Category: Society

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Society

[781] Of P. Ramlee and moving forward

Last week, Fenomena Seni – a program on Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM) that discusses the state of the arts in Malaysia – created a considerable buzz in the Malaysian blogosphere. I missed the excitement but this week, I caught it on TV and it didn’t disappoint me. The program is rich in vigor and probably, along with Debat Perdana, might herald RTM’s renaissance. Anyway, the topic for this week is about P. Ramlee; the program raises the question, are Malaysians giving P. Ramlee too much credit?

The question was raised in Malay and given that I have problem recalling the exact phrase, I might be guilty of mistranslating the question. But within context, I’m confident that it’s accurate.

For the uninitiated, P. Ramlee is considered by many Malaysians as the greatest actor, director and songwriter Malaysia has ever produced. I don’t want to go too much into why P. Ramlee is great. So, I’ll leave you with an article from the trusty ol’ Wikipedia.

The general sentiment of the show was that P. Ramlee is great and nobody should question that. While the show was running, a survey was conducted and the result was announced at the end. The proposition of the survey is similar to the topic and a little over 80% of the survey correspondents answered no. Though the survey wasn’t scientific, if a scientific survey were conducted instead, I doubt the yield would differ by much.

There were three guests on the show. One of them, Member of Parliament from Sri Gading, Mohamed Aziz, repeatedly said that nobody will be able to match P. Ramlee, reinforcing the 80% opinion. I feel that is an unfortunate conclusion that bares dim future for the Malaysian song and film industry.

If this is the case, then nobody would be able to challenge P. Ramlee’s greatness. Nowhere in the future will Malaysia be able to produce an artist better than P. Ramlee because a majority thinks nobody could match P. Ramlee. Because of this, I feel we are looking too much into the past. We grant P. Ramlee the status of god that today, many of us would feel offended by the slightest suggestion that somebody might be better than P. Ramlee. This is no right mindset to move forward.

If P. Ramlee must be left unchallenged, I fear the Malaysian song and film industry will never improve. All of us are too scared to be better than our predecessors, much less a god. After all, challenging a god is an unthinkable blasphemous act, isn’t it?

Such fear is unfounded and an obstacle to a better Malaysia. That god is the creation of our mind. For each that we created, we could uncreate. It’s important for us to take back the godlike status we have conferred to P. Ramlee, if P. Ramlee is preventing us from moving forward.

Categories
Liberty Politics & government Society

[757] Of Jill Carroll is free

Yes, she is. I saw a report on Bloomberg just now and Bloomberg says Al-Jazeera and Reuters have confirmed the news. I however have yet to see an online report. Should be up soon, I presume. She’s from Ann Arbor and would probably be on her way to Ann Arbor soon.

Jill Carroll was kidnapped sometimes ago in Iraq and was feared dead earlier.

p/s – remember my post entitled [754] Of the strengthening role of religion within the government?

Well, in that entry, I wrote in jest that “through extrapolation, maybe, the government would send Muslims to jail for missing prayers in the future.” I didn’t quite believe it was possible. Apparently, I was wrong.

There is already such provision in Kelantan. It’s Section 101 of the Kelantan Islamic Council and Malay Customs Enactment 1986 (Amendment 1994). More:

In a rare case, a 68-year-old man was fined RM300 or one month’s jail for not attending Friday prayers in his mukim (sub-district).

Mohamad Taib, from Kedepal here, pleaded guilty to not attending Friday prayers at a mosque in his area three consecutive times, an offence which in Kelantan carries a maximum RM1,000 fine or a six-month jail term.

Religious prosecution is not all. Civil liberty was also threatened; privacy intruded:

The labourer was caught by Pasir Mas Religious Affairs Department officers after two months of surveillance at the mosque.

Pasir Mas Lower Syariah Court prosecutor Rohani Kadir said the officers and mosque officials found that Mohamad had not attended Friday prayers at the mosque between June and July last year.

And I thought the presence of CCTVs in Kuala Lumpur is already bad. Thank goodness, Kelantan is not my home. In a way, I’m grateful that Malaysia is a federation. If it were a unitary state, it would get really ugly to have such law.

If there a similar federal clause on that, those green cards would start to be overly attractive. Imagine the reason to emigrate: escaping religious prosecution. LOL!

