What any Malaysian knows at heart is that the Malay community will always dominate the politics of the country. This means in concrete terms that Malaysia’s key leaders will always nominally and in reality be Malay Muslims.
However, the country’s population is a very mixed one, and from the very beginning, leaders of the Malay community who wish to be remembered as statesmen and respected as nation builders have had to expound the idea that Malay interests do not necessarily contradict national interest, or even the interests of other communities.
Umno’s first president famously tried to change the party’s name from United Malay National Organisation to United Malayan National Organisation. He realised what most of his followers had not yet realised: Malaysian politics has to be multi-ethnically sensitive.
