Who Will Replace Nik Aziz In Kelantan?

In the blur of a mutiny aiming to overthrow the “ship’s captain” in the Kelantan government, the big question that arises in the waves sweeping over the petty state is about who will replace the 77-year old PAS Mentri Besar (Chief Minister).

Nik Aziz Nik Mat, wiry, wily and aging, is also PAS’s (Islamic Party’s) spiritual leader.

Approaching 20 years into a secure tenure, he ruled like a surviving slur of the oriental despotism he seemed to believe will hold for another century or two.

Observers had him supped into a senile wanderlust when he kept taking to task the party president he wanted tamed and the deputy president he wanted out. It was a sustained attempt to dispel any notion that may reduce him into anything lesser than the “Captain of the Ship”.

He kept cajoling the party leaders and each time he did his thing the PAS swayed and buckled close to rupture.

When the mutiny broke out it was, to many, a much-awaited sign of sustained life in the PAS, but bringing in the tide a clear reading of monumental death.

The current crisis in the state can lead to a grab of power for a decent future of modernization and development the Barisan Nasional (BN) can make. The BN needs a frontline leader acceptable to the people of the small delta community.

The drama began when popular blogger, Kickdefella (here), suddenly sacked from his position as a liaisons officer of the state investment arm, hit hard on Nik Aziz Nik Mat’s nose.

The ancient squat protuberance of the spiritual leader and politician bled. It will bleed more if he is found guilty of accepting criminal gratification from a logger.

The rich logger, said to be a former truck driver who gained a timber concession from the state government worth RM20 million, must have been grateful enough to spend more than RM400k on a "five-star" Haj trip to Mecca for the Chief Minister and his select group of VVIPs.

Nik Aziz and his spouse was one pair of the beneficiaries of this Al-Santa Clausu, the Muslim Gift-Bearer. His son-in-law, Ir Ariffahmi Abdul Rahman and wife, was another pair, said Kickdefella, placing the parents of the bride and the prodigal son-in-law in a political embrace few would envy.

The "five-star" trip to Mecca costs RM65,000 for each pair when about RM10,000 would have suficed.

Nik Aziz had appointed his son-in-law as CEO of the state’s investment arm he chaired himself.

It is this fellow who sacked the blogger for reasons still unknown, the probabilities leaning heavily to a spin of intrigues Kickdefella suggested was about the creation of a dynasty.

For reasons of her own Ir Ariffahmi’s wife, Nik Amalina Nik Aziz, had written and widely published in the net a soul-spilling letter to say her father, the Chief Minister, had indeed offered the big job to her husband from about one year before he husband finally accepted the appointment.

She described it as a “hot seat”. It is looking like it could burn through his pants.

She targeted the blogger.

Kickdefella is known to be an aide of Husam Musa, a state Executive Councilor (Minister) who had been groomed by Nik Aziz he served for almost 20 years beginning as a Press Secretary in 1990.

Observers mostly agreed Husam Musa did a great job to promote his boss. He was articulate, physically well-stacked and informed.

When he became Political Secretary six years later he was seen as a protégé of Nik Aziz and being groomed for high office in the state.

Husam rose to become a state minister in 2004 and soon into his second term he lunged for number two of the Islamic Party in mid-2009.

He lost, a failed crossing of the Rubicon that would have unsettled Rome for Julius Caesar.

But Kelantan obviously isn’t quite comparable to Caesar’s Rome and Nik Amalina cannot be the asp in Cleo’s chamber.

Kelantan is actually one of nine petty monarchies in the Malay Peninsular noisily bugging the environment to create heat for a constant clear sighting by GSP from above.

Kickdefella locked in and he gripped the stoic Menteri Besar in an allegation of blatant nepotism and possible graft, threatening to spill more beans that should cause the old man to rue the day he decided his son-in-law must be the CEO of the state company he is sits on as Chairman.

Nik Aziz had slipped. The 77-year old stoic who is regarded by many as a Muslim saint is certainly having lots to explain.

