I never quite understood the near-hysterical protestations by our ministers and media-friendly intellectuals over the Newsweek and Time reports that suggested Malaysia could have been one of the bases of the Al-Qaeda network and indeed may have been the launching pad for the Sept 11 attacks.
That the terrorists have chosen Kuala Lumpur and not Jakarta could have been taken as a compliment exactly for the same reasons why they have chosen to lie low and hatch their plots in Hamburg, Paris and London and not Cairo or Jeddah. Kuala Lumpur is an ultra modern city that can match any other in terms of a reliable banking system, state-of-the art IT and communication facilities, and social diversions to occupy one's time with. The year 2020 is here.
It is not our government's fault that they chose our capital city as a base; no one invited them here. We are a very civilised society in that we don't put people under security surveillance as long as they don't ask too many questions about the state of health of our democracy.
No one was surprised that one minister reacted by threatening to sue Newsweek and another considered not buying advertisements in Time anymore. But we expected our intellectuals who have been given favoured access to the media to have come up with a more nuance response.
Unfathomable jitteriness
One favourite line was that the western media has a mischievous agenda of using the global war against terrorism to keep independent-minded countries like Malaysia on the radar screen of the US administration, to keep us under the control of western hegemonic power.
Well, that may indeed be true but the sources quoted by the two magazines' reports, and the names and dates mentioned made it rather difficult to simply brush them off as such. They could have served as a good starting point to really examine how far the Al-Qaeda terrorist network has put down roots here, at the same time accord justice to those already detained by allowing them fair, open trials.
That jitteriness was difficult to fathom as there is in fact no reason to be embarrassed about the whole thing as nobody is actually accusing our government as a sponsor of terrorism. Our only fault seems that we are too successful and precocious with our nation building and development programme. In fact we have always been proud that ours is among the few nations that can maintain peace and harmony despite its multi-racial, multi-religious makeup, usually an explosive substrate for political violence.
I suspect the source of our irritation and indignation is that the two reports have thrown a spanner into our efforts at constructing the image of Malaysia as a model of moderate Islam. Ours is an Islam that rejects intolerance, extremism and obscurantism. We have successfully embarked on a path of economic development, industrialisation, improvement in living standards and alleviation of poverty while at the same time are proud of our Islam, making it the defining principle in our social and political life. That is the message that we would like to get across to the world and to the non-Muslims of this country.
Unusual cosiness
That tiff with Time and Newsweek brought into focus something that one sensed has been building up in the past few months an unusual cosiness between a few intellectuals and media commentators with officialdom. Or could it be just my imagination running wild? The PUM (Malaysian Muslim Scholars Association) affair and that now infamous memorandum has somehow convinced me of my initial intuition.
I could not help forming the impression that in the war of two Islams, the ruling party is hiring the expertise of professional intellectuals to cultivate and project its image as the torch bearer of moderate Islam to a well-defined constituency the English-educated urban middle class, a constituency that will be crucial in determining its political survival in future elections.
Before proceeding further, it is perhaps useful to refresh our perspectives that with the reawakening of religious consciousness among the Malay Malaysians in the last two or three decades as part of a global phenomenon, like it or not Islam has become a defining principle in the political life of the nation for the simple reason of the Malays numerical superiority and the way the constituencies are drawn.
The contest for the Malay soul is between the reinvented Islamist party with its radical agenda of an Islamic state, and traditional nationalist party now forced to play the Islamic card the face of moderate Islam with its soft Islamisation programme. The latter has proven successful in keeping the Malay ground as well as persuading the non-Malays that theirs is a more acceptable face of Islam. Internationally Malaysia has long enjoyed the reputation as an enlightened prosperous Muslim nation, thanks to its architects of Islamic moderation.
But the political crisis of Sept 1998 with its exposes of corporate corruption, abuse of executive power, poor governance and the ugly reality of racial politics has severely eroded the ruling party's Islamic credentials, rendering it seriously vulnerable for the first time in its unbroken hold on power.
