelling effect:
- Racism towards minorities, in particular Malays and Indians; and
- Intra-Muslim issues, particularly Sunni-Syiah; Sufi-Salafi; and Liberal-Conservative debates.
This new funnelling effect is one that has yet to be analysed and forms the new challenge for the Malay/Muslim community in Singapore.
Gaps in perception and the new funnelling
Community issues have traditionally been articulated through the Malay Muslim elites helming the cultural, political, religious, and educational institutions. They are largely from the lower to upper middle-class segments of the community. They are also mostly university graduates. According to the Census 2020, only 10.8% of Malays aged 25 and above hold a university education. This might account for the gap in perception between the generally university educated elites, and the bulk of the Malay population.
Perceptions often emerge from, and are conditioned by, lived experiences. Generally, the lived experience of the Malay elites is that of success through hard work and persistence. Hence, the general representation of issues in the community by the Malay elites often correspond to, and at times try to fit into, the dominant state narrative of meritocracy and progress. This is understandable, due to their own personal experiences.
However, many others within the community can only relate to daily struggles and uncertainty, even if their material conditions have generally improved in the past few decades in absolute terms (though not in relation to other communities).
So, the narratives that resonate with the elites do not necessarily make sense to the rest of the community. This presents a sense of dissatisfaction that emerges from the disjuncture between the promise of social mobility and success and their daily struggles and anxiety. The ones most affected by this gap in perception are the lower middle class.
With the rise of social media, this gap in perception gets channelled online. It allows for new social actors to collate and articulate the existing cluster of concerns and craft a new lens. Therefore, a new funnelling has emerged and challenges the old funnelling of traditional elites.
A case in point is the issue of racism.
Racism issue as a microcosm of the new funnel
Racism has been a major point of public conversation over the last few years. Racism in itself is not something new. Within the spectrum of the issue, the most common type of racism experienced in Singapore is negative racial stereotyping. The impact of racial stereotyping varies and intersects with various other markers such as social class, gender, and religion. They are also experienced at the everyday level, otherwise known as “casual racism”.
Despite the above, traditional elites are not known to have engaged in the topic of racism or funnelled it to the government, for various reasons. With the rise of social media, what was once a taboo, emerged publicly and is discussed more openly especially by younger people today. Having grown up in a different milieu, they are more than willing to discuss these sensitive issues. It then snowballs as more people reveal their personal experiences of racism.
With the issue of racism gaining traction, particularly among youth, new social actors emerged to funnel issues facing the minority Malay Muslim community. The end of the funnel is touted as a demand for radical equality and equity, although these terms remain vague and not grounded in concrete examples of how that would look like.
At a cursory glance, the profile of these new social actors within the Malay community are young, English-speaking, university educated who grew up in middle class families. They have access to social resources and networks (i.e., social and cultural capital) and are adept in mobilising techniques via youth-oriented social media platforms.
But they often do not have a grassroots network because of their lack of participation in established community organisations and institutions. Instead, they develop their community and followers online.
Although they speak about championing the Malay minority, they are often perceived as not culturally anchored and show little interest in cultural activities of the Malays in vernacular spaces. Nevertheless, they are good at intersectionality issues and bring race into engagements with a myriad of other body politic issues such as sexuality and gender. This brings them support from a certain segment of the educated and anglicised Chinese who identify themselves as minorities too, such as the LGBTQs and radical feminists.
Finally, they adopt the vocabulary of the “radical left” often from different contexts (e.g. countries with fundamentally different historical and social contexts) in articulating their concerns and bringing up issues of racism within and across the Malay community.
As a result of the funnelling effect of the new social actors, there is an implicit view that Malays as a minority are victimised by the majority, i.e. Chinese community. This explains the strong reactions to public conversations over racism, such as that observed in the Zaobao series of forums on race in 2021.
Observably, those responses were a reaction to how the issue of racism has been funnelled through the new social actors as mentioned above. They are quite apart from how discussions on race have been managed and facilitated by institutions linked to the state, such as OnePeople.sg. Consequently, online discourse appears more polarised than ever.
Possible trajectories
There is clearly a new divide within the Malay Muslim community. This divide is starkly intergenerational as well as strategic. What is observable is the new form of politics engaged by younger members of the community that transcends traditional structures of authority, such as the MMOs.
Many of the MMOs are helmed by traditional elites who are yet to catch up with the new landscape of social activism online with diffused centres of authority, are non-hierarchical and fluid. This new form of activism is issue based and almost anti-structure in its approach. This focus on critiquing social structures is an integral part of the lens they adopt to analyse the problems of the community.
This opens up a plane of conflict between the ‘old’ and ‘new’, which could hasten the decline and even demise of traditional community organisations. If that happens, there will be a vacuum in leadership. Since nature abhors a vacuum, there will be new and dynamic organisations that will emerge and fill that space, although the form they take may be radically different from how traditional organisations are run and managed.
The other possibility is reform of traditional organisations. But for reforms to occur, there has to be a renewal of leadership and thinking. Renewal will occur only if there is a sense of crisis and hence, urgency – something that we have not observed within many organisations.
Md Suhaile and Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib
Md Suhaile and Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib are editors of Progresif.net