Sultan Sharafuddin’s outburst on June 26 could spark a shake-up of the national sport.
KUALA LUMPUR – The Sultan of Selangor’s rare expression of wrath at punishment dished out against the state’s football team for withdrawing from the season-opening Charity Shield match, following a shocking acid attack on Selangor FC player Faisal Halim last month, reflects the rise of state nationalism in Malaysia for which football has become a natural playing field.
“Royals understandably want to be close to the ground and the heartbeat of their subjects. They have led and been patrons of charities and sports bodies for decades,” independent political analyst Adib Zalkapli told The Straits Times. In a message viewed over 150,000 times, the anonymously run channel claimed that “J2”, a widely used reference to Tunku Ismail as Johor’s second-highest ranking royal, ordered the acid attack.
“We are very angry with which we view as irresponsible, poor, devoid of humanity and insensitive towards the cruelty that occurred,” he added in a statement, using the Malay term “murka”, which is unusual in itself. What’s more, Sultan Sharafuddin singled out his disappointment in FAM president Hamidin Amin, a former secretary general of FAS who had been conferred a datukship by the monarch, and issued a warning to the MFL to “be careful with your decisions”.
Nine of Malaysia’s 13 states have hereditary Malay rulers, constitutional monarchs who nonetheless wield power and influence beyond their legal remit, with their stature often correlating to the ebb and flow of local identity and pride.
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