Book  Review "Dumb" Genes Dr M Bakri Musa revisits "The Malay Dilemma"

Professor Tan Sri Datuk Dr Somebody ABC BDE CFG ETC Dr M Bakri Musa is a doctor who lives in the US and an author with several titles to his credit. He is also an occasional contributor to the New Straits Times. In the "Malay Dilemma Revisited" he examines many aspects of this country critically, not sparing "Professor Tan Sri Dato Dr Hitam" whose name is followed by a string of alphabets. The professor and his colleagues suffer from what he calls "the sultan syndrome"; they are  dressed not for work but to enjoy air conditioning; they hanker after titles. The universities are top heavy with such academics who are busy publishing resumes and neglect the work of teaching and research. They claim that local certificates have to be introduced because foreign qualifications are "too tough", an argument he proved to be wrong when he taught at the university.  He had introduced a rigorous training programme similar to that of a typical American hospital and his students, he says,  survived the test. Another complaint of Bakri Musa is that the local graduates are handicapped by their poor English. That was written five years ago.  Today, ministers complain that quality of graduates is poor. Tthe deputy land and co-operative development minister has recently called for a review of the courses and teaching techniques. The poor quality and poor English, he says,  has left 60,000 graduates without jobs.  While the frankness of Bakri Musa is refreshing, it is a pity he avoids  answering the big question: Can university teaching and research flourish in conditions where the Internal Security and the University and Colleges Acts have ubiquitous control like watchful pre-emptive strike satellites up in the sky?  Musa calls the expensive Malayanisation of foreign companies  "disastrous corporate restructuring". The examples are the lame duck New Straits Times as compared with The Star Publications, a home grown company which does well because it is free from the burden of buying a foreign company at exorbitant prices. Had the government spent money on developing Malay human capital and improving the  schools we would not now be short of trained personnel, Musa argues.  And we might have avoided the situation in the year 2004 which found 700 rural areas in Sarawak without full electricity supply and unable therefore to use computers. Musa condemns those leaders who call on the rakyat to be frugal but lead opulent lifestyles; and he is worried about corruption which led to the then prime minister weeping at the corruption eating into the life of his party. Today, he claims, UMNO  is a vast and elaborate system of patronage rivalling the corrupt Democratic apparatus in Chicago of years past. Musa does not spare Dr Mahathir's racial theories and the "sweepingly outrageous conclusion which says essentially that Malays have ‘dumb' genes",  a major contributing factor to Malay backwardness and his advocacy of  racial intermarriages as means of introducing new and presumably "superior" genes into the community.

Mahathir's theories Mahathir's ignorance shocks Bakri Musa who points out that when Mahathir wrote in early 1970 knowledge of human genetics had  advanced far beyond the mendelian concepts he described. The  assertion that hereditary factors are supreme in the determination of complex human attributes like intelligence is simply not supported by the then known facts. "His thoughtless and unsubstantiated" claims did considerable harm to the Malays. It allowed them to blame their genes for their failures and inadequacies. Mahathir's gene theory, something he shares with Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew ("80 per cent of talent and intelligence was inherited while only 20 per cent was nurtured"), is understandable. Perceptions of Malay society, as indicated by Syed Hussein Alatas in  "The Myth of the Lazy Native" (1977) and Lily Zubaidah Rahim in "The Singapore Dilemma", written some 20 years later, have been strongly influenced and shaped by colonial and orientalist discourse on Malays who are characterised as endowed with traits of complacency, indolence, apathy, infused with a love of leisure and an absence of motivation and discipline. Orientalism  gave birth to a tradition of self-vilification starting with Za'aba and Senu Abdullah, Mahathir and Wan Hussein Zoohri. Is this the sickness that allows members of UMNO to take the frequent scolding of Mahathir for failing to improve themselves quietly and without protest? As for Mahathir's call for a population of 70 millions, Bakri Musa points out that there is no empirical evidence to support his theory that with more people we will achieve economies of scale and the resulting efficiency will allow us to compete abroad. Iran, a model for Mahathir's dream, now admits its mistake and has been forced to practise family planning. We are told by James Chin, a newspaper columnist, that the Mahathir-Anwar team built 200 religious schools which produced 700,000 students. Bakri Musa  views the increasing emphasis on religion and the rapid tempo of Islamisation with considerable unease.  Malays should be proud of their heritage and not try to ape the Arabs; nor should Malays automatically consider things Arabic,  their culture and their language to be superior. Bakri Musa is amazed how easily well educated and sophisticated Malays can be silenced and intimidated once Koranic quotations and religious authorities are invoked. He notes that Kelantan and Terenganu are the most backward states.  Europe, he says, would still be in the middle ages had the Catholic church succeeded in maintaining its unchallenged grip.             Bakri Musa does not like Anwar Ibrahim. The man liked to wear green and praised the ayatollahs He built ABIM, an Islamic youth organisation, around his personality cult and it quickly collapsed with his arrest in 1998. He observes that, in early 1997, the then deputy prime minister tried to ingratiate himself with the "powerful Islamic establishment" by forcing non-Muslims to take courses in Islam. He thinks that Anwar spoke one thing to the West and sang a different tune to the locals.  Which reminds me of that day when the good doctor flew in from London and was asked what he thought of Khomenei's death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Mahathir rounded on the reporters; had they not got something more important to ask him? Did they not think that the more important thing was that the Muslims were killing Muslims with arms from the west?  All this while Anwar was busy kowtowing to the ayatollahs.  Bakri Musa condemns Anwar's confrontation with Mahathir. He should instead have resigned. Of the future Bakri Musa does not think that racial groupings are a threat to the nation. The greatest threat to social stability is not inter racial hostility but intra-racial, more specifically, intra-Malay discord, he says. Non-Malays will understandably be astonished at this prediction. # K L Chai M Bakri Musa: The Malay Dilemma Revisited, 1999, Merantau, Gilroy Go to the top

Bakri Musa's book is available at The BOOKSHOP  Chow Thye Road :   (Telephone 228 2252)

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_____________________ The Penang File Issue  33