"Questioning the worth of one’s own culture, tradition and history is
quite symptomatic of societies that have been colonized or defeated. In fact it is quite normal.
This lost of faith in their own culture, can take many forms ranging from mimicking the ways and habits of the colonial masters or/and to an outright condemnation and hostility to the merits of anything remotely indigenous in nature. In one form or another, and to a lesser or greater degree, the collective self- condemnation of the colonized and the defeated, has happened among the Indians, Arabs, Philipinoes , Algerians ( Berbers ), Africans and to a lesser extant the Chinese.
And of course, as u well know, and as the example your post highlights,in this regard the Malays were also not an exception.
In fact, questioning and even condemning one's own traditional values and race can even afflict people who were not technically colonized but merely suffered defeat at the hands of foreigners. The following quotation from the Japan Herald dated 9th April 1881, when the humiliating forceful opening of Japan by Mathew Perry was still fresh in the collective psyche of the Japanese, is symptomatic of such a reaction:
"Wealthy we do not think Japan will ever become: the advantages conferred by nature, with the exception of climate, n the love of INDOLENCE n PLEASURE of the people themselves, forbid it. The Japanese r a HAPPY race, and being content with little, are NOT LIKELY TO ACHIEVE MUCH"
(Pasquale, I have deliberately written some words in bold. Those words sound familiar right? Indolent, pleasure seeking, lack of ambitioned,fatalistic,etc-etc, are all part of the standard vocabulary used by the Malays, including UMNO leaders like Dr M, when attempting to explain the reasons for Malay backwardness.)
This happens because of two reasons; one obvious and natural while the other develops more insidiously.
The former happens, because being defeated by any foreign entity is by itself, a humiliating process, what more being ruled by a foreign interloper. With regards to the latter, in Malaya for example, in their attempts to ensure that their presence was met with as little resistance as possible,(apart from ruling under the auspices of the Malay Monarchy) the British had introduce an educational system whose structure and curriculum was intended to make the Malays blame themselves for being colonized. It was a classic case of reversing the appropriation of blame from the victimizers to the victims. And of course, when taken together with Winsted’s stated policy of limiting Malay education to standard six, which would have the effect of making it impossible for them to participate in the colonial economy, the political and economic emancipation of the Malays was complete.
Furthermore, due to the fact, that the poverty stricken Malays were surrounded by non- Malays who were far more economically developed, after a number of decades, in the minds of many ( both Malays and non), the poverty of the Malays was given a racial dimension.
For many Malays, Malay-ness was soon synonymous with backwardness. For them, to be Malay was to be poor, fatalistic, lazy, moronic, ugly. In short the Malays felt that they had inherited a culture of poverty.( this situation, whereby the Malays blames themselves for their predicament instead of the British apartheid policies towards them, facilitated British rule)
This general mindset continued throughout the colonial period and extended even after Merdeka.
Moreover, due to the fact, that the level of understanding among the Malays about their own tradition, history and culture is at a bare minimum, and even then, mostly derived from second hand layman opinion, for the Malays to even have an inkling about another possible interpretation of their history, was almost impossible.
Of course there were exceptions to the general rule like the academician Syed Husin al- Attas who wrote “The Myth of the Lazy Native” and his brother Syed Naguib. The latter especially in his understanding about the spread of Islam in the Malay Archepelago, the role of the Malay language in it and the signal contributions of Hamzah Fansuri and Nuruddin Al- Raneiri in that process is especially instructive in informing us about the richness of our tradition. Then there are the works of Tan Sri Ismail Hussin, Leonard Andaya, Sharil Robert, etc- etc.
But understanding about how Malay history, culture and tradition per se and their interaction with colonialism, which were given far more depth due to the direct exposure to primary and secondary sources that was taking place in the ivory towers, did not filter down to the larger community. This is tragic because the insights of our best and brightest, about our own heritage, were unable to inform the general Malay public, including policy makers. As such, the general understanding of the Malays about themselves and even their religion since colonialism remain low.
Partly it was due to the Malay political masters who were generally disinterested in academic activities. After all, what the general Malay populace knew were what their leaders, thru the mainstream media, wanted them to know. Unfortunately for the Malays, the Umno leadership was(is) by and large non- intellectuals, and their developmental priorities reflected this. And in the haste to get out of our economic doldrums, abstract knowledge about our heritage and tradition was not considered a priority.
Thus, the knee jerk “blaming the victims instead of the victimizer” mindset of the Malays, which they inherited from the colonial period, was passed down from one generation to another.
And in a situation whereby a community, in this instance, the Malays, feels that it has inherited a culture of poverty, it becomes very easy for any party to use religion to condemn and stymie any attempt to use race as a galvanizing force to garner political support.This was more apparent after the introduction of the NEP, when some of the criticism of LKY's Malaysian Malaysia was given an Islamic twist.
