By Khor Chun Kiat, Sin Chew Daily

You might have missed this piece of news while enjoying sumptuous feasts or busy visiting friends and relatives during this festive season. Let me reproduce an excerpt of what was the most clicked content on the second day of the Year of the Tiger.

Nur Hafizah was married to her Chinese husband Daniel last year, and this is going to be her first CNY after marriage. Everyone in the family was filled with joy as they celebrated the festive season with the new member of the family. Naturally, they started to share pictures of the mouth-watering food they feasted on their family chat group.

But in the midst of the merrymaking, someone cautiously asked Nur Hafizah whether it was OK to post those non-halal delicacies.

“Of course! No problem with me!” she answered spontaneously.

The merrier the family, the more pictures they shared. However, the question that would have seemed a gesture of care and respect prompted her to wonder if her own religion had been too demanding that triggered them to ask such a question.

She thought over it for the whole night. The circumspection on the part of her husband’s family in not infringing upon her religious taboos made her, a Muslim, reflect her occasional lack of empathy in other people’s religious faiths and cultural differences while constantly reinforcing her own taboos and demands on people, and the fact that even though they had their religion and culture, they had never once intervened in her day-to-day practices as a Muslim.

“The Malays always enforce their belief in other people’s cultures even though those cultures have never interfered in their day-to-day living.”

Nur Hafizah subsequently put a lengthy post on Facebook to explore this issue, and the same has since won her plenty of likes for her moderate thinking.

“How nice if everyone thinks like you!” a social media user commented.

“I think it is absolutely necessary for me to write this. As Malays, we often demand that things unfamiliar to us adapt to suit our faith and position, but we have overlooked one thing very important: even these people who embrace different religious faiths, cultures and customs from ours have never trespassed or interfered in our day-to-day living.”

After the FB post was rewritten into a news story, it became an instant hit on the second day of CNY, with many readers praising Nur Hafizah for her openness.

“So much different from our politicians. Ordinary citizens always know how to take care of other people’s feelings.”

“Absolutely right! Politicians only know how to divide the nation!”

“Extremist politicians, go through this twice, and learn from this young Muslim lady!”

Politicians who regularly issue extremist, aggressive and arrogant remarks that they are the masters of this land and the rest are pendatangs, make harsh comments and every now and then tell you to balik Cina, we know who they are, and I don’t want to list them down here to spoil our festive mood!

Many are bound to have come across the unpleasant experiences of being forcefully interfered during their growing years, at school, in workplaces or even among family members, especially from people with a powerful lust of dominating over people by enforcing their criteria on the others, arguing that they are doing this for your good.

The same thing is also rampant among people of different ethnicities, faiths and even nationalities. Such a blatant display of disrespect will often develop nasty sequels. No one will gain from a relationship marred by an absence of respect.

I have received plenty of well wishes from many non-Chinese during this festive season — people from the Istana, PM’s office, government departments, politicians, businessmen, fellow journalists, PR personnel as well as those I have interviewed or helped before. They sent their congratulatory messages either in English or BM.

In a way, this makes me see true friendship vis-à-vis politicians who customarily cook up sensitive issues, hypocritically chanting the unity and harmony slogans without doing anything substantial to promote unity and harmony, putting up a banner or two instead to wish all Happy Chinese New Year and distributing cartons of mandarin oranges in their constituencies.

Nur Hafizah has made the first step while more and more moderate Malay compatriots now share her liberal attitude. Hopefully this will create an opportunity for us to instill the change at the start of the Year of the Tiger, so that politicians who regularly make religious narratives and raise seditious issues will not get a chance to survive in this beloved country of ours.