Interview
An Islamic state
Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad looks at the fuure
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Interview
An Islamic state Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad looks at the fuure |
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... FIRST CAME national schools, which nobody objected to after 20 or 30 years of independence; then they made the schools Malay schools; and now, worse, they have made, after the Iranian Revolution, madrasah - not so much in their physical architecture as their culture, irrespective of the presence of other ethnic and religious groups there. And the worst is yet to come. ... I want to touch on the Arabisation of Malay society but let's now look at the 60s and 70s, the 'golden age' of Malaysia. ... The golden age of Malaysia, I would say, for most Malaysians, would be '57 to '69. The Malays may be a bit uncomfortable that I say that, but I do say so. Even after the NEP, I think the real downside came after Dr Mahathir took over, from '81 upwards, with the inclusion of Anwar and all that, instead of Mahathir trying to hold [the conservative forces] back. But towards the end of his premiership, he brought in the teaching of science and mathematics in English. I begged him when I was again a Member of Parliament in the 80s: I said, 'Why don't we go back to English? We can build Chinese schools and Malay schools for all those who want to study there.' He said: 'Too late.' ... I'm not against Malay schools, Chinese schools, Tamil schools. But now, you have Malay schools called national schools; you have Chinese schools, private and government-aided; Tamil schools, the same thing; and you have the religious schools, which are run by the Ministry of Education, the state government (since religion is a state matter) the religious departments, and by individuals. That makes five systems of religious schools. And I haven't even touched on sekolah pondok and unregistered madrasah. ... The Malay, Chinese and Indian elite in their twenties and thirties now were all educated overseas. Why? Because their parents could not accept jeopardising their children's futures by educating them in national schools. But they would have accepted national schools and Malay as the medium of instruction if - like the Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or Russians - we had thousands of well-trained, Malay-speaking teachers. We didn't. We did not have a big enough core of competent teachers; the Malays themselves will admit to this. |
| So
even
if we wanted to do anything in Malay now, we couldn't. Take
translation. How
many books do we translate into Malay a year? In Indonesia, around 500 books are translated into Bahasa Indonesia every year. Here, we have a very good Dewan Bahasa, one of the best buildings in town - Indonesia's Balai Pustaka is nothing compared to ours. But it produces more books. Here we probably produce 10, 20? And most, I understand, are not translations but synopses. They can't do it because you have to be competent in both languages; Adibah Amin was one such person. So we are lost in translation. I pity the people reading some of the translations, which I've skimmed through... ... One gets the impression that the country is floundering and lost in translation at this moment. We're suffering from an identity crisis on a scale I've never seen in my life. ... But the biggest proponents of Malay-only, none of them sent their children to Malay schools. Take (Jaafar) Albar's son, Syed Hamid Albar, who went to Geelong, then London. Syed Nasir's children also went to Geelong in Melbourne, then to England. (Ed's note: Tan Sri Syed Jaafar Albar, was a former Umno secretary-general in the 60s known as the 'Lion of Umno'. Tan Sri Syed Nasir Ismail was another prominent Umno politician. He was Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat in the late 70s.) But they were two persons at the forefront [of the Malay language movement]. And the children and grandchildren of those who followed what they led have generally suffered. ... So the contradiction could be summed up thus: 'Let's send everyone to local national schools, pondok schools, but my children will go to Oxford or Cambridge.' Most of their children went to the likes of Newcastle, Manchester, Hull or Inns of the Court... What frightens me now is that they're telling people to behave like the Wahabbis, but ironically the Arabs and Wahabbis are opening up... Look at the Gulf states, for instance. But it's 'do as we say, not as we do'. The Arab elite send their children to the best public schools in the West that money can buy, and tell their people to behave as if they were back in the Prophet's (pbuh) days. That's why I think there will eventually be turbulence, even revolution, there. ... You see, we're not going to be a Malaysian nation. That's wishful thinking. We're moving towards becoming an Islamic Malay nation. It used to be that we said, 'bangsa, tanah air dan agama'. Now, it's 'agama, bangsa dan tanah air'. It's a very subtle process of penerapan (cultural osmosis). ... Do you think the Malaysian nationalist project is dead? Not quite dead, but more Islamist in nature. The future here is Islam. Nik Aziz (Pas spiritual leader) said so... Realistically, I agree with him. Umno doesn't want to be outflanked by Pas, so sometimes it is more 'Islamic' than Pas. Umno is reacting, not responding, to Pas' agenda. So who's responsible for this? |
| Dr Mahathir is partly
responsible because he declared Malaysia an
Islamic state. If we were to be scrupulous in describing Malaysia, it
is not. When you're
an Islamic state, you have to use the Shariah - which we do, but only
in family
law, for Muslims. As long as a country is an Islamic state in name, the
Islamists will, and have, demanded that the government 'melaksanakan'
or 'isikan' the substance of an Islamic state. And I don't blame them. Take the universities. Most graduates took up Malay language studies or Islamic studies and arts. These are the people who are going to implement national policy, and they're not going to implement it as how you or I think it should be implemented but what they and their political leaders think it should be. ... In 20 years time, we may be the twenty-second Arab state rather than the twentieth Chinese province, as once feared ... If you listen to the sermon in some mosques here, doomsday is at hand. And they have been talking like this for a long time! They are fixated on the afterlife, as if this one doesn't matter. And these sermons are written by government officials working in the agencies under the Prime Minister's Department. Badawi couldn't do anything because the people who are running our governmental religious institutions were largely educated in the conservative theological universities of the Middle East and not, say, at the more progressive University of Cairo, or Tunisia and Syria - I've been to all these countries. Things are not that bad now, but we need a strong character to lead the country. We can't find him in the form of Najib, Muhyiddin or Hishammuddin. # (these are extracts from an interview given by Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad to Off the Edge magazine) Go to the top |
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| ______ INDEX Point to the article that you want to read, and CLICK Index page ABC Penang An Islamic Malaysia Baba meals Book review Clarey Khoo (Exhibition) Enemy No 2 Expressions (exhibition) Food guide An immigrant's story (9) Letter from Pulau Tikus Old booksRefugees, Odisi Remember me (poem) Secret Servce fake |
| _____________________ The Penang File Issue 66 |