Race based politics in general, and Malay based politics and policies in particular, were being cast as unIslamic. Those who used these arguments claim that Malay policies were racist in nature and Islam is against racism in any form. (Though I feel that such assertions are very shallow in nature, I wont record my rebuttals here) They claim that pro Malay policies were assabiyah. (Of course with regards to its compatibility with Islam,the real status of Malay( Umno) politics is far more subtle and complicated than that. Additionally, the fact that the term assabiyah has also been given positive connotations by Ibn Khaldun and is regarded by him as being the main ingredient underpinning civilizational rise and decline, as recorded in his seminal work “The Muqqadimah” is also largely unknown to the majority of Malays.)
Later when DSAI joined Umno, many of the more seasoned politicians like Musa, Ku Li, Rais etc-etc, had already establish a strong following which in some ways was derived from them having a defined platform. Most of these platforms were nationalistic in nature. Thus in wanting to differentiate himself from the crowd so to speak, DSAI decided to have a platform that had a more “Islamic face”.
Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that the "Islamic Face" of DSAI's politics had the effect at the operational level, of reducing Islam into symbols. The rich and sophisticated moral and intellectual ethos of the religion, which were, by its very nature not easily package and marketed, was relegated to the back seat. More emphasis was being given to the promotion of religious paraphernalia, like the tudung for instance, than a proper explanation of the moral and ethical principles behind it( for instance, the understanding that the tudung, is but an external manifestation of our internal commitment to maintain a certain behavarial standard, rather than a substitute for it )
And of course, though Malay nationalism was never directly condemned, nonetheless, it was never disassociated completely from the charges of assabiyah. In fact in subtle ways it was encouraged.
For instance tv drama, religious programmes and popular magazine articles slowly introduce the idea that there exist a seeming conflict between being a Malay and being a muslim. And in any contest between the two, the latter was of course given more weight. Soon statements along the lines of "Malay is just a race, while Islam is universal" gain a lot of currency and popularity. This was an indirect attempt to discredit and later delegitimize the nationalistic platforms of his competitors. And after the purging of Umno in 87, and the franchising of the paper and tv media to his stooges, Islam ala Anuwar, was given unlimited free reign. ( of course, additionally such a development also served the interest of PISM, which would also jump on the bandwagon of denouncing Malay nationalism as unIslamic)
Thus Pasquale, to me, the shallow and irrelevant incongruousness that some( many?) Malays today see between being a Malay and being a Muslim, and the supremacy that the latter holds in any imagined conflict between the two, originated because of the following factors:
1) the lack of confidence that we have on the worth of our traditions and values caused by being colonized,
2) a lack of understanding about our history, culture and tradition.This was further compounded by deemphasizing the importance of academic diciplines which did not have alot of "economic" merit or whose role in the rapid industrialization process was unclear
3) our failure to control the public debate with regards to the compatibility of Malay nationalism with Islam.
quite symptomatic of societies that have been colonized or defeated. In fact it is quite normal.
This lost of faith in their own culture, can take many forms ranging from mimicking the ways and habits of the colonial masters or/and to an outright condemnation and hostility to the merits of anything remotely indigenous in nature. In one form or another, and to a lesser or greater degree, the collective self- condemnation of the colonized and the defeated, has happened among the Indians, Arabs, Philipinoes , Algerians ( Berbers ), Africans and to a lesser extant the Chinese.
And of course, as u well know, and as the example your post highlights,in this regard the Malays were also not an exception.
In fact, questioning and even condemning one's own traditional values and race can even afflict people who were not technically colonized but merely suffered defeat at the hands of foreigners. The following quotation from the Japan Herald dated 9th April 1881, when the humiliating forceful opening of Japan by Mathew Perry was still fresh in the collective psyche of the Japanese, is symptomatic of such a reaction:
"Wealthy we do not think Japan will ever become: the advantages conferred by nature, with the exception of climate, n the love of INDOLENCE n PLEASURE of the people themselves, forbid it. The Japanese r a HAPPY race, and being content with little, are NOT LIKELY TO ACHIEVE MUCH"
(Pasquale, I have deliberately written some words in bold. Those words sound familiar right? Indolent, pleasure seeking, lack of ambitioned,fatalistic,etc-etc, are all part of the standard vocabulary used by the Malays, including UMNO leaders like Dr M, when attempting to explain the reasons for Malay backwardness.)
This happens because of two reasons; one obvious and natural while the other develops more insidiously.
The former happens, because being defeated by any foreign entity is by itself, a humiliating process, what more being ruled by a foreign interloper. With regards to the latter, in Malaya for example, in their attempts to ensure that their presence was met with as little resistance as possible,(apart from ruling under the auspices of the Malay Monarchy) the British had introduce an educational system whose structure and curriculum was intended to make the Malays blame themselves for being colonized. It was a classic case of reversing the appropriation of blame from the victimizers to the victims. And of course, when taken together with Winsted’s stated policy of limiting Malay education to standard six, which would have the effect of making it impossible for them to participate in the colonial economy, the political and economic emancipation of the Malays was complete.
Furthermore, due to the fact, that the poverty stricken Malays were surrounded by non- Malays who were far more economically developed, after a number of decades, in the minds of many ( both Malays and non), the poverty of the Malays was given a racial dimension.
