The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| 9/11: Ten years later in Malaysia Posted: 07 Sep 2011 04:16 PM PDT SEPT 8 — That evening was surreal. While a just-awake America was jolted to madness, Malaysians were scrambling for their remote controls during prime time as calls from abroad were streaming in about insane tales. Twelve hours ahead of New York, the 8.46am crash into the first World Trade Center tower for us Malaysians was TV dinner time. With the long-standing transmission delay for our satellite TV, text messages from outside Malaysia were telling us what to expect on TV within minutes. So yes, most Malaysians just rejected outright such a preposterous lie that the other tower was hit, and then it happened. By then no one was willing to rule anything out. For a few hours no one on the planet knew what could possibly happen next. These next days will see a glut of commentaries and editorials on America and the world, 10 years after the four planes went down killing more than 3,000 people. About two that brought down a pair of towers, one hitting the Pentagon in Washington and one which ended on a field in Pennsylvania. How has Malaysia been affected by September 11, 2001, or 9/11 for short? For sure America has changed. In January of 2001 an earthquake in Gujarat, India claimed more than 20,000 lives; 9/11 was not the worst human tragedy in that year, but the audacious strike at the business and political capital of the world was a mortal left hook. Initially, America buried its dead and then hit back. Most of it was knee jerk. A Sikh man was shot dead in a gas station, for looking Arab. Muslim Americans were in a quandary though Muslim leadership condemned without reservation the attacks. Soon American troops were in Afghanistan after "friendlies" rose to the call of revolution, an Iraqi incursion followed. The "Axis of Evil" label was dropped, but the lurking image of evil is always caricatured to remind America it takes great effort to keep home safe. Couple of years later, the Economist wrote about the Illinois primary selecting a Democratic candidate for the US Senate. That it was a crowded field and a self-made millionaire was the front-runner. A Hawaiian-born, half-African former state legislator was seen as a rank outsider. It did not help that his father was a Muslim and his middle name was Hussein. The magazine mused that he would have a better chance if he had an apostrophe in his last name, so that he would sound Irish and more winnable. O'bama for the US Senate? By November 2008, America came around to a new way of looking at the world as Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States. The example does not seek to reduce the philosophical shifts in America to the advancement of one man. But the gravity of the post shows an America which no longer saw its problems and the world's in black and white anymore. The reasons for violence, hate and bigotry are not demographics anymore. Which is why America today does not see its homeland security or global leadership relying on proxy states worldwide doing their dirty work, the simplistic Cold War model. If anything, 9/11 buried Cold War thinking, it just took a long time to give the eulogy. Which brings us to Malaysia. Arab summer, happened so fast The initial US knee-jerk reaction made millions of Muslims "possible threats." Student and business visa rejections grew, tourist visas were rare. The traffic was redirected and Malaysia was a major benefactor. Long before this year's Arab Spring, the Arab summer has been in full-swing in Kuala Lumpur. Arab men paying sticker price for five-star hotels, and then promptly haggle unrelentingly with city cab drivers for lower fares. Arabs got the modernity of America with the comforts of Islamic assurances like food and mosques, at half the price. It earns Malaysia major tourism dollars. The student population from largely Muslim-populated nations exploded. The lure of getting of a foreign degree coupled with our institutions going after customers directly through their roadshows has changed the face of tertiary institutions, literally. There are swathes of student population zones in places like Seri Kembangan and Petaling Jaya which is also leading to a new segment of those settling down. I was at my Syrian friend's open house last week at his Malaysian in-laws' home, complete with Middle-Eastern fare. This obviously is a tricky political situation, as Malaysia's Achilles heel is racial composition. A lack of policy in this regard has led to a mismatch disadvantaging Malaysia. Unlike Singapore which tries hard to keep its top-notch China and India graduates from its universities. America has been doing this for decades, keeping its places of learning open to the world, and then enticing the top scholars to stay back and build America as new Americans. Here, the best foreign students struggle for years to adjust to a highly xenophobic society, and leave at the first chance for developed nations for jobs and graduate school. They aren't courted. The second tier of average students, seeing they cannot use Malaysia as a launch pad and do not fancy returning to their more economically challenged nations, realise quickly there are opportunities here if you learn the Malaysian way. There are already pockets of communities and they will continue to grow. The challenges will also grow with the numbers. PAS for all or none The new PAS. Social scientists will have better explanations why the Islamist party as it is today is far different from the one that emerged rudderless after Election 1995. The Al Maunah group's attacks in mid-2000 had already aided the Barisan Nasional's government plea that moderate Islam is their ethos and that Malaysians should reject extremism. On August 4, 2011, the government clamped down on the Mujahideen group, purportedly seeking to overthrow the government through violent means. One of the 11 arrested was Kelantan Mentri Besar and present PAS spiritual leader Nik Aziz Nik Mat's son Nik Adli. According to Time magazine: "The Islamic Party (PAS) still has much explaining to do if it is to convince the country's non-Muslims that its more fervent members won't cross the line between belief and extremism." This came out on September 10, 2001. A day before 9/11. The global pressure for Islamic political parties, groups