The Other Malaysia

(This is a summary of the talk I gave at the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM) on 2 February 2010, at the ASEAN LOGICS conference. The panel was addressing the question of Addressing the Gulf/Divide in ASEAN over Cultural, Racial and Religious Differences. Ive tried to reproduce my talk verbatim below.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow scholars,

Allow me to begin by thanking the organisers of this event for their kind invitation to speak to you today. I am particularly happy to learn that this event was organised entirely by the students of IIUM themselves.

As this is a meeting of scholars, let us behave as scholars and address the issue at hand from a scholarly point of view.

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(*Terjemahan dari rencana Farish A. Noor bertajuk “Pigs’ Heads, Cows’ Heads and The Demons Among Us” oleh saudara David Chong yang budiman. Saya terhutang budi kepadanya atas kesudian beliau untuk menterjemahkan rencana ini.- FN )

Oleh Farish A Noor/ Diterjemahkan oleh David Chong

Terjemahan Mahabharatta dalam bahasa Melayu-Indonesia, Hikayat Pandawa Lima, menceritakan episod menarik dan mustahak yang berlaku atas medan pertempuran Bharatayudha. Putera sulong Pandawa bernama Putra Yudistira – seorang pertapa berjiwa damai – terpaksa berperang dengan Raja Prabu Salya. Prabu Salya memiliki suatu senjata hebat yang tidak boleh dikalahkan oleh sesiapa pun, iaitu, Raksasanya Chandrabirawa.

Raksasa ini tidak mudah ditumpaskan kerana ia menjadi lebih kuat setiap kali ia diserang. Jika tangannya dipotong, tangan baru tumbuh semula, lebih berkuasa dan berbisa dari yang sebelumnya. Ratusan pendekar cuba mengalahkan raksasa ini tetapi mereka semua gagal. Malah makhluk itu menjadi lebih kuat selepas pertarungan kerana ia dibekalkan keganasan dan kebencian.

Namun Prabu Salya telah diberi amaran bahawa beliau akan tumpas di tangan ‘orang berjiwa murni yang tidak mencederakan sesiapa’.

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Q and A for students of AS6011:

I’ve taken the liberty of cutting and pasting some of the questions that some of you have been sending me over the past two weeks and am going to address them here as best I can in stages. Here are some of the questions that Ive received so far, and perhaps we can discuss them in greater detail in the following classes too.

Q. Does this suggests that even irrational, primordial and non-factual mythologies can be used at the search for identity-construction and nation-building? - This is where I start to think about the comparison of what would be a natur(al) community vs imagined communities today. We see in Rwanda that natural divisions can have disastrous effects, while many nations today continue to live harmoniously today in ‘imagined communities’. I am not sure how important is my question - but it seems to me that world history has brought human race to this point of development that it is useless to think about what is imagined and what it should have been. The European Union prompted me to think of nation-building as a process. From being absolutely bellicose towards each other, to individual nations, to bi-polarism in cold war, to moving towards a ’super-federated’ Union - Europe could be the model of community evolution that we are witnessing. I think what drives the Europeans down this process: learning from conflicts and changing to survive (in the globalised world and balancing the power of US and China).

A. Firstly, be careful when you use terms like ‘natural’ communities etc. How and in what sense are they ‘natural’? The term natural, when applies in contexts such as ‘natural law’ or ‘natural justice’ has a teleological and essentialist ring to it that can be dangerous. After all, patriarchy has been described as ‘natural’ by some, and even apartheid was said to be ‘natural’ by its proponents and defenders. Using the term thus has the potentially dangerous effect of rendering essentalist and given something – esp social phenomena- that ought to be interrogated instead.

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In the Malay-Indonesian rendering of the Mahabharatta, the Hikayat Pandawa Lima, we have an interesting and important episode that takes place as the great battle of Bharatayudha is fought. The Pandawa prince Yudistira - who is an ascetic and pacifist at heart - is forced to do battle with the great King Prabu Salya. Prabu Salya has one great weapon that could not be defeated by anyone else, the demon Chandrabirawa.

The demon Chandrabirawa could not be defeated as he grew more and more powerful every time he was hit. If his arm was chopped off, he would immediately grow another arm, even more powerful and deadly than the one before. Hundreds of warriors tried to defeat the demon, but they were all slain and the demon grew stronger with each fight- for the demon thrived on hate and violence.

Yet Prabu Salya had been warned by the sages that his defeat would come at the hands of ‘the man of pure heart who has done no harm to anyone’.

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Looking at the state of Malaysian politics and society today, at a time when the nation is caught in the grip of a collective anxiety over questions of identity and its future, it is heartening to note that so many of the efforts at nation-building, reconciliation, the fostering of a sense of nationhood and common belonging is coming from ordinary people from all walks of life. Almost all of the efforts we have seen thus far - be it in the form of defining the meaning of Anak Bangsa Malaysia to the healing of collective wounds and sensitivities - have been individual efforts initiated by Malaysian citizens who still believe in the Malaysian project and the idea that Malaysian identity ought to be founded on the notion of a common, universal and equal citizenship for all.

Such positive developments, however, are set back by the lame and insipid developments on the political front; most notably the turgid pace of reform in some of the political parties of the country, including those parties that claim to be founded on the basis of reform itself.

Most recently we have witnessed the pathetic spectacle of political parties totally unable or unwilling to undertake the task of reform in their own ranks, and failing to admonish errant members whose actions and speech seem to contradict what the parties stand for. We are told that this is due to political necessity and fed the same excuse that politics is a ‘complicated business’ where egos and personalities need to be massaged all the time. Then there is the other familiar excuse of pragmatism backed up by the equally lame argument of having to pander to the communitarian sensitivities of their vote-bases and constituencies.