Is Islam actually free of value reserves that collectively forbid nepotism? Are gifts from the well-gratified merely a pleasant way of saying “Thank You” to state leaders and their councils of powerfolks called in Kelantan “VVIPs”?

Husan Musa, obviously dunked by the wily old man, was soon reported to have said he wanted out of the state government and the party, sending the Chief Minister into a corner too tight for him.

How can he face the future should his former protégé lead the final attack against him from within, or abruptly slide into the Opposition and invade his fort?

The Deputy Mentri Besar, Mohamad Yakub, is a quiet man of diligence that seemed to have cleverly failed to record his political existence. He is held in the state as unavailable for the high office.

Ariffahmi Abdul Rahman, the Engineer CEO of the states investment arm should have accepted the job his father-in-law offered him a year earlier. He has many steps to go before he can be in the running.

That leaves either Husam Musa who is now zoomed into a limbo and the Umno Kelantan liaison chief and federal minister, Mustapha Mohammed, a brilliant former civil servant.

Nik Aziz, cornered into the wilds of the fall from grace, is likely to be thinking of dissolving the state assembly pronto and let the party run for the sun it can lose.

Whoever will finally be chosen to lead the charge in the BN must be the sort of personality the people of the tightly knit delta community can accept and can trust. Mustapha, who is the brightest, must quickly take the lead. But will he go for it? ----a. ghani ismail, 29 Nov. 2009.

Umno Won Bagan Pinang. Who Lost?

Umno President and Prime Minister, Najib Tun Razak, slumped on the leeward side of Isa Samad’s landslide victory in the Bagan Pinang by-election on Oct. 11, suffers a popularity downslide he may find difficult to overcome as he plans to dissolve parliament next year for a quick grab of his own mandate to rule.

Najib had taken over a corrupt Umno. Unless purged, the party no longer made sense as a nationalist organization and would stand to lose more and more members to the Pas and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) Anwar Ibrahim had mounted to overtake Umno.

Isa Samad, Menteri Besar (Chief Minister) of Negeri Sembilan for 22 years, found guilty of buying votes to win as party vice-president in 2004, has now successfully made a tainted second coming, the taint a costly color that Najib had taken to win in the ninth by-election since the general elections on 8 March 2008.
Umno and the BN had lost the remaining eight.

Even if Isa was clearly in control of the constituency and could scuttle Umno in the by-election, a lot of people agreed with former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, when he openly attempted to persuade Najib not to choose the tainted Isa as candidate.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who contested Mahathir for Umno president in 1987 and narrowly lost, wrote on the eve of the by-election it’s better for Umno to lose rather than “affirm corruption” should Isa win.

Now that Isa has won by a record 5,435 votes, it is Najib who stands as a casualty.

He caused the party to reel under a weight it may not be able to carry through the next general elections. Umno cannot even be classified anymore as a nationalist party the Malays can trust to take care of their interests.

Many party divisions have been bought and are controlled by money-laden contractors and businessmen since vote-buying, or “money politics”, became rampant in Umno from sometime in the mid-1980s.

After suggestions to purge the party of the corrupt have fallen on deaf ear, the resurrection of Isa Samad on Oct. 11 seemed to have spaced out all alternatives to regime change, making it pertinent for my former teacher, Gamany of Daim and Gamany (now retired) to meet me to discuss some matters of ideological vehemence in the Opposition, the Pakatan Rakyat.

Gamany was a member of the PSRM and he agreed Kassim Ahmad's helmanship of the party for 18 years was senseless.

We areed even if there is still a chance for Umno and the BN to survive by an internal putsch, the possibility did not interest Gamany and the first thing Gamany asked when we met at Restoran Jamek in Kuala Lumpur was whether or not I could accept PKR’s Marhaenism as a suitable ideological base.

