Mufti’s readiness to apologise apt and should be accepted — PBS

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KOTA KINABALU: The State Mufti’s readiness to apologise for his statement that the Kadazan is an invented race and that all Muslim Bumiputeras in Sabah should be identified as Malay has brought some relief to those he had angered.

Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) Youth chief Datuk Jahid Jahim said the offer by Bungsu @ Aziz Jaafar to apologise, albeit late, showed that the mufti was a man with a conscience.

“Offering to apologise to the KadazanDusun communities in Sabah in conjunction with the coming Hari Raya Aidiladha celebration is apt and we should accept it even though we have been hurt by his statement and proposal,” he said.

Jahid, who was trying to set up a meeting with Bungsu to get to the bottom of the matter, said that religious, race, culture and language issues are very sensitive and should not be taken lightly.

“It is therefore imperative for anyone making statements relating to these issues to be very careful about what they say in order not to hurt the feelings of others,” he stressed.

Jahid added as Bungsu is ready to apologise, he will no longer be pursuing for a meeting with the latter. He however stressed that PBS Youth is of the opinion that what has happened must be taken as a lesson so that there will not be similar incidents in the future.

“We must be guided by the fact that religion and race are two different things so there should not be any attempts to identify one with the other. We in Sabah are multi-religious and multi-racial and we in PBS hold firm to our multi-racial philosophy in every sense of the word,” he stressed.

Bungsu had, on Saturday, issued a short statement and said that he is ready to apologise to the KadazanDusun community and other natives in the state if his statement was interpreted differently from what was stated at a forum in Putrajaya recently.

The mufti said it was not his intention to offend any of the racial and ethnic groups in Sabah because he himself is an Orang Brunei and Dusun from the state. He hoped that in conjunction with the Hari Raya Aidil Adha on Tuesday, there was nothing wrong to seek forgiveness like what is normally done by all the races in the state and country.

Bungsu caused a storm last month with his proposal for a programme to ‘Malaynise’ the state’s non-Malay Bumiputera Muslims, citing a need to unite the country’s Muslims.

He told a thousand-strong Muslim symposium in Putrajaya that many of the indigenous Muslims in the north Borneo state still refused to call themselves Malay, unlike ethnic groups like the Javanese and Bugis in Peninsular Malaysia who today identify themselves as belonging to one Malay race. Bungsu had also claimed that the Kadazan is an ‘invented’ ethnic group made of non-Muslim Dusun people.