Comment: Symbol of Malaysia’s uniqueness
New Straits Times (Columns)
05 Nov 2006
Paddy Bowie

THERE is nothing like it anywhere in the world. It is once again the season of goodwill, forgiveness, love and brotherhood we know as Hari Raya.

It is the greatest of all the festivals that punctuate our celebration-saturated calendar. Malaysians are a naturally convivial people. They love their festive occasions. And when they rejoice they like to share it, to do it together, publicly.

The instrumentality is the unique and heart-warming custom of the open house. I recall my own initiation into the visiting ritual. It was one of the early culture shocks, albeit of the most pleasant kind. I had come from a country where social intercourse beyond one’s close and all too often private circle of family and friends was inhibited.

You can travel in the close confines of a railway carriage in an English train, and it might be the same set of fellow commuters you are with on a daily basis, without ever speaking to each other. In Malaysia you can be affably greeted by total strangers. In the United Kingdom you have to be formally "introduced".

The open house is just that. I remember one Hari Raya, an Australian family — tourists — arrived here and to their dismay found it was a public holiday. Disconsolate, they wandered around the Lake Gardens, having nothing better to do. Then they saw a large number of people converging on a big house which they assumed was some sort of museum, and joined in. They were greeted at the door by a gentleman in "native" dress they took to be the commissionaire.

Once inside they found themselves in a well-dressed crowd, and felt embarrassed at being clad in their casual, somewhat ragged shorts. There were tables groaning with delicious looking food. "Where are we?" they asked the woman next to them, who happened to be me. "In the prime minister’s house," I told them with some amusement.

Their reaction was to flee, till I hastened to explain they were welcome. This was a customary open house, "open" to all, no invitation required.

"But where is the prime minister?"

When told he was the one at the door, they were mortified. They had even intended giving the "commissionaire" a farewell tip.

Over the years, one comes to appreciate the deeper meaning behind it. At one level the fundamental basis is respect for others, a virtue the world seems to be in danger of losing.

This is a very egalitarian event. You can visit the King and ministers and then on to your driver’s house in the kampung. It confers dignity on the poor and to the humblest of homes. And the hospitality will be the same.

Malaysia has the highest power distance in the world — the gap between the high and the low — which explains the whole ritual of protocol, ceremony and the etiquette of politeness that govern social intercourse, the outward manifestation of that very respect to others.

We must, however, distinguish power distance from class distinctions and snobbery. Here it does not matter where you live, no such thing as the wrong side of the tracks. At Hari Raya we visit the Istana and the humblest abode alike. What you see on display at the open house is the multi-ethnic co-existence, which is our way of life.

I’m at a loss why CNN doesn’t film this rare social phenomenon more often, instead of endless spectacles of violence and tragedy as mankind sets about destroying itself.

Above all, Hari Raya is a religious occasion. It begins with prayers in a mosque. Beneath all the lavish hospitality and celebration the reality is a reaffirmation of faith — a spiritual reassurance in a world vexed by hatred and fear. It also puts on display our multi-religious diversity and the Malaysian brand of civilisational Islam, validating the claim to be a role model of a modern, progressive, Muslim country.

Here, temple, mosque and church sit happily side by side. You can find a mosque in the middle of an industrial estate. Or next, as in Alor Star, to a Telekom tower — one a symbol of scientific enlightenment, the other of enduring spiritual values. Islam is not incompatible with technology in this country.

Nor is multi-religious diversity inimical to religious stability. Compare this with our neighbours — southern Thailand or southern Philippines, surrendered to sectarian strife. Or Indonesia where three Christians were executed by firing squad only recently and attacks on churches are recurrent.

I have to say that in all my 50 years in this country I have experienced no encroachment on my Christian faith. The seminal clause is of the Constitution stating that Islam is the state religion, with freedom of worship for all other creeds, a reality in both respects.

I would have Osama bin Laden know I have never been made to feel like an "infidel". Again we respect each other’s right of choice — the choice to find one’s own way to God.

As I write this I am halfway through the open house rounds. It’s amazing — a catering nightmare for the hostess, for the guests an ordeal by hospitality. I remember going back to Shell one year and complaining that in two days I had put on 1.8kg in weight. "1.8kg? That isn’t very much" rejoined one of my irreverent colleagues, "if you take it as a percentage!"

However, nothing would deter me from the tosai at Tan Sri Hassan Merican’s open house or the Johor Laksa at Tun Musa Hitam’s, and of course the rendang.

I love to see the little ones in their best baju Melayu bowing to their elders, conditioned from young in a proper respect.

For me it is reminiscent of my childhood and another religious occasion when new clothes were de riguer in order to parade in the Whit Sunday procession through the streets. Whatever their reduced circumstances, one’s parents would sacrifice to provide one with the proper attire.

Today, I suspect the custom no longer holds. The young would not be interested, favouring only the uniform jeans and T-shirts proclaiming their quite extraordinary and sometimes obscene legends. Graffiti seems to have migrated from lavatory walls to the front and back of the younger set, and even the not so young.

In this regard it has become a very irreverent generation, and we talk of respect with no regard for decorum.

Soon I will be looking, myself, to balik kampung, a journey of 12,800km for my ritual, tribal, English Christmas. I refuse to eat plum pudding in the tropical heat. I want snow, church bells ringing, log fires blazing, crumpets by the fire and carol singers at the door.

I’m no doubt dubbed old fashioned by my English friends, an increasing number of whom will be heading for Majorca or the Caribbean for an unseasonable Xmas in the sun. Old fashioned or no, I prefer my traditional festival. Like Hari Raya, it is a religious occasion, Christ’s Mass, the birthday of Christ.

I look forward in the same way to the traditional fare and what is still a family occasion.

Hari Raya has been a pleasing prelude, with its much needed lesson to the world, a marriage of tolerance and mutual respect.

It puts our diversity on display. In a plural society, respect for difference is an imperative, instead of the pernicious and unholy union of violence and religion, of hatred substituted for love.

Civil society is no longer "civil", what with those infamous cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and Sunnis killing Shias in Iraq. As for Jack Straw, the MP for my home town, Blackburn, I think his attack on the veil was uncalled for and, to say the least, uncharitable.

Nor is Malaysia spared when two perfectly respectable American visitors are hauled out of bed in the middle of the night by some high-handed, overzealous morality police on a spurious suspicion of khalwat. What does that do to our image abroad or tourist promotion or foreign investment?

It is thus with sadness that I have to comment on a perceptible change in our multi-religious accord, a creeping heightened religiosity that is exclusivist and accompanied by a growing racism.

Let’s not go down that road. It leads at the end to religion at the barrel of a gun or at the controls of an aircraft. We can debit the new phenomenon of the suicide bomber to jihadism and zealotry combined. What induces young men, educated, not shoeless Arabs, with all their lives before them, to willingly consign themselves to a premature death? Even the Christian martyrs did not nail themselves to the cross.

If I may presume as a non-Muslim, is this not difficult to reconcile with the true spirit of Islam? Surely it is in direct contravention of Islamic justice and its religion of peace and love.

I am grateful all the more this year for Hari Raya to be reminded and reassured of what a deeply religious country this is, a reminder also of the universal discipline of puasa, and the privilege of being welcomed into so many open houses and into the bosom of the family.

To those I could not visit or meet — one month even is not enough — may I here wish you and yours Selamat Hari Raya.