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Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
True, the racial discrimination in the mosques is ultimately a self segregating exercise instead of an actively ordained one. The mosque leaders being active community members volunteering to be part of the administration instead of job appointees does make the difference between racial vs religious based discrimination in the mosques difficult to parse.
One minor observation though is the schismatic fissures in Malaysian, and probably larger muslim world. While internally Islam is a race neutral religion in the whole, the cleaving of Islam into its various sects has mapped somewhat closely to differing ethnic groups as well. Shafi is the school of thought for the overwhelming majority of Southeast Asia, with explicit bans on Shia and Ahmadi in Malaysia.Yet there exist strong informal deobandi influence from Indian preachers, while I've seen discrimination against the bangladeshis justified as them being hanafi. Islam may be a racially neutral religion, but it still has been used as justification for racism.
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