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Timeline for students of AS6011: State, Society and Politics in Malaysia: 1981-1990

1979: Pakistan declares itself to be the world’s first officially Islamic state and Iran goes through a revolution that topples the Shah of Iran and leads to the rise of the Islamist revolutionaries led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The impact of both events is felt all the way to Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysian Islamist leaders support the Iranian revolution and in 1979 ABIM sends a delegation to Iran to meet the Ayatollah, led by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar then calls for an ‘Iranian Liberation and Solidarity Day’ to be held in Malaysia on 16 March 1979.

1981: Dr Mahathir Mohamad comes to power as the 4th Prime Minister of Malaysia. At the UMNO General Assembly of 1981, the UMNO assembly issues the resolution that the Malaysian state should ‘enforce and defend the purity of Islam’. By 1982 the Prime Minister’s office had 100 Ulama working under it, and the Ministry of Education had 715 Ulama working for it as well. The Fourth Malaysia Plan (1981-1986) stated that Islam would play a greater role in the development of the country.

March 1982: Anwar Ibrahim declares that he will join UMNO and support Prime Minister Mahathir: “I have chosen to join UMNO because it affords me the opportunity to continue with my struggle and I hereby pledge my total support to the Prime Minister (Mahathir Mohamad)”. This move effectively splits ABIM and leaves the movement leaderless. Many other ABIM leaders decide to leave ABIM and join PAS instead.

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The first decade of PM Mahathir Mohamad

Note: The main text for this week and next will be chapters 4-5 from: Farish A Noor, Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) 1951-2003, MSRI, Kuala Lumpur, 2004. (Volume 2)

To return to our discussions earlier, note the salient points of this period:

1. Malaysia’s Islamisation Race and the Mainstreaming of Islam in Malaysia’s Public political domain.

The first decade of the Mahathir era was characterised by the sustained attempt to rapidly project Malaysia into the international arena and to develop the country (See time-line in the next note), moving it away from an import-substitution based economy to an export-oriented economy and to rid itself of the dependency on exportable natural commodities such as tin and rubber whose prices in the international market fluctuated beyond the control of the Malaysian government.

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Malaysia has been making international headlines over the past few weeks for all the wrong reasons, yet again. The spate of arson attacks on Churches, Temples and Mosques is a worrying sign that the fragile social contract - if there ever was one - that underlies the Malaysian multicultural project is in danger of falling apart if centrifugal forces aligned to communitarian groups and lobbies are not kept in check.

Ostensibly the controversy began as a result of protests on the part of several Muslim groups in the country over the use of the word ‘Allah’ by non-Muslims, in particular Christians, in the country. But one needs to take a step back from the furore to understand the other structural and socio-economic factors that may have played a part in this sudden mobilisation of mass communitarian anxiety. After all, why now? Christians in many parts of the country, notably in East Malaysia, have been using the term ‘Allah’ for decades, in fact long before the states of Sabah and Sarawak even joined Malaysia in 1963. If this was not an issue of concern over the past four decades, then why has it been made an issue now, and by whom?

The government of current Prime Minister Najib Razak is therefore caught in a double-bind, thanks in part to the communal nature of Malaysian politics that has been normalised over half a century. Despite talk of ‘1Malaysia’, ‘Middle Malaysia’, ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ by politicians in power as well as the opposition, the reality is that there are many Malaysias that have remained largely isolated and alienated from each other, developing in tandem but without ever seriously communicating. Malaysian society remains a distant idea as the communities of the country remain living in their private comfort zones with little real contact and understanding of each other.

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Following the discussion we had today, let us return to the salient points that were raised:

1. The National Operations Council. Now referring to the interview with one of the directors of the NOC (that appeared in Off the Edge magazine and which was photocopied to you), note that the National Operations Council (1970-71) marked the temporary suspension of the democratic process in Malaysia when Parliament was very much redundant, thus rendering null and void the gains of the opposition parties at the elections of May 1969.
It was during this period, when the country was run by the NOC that the Prime Minister (Tun Razak) assumed control as Director of Operations (DOO) of the NOC and where there was direct and immediate governance with the NOC taking over the responsibilities of government. This marks the centralisation of power in the hands of the executive, and also corresponds to the eventual demise of local government in Malaysia.

There were, however, several distinguishing features of this particular period, all of which are related to the personalities of the men (and only men, no women) who were in charge of the country then. Firstly they were almost entirely made up of western-trained bureaucrats who governed the country on a pragmatic and realist basis, and who argued that the social contract (that was really an inter-elite contract among the leaders of the Perikatan Alliance) had to be re-worked on the basis on political necessity and realism. Note that pragmatism was the order of the day, and this very much reflected the pragmatic and realist attitude of Tun Razak in particular.

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Nationalism, Communitarianism and the Contestation for Symbols and Meaning over the “Allah controversy”: Structural-Economic Underpinnings.

Apropos last week’s discussion about the current controversy over the use of the word ‘Allah’ by Christians in Malaysia, we need to take into account the socio-economic and structural underpinnings of what is going on and the variable factors that have led to this. Note that the situation in Malaysia as we discussed is not unique: The current debate in France over what constitutes French identity has sparked a national debate that is heated and even polemical, though the symbols and markers of identity that are being contested are all subjective and variable.

Bracket out the specificities of the ethnic/cultural and religious groups involved and consider this hypothetical scenario:

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