There was recently a video of some Singaporean Malays circulating around Malaysian Twitter.

The video showed four friends smoking, drinking and generally having a good time.

No harm, no foul right?

Harm and foul

A tweet from a Malaysian man admonishing these four gained quite a lot of virality, chalking up more than 5,000 retweets, and 2,500 likes.

Here's a rough translation:

"She is a Malay Muslim, I want to ask netizens if this is normal? This is not the first time I'm watching her Instagram story where she is drinking alcohol like it is normal."

He later on tweeted about the harmfulness of drinking and drink-driving for some reason.

He also admonished the four friends for their liberalism.

Yikes.

Play country

Well, that sentiment took on a more condescending, nationalistic tone, by some Twitter users, with one in particularly chastising Singapore Muslims.

Here's her tweet.

Which roughly translates to:

"She's SINGAPORE. For me la... FOR ME EHH, it's difficult to control the way Singaporean Malays socialise with one another. They may look like they have progressed, but poor them. They not yet celebrate indipendent (sic). It's normal to see such things there. Sometimes, they will even get drunk."

Which seemed to imply that drinking somehow made Singaporean Malays less than them.

She continued on her very well thought out hypothesis.

"Plus, the way they dress are so revealing. There are still some Malay teens there who are devout Muslims. But 80% others are like this. So, don't be weird. Their (sic) nearby Johorean. No wonder why a little of Johoteen follows how they live (sic)."

Yup, she even found time to bag on some Johor people for dressing too revealingly as a result of living too close to Singapore.

Response

There were a lot of tweets calling out this gross generalisation.

But perhaps the most eloquent reply came from Singaporean Twitter user Anyalien Jay.

Here is her reply, in five tweets.

Not true. Living in a secular country gives us freedom to make our own choices without judgment. It does not mean (80% you say?) Muslims here don’t follow their religion like M’sians do. I dare say some do it better than u.

Here, we just mind our own business more. https://t.co/OSJDogVDgq

— goyeng pichang (@anygalien) October 13, 2018

Here's the entire reply, in case you can't read it.

"Not true. Living in a secular country gives us freedom to make our own choices without judgment. It does not mean (80% you say?) Muslims here don’t follow their religion like M’sians do. I dare say some do it better than u.

Here, we just mind our own business more.

I‘ve friends who would stop to visit the mosque & pray on their day out. They’re not a minority. I also have friends who are non-practising Muslims. There are all kinds of people here because we accept one another’s right to choice.

It doesn’t make SGeans immoral like u suggest.

Just because you’re Johorean and see S’poreans at a closer distance than your fellow M’sians, does not mean that what you see is representative of the Malay/Muslim community here.

If you immerse yourself among our Malay people, you will find that it’s not that we’re “tak terkawal” (uncontrollable). It’s that our community sees no need for any sort of “perkawalan” (control) because our morals and camaraderie permeates in our community, not just religion.

Also, we. mind. our. own. business."

Mic drop.

And Jay's response prompted this response from a Malaysian who took issue with the original post as well.

Great.

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Image from Hariz's Twitter