Pro-Malay policies grounded in colonial racist narrative, says academic
Sharifah Munirah Alatas speaks on the demise of the intellectual culture in the Malaysian education system through the eyes of her late father, Syed Hussein Alatas.
KUCHING: Government policies favouring the Malays have their origins in a racist narrative first promoted by the British colonialists who depicted the community as lazy, an academic said at a university programme here yesterday.
Sharifah Munirah Alatas, of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, referred to work published five decades ago by her late father, Syed Hussein Alatas, the renowned sociologist who was also a vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaya.
In the book on Thomas Stamford Raffles, Syed Hussein said the British colonialist administrator had regarded the Malays as “rude and uncivilised, of feeble intellect and at a low stage of intellectual development, indolent, submissive and prone to piracy”.
“These psychological tactics have resulted in two opposing phenomena today: first, a majority of Malays have gradually learnt to be very accommodating of leadership, despite glaring transgressions; second, a majority of non-Malays feel progressively alienated from society, despite their obvious positive contribution to the development of the country and their comfortable economic status,” Munirah said in her speech at a mentor programme for junior academics at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak yesterday.
She said such a narrative has resulted in “imagined perceptions of threat and oppression” by the Malays, and contributed to racist discourse in the media as well as communal politics.
“If my father were alive today, he would say, ‘we are now in a condition of coloniality without colonialism’,” she added.
She said the Malay Dignity Congress, held early this month in Shah Alam, was also a reflection of how such a narrative promoted by colonialists still has a hold on the community.
“Syed Hussein would have commented that such a congress is racist and should not have been organised in the first place. It only feeds into the post-colonial agenda, which is a continuation of British colonialism in pre-1957 Malaya.”
Munirah also spoke on what Syed Hussein had termed as the “captive mind” among intellectuals and policymakers, especially in the field of education.
She said this could be seen in calls for “academic reforms” through successive blueprints and education policies, which she said were focused on revamping courses and syllabuses to be in line with market trends.
“The infatuation with ‘market-driven’ courses within our higher education industry is lopsided and does not address our own ‘original’ problems,” said Munirah, who has written critiques on Malaysia’s higher education institutions.
“What our education ministry fails to understand is that more emphasis on science, technology and engineering in higher education will not attract businesses and foreign investment if our society continues to be mired in moral, religious, racial and ethnic tensions,” she added.
She said while universities today rush to produce “skilled knowledge workers” for the “knowledge economy”, the intellectuals have been sidelined.
She said the recent emphasis on humanities and literature as foundational subjects in higher education was a welcome development.
“This is a new narrative, whereby new approaches to critical thinking skills will be applied.”
She said policymakers must come out of their “captive mind” which regards to scientific achievement as the benchmark for development.
“The perception is that more scientists and engineers are needed if global economies are going to progress and benefit from global market forces.
“The global reality is, though, that sectarian violence, civil wars, poverty, environmental degradation and economic backwardness in the global south are not the result of a lack of scientists and engineers,” she said.
‘Pseudo-intellectuals’
But Munirah also warned about “keyboard pseudo-intellectuals” who would impress the nation’s leaders and the laymen.
She said local universities have not been forthcoming with original ideas or explanations on current socio-political problems.
She cited an example of the Malaysian Muslims’ trend towards Wahabbism, a form of Islam promoted in Saudi Arabia, which has yet to be studied in-depth by local Muslim scholars.
“There are pockets of academics in Malaysia who are very knowledgeable of the social problems generated by bigotry, misinterpretation of religious texts and narrow-mindedness.
“However, the discourse hardly expands beyond analyses of the parochialism of syllabus content for national schools, Jakim-approved khutbahs for Friday prayers, or the need to teach democratic ‘Islamic’ values such as respect for diversity and multiculturalism,” said Munirah.
She said Syed Hussein had posed questions on what defines a true intellectual, adding that just because a person thinks about ideas and non-material problems does not make one an intellectual.
“For Syed Hussein, the intellectual and the specialist differed enormously. Unlike specialists in physics, an intellectual who is a physicist would try to see phenomena in a broader perspective.
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“They are not only knowledgeable in physics but are constantly engaged in problem solving on multiple aspects of society, which includes aspects of physics.