By Farish A. Noor ~ July 3rd, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
Studying Malaysian politics is a chore in itself, but rewarding for the simple reason that it is one of the most plural, complex and complicated countries in the world. Among all the countries that I have worked on, it is Malaysia that continues to challenge my capacity to think (and relax) for the simple reason that its communitarian mode of sectarian politics is an odd blend of modernity and primordialism that is seldom equalled anywhere else.
At present the opposition coalition known as the Peoples Alliance (Pakatan Rakyat) is once again in a state a crisis – or rather manifold crises – as the component parties bicker over the mode of governance in the states that they won after the elections of March 2008. Bringing together the predominantly Chinese-Malaysian Left-leaning DAP, the multiracial PKR and the overwhelmingly Malay-Muslim Islamists of PAS was never an easy task; and it was said from the outset that the coalition was an instrumental one.
Today however the coalition is once again at breaking point after the DAP threatened to leave the coalition over a dispute over the destruction of a pig abattoir in the state of Kedah, disputes over contracts awarded to development projects in Penang and Selangor, and the lingering fear that the Islamists of PAS will push their Islamisation agenda in the states that have come under their control. Seemingly trivial matters such as the sale of pork and alcohol have forced all three parties to the defensive, with each party holding steadfast to its stand.
By Farish A. Noor ~ July 3rd, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
(Note: This article first appeared in The Nut Graph, where as usual it’s much better laid out and has pretty pictures — Yusseri)
THE historian’s lament is that he or she is often witness to mistakes of the past, and yet is unable to prevent them from recurring. In the end, the historian is cursed with the Cassandra complex and accused of being a tiresome doom sayer.
At the risk of being black-balled from dinner parties, I would like to restate that our country’s current state of affairs should remind us of our collective errors in the not-too-distant past. For example, just when we thought that talk of a unity government was dead and buried, this wearisome poltergeist has been resurrected to spook all and sundry.
One is forced to raise, yet again, the most obvious of questions: How can we work towards national unity as long as there remain politicians who continue to harp on and on about the myth of racial-ethnic unity?
By Farish A. Noor ~ June 26th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
(Note: I have closed the comments section for these series of articles, mainly because some of the comments made by the readers were rather short on sanity, but quite high on the vitriol. While it’s a very small number, it still remains rather a chore for me, since I actually have to read all of the comments before allowing them to be published. And when push comes to shove, I’d rather not sieve, and just live. For those who still want to comment, please go to Farish’s notes page in Facebook. This is not Farish’s doing, it is mine — Yusseri)
These days we often hear the accusation that someone or another is doing something nasty by interpreting a book or text out of context. The common refrain that follows goes something like this: “Who are you to interpret our holy book on your own without the guidance of our supreme religious elders who are so knowledgeable in scriptural knowledge that your own petty knowledge is like that of a gnat’s in comparison?” From this bombastic salvo there usually follows the same train of accusations and slander, which include the following: Muslim/Christian/Buddhist/Hindu feminists are simply reading and re-reading the holy scriptures with their own agendas in mind; that they are engaged in wilful and unregulated interpretation that goes against orthodoxy, etc.
Before we deal with the political nature and consequences of such accusations, let us return to the original premise and deconstruct it a bit.
Interpretation, of any text, is necessarily a subjective, historically-determined and culturally-contextualised endeavour. Every act of reading is necessarily subjective and therefore contingent and we cannot escape from the possibility of error, misinterpretation and misappropriation. This is true of reading a holy scripture as it is true about reading the menu of a restaurant, for the fact is that reading is necessarily a risk-laden enterprise and this has more to do with the nature of language as a social phenomena than anything else.
By Farish A. Noor ~ June 18th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
If I were to tell someone that I don’t like Satay, loathe batik shirts and can’t stand keroncong music, does it follow from that that I hate Malay culture in toto? Now one would have to be deliberately and consciously paralysingly stupid to believe that, by assuming that the rejection of some aspects of normative culture amounts to a total rejection of an entire culture as well. If that is the case with culture, then why cant we see that the same rule applies to talk of religion as well?
I raise this point because it has become ever so trendy in Malaysia these days to assume that any rejection, critical questioning or even debate over some normative aspects of religious epiphenomena amounts to a total rejection of the religion per se. This arises because of the unscrupulous manner in which some religiously-conservative individuals have erroneously equated the normative aspect of religiosity with the dogmatic aspect of religion in general. The two spheres, however, are distinct and should remain so.
