A youth leader from an Islamist political party in Penang was recently reported to have said that leadership of Muslims should be reserved for Muslims.
He was referring to a particular constituency in which the majority of voters are Malays.
Has he perhaps wandered into a fog of confusion? Is he suggesting that a leader from a minority group cannot lead the majority in a nation?
If so, Britain offers a clear counterexample. Rishi Sunak, a Hindu and leader of the Conservative Party, served as prime minister of the
United Kingdom – a predominantly Christian nation – from October 2022 to July 2024.
A week ago, the Anglo-Saxon whites elected a black woman to lead the Conservative Party. Clearly, the British people recognise that a leader’s empathy with the common person’s basic concerns, his or her knowledge of practical economics and experience in creating job opportunities for youths count as far more important than race or religion.
Or is he implying that Islam holds a higher position than other faiths, which are seen as less relevant or less true? Such a view of religious superiority can be tempered by recognising that diversity in faith – much like diversity in nature – reflects the divine will to ensure that every community, from remote tribes to advanced nations, is guided by beliefs suited to their circumstances.
Forest tribes are served by the religion of nature – love for and abiding with the natural ecosystem in their midst. This has been their religion for 300,000 years, which is the age of humanity.
Civilisations only began 12,000 years ago, with the invention of large-scale or commercial agriculture that led to the growth of towns and cities.
All the living faiths that we have today are less than 6,000 years old and they serve the purpose of keeping a civilisation going by acting as an anchor, securing it to a bedrock.
Each religion serves the context of its civilisation to the best of its ability. For instance, Hinduism – the world’s oldest living religion – used myriad images to depict multifarious aspects of God 3,000 or 3,500 years ago when there were no books and no schools. Stone images served as books.
Images are still used to this day by Hindus because of their legacy value, just as many traditional families preserve grandpa’s rocking chair.
Buddhists depict the Buddha as sitting in a lotus posture with his eyes closed. This represents equanimity and being fully present in each moment of your life.
Only when you are fully present can you sense the omnipresence, the divine presence everywhere at all times. Only through being fully present can you sense the presence of God or the ultimate reality, as the Buddhists prefer to call it.
Let’s highlight a religion indigenous to China. Taoism was developed by sages in mountains and valleys and, hence, it emphasised complementarity – that life’s experiences will always be a duality of yin and yang.
The yin-yang duality is represented by a circle formed by two halves that each look like a stomach. Without male-female complementarity and cohabitation, there can be no animal or human birth.
You reach God only when you can surpass the complementarity and become the whole, embracing the two halves. To reach God, you have to go beyond all pairs of opposites. You have to achieve perfect equanimity, perfect mental balance in times of good fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, joy and suffering.
The principle of complementarity extends to every aspect of human endeavour. Global trade itself illustrates this well – our nation sells what we produce but others may not need while we buy what we desire but do not produce.
Arabs, on the other hand, were nurtured in a bland desert environment with the occasional rest and recreation area in the form of an oasis, with a handful of succulent palm trees. Hence, they eventually developed a vastly different approach to God, an approach completely devoid of statues or art showing human forms.
What is the key teaching of Christianity? It is servant leadership wherein the primary goal of the leader is to serve others. Servant leadership is a selfless type of leadership that focuses on the well-being and long-term growth of all.
In contrast to traditional leadership styles that focus on authoritative rank to stand above others, the servant leader views leadership as an opportunity to serve and to put others above self.
The Garden of Gethsemane incident described in the Gospel offers a profound insight of the end days of Jesus Christ that brings out the meaning of servant leadership.
Jesus is praying in the garden with his close disciples when Roman soldiers come to arrest him at the instigation of his enemies. The Pharisees and Saducees are notorious for abusing the local area, with authority granted to them by oppressing the poor. They hate Jesus for trying to correct their ways.
Jesus’ close disciples, led by Peter, want to fight the Romans to buy time for Jesus to escape but Peter and the other disciples would have been no match for these Roman soldiers trained for combat. Jesus instructs Peter to sheath his sword. A bloody fight is averted. Jesus is arrested, tried before Pontius Pilate, found guilty and sentenced to death by crucifixion.
Jesus could have escaped if he had let his disciples fight to buy time for himself to run but he would not sacrifice others for himself. That is servant leadership – just as a maidservant in your home will stop you from mopping the floor if you spill soup. The servant will do it for you.
Since each religion displays unique qualities based on the circumstances of its formation and growth, every religion offers us a lesson. Our lives get all the richer when we pick what is suitable from other religions to incorporate into our lives.
Continued failure to appreciate and make use of each religion’s unique qualities will shackle any possibility we may have of saving Malaysia in a time of climate change.
Alas, a toxic reason for our failure to appreciate and incorporate into our lives each religion’s unique qualities is the game of one-upmanship. We gain an advantage by having more adherents than your religion.
We doom ourselves when the device to guide us on the way is mistaken
for the way. Religion is a device, a guidepost. If we get stuck on religion, we will pass by God and fail to see him because thinking about religion all the time has pushed our brains into a fog. Instead of inviting God into our lives and living God-centred lives, we keep thinking about religion.
Trapped in brain-fog thinking, we ignore the question: What is God’s plan? Is it that He allows many religions to crop up so as to confuse us? To see who is smart enough to separate the true religion from all the false ones? Is God playing a devil’s game with us, his creatures?
No. It is obvious that the God who has given us planet Earth, which is able to host a huge diversity of life forms, wants life to go on.
But there is a human-induced threat to life – the threat of global climate change, the greatest threat to humanity in at least 5,000 years.
This is not only a threat in Malaysia; it is also a threat to all nations and humanity. Hence, all nations must bundle together as one. This is what it should ultimately mean to have a United Nations.
If each race and each religion looks for its own solution, it is likely all will perish in the growing heat. Never in the past 10,000 years has there been such a challenge to leadership at every level of authority as now.
Malaysians have evidence that the climate is worsening as daytime temperatures in hot weather are hitting 37°C and 38°C. At 40°C, frail oldies may collapse and die.
How did we humans bring about global warming? We stoked the dark side of complementarity. Positive effects and negative effects are also a complementary pair. We cannot have one without the other.
In the mid-18th century, oil under the ground was discovered and pumped out. Bonanza! Oil enabled a breakthrough as it could generate enormous power to run bigger and more sophisticated machines.
Industrialisation got underway. But there was a dark side. Although oil created myriad jobs by way of the cascading effect – one type of job spawned another and more jobs meant bigger populations could be fed – we have seen a never-before population explosion.
We now have 8.2 billion in the world generating carbon dioxide emissions that hit a record 37.4 billion tonnes in 2023. Each tonne of carbon dioxide traps more heat in the atmosphere, intensifying floods and droughts. With most nations also enlarging their populations, global warming has become unavoidable.
With the population of most nations still growing, more forests will continue to be chopped down to create farmlands, towns and factories. This will release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, warming the air further.
Perhaps Malaysia can boldly advance a proposal at the United Nations, proposing a global law requiring all nations to reform their tax systems – imposing high taxes on products that generate carbon dioxide, and low or no taxes on those that do not.
Joachim Ng champions interfaith harmony.
Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