I had earlier suggested we use the broader Qur'anic class of Mustaz’afin (Oppressed/ Dispossessed/ Exploited) and the class of Mustakbirin (Oppressor/Exploiter/Corrupt) in socio-historical conflict to bridge the ideological divide between the Pas, PKR and DAP in the Opposition. (see here)

Since our purpose for an ideology would be to provide for coherence and cohesion while defining objectives, priorities and methods, whatever we decide should be something that can last a long time and not become merely a convenient adoption and adaptation that bears no relevance to our historical mission and society.

Marhaenism, whatever Sukarno had conceived and introduced it for, should be conveyed within the scope of historical materialism.

What we get is the petty traders and peasants who owned some scraps of capital but who would be badly mauled by a change in any of the factors of production, or merely by an increase of taxes or rent.

In our society we have 48 percent of landless farmers (in KADA and KEMUBU for example) and the social dynamics issued from the numbers do not favor Marhaenism.

Our landscape differ from the little patches of terraced rice-fields in Java Sukarno had seen fit to use as a means to enhance his NASAKOM (Nationalisme-Islam-Komunisme) of his Guided Democracy which lasted until his overthrow in 1965.

We need something that can provide for coherence and cohesion while striding distinctly above the communal and sectarian drawbacks of our own plural makeup, the likes of which would have been shunned by heaven and hell had these places been pre-informed in any detail about Malaysia.

Gamany did not worry about returning to a purely proletarian workout seeing that could inspire more Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Myanmar workers in Malaysia than the sum total of the Malaysian blue-collar labor force.

So I suggested we can do with the scriptural generalizations and hone those into social stratifications and identities to display a broad ideological understanding as Ali Shariati had done in Iran during the Islamic Revolution that ended with the fall of the Pahlavi in 1979.

Gamany asked me what I thought of the DAP reviving the Chin Peng-Abdullah CD model of relationship between the Chinese-dominated MCP and the small 10th. Malay Regiment and I answered we can do better by aspiring to override the communalism.

Malays in Malaysia generally remain averse to socialism because of the anti-Malay policy of the MPAJA (Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army) during the Japanese Occupation.

Abdullah CD hailed from Lambor Kiri, a village several miles upriver from Pasir Salak where J.W.W. Birch was killed in the early years of the British Residential System. He and many of his Malay compatriots were anti-colonial first and last, or so his family members assumed of him.

There we stopped. Gamany and I shall meet again.

Since neither of us wish for a total command economy and both are favorably inclined towards choosing western models for change, modernization, development and integration, many finer points will need to be discussed before we can draw the Pas and other Muslims into serious discussions over the Islamic Welfare State and other matters of common interest.

Umno is obviously lost in the overwhelming materialism of the awesome transitional society and even if Isa Samad had won handsomely in Bagan Pinang on Oct 11, given its ruling attitude about corruption, Umno is bound to become even uglier still in the near future. -----a.ghani ismail, 12 Oct. 2009

CAN PKR BE MENDED OR WILL IT SIMPLY BREAK APART?

With the newt-like metamorphosis of Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) encumbering the Pakatan Rakyat’s lurch for power, Lim Guan Eng’s hunch that the ground is no longer the same as it was under Pak Lah must be a strong hint that the DAP secretary-general has become illumined.

Guan Eng had said knocking off Najib Tun Razak from the helm would not be easy.

The PKR is breaking down. The recent crossover to Umno of the PKR Lunas assemblyman in Kedah and the recalcitrant Port Klang assemblyman in Selangor are obvious symptoms of the newt reaching maturity and must return to the mud and slush for it to spawn a fresh batch of larvae.

Guan Eng must have known there wasn’t and hasn’t been much in the PKR. It is mostly about Anwar, his secretaries and a few NGOs close to him, many of the rest picked from the streets without any character assessment.

Months after the Pakatan Perak state government was formed, two PKR State Executive Councilors were trapped suckling China dolls paid for by a contractor. As a consequence the government fell in disgrace.

The playtime of these PKR members in the lair of power did not stop there.

A personal tryst of another PKR State Executive Councilor rushed into the Internet a set of near-nude pictures a gory Gallum of the middle-world said was altogether alright in Islam.

