Alhamdulillah, most of my friends are those who have not been indoctrinated.
There are Muslims who have good intentions but lack political understanding. They assume that with his death, LKY does not have any further effect on Muslims. We should then move forward and not discuss him anymore.
But that is the problem when someone lack appreciation of political narratives and try to make a claim on political effects. Let me make this simple to understand. An institution is made up of 3 primary components: routines, expected behaviour and shared goals. The government is an institution through the existence of the 3 characteristics.
The shared goals (or shared reality) is a set of ideas, values, philosophies that are developed through the institution. In the PAP and government, how Muslims are engaged and treated owes a lot to Lee Kuan Yew’s views of reducing Islam to its bare minimum
His demands for rejection of various aspects of Islam were not adopted through any objective measure. Rather, they were granted legitimacy simply through the force of his demands.
Ideas do not die with the death of its advocates. They live on. The way Lee Kuan Yew discriminates the Muslims, lives beyond his natural life.
Thus, the only way to challenge the ideas and halt its promotion is to challenge the narrative surrounding Lee Kuan Yew. Delegitimise his interaction and management of the community and his ideas of how the Muslims should be discriminated (while pretending to support) loses currency.
So for those who want to keep quiet and accept his legacy, that is your right. Do that. Those who want to promote him as the spirit of Singapore’s development, you can do that too.
The rest of us will tear down the fiction of Lee Kuan Yew’s history. Not because we want to discuss the man.
But because his ideas on how the community should be discriminated and how Islam should be rejected cannot be allowed to live on.
Source: Zulfikar Shariff