For many Malays, Malay-ness was soon synonymous with backwardness. For them, to be Malay was to be poor, fatalistic, lazy, moronic, ugly. In short the Malays felt that they had inherited a culture of poverty.( this situation, whereby the Malays blames themselves for their predicament instead of the British apartheid policies towards them, facilitated British rule)
This general mindset continued throughout the colonial period and extended even after Merdeka.
Moreover, due to the fact, that the level of understanding among the Malays about their own tradition, history and culture is at a bare minimum, and even then, mostly derived from second hand layman opinion, for the Malays to even have an inkling about another possible interpretation of their history, was almost impossible.
Of course there were exceptions to the general rule like the academician Syed Husin al- Attas who wrote “The Myth of the Lazy Native” and his brother Syed Naguib. The latter especially in his understanding about the spread of Islam in the Malay Archepelago, the role of the Malay language in it and the signal contributions of Hamzah Fansuri and Nuruddin Al- Raneiri in that process is especially instructive in informing us about the richness of our tradition. Then there are the works of Tan Sri Ismail Hussin, Leonard Andaya, Sharil Robert, etc- etc.
But understanding about how Malay history, culture and tradition per se and their interaction with colonialism, which were given far more depth due to the direct exposure to primary and secondary sources that was taking place in the ivory towers, did not filter down to the larger community. This is tragic because the insights of our best and brightest, about our own heritage, were unable to inform the general Malay public, including policy makers. As such, the general understanding of the Malays about themselves and even their religion since colonialism remain low.
Partly it was due to the Malay political masters who were generally disinterested in academic activities. After all, what the general Malay populace knew were what their leaders, thru the mainstream media, wanted them to know. Unfortunately for the Malays, the Umno leadership was(is) by and large non- intellectuals, and their developmental priorities reflected this. And in the haste to get out of our economic doldrums, abstract knowledge about our heritage and tradition was not considered a priority.
Thus, the knee jerk “blaming the victims instead of the victimizer” mindset of the Malays, which they inherited from the colonial period, was passed down from one generation to another.
And in a situation whereby a community, in this instance, the Malays, feels that it has inherited a culture of poverty, it becomes very easy for any party to use religion to condemn and stymie any attempt to use race as a galvanizing force to garner political support.This was more apparent after the introduction of the NEP, when some of the criticism of LKY's Malaysian Malaysia was given an Islamic twist.
Race based politics in general, and Malay based politics and policies in particular, were being cast as unIslamic. Those who used these arguments claim that Malay policies were racist in nature and Islam is against racism in any form. (Though I feel that such assertions are very shallow in nature, I wont record my rebuttals here) They claim that pro Malay policies were assabiyah. (Of course with regards to its compatibility with Islam,the real status of Malay( Umno) politics is far more subtle and complicated than that. Additionally, the fact that the term assabiyah has also been given positive connotations by Ibn Khaldun and is regarded by him as being the main ingredient underpinning civilizational rise and decline, as recorded in his seminal work “The Muqqadimah” is also largely unknown to the majority of Malays.)
Later when DSAI joined Umno, many of the more seasoned politicians like Musa, Ku Li, Rais etc-etc, had already establish a strong following which in some ways was derived from them having a defined platform. Most of these platforms were nationalistic in nature. Thus in wanting to differentiate himself from the crowd so to speak, DSAI decided to have a platform that had a more “Islamic face”.
Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that the "Islamic Face" of DSAI's politics had the effect at the operational level, of reducing Islam into symbols. The rich and sophisticated moral and intellectual ethos of the religion, which were, by its very nature not easily package and marketed, was relegated to the back seat. More emphasis was being given to the promotion of religious paraphernalia, like the tudung for instance, than a proper explanation of the moral and ethical principles behind it( for instance, the understanding that the tudung, is but an external manifestation of our internal commitment to maintain a certain behavarial standard, rather than a substitute for it )
And of course, though Malay nationalism was never directly condemned, nonetheless, it was never disassociated completely from the charges of assabiyah. In fact in subtle ways it was encouraged.
For instance tv drama, religious programmes and popular magazine articles slowly introduce the idea that there exist a seeming conflict between being a Malay and being a muslim. And in any contest between the two, the latter was of course given more weight. Soon statements along the lines of "Malay is just a race, while Islam is universal" gain a lot of currency and popularity. This was an indirect attempt to discredit and later delegitimize the nationalistic platforms of his competitors. And after the purging of Umno in 87, and the franchising of the paper and tv media to his stooges, Islam ala Anuwar, was given unlimited free reign. ( of course, additionally such a development also served the interest of PISM, which would also jump on the bandwagon of denouncing Malay nationalism as unIslamic)
Thus Pasquale, to me, the shallow and irrelevant incongruousness that some( many?) Malays today see between being a Malay and being a Muslim, and the supremacy that the latter holds in any imagined conflict between the two, originated because of the following factors:
1) the lack of confidence that we have on the worth of our traditions and values caused by being colonized,
2) a lack of understanding about our history, culture and tradition.This was further compounded by deemphasizing the importance of academic diciplines which did not have alot of "economic" merit or whose role in the rapid industrialization process was unclear
3) our failure to control the public debate with regards to the compatibility of Malay nationalism with Islam.
