(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 [...]
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 [...]
The Malaysiakini site with the same video is here.
The Malaysiakini site with the same video is here.
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
How soon we forget. Malaysian politics is characterized by a curious form of ahistoricity and a willful neglect of history in general. The contribution of the diverse communities of Malaysia to the country’s nation-building process is often forgotten in the official narratives of the country, the role of women in our national history is seldom [...]
The recent general assembly of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS has left us with a rather mixed serving of results and outcomes, some of which will linger for a while and some of which may prove harder to digest than others. Despite the re-iteration of PAS’s stand vis a vis the UMNO party that was [...]
