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June 16, 2000 VOL. 29 NO. 23 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
One academic's personal viewpoint By FARISH A. NOOR Over the past five decades Malaysia has witnessed an unceasing struggle between UMNO and the Parti Islam seMalaysia (Pas) for the hearts and minds of the Malay-Muslim constituency. One of the consequences of the frenzied race between the two parties to "out-Islam" each other can be seen in the country's institutions of higher education. When I was teaching at the University of Malaya, I came across a number of Malay-Muslim students whose understanding of Islam could only be described as very different from mine. Once, a student told me that he preferred not to study in mixed classes because "even the voices of women were tempting," so better that male and female students be kept apart. On another occasion a student asked me to delay beginning my lecture until he could say a doa (prayer). He then proceeded to pray aloud, but not without making a crucial qualifying remark first: "This is just for the Muslims. The rest of you must not take part." With a few ill-chosen words, he had effectively split the audience into two groups, Muslims and non-Muslims. I was then expected to lecture on, of all things, inter-cultural dialogue and how communities should come together. Malaysian universities are experiencing a steady encroachment of religious activists and ideologues who have upped the stakes in the Islamization contest and have radically altered the social and cultural terrain of university life. Many student unions have been taken over by self-proclaimed "defenders of the faith" who claim they represent the best in Islam and are models to be emulated. This trend is not confined to Malay-Muslim students. There are non-Malay and non-Muslim organizations equally obsessed about policing the frontiers of ethnic and religious differences. That Malaysian university students are more politically minded is not in itself cause for alarm. Indeed, it's a normal phenomenon most everywhere else. But what is disturbing is the kind of politics that might eventually develop on campuses. Recently a group of students sent a letter of protest to the Ministry of Education calling for an end to the policy of housing students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds together in the dormitories. The students, who were made up of both Muslims and non-Muslims, claimed that the policy, introduced last year, has made it difficult for them to perform their religious rites. This latest protest is another blow to the already slow and complicated process of nation-building. It is bad enough that after nearly half a century of Independence Malaysians still do not have a national culture they can call their own. Now young Malaysians are saying they do not even want to live together with other ethnic groups. The exclusionary politics being promoted by these student organizations has led to the further fragmentation of the student body along cultural-religious lines and a hardening of racial and religious boundaries on campus. Nobody has cared to point out to these students that the toleration and accommodation of cultural differences happen to be one of the prerequisites of any multicultural society, and Malaysia happens to be one of them. But if the students have grown increasingly narrow in their religious values and way of thinking, part of the blame lies with the powers-that-be. The fragmentation of the student body is in itself a reflection of the ethnic and cultural divisions that exist in Malaysian society. Malaysia's leaders should look to themselves first before they accuse others of over-emphasizing ethnic and cultural differences among the communities. Likewise, the increasingly narrow and simplistic understanding of Islam among Malay-Muslim students in Malaysia is a reflection of the sort of cosmetic Islamization that has been at work in the country over the past two decades. After years of feeding the population with endless polemics against the "corrupt, decadent" West and all that it stands for, it is not difficult to imagine why so many Malay-Muslim students are willing to swallow the line that everything dubbed "modern" or "secular" is inherently evil and unIslamic. Their use of religious vocabulary as the ideological weapon of first resort is also understandable considering the inflation of religious discourse in Malaysia thanks to the constant war of words between UMNO and Pas. Malaysia's universities have always been a microcosm of wider Malaysian society. Before, universities were the incubators for technocrats and planners who wished to create a new generation of middle-class professionals. But now our universities have become the breeding ground for a new generation of activists and ideologues who will undoubtedly take up the Islamist cause if and when they are able to. Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist who is currently a research fellow at Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin. He is working on a book on Pas. Parts of this article first appeared in the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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