Tragic as it is, Muslim disunity is historical, stretching back a millennium following Prophet Muhammad's death after he first preached, in what would later be embraced as Islam, to a disenfranchised assemblage in Makkah.
Two caliphs — Umar and Uthman, who were among the closest companions of the prophet — were murdered by people considered as close kin, thus cementing a very consequential schism.
Fast forward to the present era, as Islam ascended to what is now the Middle East and spread to the Far East, the schism despairingly tagged along. During this time, Muslims prospered and floundered in equal measures, many unable and unwilling to outgrow their entrenched sectarianism.
This was cataclysmically reflected in the emblematic Sunni-Shia divisions that erupted during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Post-Arab Spring, Syria especially became a regional flashpoint of deadly battles, muddled by Western interference.
Sectarian thoughts are equally powerful and weak: some Muslim nations' politicians deploy the differences to aggravate Middle East conflicts. Sectarians occasionally settle quarrels with bombs and bullets, sometimes through revolutions, but most were welcomed if they determined rivalries by democratic means. Which is a Malaysian hallmark through heated disputes, first represented by the Umno-Pas skirmishes roiling since the 1960s, but now takes on a more complex complexion.
Alluding to this historicity, Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah of Perak has added another dimension to the disunity: growing inequality between the richest and poorest countries. This is recorded by the United Nation's Human Development Index trends and aggravated by undiminishing international conflicts, clear signs of a disunited global Muslim community.
Befitting his reputation as a public intellect, Sultan Nazrin offered a simple solution: focus should once again be on humanity. In a royal keynote address during a recent Islamic conference, Sultan Nazrin reflected on the duty to support vulnerable members of the international community, those in poverty, hardship and deprivation.
Sultan Nazrin's humanitarian concept flourishes in a democracy, but some Muslim nations are unfortunate: tell that to combatants killed, maimed or smeared, trying to build a democratic legacy. Muslims are regularly implored to return to main religious sources while abandoning sects to establish nation states that reject extremism.
Still, this method isn't phasing out sectarianism: in fact, it enrages the sects to rail against the state. Perhaps divided Muslim nations could look to Malaysia as a pragmatic example of harmony.
A nation fully subscribing to Islam as the official religion, Malaysia is a living testament to religious pluralism, inter-religious dialogue, functioning secular laws and policies undergirded by a competitive democracy.
This scenario would be the ideal instrument responding to Sultan Nazrin's imperative entreaty.