As a Muslim, I would like to express my solidarity and empathy with the struggle of the Chinese Malaysian community for the constitutional right to mother-tongue education.

The Indonesian experience under Suharto has shown clearly that the discrimination against the Chinese community, and suppression of the Chinese language, failed the nation economically.

As PAS spiritual leader, Nik Aziz has affirmed that all languages, including Chinese, are gifts from God. Prophet Mohammad also once enjoined Arabic Muslims to seek knowledge "even as far as China".

The right to mother-tongue education is therefore compatible with the true teachings of Islam and this belief differentiates PAS, which defends universal human rights, from Umno, which upholds the secular nationalist policy of forced assimilation in utter disregard to the legitimate feelings and sentiments of the ethnic minorities.

In fact, the Chinese language is more and more appreciated by many Muslims in Malaysia as evidenced by the thousands of non-Chinese studying in the many Chinese primary schools financed and managed by the Chinese community itself.

Muslims who have benefitted from this must be thankful, not to the Umno government, but to the many Chinese education groups who have to fight the government for the rights of Chinese and non-Chinese alike, to learn the Chinese language.

In Kelantan and Trengganu, all Chinese and Tamil schools are regularly supported financially by the PAS state government. It is time the Chinese community see the real differences between the nationalist Umno and the universalist PAS.