Once again, sex is in the headlines. The news that distributors and purchasers of pornographic VCDs and DVDs can and will now be prosecuted has no doubt sent shivers down the spines of the curb-crawling denizens of Malaysia.

Those who inhabit the demimonde of the porn industry are no doubt cursing their luck, and the fact that in its effort to bolster its own religious credentials before the electorate, the government has decided to strike out against them in particular.

Perhaps the only people who are truly relieved by this move are those concerned parents who have of late been worried that their pirated copy of ' Snow White ' or ' 102 Dalmatians ' may contain more than they bargained for.

It may be trendy for those of the post-structuralist school to de-construct the persona of Snow White herself and to claim that underlying the whole story is a sublimated sub-plot which involves sexual repression and unspoken desire.

But to suddenly find Snow White undressed and in the company of several men who certainly do not look like dwarves is another thing altogether.

Then there are those who are hungry for American propaganda and who just cannot wait to get home to watch their own bootleg copy of ' Pearl Harbour ' or ' Independence Day '.

Imagine their consternation and surprise when they are instead confronted with the image of humping couples in various compromising positions five minutes into the Hollywood epic which has turned out to be more wooden than most.

As a laborious aside, one wonders why the authorities have not pulled the same trick on the punters of porn themselves. Just imagine the shock and horror of the poor chap who goes out to buy the latest ' Gang Bang 2000 ' or ' Babes in Bondage V ', only to find that five minutes into the film the screen suddenly changes and he is confronted with 'The Waltons' or 'Little House on the Prarie' instead.

But there are, as always, many other interesting developments, twists and turns to this latest moral campaign on the part of the powers-that-be.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that this latest move has just as much to do with economics as it has with morality.

Malaysia of late has been hammered by the international media and foreign multinationals for not doing enough to control the spread of illegal DVDs and VCDs in the country. This is also true for the pirated computer software which one can get easily over the counter anywhere in the country, and needless to say Malaysia's new friend Mr Bill Gates does not appreciate the Malaysian interpretation of laissez-faire economics.

Indeed, in many ways the economy in Malaysia is so free of any real regulation that one can get almost anything one wants, provided that one has the money and the street sense to know where to get it.

The economic crisis of 1997 has only broken down the established barriers even further, making it even more easy to get one's hands on any product, good or service in the country.

Those who would like to defend the porn industry by saying that it is a form of artistic expression or an aesthetics should also disabuse themselves of the fallacy. The fact is that pornography today is nothing more than an appendage of the capitalist system and that the production and sale of porn is nothing more than an industry.

Furthermore, the porn industry is not being run by painted 'madames' in their clandestine boudoirs, but by boring accountants and sales managers instead. Art went out of the window along time ago (along with eroticism and taste) and all we are left with is the MacDonalisation of the media.

Contemporary porn is just as crass, crude and unsophisticated as any of the junk that comes out of Hollywood these days, except that its production costs are much lower (and the returns much higher, relatively).

The international business community is understandably ticked off by the fact that video and VCD pirates are robbing them of the profits that they would rather keep for themselves, and that is where the pressure for regulation and control is really coming from.

But the fact that Malaysians consume porn at all is something that nobody has raised, and no attempt has been made to ask the simple question: Why?

Repression breeds desire

It may sound like a clich to state that repression breeds desire, but it also a truth nonetheless. When I was in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan recently I was amazed by the extent to which the country was literally drowning in guns, drugs and pornography.

Everyone with the sense and eyes to see it could see that porn was readily available anywhere and everywhere in the country that calls itself 'the land of the Pure'. Purity there certainly was, but only the hardcore 'XXX' version.(1)

That such things take place in such a puritan environment where women are not even allowed to show their faces in public should strike anyone with even a modicum of intelligence as commonsensical. The same I would argue is the case with us here in Malaysia.

Malaysia, as we all know is an Asian country with the purest of Asian values. Sex, of course, is something that none of us really want to bring out into the open like this because it is regarded as taboo and private.

Talk of sex and sexuality is strictly off-limits and there are quite enough moral guardians among us to remind us that it is not allowed. We balk at the thought of revealing our private lives and private fantasies, for the simple reason that these subjects have remained consigned to that private sphere and that other Malaysia that we never seem to want to acknowledge.

But as long as this complex and highly emotive subject is not brought out into the open and treated with the intelligence and respect that it deserves, should we be surprised by the developments in the country of late?

The mad rush for porn in all forms - DVDs, VCDs, video and in cyberspace - is proof that there are millions of Malaysians who think about the subject of sexuality all the time. The fact that they are not allowed to bring this out into the open only forces them to go underground and this is why so many of them have resorted to pornography in the first place.

The worse thing about this is that it merely leads to even more repression and the distortion of reality itself. Contemporary commercial porn, lest it be forgotten, is a fantasy that has nothing to do with reality.

The porn actors/actresses themselves are unreal figures made up of silicone and plastic and they bear no resemblance to the rest of us who have to live with warts, cellulite and receding hairlines.

By forcing people to turn to such unreal fantasies our own fantasies and desires become twisted by unreal and unrealisable wants and desires.

Far from bringing us closer to where we want to be, contemporary 'industrial' porn merely takes us further from the truth and by extension, ourselves. In the end we become slaves to the Barbie-doll figures of Baywatch (or if you happen to be into anorexics, Ally Mcbeal.)

