COMMENT | In the cacophony of brickbats hurled and justifications proferred for Zahid Hamidi's crass attack on Dr Mahathir Mohamad's racial ancestry, it was not easy to come across voices of sanity on the issue.

Voices that hold that one's racial ancestry is no big deal, that the race you are born into is something to be accepted with equanimity, if not gladness if for no other reason than not being comfortable in one's own skin is a yoke nobody would wish upon others.

Hence it came as a refreshing sponge on the country's racially fraught psyche to hear Amanah's deputy president Salahuddin Ayub, a man whose transparently mixed racial looks and serene acceptance of it is such that listening to him bracingly dwell on the subject last Sunday must have made his audience think that Zahid's beef about Mahathir's ancestry was more indicative of his defective psychology than anything to do with Mahathir's.

Salahuddin is in the third tier of Pakatan Harapan's leadership hierarchy, a perch not lofty enough for a man of his good sense, judging from remarks he made on the subject of his mixed-race parentage.

Uncouth attack 

The subject had become febrile by the very evening of its ignition earlier in the day when Zahid launched his uncouth attack on Mahathir's ancestry at the opening of the Kelana Jaya Umno divisional meeting.

The manner and content of Zahid's attack were scurrilous, and although it was unrelated to another instance of a racial attack in an altogether different place and context, alluding to this episode, which occurred on the same day, is useful for the latter narrative's instructive coda.

Kevin Myers, a writer in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, was told within hours of the edition hitting the streets that he had written his last column for the paper because of comments he made about Jews and money.

His column was pulled out from the paper's website and the newspaper's editor announced that the following week's edition would carry an apology over Myers's antisemitic association of Jews with money.

The swiftness of the punishment, the alacrity with which the offending column was retracted and assurance given that the following week's edition would carry an apology, combined with the relative absence of extenuating statements aired in Myer's behalf, were redeeming marks of the otherwise sorry saga.

It's far too much, in the current Malaysian race relations scenario, to expect that Zahid's career should be over for the shameless way he depicted the links between Mahathir's alleged racial origins and the latter's deportment as prime minister of the country over a span of 22 years.

If not even the two combustible matters that Mahathir brought up in his riposte to Zahid – a contemplated revolt by Zahid against Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and Zahid's inexplicably inordinate personal wealth already accumulated 21 years ago – cannot bring down the man, how to expect that racist remarks made by the deputy prime minister would fell its speaker?

In this light, the remarks made by Salahuddin about his Malay-Chinese parentage at the PKR fundraiser in Johor is a balm for racially lacerated spirits.

Salahuddin, in his speech before a mixed-race crowd of diners, said that he loved the Chinese side of his parents as much as he did the Malay side.

A ready acquiescence to existential realities is usually the sine qua non of a well-adjusted personality.

Quietist Islam 

Further, Salahuddin said he was not embarrassed about his mixed-race parentage and did not feel prompted to say things in extenuation or in praise. He just allowed these matters to be and accepted them as such.

This could only mean he seldom, if ever, found himself being apologetic or impelled to upmanship. More buttresses, then, for the evenness of his temperament.

Nothing of what Salahuddin said at the fundraiser would have been surprising to readers of the party's weekly paper, Amanah, an editorial organ brimming with news, opinions, and homilies positively projecting the universal ideals of the Islamic religion.

On any weekend of the month, the paper is rife with the equableness of its message.

In his speech, Salahuddin went on to say that what mattered most to him was fidelity to his political struggle which, he said, was for Islam.

He did not hold forth on what kind of Islam he espoused, though if it is what's propounded in the party's weekly, it's a version that is more what may be called quietist Islam rather than the supremacist version of the creed.

The supremacist version would be the credo Zahid affirms.

Otherwise, the DPM would not have called for Muslims in Malaysia to unite to oppose a recent ruling of the Court of Appeal which rejected as not having the force of law an edict of the National Fatwa Committee that children born out of wedlock cannot be given the name of their fathers.

Secularists hailed the ruling; Islamic supremacists decried it.

There was no word from Amanah on whether they supported or objected to the ruling.

Hence the 'quietist' label for the Islam espoused by the party. The description is not meant as irony.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.