Now a Kedah State Executive Councilor who is the assemblyman for Lunas has crossed court saying he has lost confidence in Anwar Ibrahim who is again facing a charge for sodomy.

What’s left for the PKR to use as a foundation to acquire public confidence is a mystery. After more than a year of coaching most of the party’s state executive and district councilors are said to be ineffective or utterly deadwoods

They are mainly members of NGO’s who are hardly acquainted with government or with any executive function.

Now suddenly propped with power they seem to believe that that power is well spent by attending meetings after meetings in a pretense of hard work. It is Anwar that is stuck and stumped in the up-shot.

While he and his team can win a significant number of seats in state assemblies and in parliament, delivery is yet to unfold into the tangible world.

The PKR, which may have started out well in Selangor with former Guthrie’s CEO, Khalid Ibrahim, leading the state government, is now looking frothy and fat.

The DAP too may be staring into space in Selangor where the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) investigations and the select committee on competency, accountability and transparency (Selcat)interrogations can reveal more graft-stubs and fund-pilfering graver than previously suspected.

In the Islamic landscape the Pas has run berserk with the party’s Selangor state commissioner, Hassan Ali, wishing to form mosque-based moral squads to nab beer from the shelves in Muslim-majority areas.

He seems enthralled by the Pahang Shariah Court judge who had slapped some Muslims who drank beer with a fine of RM5,000, six lashes of the whip and recently, with a year custodial sentence as well.

As Malaysia appears to be going religiously mad, the PKR’s Reformasi and Pakatan’s Civil Society are staying clear from the mental-waste.

Anwar and his PKR were strangely soft about the Pas’ war against beer.

When the powers-that-be decided to slam six Shah Alam demonstrators with sedition for parading a cow’s head and then stepping and spitting on it, the PKR quickly distanced itself from the deemed sacrilegious act to appease their members who are Hindus.

It will be the monkey that the PKR should next uphold as a sacred creature, the being associated in Hinduism with the god, Hanuman, and with Sun Wu Kung in Indo-Chinese beliefs.

What is the policy position of the Reformasi and of Civil Society concerning these bewildering developments involving beer and cattle? Anwar must elucidate or the whole of the Reformasi will have to be disregarded as merely a politically sopped maverick and hence, in Islam, as short-changing the people and therefore fraudulent (Mutafiffin).

The relevant Quranic verses run like this:

Woe to the cheaters,
Who, when taking the measures from the people, they take full measure,
But when they give the measure to the people they cheat.
Do they not expect to be resurrected? --- Q. 83: 1 – 4

The PKR may be resurrected as a newt given its sidestepping of issues relating to the religious mental-waste.

The newt lives through a three-stage metamorphosis – a creature born in mud and slush that lives on dry land as a juvenile and then back to the mud and slush in its maturity.

As for the cow, is it really sacred to the Hindus or is it merely taboo to a large number of them? Haven’t you seen Indian cowherds whipping cattle? --- a. ghani ismail (16 Sept. 2009)

Busted Party Hot Over Sacred Cow

PAKATAN IS BECOMING WOEFULLY A BAD TASTE

Hot lips blowing flying kisses over a head of cattle in Shah Alam in psychedelic rays of sunshine on Friday 28 August– a brew of a Hindu temple, caning for drinking beer and the sudden leap of one PKR member, Radzi Salleh of Lunas, over to the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Kedah on August 23.

Now three others are rumored “missing”, meaning the Pas-led Pakatan Rakyat government in Kedah may have to call a snap state election to save its skin – gossamer-thin and serving no more than as a prophylactic to hide the non-performance since coming to power after the stupefying 8 March 2008 general elections.

Holy Cow! There’s really no need for the Police to exact a severe penalty over the Shah Alam ruse, nor any reason for paranoia.

What’s behind it is the death knell of the Pakatan in Kedah following the fall of the bugged pact in Perak. The position of the partnership in Selangor is also shaky.