Even more surprising is the fact that Malaysia today has become a society that seems incapable of dealing with the subject of sexuality and sexual relations in a mature, adult and sensible way.

Yet this was once a part of the world where sex and sexuality was intimately bound with the culture and civilisation of its people, and where sexuality was treated with respect (almost reverence) as a sublime act that was both carnal and spiritual at the same time.

Centuries of civilisational development in the Malay archipelago testify to the existence of a complex cultural and belief system that incorporated sex and sexuality into the framework of existence and being in the world.

What is more, sexuality (in all its forms and orientations) was brought out into the open in works of art and literature such as the Hikayat Panji Semarang . (2)

'The pornographic book'

Perhaps the last person who had the courage and audacity to bring up the subject into the open was the great reformist and modernist thinker, Syed Sheikh al-Hadi. For his efforts, the Sheikh was summarily branded a peddler of pornography by the esteemed Ulama instead.

Syed Sheik al-Hadi (3) has to be one of the most important figures in the political, cultural and literary landscape of Modern Malaysia of the 20th century.

Thankfully a highly informative book about the life and times of the man and his ideas has been published at last by the Malaysian Sociological Research Institute (MSRI) recently.(4)

Throughout his life Syed Sheikh al-Hadi championed the cause of modernisation and reform of his own society. He sincerely believed that the Malay-Muslims had to be saved from the combined onslaught of secular modernity (that was being imposed on them by the colonial powers) and the reactionary traditionalism of the Ulama themselves.

The Malays, he felt, were caught between two equally repressive and distorting systems of values that ultimately warped their own sense of identity, self-pride and subjectivity.

The British colonial establishment wanted to turn the Malays into modern Europeans while the Ulama wanted to turn them into pseudo-Arabs instead. Sheikh al-Hadi lamented the fact that neither modernisation nor traditionalism had led to the creation of independent subjects who were aware of their own free will and rational agency.

For Sheikh al-Hadi, Islam - or rather his interpretation of it - was essentially a system of values and beliefs that opened the mind and world view of the subjects themselves. He saw in Islam a means to liberate individuals from their personal fears and prejudices, irrational beliefs and backward practices.

Islam was also for him a belief system that was opposed to all forms of oppression and inequality, and as such he used it as a discursive weapon to critique the prevailing power structures at the time - which included the patriarchal system of his own society.

At the centre of his world-view was the rational subject who was the master of her/his own destiny and the engine of progress.

Man was the motor of history, he argued, and the development of society depended on the will and capabilities of the human subjects themselves. In order to develop an open and progressive society, one therefore had to nurture the open-minded and progressive subject.

Monday: Pornography and the Sheikh, Part 2

Endnotes

1) While working at the Internet cafes in Pakistan (from where I was sending my weekly despatches to malaysiakini among others), I was amazed to see men and boys openly surfing the web in search of porn sites. The walls of the cafes had signs that read 'Please do not look at Porno' all over the place, and the clients dutifully complied by going straight to websites like ' longjohns.com ' and ' hairybutts.com '.

2) I have mentioned this text before in some of my earlier articles, but it bears repeating again. The ' Hikayat Panji Semerang ' is a classical Malay text which tells the story of the Javanese hero Panji and his exploits in the ancient Malay archipelago.

The tale is littered with numerous moral vignettes, but also numerous references to ' cinta sejenis ' between same-sex couples. There is a fairly reliable edition by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) which was published as part of a special series of Malay classical texts ( Hikayat ).

3) Syed Sheikh Ahmad al-Hadi was born on Nov 22, 1867 in Kampung Hulu, Malacca. His father, Syed Ahmad ibn Hasan ibn Saqaf al-Hady al-Ba'alawi, was a Peranakan Arab of Hadrami descent. In his youth he was adopted by Raja Ali Kelana of the Sultanate of Riau. He later studied in Mecca, Beirut and Cairo.

At al-Azhar university he came under the influence of the Egyptian reformist thinker Muhammad Abduh. Along with Sheikh Mohamad Tahir, Sheikh Mohamad Salim al-Kalili and Haji Abbas Mohamad Tahar he started the reformist magazine Al-Imam in 1906 in Singapore.

On Feb 4, 1908 he opened the Madrasah al-Iqbal al-Islamiyyah in Singapore. Between 1909 to 1915 he served as an attorney at the Shariah court of Johor Baru. But in 1915 he decided to leave the post in order to return to Malacca and open a Madrasah there (along with Abu Bakar Ahmad), which came to be known the Madrasah Al-Hadi. However the Malays of Malacca were not happy with teachings which they regarded as too radical and controversial at the time.

In 1919, he moved to Penang in order to open another Madrasah, the Madrasah Al-Mashoor. The Madrasah was perhaps one of the most famous of the radical 'reformist' Madrasahs of the colonial era. In 1927, Syed Sheikh al-Hadi left the teaching profession and opened the Jelutong Press in Penang which became one of the leading reformist publishing houses in the land. The Jelutong Press published Syed Sheikh al-Hadi's translation of the Quranic exegesis ( tafsir ) of Muhammad Abduh as well as a host of other important reformist articles and books.

4) See: Alijah Gordon, (ed.) The Real Cry of Syed Sheikh al-Hady . Malaysian Sociological Research Institute (MSRI), Kuala Lumpur, 1999.