Saving grace
Sept 11 was to be its saving grace. But it must be said that in the preceding months the Islamist opposition's swagger and thoughtlessness in pushing its Islamic state agenda have persuaded the non-Malays and a significant section of the Malays to grudgingly give a second chance to the present administration to prove itself. The errors of the Islamist opposition have prepared the ground for Sept 11, and their initial ill-conceived responses to the war on terrorism gave a new lease of life to the ruling party as the torch-bearers of moderate Islam, nationally and internationally.
This is not a difficult image to project internationally, given the western world's perception of Islamic in general and Islamic radicalism in particular. The prime minister's speech at the World Economic Forum in New York City recently was a characteristically persuasive exposition of what moderate Islam stands for. But it is at the real voters that it really has work hard on cultivating this image.
For the Malay constituency the battle lines are perhaps too firmly drawn but still no effort is spared to regain lost ground through government-controlled religious institutions and mosque committees. Religious scholars are engaged to explain to the Malays of the ruling party's Islamic commitment, like the sloppy booklet Malaysia adalah sebuah negara Islam which was later withdrawn.
Naive moan
That brings me back to the main idea of this piece Muslim intellectuals doing the bidding of the ruling party's 'moderate Islam' credentials. In a New Straits Times column on Feb 15 entitled Alas, our foxes are few, the writer lamented the dearth of public intellectuals in our midst. The title alluded to Isaiah Berlin's characterisation of public intellectuals as the fox who knows many things as opposed to hedgehogs, those who know of one thing. (One can draw a parallel here to Edward Said's professional versus the amateur intellectual). It is quite amusing that the writer considered Rembrandt and Warhol as great intellectuals to be mentioned alongside Plato, Ibn Khaldun and Gramsci.
We can safely assume that the writer is familiar with the state of today's mainstream media which exists as an extension of the ruling party's propaganda machine that his/her bemoaning the dearth of foxes is naive if not pretentious. Nobody has the illusion that our mainstream media is the place for balanced news, independent critical opinions and healthy debates on issues affecting our multi-religious, multi-racial society.
Unless it is only my imagination, it is also curious that something else has escaped the writer's notice. In the last few months we have seen the nurturing of a few intellectuals and commentators (with a particular view who have) accorded much space in the mainstream media to articulate on the contested topic of the day: Islam in the modern world.
Some of these pieces are brilliantly searching evaluation of the malaise and degeneration of the Muslim world, and how that has led to the current problem of Islamic fundamentalism, extremism and violence; that the path to the ummah 's regeneration is a fresh reappraisal of Islam in social and political life, an Islam than affirms humanity's universal values, one that is compatible with modern civilisation and able to coexist peacefully with other cultures.
Muslims must eschew the politics of the radical Islamists that seek to establish a theocratic state and instead learn the art of modern governance, politics and international relations as well as master modern sciences and technology... these are the common themes that recognisably belong to the discourse of moderate Islam. This is of course very sensible (and I fully agree with), but such views are not at all new. The man best known for articulating them is now serving time in prison.
Sinister agenda
But beyond that pursuit of cultivating an image of moderation, one senses that there is a more sinister agenda behind this nurturing of media-friendly intellectuals when the PUM fiasco exploded that they focused a large part of their writings on denigrating and abusing the symbols and rituals of Islam, and aspects of personal behaviour and morality that derived their legitimacy from the prophetic traditions.
Is there a collective, conscious effort to associate these outward expressions of the Islamic faith with the Islamist opposition and ipso facto , extremism and obscurantism, as we all know too well the Islamists are passionate defenders of this aspect of Islam as part of their totality of the Islamic world view?
But these outward expressions of Islam and the prophetic traditions are also the concerns of ordinary Muslims unenamoured with the ideology of the Islamists.