This explains in part why groups such as Malaysia’s Sisters in Islam have been in the limelight for so many years, and why this group of Muslim feminists have been attacked again and again, and accused of being anti-Islamic. The fact however is that Sisters in Islam (SIS) has never raised any questions or doubts about Islamic orthodoxy, but rather have questioned the application of Islamic law and the praxis of Muslim norms in the country that go against the spirit of Islamic orthodoxy itself.
By Farish A. Noor ~ June 16th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
“You are not qualified to talk about Islam”. How many times have I heard and read that same line, again and again? And more often than not, the same sentence is uttered or written by precisely the sort of self-trained autodidact whose own knowledge of Islam came from whatever he or she read on the internet or some cassette he bought at the local market.
It has become rather commonplace for conservative Muslims – as well as conservative Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews – to claim monopoly over the discourse of Islam and to try their best to close off the space of public discourse on all matters religious for the sake of protecting the integrity and sanctity of that discourse. Or so we are told. But one can also argue that such attempts at restricting the participation and contribution of others in a discursive arena that is hotly contested is little more than a conventional and predictable attempt at censorship and the narrowing of the Muslim mind.
A recent case in point is the attempt to once again label the Muslim feminist movement Sisters in Islam of Malaysia as a group of ‘western-educated’ ‘liberal’ feminists who have no right to speak on matters Islamic. And once again we are in a paroxysm of anxiety as to how to deal with such accusations.
By Yusseri ~ June 11th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
Dr. Farish Noor is a prolific academic. The founder of The Other Malaysia project writes on the politics of Malaysia, Indonesia, Islamism, and old Malay hikayats with gusto and insight. He has been published everywhere. Well, nearly. It makes one wonder what he does to de-stress.
“I repair old batik, I knit and I stitch,” he tells The Nut Graph. What? No American Idol for our historian-activist?
“I haven’t watched television since I was 19, although lately I’m drawn to Indonesian pop culture,” he says.
By Farish A. Noor ~ June 10th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
Political parties are, it should be remembered, composite entities that are made up of a myriad of different personalities and subjectivities. It is hard enough to reach any kind of consensus in the open public domain, and certainly even more difficult to do so when trying to cobble together any corporate entity that has to be artificially brought together. God knows that even organising a dinner party can lead one to severe states of trauma and depression, and what more a political party!
The tendency for some political parties, organisations and movements to impose a general line of thinking, ideological parameters and code of conduct is therefore something that is necessary, but also necessarily double-edged. For here we are bound to walk along the very thin line that divides the public and the private; the will of the mass and the agency of the individual.
Does a political party have the right to demand a code of dress, a code of behaviour, a code of speech or a code of personal conduct from its members? As a democrat and an individualist, I am unable to accept any unreasonable constraints on my personal life, behaviour, beliefs and gender orientation from any party or organisation; and hence my reluctance to join any of the political parties in Malaysia (save one with a rather fetching clenched fist logo). I was tempted to join another party not too long ago, but decided not to do so in the end when the party made it a policy to forbid smokers from running for office. And so the list of prohibitions and inhibitions goes on and on…
By Farish A. Noor ~ June 9th, 2009. Filed under:TOM_Main.
The repercussions of the somewhat clumsy attempt by some sections of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS to call for the investigation, and possibly banning, of the Muslim women’s rights group Sisters in Islam are still being felt today. Many questions have arisen in the wake of the proposal that was passed without debate at the recent General Assembly of PAS: How and why was the proposal passed as one of the ‘non-debated proposals’ in the first place? Why was it not vetted properly and why was it tabled at all? What does this say about the internal cohesion of PAS and its internal discipline? Does this proposal reflect just a faction of opinion among PAS members, or is it actually representative of the party as a whole? And what does this mean with regards to PAS’s avowed claims to be a modern party that supports the democratisation process and dialogue with others?
It is hard, to say the least, to believe that a party can be supportive of democracy if it starts by calling for the banning of NGOs even before it comes to power…
For now however we are left to watch the internal and external drama of PAS unfold as the party seeks to re-consolidate itself after what was clearly a hectic assembly for all. The lingering question of where PAS really stands, and where it goes from here though will have to be addressed sooner than later.
