PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang has found a new culprit for a very old and very uncomfortable problem: despair. This time, as with so many times before, the villain is the West.
According to Hadi, Malay Muslims did not commit suicide in the past, but they do now, and the explanation—conveniently neat and ideologically satisfying—is that Pakatan Harapan is importing “Western-inspired reforms” rooted in secular thinking.
“The destructive effects are spreading in our country. In the past, Malay Muslims did not commit suicide, but now it happens.
“Even smaller misbehaviours, like family conflicts or bullying in schools, have become more common, especially in today’s open-media era, which spreads foreign influences into every home,” he said in a statement .
It is as if in Hadi's mind, the only meaningful difference between then and now is a set of policy ideas drafted in Putrajaya and allegedly inspired by foreign philosophies.
What is striking is not merely the claim itself, but the reflex behind it. Everything that goes wrong must come from outside. The West. Secularism. Foreign values. Open media. External contamination of a once-pure society. Responsibility is always pushed outward, never inward. Introspection is treated almost as a betrayal.
Yet there is an explanation far closer to home, one Hadi appears entirely unwilling to entertain: perhaps Muslim leaders and intellectuals in the past were simply better than many of those we have today. Perhaps they were wiser, more grounded, more capable of speaking to human suffering without reducing it to a civilisational conspiracy. Perhaps they understood faith not merely as a weapon against enemies, but as a source of meaning, consolation, and moral strength.
If today’s leaders, like him, were better—intellectually, spiritually, and ethically—the people they lead might not find life so bleak that death begins to look like an escape. Despair does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows when people feel unheard, unseen, and trapped in a moral language that explains everything except their pain.
Leadership, especially religious leadership, is not only about identifying what is sinful or foreign. It is about giving people hope without lying to them, meaning without coercion, and moral confidence in a world that is undeniably more complex than it was fifty or sixty years ago. When despair spreads, it is not merely a social or economic failure; it is a failure of moral imagination.
But suicide is not the only thing Hadi lays at the feet of the West. Practically every social ill—family conflict, bullying in schools, crime, moral decay—is traced back to foreign influence.
Hadi cited Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as an example, arguing that Western-style reforms failed to restore the country’s greatness.
“On the contrary, the country fell further into decline, suffering from the failure of these reforms, whether in Eastern bloc countries shifting towards the West or Western bloc countries pursuing their own agendas.
“Thus, the pioneers of reform in Malaysia, who rely on or remain passengers of the Western bloc, will sink along with it,” he said.
The West becomes a metaphysical dumping ground, a single explanatory device that absolves local actors of responsibility. When everything is blamed on an external force, nothing ever needs to be fixed internally.
This habit of mind brings to mind a line attributed to Henry David Thoreau. I may not be quoting it verbatim, but the spirit is unmistakable: even when it is their own belly that aches, people have a tendency to look outward, trying to set the world straight, instead of fixing themselves. Whether the quotation is exact is beside the point; its truth is obvious. And it fits Hadi perfectly.
Rather than examining the quality of his own ideas, the emotional dryness of his rhetoric, or the intellectual poverty of constant civilisational scaremongering, he prefers to wage an endless war against abstractions. The West. Secularism. Liberalism. These enemies are conveniently vast, vague, and permanently out of reach—and therefore permanently useful. You can never defeat them, which means you can never be proven wrong.
Even if, for the sake of argument, Hadi were right about Western influence—and that itself is highly doubtful—what exactly is his response meant to achieve? Is the role of a religious leader merely to catalogue decay and announce doom? To act as a professional mourner of civilisation, forever listing sins while offering no path forward except withdrawal and resentment?
There is something deeply unhealthy about a worldview that seems to take grim satisfaction in decline. Everything is going to ruin, everyone is corrupted, the world is irredeemable—and somehow this is presented as moral clarity. In reality, it is moral laziness. It requires no creativity, no empathy, no engagement with the messy realities of human life.
Why not aspire to better things? Why not speak about what is working, what can be strengthened, what kind of moral excellence is possible here and now? Why not acknowledge that Malaysians today live in a vastly different social, technological, and psychological environment, and that old answers may need to be rethought rather than merely repeated more loudly?
At the very least, if one insists on staring at failure, why not start with oneself?
Self-examination is uncomfortable precisely because it is productive. If you look at your own failures, you can actually do something about them. You can refine your ideas, soften your language, deepen your understanding of human suffering, and recognise where your leadership may be contributing to alienation rather than healing.
Studying everyone else’s failure, on the other hand, is easy. It costs nothing. It demands no change. It becomes an exercise either in endless lamentation or, worse, in taking secret pleasure from the belief that everything is collapsing. It is just you finding an alibi for your own shortcomings, defects and failures, rather than striving to improve upon it, because if everything else around you is going to ruin, you shouldn't be at fault for not being able to better yourself or your circumstances in such a defective world, isn't it?
Hadi might benefit from lifting his gaze once in a while. Instead of forever peering into the muck on the ground—searching obsessively for signs of decay—he could look up at the stars. Not to escape reality, but to recover a sense of proportion, humility, and aspiration. Moral leadership is not about obsessively identifying rot; it is about cultivating growth.
A politics, and a theology, built entirely on blame will always end in emptiness. And emptiness, ironically, is precisely the condition that gives rise to despair in the first place. If leaders truly care about preventing despair, they should begin not by condemning the world, but by examining themselves.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.