All Malaysians begin life at the bottom of the food chain. Whether we wind up with a silver spoon in our mouths or far from an urban centre, all of us enter the administration’s tracking system at birth. By way of our birth certificates and our initial biometric national identity card, and as adults, the adult biometric national identity card, our growth is carefully marked. Along the way, we might pick up any number of further identifying documents — things one might encounter in the normal course of life, like passports and drivers licenses, and the slightly more arcane, like the Muslim proof of marriage card and proof of conversion to Islam card. Every milestone, and especially milestones that define us by race and religion, is another tick on a government file.

Starting at age seven in Standard One, each Malaysian child is primed with an increasingly complex historical narrative of our country until they leave secondary school or university. (Taking one Malaysian History module is a compulsory prerequisite for graduating from university.)

The simplest narrative is that our founding fathers, representing the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians — the three dominant races in Malaysia — came together and peacefully negotiated our independence from the British. Underneath this message is a duality reinforced from the very beginning of our history, as the government curriculum tells it. Those founding fathers each represented a political party based and divided on race. They had to work together for independence, but to each race went his own domain. This political reality has barely changed in the 56 years since independence, and divides the landscape among the Malaysian people as three races: the Malays the Chinese and the Indians (in order of percentage of population) and the Others. (More on this later.)

Every morning at assembly, schoolchildren throughout their twelve years of pre-college education may also find themselves reciting the Rukunegara (National Principles), a concise summary of our nation’s values. Generally, the five principles students swear to are:

Kepercayaan kepada Tuhan (Belief in God)

Kesetiaan kepada Raja dan Negara (Loyalty to King and Country)

Keluhuran Perlembagaan (Supremacy of the Constitution)

Kedaulatan Undang-undang (The Rule of Law)

Kesopanan dan Kesusilaan (Courtesy and Morality)

Of these, the first three values carry the most relevance to how we view citizenship.

The first value, “Belief in God”, is less an indication of my countrymen’s faiths and more an indication of the underlying system from which the British cobbled together our long, warped racial-immigrant history. Nine of what are today the Malaysian states with hereditary royal rulers were, prior to European intervention, independent Muslim nation states. Each state seemed to have different ideas on how Islamic law and rulership should work in their monarchies, but each reigning Sultan ultimately represented leadership of the Islamic faith for his state. Having Islam as the country’s official religion was a necessary concession to maintaining the prestige of the Sultans’ roles, a binding agent for the Malay peoples under them and an overall link between the traditional leadership of these states to the new unified country.

Which brings us to “Loyalty to King and Country”. History textbooks celebrate our democratic process of electing and rotating a King from among the nine hereditary rulers for a set five-year term. In A History of Malaysia (2nd Ed., Andaya & Andaya, University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), the authors discuss the formation of these nine states with hereditary rulers, particularly their much earlier Hindu precursors. Indian influence lent a plethora of words and ideas still in use today, but one of the most enduring, with respect to the Malaysian monarchies, is the concept of derhaka (treason towards the ruler) from Sanskrit. The court of Srivijaya, one of the greatest, oldest and most influential of these Hindu kingdoms, whose descendants (legendary or otherwise) form part of the Malaysian monarchies today, may have helped propagate the belief that rulers held supernatural powers (potentially derived from the Hindu concept of a God’s sakti) by which traitorous vassals would be struck down for their crimes.

Treason against a ruler is in fact one of the criminal offenses that still carries the death penalty in Malaysia, specifically “Waging war against the King” (Section 121 Penal Code) and “Offences against the person of a Ruler” (Section 121A Penal Code — which covers all hereditary Malay Rulers, not just the King). Andaya & Andaya note that sakti during the arrival of Islam was replaced with the more general Arabic daulat (sovereignty), but the dire repercussions of treason continued to be reinforced by legend and allusions to the supernatural in court writings well after the fact. And while no one expects to be struck down by the heavens for treason today, derhaka as a symbol, the opposite of what Malay culture should strive for, continues to be a powerful concept in our political and racial discourse. As recently as 2013, a former Appeals Court judge suggested that a Derhaka Act should be formed with a minimum two years imprisonment for lesse majeste, as people were forgetting the powers of the rajas.

This brings us to the “Supremacy of the Constitution”, a valuable form of loyalty in any country; inequalities, amendments and all. In the Malaysian context, this hallowed document from which many of our laws derive is remarkably detailed on the specific sanctity of Islam and Malay culture. Among the acts are concessions to Islam as the national religion, the reach of Islamic law and the Syariah courts, the special privileges of the Bumiputeras (lit. “sons of the soil”, used mostly to mean Malays and aboriginal Malaysians), the sovereignty of Malay rulers and particularly, the Constitutional definition of a Malay. The King (and the nine hereditary state rulers) are always to be Malay. The Prime Minister doesn't have to be a Malay, but the risks of upsetting the Malay majority are so permanently etched in the national psyche, this is not a trend I expect to see changed in my lifetime.

Islam as the national religion caused a great deal of soul searching in the late 90s, when the idea was more solidly propagated by our administration that we were really an Islamic state. In the present, fundamentalist Islam has permeated our political scene so deeply (both within the administration and the opposition), that the “Islamic state” is the default, and those who might remember differently disappear into the woodwork before they are found.

But all this is neither here nor there. We forget that when we speak of our history, cobbled off the backs of nine Sultanates and various tribal entities, sausage-machined into Colonial-era borders and left to historians of every generation since Independence to reforge into a cohesive Malaysian identity, we are looking at the manufactured, national message of history. Beyond what is convenient for the National Front, the coalition of three racially-aligned parties that has ruled us since 1957, there are gaps in the places where binding ties between our country’s different ethnicities should be. They remain hidden precisely because the current focus has been on different racial communities that came together as one nation.

This is where the Others become vitally important. Virtually from the moment the historic states of the Malay Archipelago opened their ports to outside contact, the Malay historical narrative has been multicultural, not monolithic. Ethnically, the Malay peoples (yes, plural) are interspliced with every culture that ever came to trade in our region, be that Indian, Chinese, Thai, Arab, Portuguese, or local aboriginal groups, from the Orang Laut and Orang Asli, to the Javans, Minangkabaus and the various regional ancestors and relatives of the Malays (the Indonesians), to the innumerable tribes of Borneo. This is even before we take into account the different sub-groups within the major ethnicities, at which point we might as well call the people of our region a primordial soup.