If three other PKR elected members in Kedah officially swing, we would be seeing a clearance sale of the PKR in the state – all four crossing from the sick-bay to the glory of Hallelujah in a near repeat of the Perak sell-off. Pakatan would have 18 against BN’s 18, with one independent worth the moon.

It’s Anwar that’s gone all wrong with his September 16 (2008) misadventure of a calculation that was a bluff, leaving him and his party with a bill they can hardly pay for the trip that was merely a bad dream.

Anwar was reported to have confessed PKR is flawed and it is the weakest in the pact.

But some people find it is motley, showing up a legend of those types that were dragged from the trenches of the beaten.

Riding into the skirts of power they strut like crippled horsemen, making rather of a comic platoon of the wasted wherever they made their presence.

Some observers have asked whether Anwar is at all serious about making a bid for power, him to reach the pinnacle in Putrajaya with a bunch of slushy boys and big-butt sluts for the paradise his think-tank has devised for a third space of much fun?

Losing grip of the great dream to gain power over Malaysia after the paunchy win of 8 March 2008, members of the Pakatan-Pas leaderships are now seen to try for a racial polarization that will deny the 1Malaysia Vision.

While in the DAP it is about lancing Islam in the ribs, like Jesus had been lanced on Golotha, to those with a weakness for the Pas the game drags them into a historical curling, like the snake is swallowing its tail.

To the Malays the big fight that changed the course of history had been between Islam and Tantric Hindu-Buddhism in the 14th century, depicted in Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (the annals of Pasai) which marked the beginning of Islam in Malacca with the conversion of Parameswara when he married the princess of Pasai in 1409.

In that Hikayat was Perumal, the Pasai Raja and bhairawa (God-King) who insisted his daughters become his concubines and when his son protected the girls from their father, Perumal ordered his son to drink poison, which the son did.

It’s by the tantric to deify the kings and princes that the Malays came to know Hinduism and Buddhism in Sumatera.

It is this kind of a man-God that first became Raja of Pagaruyung, the Minangkabau heartland where Adityawarman enthroned himself king and drew attention to himself as a bhairawa who killed hundreds of his subjects, drank their blood and ate of their flesh about which he had inscribed on a stone statue which is resting in the Jakarta Museum, under the staircase.

This history of the fight against mangled Malay humanity is what is clearly stirring once again in the country, presided as it were by the Cassius-like Great Guru of the Pas whose umbilical attachment to Anwar’s PKR and the DAP cannot be taken flippantly as a passing fancy that will bear nobody any intended malice.

Though early Majapahit had driven back Kublai Khan’s 12,000-strong army in East Jawa, the Malays had never fought against the Chinese until they were forced to retaliate Chinese excesses in the 1942-46 conflicts from Batu Pahat in Johor to Grik in Perak. (see Chia Boon Kheng, Red Star Over Malaya).

It is not with the Taoist or Buddhist Chinese that the historical racial combustions lie in Nusantara, but with Tantric Hindu-Buddhism.

That is why it is critical for the Malays to be told the bhairawa-period of Perumal of Pasai and Adityawarman of Pagaruyung has long gone and that the Hindu-Muslim crises in India are differently patented.

Indeed there is no reason to be recalling the primitive conflicts between Islam and Hinduism in the Malay World.

When the chips are down there really is no reason to be flogging the Sacred Cow. ---a. ghani ismail, 1 Sept. 2009

Whip Kartika Publicly On Malaysia Day?

Swarmed by a pious warrant of zealotry for more than a year because she drank beer at an hotel bar in the beachside of Cherating, Pahang, and after four court appearances, Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, now Peoples’ Princess, was slammed by the Syariah High Court in the state with a fine of RM5000 and six strokes of the cane.

The mother of two who emotionally slumped when she was told on Monday 24 July 2009 the caning was postponed because it was Ramadhan, said she has been treated like a football since the arrest on 11 Dec 2007 and now she would prefer to be publicly whipped rather than caned, a report said.

