Article From Farish Noor - Malaysia's Taliban Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 05:31:11
PDT
The Taliban in Our Universities.
By Farish A
Noor
While teaching at the University of Malaya not long
ago, I experienced a number of episodes that made me wonder about
the future of the Malay-Muslims in the country.
On one
occasion, I found myself in one of the science faculties of the
university. I was about to deliver a lecture on the subject of
civilisational development and inter-civilisational dialogue to the
students who were assembled there. Just as I was about to begin, a
young Malay student came up to me and asked if the lecture could be
delayed for a few minutes. When I asked him why he wanted the delay,
he stated that he wanted to read out a doa (prayer) on behalf of the
students who were present. Caught off guard, I turned to the other
lecturer present, who told me that such things happen quite
regularly and that most lecturers allow the students to have their
way.
The student then proceeded to read the doa, but not
without making a crucial qualifying remark first: 'This is just for
the Muslims. The rest of you must not take part' he said. Thanks to
a few ill-chosen (or perhaps deliberately-chosen) words, the student
had effectively split apart the audience into two groups: the
Muslims and the non-Muslims. When he finished reciting his prayers,
the young demagogue passed the floor back to me. I was then expected
to speak about inter-cultural dialogue and how communities should
come together!
The fact that the pharisees have taken over
the universities in the land is not a revelation to us. For decades
now the universities in Malaysia have experienced the steady
encroachment of religious activists and ideologues who have upped
the stakes in the Islamisation contest and have radically altered
the social and cultural terrain of university life. Many, if not
all, the student unions in the universities have been taken over by
the self-proclaimed 'defenders of the faith' who claim that they
represent the best in Islam and that they are the models to be
emulated. Islamists have set the standards for behaviour, dress,
inter-communal relations and even the mode of education in many of
the institutions of higher learning in the country. The exclusionary
politics of cultural difference that they promote has also led to
the further fragmentation of the student body along
cultural-religious lines and a hardening of racial and religious
boundaries between the different student communities on campus.
Those who question or challenge the credo of this new
juvenile theocracy soon find themselves the target of their wrath. I
experienced this myself, when in the course of my lectures I had the
temerity to suggest that the Arab-Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun was in
many ways a modern thinker who founded what we now call political
sociology. Ibn Khaldun's worldview, I insisted, was a modern one as
he placed human beings and rational human agency at the centre of
the process of civilisational development. Khaldun had argued that
in order to understand how cultures and societies develop, we need
to understand the workings of human society and the role played by
the most important agent of history itself: the human being.
For this scandalous assertion on my part, I was soon dubbed
a 'secular' thinker who had studied too long in the West and who was
a product of eurocentric education. The students who opposed my
views claimed that as Ibn Khaldun was a Muslim, he could not
possibly have held the view that man was the centre of the world.
Surely it was God, they argued, that decided which civilisation
should develop and which ones should perish. The development of
nation-states and economies were all part of God's cosmic drama and
should an economy collapse, then it must be the result of God's
anger more than anything else they claimed. If that were the case,
said I, then God certainly must be against the Muslims, for the
civilisation of Islam seems to have declined somewhat over the past
few centuries. Some of the more vocal members of the 'Taliban' in my
class then issued their own equivalent of a fatwa, claiming that my
lectures were unIslamic and that I was confusing the minds of
innocent and hapless Muslims.
These episodes (and there are
bound to be many others) illustrate the contradictions and paradoxes
that exist in our educational system today. Despite the many
attempts to weed out the more bigoted and extremist members of the
student body- such as the introduction of minimum grade requirements
for higher student union posts- the tendencies remain and are in
fact growing ever stronger. What makes matters worse is the
indifference, if not the connivance of those in power who are
actually colluding with the extremists and are quite happy to
witness the gradual colonisation of our universities by the
home-grown Talibani of Malaysia.
The saddest thing of all is
the fact that thanks to these self-appointed 'guardians of the
faith' among the Malay-Muslim student body, it is the Malays as a
whole who will be unduly affected. As the more dogmatic religious
leaders and spokesmen among them come to the fore to dictate what is
right and what is wrong, what can be taught and what should not, the
entire educational process itself will be held hostage by a vocal
minority who remain trapped within their own exclusivist
religio-cultural discourse.
The net result in the long-run
is not difficult to imagine. As Malay-Muslim students reject the
sciences and arts taught to them on the grounds that it does not fit
with the narrow and monochromatic worldview taught to them by the
party-political Mullahs outside, a whole generation of young
Malay-Muslims will not be able to learn the tools of applied
physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. If these young
Islamist students insist that disciplines such as sociology,
political theory, history, economics and the sciences are all
fundamentally irreconcilable with Islam on the grounds that they are
based on humanistic or materialistic premises, then what hope will
there be for the future of the Malays who have to live in a global
world that is torn apart by very real (and man-made) cleavages of
power and interests? Can Muslims still cling on to clichés and myths
of the past in the face of the painful realities of the present? And
can those students who insist that the hand of God is everywhere try
to explain for themselves the workings of the globalisation process
which is inexorably marginalising the Muslim world further and
further by the minute?
Dealing with these young fanatics in
our universities is a task that needs to be taken seriously, but
also with sensitivity and intelligence. It is clear by now that the
measures that were introduced and used in the past have not really
worked. Our universities today have become the breeding ground for a
new generation of Islamist activists who will undoubtedly take up
the Islamist cause if and when they are able to.
But putting
aside the long-term political implications of these developments, we
still need to address the difficulties that confront us in the short
to medium term. As long as there is no attempt to address and
correct some of the fundamental assumptions and beliefs that
underlie the increasingly constricted worldview of the Muslim
students in the country, the development of the Muslims themselves
will be hindered. The net result will be an obvious discrepancy
between the performance of Malay-Muslim students and their
non-Muslim counterparts. Should this happen, it must be stated that
the blame for the decline rests squarely on the shoulders of the
former and not the latter.
For now, one is left only with a
bleak picture of the present. It is disheartening to come across so
many bright young minds that have been thoroughly taken over by the
hyperbole and sophistry of religious pedagogues who have no
solutions to offer except for empty slogans and longings for some
'golden age' of Islam in the past. We are reminded of the lament of
Muhammad Iqbal, who wrote: 'One can only imagine the wretched state
of a people who are told by their religion that the present state is
fixed and unchangeable'.
End.
Dr. Farish A Noor is a
Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. He once
taught at the University of Malaya and is presently working on the
topic of Islamist movements in Southeast Asia. His current project
is a book on the development of the Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS.