That these columns are all in the English press persuades one to draw the conclusion that the ruling party is hiring the expertise of these intellectuals and commentators to persuade an important constituency the urban, middle class, English-educated Malays and non-Malays, a discerning segment of the population who have some notions of justice, democracy and good governance but whose overriding concerns are stability, material comforts and security. These are after all, perfectly legitimate concerns. It seems that it is for this constituency that image of the establishment as the purveyors of moderate Islam is being consciously cultivated in the media.
Since there is no escape from Islam anyway as a governing principle, the moderate Islam of the establishment is much more preferable to that of extremist opposition, of which the beard, the turban and Islamic modesty and morality are part and parcel.
Scope of moderate Islam
If moderate Islam is only about platitudes on the compatibility of Islam with the modern world, science and technology on the one hand and abusing the outward expressions of Islamic faith and morality on the other, then our professional intellectuals in the stables of the English language press have failed us.
In the sphere of politics, moderate Islam is above all, concerned with the rule of law, justice, the sacredness of the fundamental rights of every human being, accountability and good governance, the very same universal values that are inherent in every authentic spiritual tradition.
After all, Islam does not claim to be a new religion, it merely affirms what came before.
And these are not the ends in themselves but merely the means towards achieving its broad objective, that is to restore a sense of balance for every individual, to give man back his private space for spiritual understanding and meditation. This is only possible where justice and fairness exist in society.
We have yet to hear our spokespersons of moderate Islam articulating the above concerns forcefully and honestly, least of all on that extremely evil and unjust legislation inherited from our colonial masters. The power to arbitrarily detain a person on mere suspicion is abhorrent to Islam as it is to other spiritual traditions. The public deserves to know the extent of terrorist networks in this country.
Of the scores of alleged so-called KMM (Malaysian Mujahidin Group) detainees, how many are genuine terrorists who deserve punishment and how many have been cruelly separated from the loved ones on mere suspicion?
Has the irony been lost that even as 2020' is already here, we read about communities of a particular ethnic group living in squalor and neglect in forgotten estates, their sad plight coming to the open only when greedy developers come to stake their claims? Where is the voice of our professional intellectuals?
Favourite leitmotif
One favourite leitmotif is that Muslims today need to master modern knowledge, science and technology, and always expressed with a sense of urgency. The state of our public universities will not make this happen.
The love of knowledge and flourishing of research require something that is in the heart of every intellectual worth his salt: intellectual independence, other than good funding and respect for men and women of knowledge.
When our public universities have become another of the hallowed institutions that have fallen victim to political patronage, our science-related faculties become mere technical institutes and our humanities departments cannot produce critical thinkers, whose dearth we then bemoan endlessly?
Well, clearly, the image of moderate Islam presented to us by the media is constructed on an edifice of hypocrisy with no real intention of living up to its ideals.
What Said said
Let me go back to Said, whose works I am more familiar with than Berlin. To Said, professional intellectuals are those who sell their expertise to governments and corporations in furtherance of their interests.
But the public or amateur intellectuals are those endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a philosophy or an opinion for a public. They ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.
Theirs is to publicly raise embarrassing questions his favourite phrase, "of speaking truth to power". The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice. (From the 1993 BBC Reith lectures which were then compiled into the slim volume Representations of the intellectuals ).
In closing, since the discussion concerns religion and society, it is perhaps appropriate for me to return to Benda whose well-known work La trahison des clercs (English translation: "The treason of intellectuals") I alluded to in my previous article.
Benda considered that the duty of the modern intellectual is the defence of the eternal, universal values of freedom, justice and reason. While Said situates the role of the intellectual in a totally secular context, Benda ascribes this role with a sense of the sacred, something akin to a religious calling, hence preferring to call them " clercs " (clerics) instead of the usual french " intellectuels ".
To what extent have our media-friendly professional intellectuals discharged this sacred duty with all honesty and diligence? Or have they become specialised servants of the establishment, " les clercs qui trahissent "?
DR MAZENI ALWI is a medical practitioner who takes care of sick children.