As the country awakens to the agony of a woman and mother from the lower middle-class who had lost her full-time job in a hospital because of the “religious crime”, the Mufti of Perak, Harussani Zakaria, and Pas president, Hadi Awang, presented the country with a classic apology for the Islamic law.

Said they, drinking any alcoholic beverage is a hudud crime, meaning it is an offence mentioned in the Holy Qur’an. The punishment, they said, is between 40 to 80 light strokes of the cane, the victim fully dressed and not bared to show her flesh.

If you wish to debate that law you can begin by saying nowhere in the Qur’an is there a mention of the punishment. Since it will be said it comes from the Hadis (Prophetic Tradition), it should be asked, is it really sourced from the Hadis or from the reported sayings of the prophet’s companions, i.e. Atsar and not Hadis?

But the two missed the point altogether. The simple point is the fact Kartika was fined RM5000 and has paid the money. Had she been any poorer she would have to spend three years in jail. Are those deals also a part of the hudud?

She lost her fulltime job because of the zealotry. Is that not enough to satisfy the appetite for power to do violence of this unkind sort?

If the appeal to mercy and compassion is not enough to appease the temper of the holy of the holies in the country, then we need the pure souls to categorically inform us whether or not it was true Muawiyah, when he was Caliph in Damascus, was reliably reported to have been drunk on several occasions as he read the sermon and then led the Friday congregational prayer?

Was it true or false that the illustrious Umar Bin al-Khattab was drunk at prayer in the prophet’s mosque in Medina and because of that event God Almighty inspired the verse saying ‘ do not approach prayer when you are drunk so that you may know what you are saying...’ (Q. 4:43)?

That cannot be serious admonition of an abominable crime, surely.

Hence, we need to ask how serious is the crime in having a few beers to ease the stresses and tensions of working in a commercial and industrial landscape with a recession to boot and without a war to fight like the Muslims in Medina in the time of the prophet?

What more, the Pas Selangor Commissioner, Hassan Ali, wants to train squads of Beer-Fighters in all mosques in Selangor to perform a search-and-destroy mission of the beverage from hops and malt. He should begin by removing all Muslim workers from the breweries in PJ.

Since by Islamic law one drop of an alcoholic beverage is as haram (prohibited) as a jug of it, Hassan Ali should ask himself how about Air Tapai (fermented glutinous rice)?

The alcoholic content in beer is between 2.5 to 3 percent proof while in Air Tapai it is between 12 to 16 percent proof.

Go to Chechnya and you'll find some of the mujahids (Muslim fighters) drink Vodka to keep themselves warm in winter. You need to experience frostbite before you condemn that!

So, do you really believe we ought to apply the Prohibition in Malaysia in the 21st century simply because it is in the Holy Qur'an?

People of my ilk are saying it is a paltry matter Hassan Ali has grabbed for his mission and mileage. It has been said he has done nothing since assuming office after the 8 March general elections last year.

He could have worked on Cooperatives to help the members of the Pasar Tani (Rural Market) and the Pasar Malam (Night Markets) who are losing cients in the recession instead of choosing to raid 7-Eleven outlets and remove the beer.

Islam we know is a religion of mercy. But the nature and quality of a religion can and will change given a change of its environment and the means of production in the community it is upheld.

Therefore, when the environment of A and the means of production in that environment changes, A will no longer be equal to A. Its nature and quality would have changed.

The gist is, Islam will have to change substantially for it to remain a religion of mercy in our commercial and industrial society, not to mention the time that has lapsed between Muhammad in Medinah and Kartika in Malaysia.

Peoples' Princess, Kartika, should have been counseled and not punished by a RM5000 fine, removed from her job, taken into custody for a week and whipped in the privacy of a prison’s courtyard by body-builders, like these



What chance does she have? Where’s the compassion? Is it lost in the new metropolitan and industrial environs against what the Quixotic is, in fact, furiously battling?

