Source Aliran

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia-To Pas president Hadi Awang, any concept which he suspects has any link to Western philosophy is unacceptable, even though the term madani is an Islamic term and many of its core values come from Islam.

[A madani community is a society that is advanced in thought, spirituality and community development.]

It is silly to say that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s madani concept is not Islamic enough to be palatable to Malaysian Muslims because of the linkage to Western philosophy, ancient or modern.

Nearly 20% of the Ancient Greek philosophers’ works that fuelled the Renaissance in the West came from the Islamic world, which had survived the ravages of Western religious extremism at that time.  

Thus, Hadi’s apparent effort to cage all these Western philosophers such as Thomas Paine, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, with such trivialised simplicity has pauperised the value of his argument and blurred it to the point that the real issue is being misinterpreted.

Hadi is not wrong in saying that modern civilisation is burning itself now in the West, as seen in the vivid example of the Ukraine War and xenophobia.

But all these issues are not sparked by the teachings of these philosophers or civil societies.

The teachings of these philosophers are the building blocks of Western civil societies.

But what is happening now is that civil societies in the West are decaying. They are collapsing under the weight of violence, hatred, extremism and intolerance.

It is people like Rasmus Paludan, a malicious Swedish-Danish right-winger, who are fast-tracking its decay – turning Swedish civil society into a rogue society. The malicious burning of the Quran is proof of this trend.

Thus, when violence, hatred, extremism and intolerance seep into civil societies, they stop being civil and turn rogue. These were apparently the same factors that felled mighty ‘civilisations’ in the past.

In a similar manner, modern civilisation is following suit, ‘burning itself’ out with the same fuel of violence, hatred, extremism and intolerance.

Malaysia Madani, broadly speaking, is an idea to bring together people of all ethnicities to live in harmony, peace and prosperity in a society where humility and compassion are abundant.

We have gone through a couple of tumultuous years of Perikatan Nasional rule. Now let us give Pakatan Harapan, with its madani concept, a chance to govern the nation in harmony, peace and prosperity.