Recently I visited a National Service (NS) training camp where the girls were walking around in prim, closed-collar shirts. For reasons best known to the trainers, female trainees are forbidden to leave undone the topmost button of their outfit – which looked like a hybrid of security guard-cum-factory worker uniform.

Non-Muslim girls were given to understand that the two inches of bare flesh peeking out from the top of their neck is indecent exposure. The point is moot however for Muslim girls whose tudung conceal the collar.

It seems to me that the NS is applying a ‘ tutup aurat ’ requirement on female trainees. Who determines the parameters of this ‘Islamic dress code’ stricture on non-Muslim NS participants? Indeed why should there be at all this regulation to fasten that one top button?

Get real, please. How many people would want to choke themselves so unless they’re wearing a tie? And spare me the hogwash that it is for the sake of uniformity when boys are exempted from buttoning-up thus.

What it has really come to is this: The powers-that-be have reached a stage where they are taking it upon themselves to micro-manage how Malaysians dress. The restrictive imposition above reflects how Little Mullah Napoleons (LMNs) are now poking their noses even down our necklines.

And these controversies concerning formal dressing keep erupting one after another. Non-Malay graduans are to wear songkok at convocation and their female counterparts the tudung. Directives on attire are making Malay or Muslim signifiers compulsory for Malaysia’s minorities.

Pilot project on ethnocracy

Our country is getting to be world famous for criminalising anything and everything under the sun. Not attending NS is criminal too. So like it or not, there’s no way that pampered middle-class teenagers can escape call-up. (The elites and upper classes, I’m reckoning, have their own ways and means of evading this onerous duty.)

When middle-class teens, used to generous allowances blown on spaghetti straps, baby tees and hipster jeans at Shopping Mall Central are hauled away to NS, they get culture shock. Posted to some rural campsite, they’re mandated to wear thick, long-sleeved uniforms and buttoning up to the chin.

NS is like a forced coming together of two segregated worlds, the tectonic plates colliding and grating for three months. In the dorms, there is the artificially enforced social mixing where teens are alternated Malay, Chinese and Indian etc in their bedding arrangement. As with other ill-conceived and costly flip-flop policies in education, NS is a logic-defying, top-down fiat.

Its ostensible purpose is to integrate the races and this done amongst 18-year-olds. It’s a ‘too little, too late’ measure that is at odds with the world as Gen Y knows it. After leaving behind the NS regimen, will these teens be expected to revamp their wardrobe filling it with long-sleeve shirts, and remembering to button up completely? Or would they, upon their return to suburbia, thankfully revert to tank tops and mini skirts?

But the realpolitik issue is this: How can NS ever hope to correct the damage inflicted on the non-Malay, non-Muslim psyche that occurs in school every day? LMNs are bent on trampling minority sensitivities, imposing Malay-Muslim values and traditions, and in the process turning schools into wannabe madrassahs.

Nowadays national schools train children to be Syariah-compliant. There is recitation of ‘doa’ at assembly and functions. Will the non-Muslim pupils have to raise their hands palm up for the Islamic prayer? Will they suffer punishment if they don’t? Well, I’ve heard that some indeed have been punished for not complying.

A lot of the mischief comes from those in the Education Ministry and department heads who uninhibitedly hand down Ketuanan Melayu directives. They make over our institutions of learning to be Arabier than thou. And at the next tier, principals and school administrators strive to emulate those higher up the Hadhari hierarchy. Then teachers too devise their own Islamist pet schemes.

Houston, we have a problem

Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang recently posted four threads in his blog on the topic of songkok made compulsory for prefects in a premier Johor school. He described the actions of the LMN at Maktab Sultan Abu Bakar as the latest in a “series of insensitivities usurping the ‘middle ground’.”

His lively blog discussion drew close to 500 comments over five days. Following the public outcry, Maktab SAB principal Haji Zulkifli Mahmood backed down and rescinded his school’s edict.

Lim commended the affected parent for bringing the songkok issue into the public domain. The son, a Form Five student, had been prepared to resign from the prefect’s board was the regulation to be implemented. Still, how many non-Muslims would be as willing to step forward as this father and son?

There’s not been much to suggest that the Malaysian middle-class is generally composed of the moral fibre to stand up and stand firm on principles. Most fear a backlash should they complain and the Chinese mentality (and perhaps professional Indians too) is one that has been honed to first-class acquiescence.

The Johor school would now like to persuade the general public that the matter has been resolved amicably. On the contrary, if the complaint had not gotten its high profile expose, another brick in the wall would reinforce Fortress Islam laying siege to Malaysia’s minorities.

Have we heard of the LMNs who create havoc with their idiosyncratic rules and regulations ever handed a reprimand? If anything, their actions would probably fast-track them up the career ladder for services to Bangsa, Agama dan N e gara . Concomitantly, these actions left unchecked are rendering Malaysia a place almost impossible to call home by citizens who are neither Malay nor Muslim.

We can no longer tamp down these episodes of Islamist bigotry using the spot fire-fighting technique or approach. The problem has to be addressed at its root and the root cause is the almost total Malay domination of the teaching profession in the public sector.

What we need is a complete overhaul of our national policies so that teacher training colleges enrol non-Malays and when these qualify to teach, they will find it a rewarding career and not have their ethnicity and religion count against them. This means the NEP in all its devious and odious guises has assuredly got to be dismantled.

If the Abdullah administration is unprepared to accept the urgent need for reform, then all those who care about the future of our children cannot in good conscience continue to support the status quo.

Note: As I go to press, there’s been another report of LMN terrorism in a suburban school.

Postscript on Muslim dress:

Does attire have connotations of ethnic or religious identity? In Malaysia, it apparently does. I do not consider that a baju kurung – which I wear often – colours me in any way as ‘ masuk Melayu ’ (embracing Islam).

Yet I remember one incident where a driver took umbrage because I was (unconsciously) chewing gum in his taxi – it was Ramadan and I was in baju kurung . I’ve since learnt to put this dress away during fasting month.

A songkok in itself is not objectionable. But can someone in songkok settle down to a roast pork lunch? If the answer is ‘No’, why compel non-Muslim pupils to wear songkok , especially when it’s never been part of the school uniform?

The second bone of contention is compulsion. I consider the baju kurung to be a most unrevealing dress, especially the ones I wear which have ‘pesak’ (side panels) leaving it loose-fitting and – the reason I like it – accommodating a pocket where I can stuff keys and odd bits of paper. But according to the illogic of the LMN, if the button of my otherwise modest baju kurung were left unhooked, I shall be indecently exposing myself.

The way I see it, it’s not that Malaysians are unwilling to adopt the forms of majority or national culture but that religious bigots are polarising our society with their domineering and unmitigated arrogance. Acceding to these self-appointed enforcers of the Islamic State will only pave the way for what are essentially Muslim features to incrementally become the normative.

We cannot sanction this back-door Islamisation.