The people is swiftly mobilizing. It'll be people against the traditional and religious elite. ---a. ghani ismail, 26 August 2009

CANE KARTIKA AS PART OF MERDEKA CELEBRATIONS?

Sunk into the opening day of Ramadhan, the scheduled caning of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno for drinking beer has ruined whatever lasting enchantment Islam in Malaysia may have advanced since the Arab religion beached here sometime in the 14th century.

Kartika, 32, a mother of two, on a modeling tour in Pahang for a tourism stint drank three glasses of beer in the lounge of an hotel in Kuantan, Pahang, on Dec. 11, 2008.

She was suddenly pounced upon by a squad of Islamic moral-police and shot to fame for being the first woman in the country to be fined RM5000 and to be caned six strokes for the terrible misbehavior, the brewery quite clearly enhanced as among the worst enemies of Muslims in Malaysia.

She’s due to be detained in a prison for a week beginning Monday for the sentence to be meted in the elegant privacy of a prison hours before the country celebrates Independence Day on August 31st. The gutsy woman has been asking for the caning to be carried out in public.

Inside the sullen side of the first of Ramadhan while the otherwise cacophonous and virile opposition has fallen silent over the event, Marina Mahathir and Nuraina A. Samad took up the challenge and called people to read the Qur’an for the whole of the month in code, like this,

(Q.2:34)

Even if meanings may be sometimes elusive, the intent of this suggested campaign is clear.

Islam, the way it is in Malaysia, is apparently coded in an exclusive system that is meaningless to the outsider and a referendum to let the Malays freely choose their faiths would probably leave the established domain to a minority of clowns.

In a society that’s plural and already long industrial, religious Puritanism should begin and remain at home.

But the matter is neither Puritanism nor any genuine concern for social morality. It is rather a system of feudal social control extended into the 21st century from the 17th by virtue of the fact the mullahs have no commercial, industrial or developmental talent to revise the method they had used from the time Nuruddin ar-Raniri became the Shaikh ul-Islam in Aceh under Iskandar Thani.

In early 20th century, while in Indonesia Tjokroaminoto founded Sarekat Islam and turned it from a batik cooperative into a revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement, the religious departments in this staunchly feudal compliance during colonial rule fought against the modernists or Kaum Muda responsible for the advancement of independence in the Malay world.

The result was an Islam that was crass, violent and as shallow as a bird-bathing pool.

In 1922, before the Comintern in discussing Pan-Islamism, the Indonesian Communist leader, Tan Malaka, stood up against the tide to say Pan-Islam in the Indonesian experience, was not the same as it was elsewhere.

More akin to the Caucasus where the Muslims had joined the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to overthrow the Czar in 1917, Indonesian Muslims likewise should be treated exclusively, the numbers at that time showing 13,000 members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia against more than one million in Sarekat Islam.

At that same time in Malaya, the conservative ulama working for the religious departments that were directly under the respective rulers, were relentlessly exhibiting their powers of violence against any and all non-conformists. There would be no religious dissident allowed in Malaya.

This feudal power abuse, once threaded into the fabrics of state power, will obviously need more than a drill of Wingdings a month long or even yet another media blitz to retrain the power-appetite and traditional inclination.

It will need the youth and the people to directly aggress for reshaping the Constitution and the terms of references of the Islamic institutions. We have to go the way of Fazlur Rahman and Cak Noor - Islam ‘Yes!’, Islamic State ‘No!’.

Malays must have the right to choose their own faiths, to conduct their marriages at the civil registry and to set themselves free from the feudal catch-22 to escape the violations.

This sustained display of abuse is about Consciousness. The apparatus is a schematic form lost in the woods of historical materialism and never to enjoy a union of opposites like when the Raja (King) also becomes Rakyat (Subject) for the contrast to blend into a different substance in a synthesis and so the Malays and Malaysians can finally enjoy Liberty – in the 21st century that already is.

Yes, I would like Kartika to be caned in public too, as a part of the Merdeka Celebrations. We need to be sure she will not be brutalized and raped after the caning. Members of NGOs can help take her home to her family after the ordeal.