and activists to fall on the right side of an imaginary "progressive-extremist" line caused all kinds of rationalisation, PAS no less with Umno hitting it from both sides. It was not good enough to claim they were the better Muslims than Umno or join the "Anwar Ibrahim's a victim bandwagon" to stay relevant. There is a lot of talk about PAS now being attuned to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and his AK Party through all its reincarnations. There are unlikely formal ties or a concerted effort to mimic the European party which relies on Islamic principles to govern a stubbornly secular country. PAS thinkers look at Turkey, but what they want is to present themselves as party of Muslims fighting for Malaysian ideals. They want to be inclusive and multicultural. Our friends in peace, Indonesia Indonesia emerged as the leader of Islamic moderation in this side of the developing world. In many senses the Asean policy of neutrality to stay prosperous was under the knife after 9/11. Already the violence in various Muslim-Christian islands in the republic was straining the republic's reputation. The continued unrest in southern Thailand and the Philippines' Mindanao provided grim reading. 9/11 tipped the action scale. No more could Asean states use rhetoric as a basis to assert their moderate credentials. The rise and proliferation of localised Islamic extremism enhanced by an American keen eye on their activities asked the modern state to act upon the situation and provide moral leadership. Through the two presidencies from opposing parties Indonesia has kept its commitment to fight extremism openly. Malaysia may still stake a place in global leadership, but no more can it do so by saying it does not take sides. So three more days, to 9/11. Not many might remember the evacuation drill they had at our Petronas Twin Towers the next morning, on September 12, 2001. Or the catchwords on TV then, "America under attack" or "War on terror." The years the US Embassy's security perimeter was extended, and tightened up that stretch of Jalan Tun Razak, hurting traffic for years. I'll end by remembering the three Malaysians who died that day in the collapsed towers — Ang Siew Nya, Khoo Sei Lai and Vijayashanker Paramsothy. May they rest in peace. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
| Posted: 07 Sep 2011 04:05 PM PDT SEPT 8 — Contemporary wisdom has us believing that when the economy grows beyond a certain point and globalisation becomes the norm, there is a corresponding lowering of traditional barriers of ethnicity, religion, community and culture. Economic development should lead to a more open, forward-looking society that is inclusive and egalitarian. In actual fact, the shifts in mindset are more subtle and more continuous than discrete. Traditionally, communal identity was the primary determinant of a sense of self and the behaviour codes enjoined by the community or tribe were the default arbiters of most social interactions. Social and faith affiliations at birth determined every aspect of life, whether it was where to live or work, who were counted as friends, what was eaten and drank, to who married who. The current cacophony against the likes of Perkasa betrays a sense of indignation that just when Malaysia seemed to be on the brink of becoming a moderate, democratic, developed country, there are people who just don't seem to get it and are hell bent on dragging the country back down into the quagmire of a race- and religion-based national discourse. The problem with this approach is that it links economic change linearly with social change. If this was correct, we should be witnessing in tandem with economic growth a commensurate drop in conservatism of the extreme kind fuelled by communal tendencies. We should be feeling the whiff of a more open, tolerant and flexible social structure, one that is shedding its inward-looking insularity. But if anything, these voices are getting ever shriller, suspicion between communities and faiths in social settings is as strong as ever and there seem to be more pejorative terms for "other" Malaysian cultures than ever before. Paradoxically though, people are more open and accepting than ever before of these "others" in certain situations, such as the workplace, in their interactions at the marketplace, in the entertainment arena, in the way they dress for the outside world, and in their schools and colleges. What is happening is that contrary to popular discourse, we are actually raising higher and higher walls of communalism, but they are not between us and the world, they are between our private and public selves. Today, the economic sphere and the opportunities that it has suddenly thrown open are forcing us to leave our prejudices at home if we are to partake of these opportunities. But we have not abandoned these attitudes entirely; we have just shifted them behind walls, where only like-minded people sharing the same communal attributes are welcome. The explosive growth of community-based television on Astro and that of global economic news media are two sides of the same coin. The blink and you miss the rate of change in the economy has a very small relation to how traditional social structure changes. While economic change is often disruptive and discrete, social change is almost always cautious, continuous and slow. The real social change has come about in our ability to expand the arenas of both our private and public selves to accommodate changes imposed on us. Where earlier restraint characterised our social selves entirely, today we are more strident and confident in our private communal identity as well as in our public cosmopolitan identity. While at one level the wall dividing these identities has become stronger, there are significant ways in which the secular nature of the economic discourse is wearing away at communal structures. It is precisely because of these inroads that the walls get built ever higher. If one person changes religion through proselytisation, the penalties for all the others multiply. To conclude, if the current economic trajectory becomes a permanent feature, expect social change, but slowly and incrementally, rather than at the pace of economic change. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
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