And this is her family


-----a. ghani ismail, 22 August, 2009









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LAMENTATIONS OVER ENGLISH FOR MATHS AND SCIENCE

Has Parents Any Say In Our Education Policy?

Ghoulish in the way educational policies are crafted by politicians in Malaysia has dogged parents, teachers and children once again. This time, when after much ado a lot want the teaching of mathematics and science in English (PPSMI) to be continued with choices given to parents, the Cabinet reversed the policy in a flourish six years after the policy was begun.

A host of students were sent reeling, the three in the montage above representing many more this writer had met in the several weeks before the decision was announced.

Since the parents are divided about this and students who have learned mathematics, science and many more elective subjects in English want to continue with it, the Cabinet could have opted to let the parents make the choices.

There was a time when parents could apply to the school to teach a subject of their choice, needing only 15 parents to clinch the deal with the school. A posse should be quickly organized to search for that parents’ right in education. It must have run away.

The PPSMI policy reversal is not catastrophic as some may wish to suggest it is. But it clearly is a disappointing turn of policy for a lot of middle-class and urban families.

It should be noted this is not merely about teaching and learning of mathematics and science in English. Some elective industrial and vocational subjects are also taught in English, the reason stated being mainly because of the lack of supportive reading material in Bahasa Malaysia.

This is not about language learning, which the Ministry shall attempt to enhance and shall recruit more than 13,500 English Language and Literature teachers.

After that is understood, it remains rather of a big waste to relieve the society of a policy that had worked well in urban schools but not for schools in the rural, a matter of fact that applies for almost all subjects and for the whole of the teaching-learning process generally.

Gunnar Myrdal’s study of the rural-urban divide had made that clear.

Urban and rural performances in the learning process cannot be expected to be the same. The teaching-learning occur in different life-spaces, the same as between the better-endowed suburbs and the ghettoes, or with the inner-city schools.

After RM 4 billion have been invested in the venture over six years and every student I asked want to continue learning the subjects in English, the writer will have to register his own feeling of going south following the cast-away decision that need not have been as black-and-white as the Cabinet had decided.

It looks done, especially after it is clear very few teachers were trained to cover the need in the past five years.

But teachers can be trained if there’s the political will and with a mighty perhaps, enough parents can be brought to hold the pitch and ransom the Ministry to be accommodative and let those who want to continue with the subjects in English do so.

Former Prime Minister, Tun Pak Lah, declared the policy was a failure. It was not. It merely lagged in the rural, something we can find happening with subjects taught in Bahasa Malaysia and especially with mathematics and science.

Trouble brewed inside of the political nuances, which happened even in Proton, whence a whole chunk of valuable shares in Augusta were sold for One Euro or RM4.50, the same shares sold later for more than RM300 million.

Tun Pak Lah, as Prime Minister, also wrote off the Smart Schools project Tun Dr. Mahathir had started. Pak Lah merely said the money would be better spent to upgrade hundreds of schools.

We would not be facing the drastic decision had that been done satisfactorily during his tenure.

The three girls in the montage are from the first cluster of Smart Schools Mahathir had wanted to pursue, i.e. the Sekolah Seri Bintang (formerly Sekolah Bukit Bintang) located in Shamelin Garden, Cheras.

Asked, they replied they are from a Smart School (Sekolah Bistari) but when I followed through they said Smart Schools are schools where teaching and learning are electronic-aided.

Electronic-aided teaching-learning is less than 50 percent of what a Smart School should be and I suggested they get into the net and search for Smart School for a start.

When the concept is understood I told them they should get organized and aggress for a proper Smart School development. I had been a teacher, you see.

So the question should be asked as to whether or not we had been heading South in education because of the political blur and have we now done a leap South again?

Well, it’s about one and another policy and facility gone and we’ll need to wait to see if the new initiatives will show any better performances in our schools after 2012. --- a. ghani ismail, 11 July 2009