Or maybe, it’s not so funny after all.

pp/s – two hours to the tabling of the Ninth Malaysian Plan and what am I doing? Trying to convince my mom into buying equities of major Malaysian construction-based firms. Well, correction – a buying frenzy.

ppp/s – alright. Not A2 but Boston.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[754] Of the strengthening role of religion within the government

I read a disturbing article in Utusan Malaysia (in Malay) earlier this week. A bill known as Enakment Zakat (literally, Tithe Enactment) is set for enforcement next year at the latest in Selangor. The bill will enable the state’s Islamic religious authority to imprison any person that failed to pay alms or zakat; zakat is obligatory alms on Muslims and part of five pillars of Islam. The troubling part here is the power the state government has to enforce religious tenets on its citizens. The state is enroaching on private citizens’ life in the name of religion.

The past few years have seen the strengthening of role of religion, specifically Islam, within the Malaysian government. Not too many months ago, we saw how certain religious authority had the audacity to form moral police squads despite public disapproval. It took several hard no’s to convince that religious authority to abandon that idea. More recently, policewomen had been ordered to wear headscarf at an official function regardless of belief. The police stated that it was for the sake of uniformity but I suspect something more sinister going on. Though this enactment is only effective at state level, it may well be another step taken to further erode secularism in Malaysia.

This trend is definitely the effect of intense UMNO-PAS rivalry that started in 1999. PAS managed a stunning win in the year’s general election. In effort to counter PAS, UMNO tried to be more Islamic than PAS, enticing conservatives that would normally vote for PAS. It worked and in the 2004 general election, UMNO gave PAS a severe beating.

The “I’m more a Muslim than you” policy may have accomplished what UMNO desired but they’re disfranchising the more moderate Malaysians. For such reason, I hope to see UMNO’s current policy to backfire in 2008 or 2009, the year the next general election is due. Such backlash would halt UMNO and indirectly, the government’s march to the right. PAS suffered somewhat similar backlash during the Pengkalan Pasir by-election, or not.

Else, soon, through extrapolation, maybe, the government would send Muslims to jail for missing prayers in the future. Hey, they’ve already sent those that don’t fast during Ramadan into a “timeout”. That could happen unless we stop giving those in the right more power to impose their self-proclaimed superior moral and other religious rules on the masses.

The problem is, of course, we have a commie wannabe as an alternative to UMNO and PAS and that makes things tougher than it ought to be. In the end, it’s all about the lesser devil, unfortunately. And that lesser devil is currently somewhere on the left.

Categories
Liberty Society

[725] Of Malaysia’s cool, other countries with Muslim majority aren’t

When I first heard that a Danish media published caricatures of Prophet Mohammad last year, to be honest, being a Muslim myself, I was slightly irritated. Though it’s an act of free speech, the Danish media abused its rights. That was that and I didn’t expect it to balloon up unnecessarily. I didn’t expect it because I don’t think it’s rational for such issue to take a center stage in world politics. Apparently, I have overestimated the Muslim world’s sensibility. Muslim Malaysians on the contrary are acting coolly. Comparing Malaysians’ response against Arabs and Indonesians’ reaction on it, I can’t help but feel proud to be a Malaysian.

In my opinion, what’s happening in the Muslim world is a gross overreaction followed by impossible demand. The side at fault is the rightwing newspaper Jyllands-Posten, not the Danish government. Moreover, the Danish government has no right to censor the newspaper. Nobody should but that’s another matter altogether. Hence, the Danish government has no reason to apologize.

I’m not sure whether it’s simply a refusal to understand the concept of free press or a thick skull but a lot of people are choosing to ignore why the Danish government is refusing to take the blame. Libya’s act of closing its embassy in Denmark is one of the overreaction and also an example of failure to appreciate free press concept. Another one is consumer boycotts in the Arab world. These boycotts, instead of hurting the rightwing paper, are hurting real people that have nothing to do with the paper. This is plain wrong. It’s as stupid as Republicans’ action of boycotting French fries during the invasion of Iraq – that boycott would only hurt potatoes farmers in the United States instead of the French economy.

Malaysian Prime Minister has been discrete on the matter, criticizing the paper instead of the Danish government. Apart from 50 PAS supporters that protested in front of the Danish embassy in Kuala Lumpur yesterday – which obviously doesn’t represent the majority – Malaysians are being quite rational on the matter. I haven’t heard Malaysians storming the Danish embassy like what happened in Jakarta or anybody calling a boycott of Danish or any European products here in Malaysia yet.

The ability to discern between the government and a private entity is not lost on Malaysians, unlike Arabic countries and Indonesia. In fact, I think, Malaysia is the only Muslim-majority country that is not blaming the Danish government for a private entity’s doing. I might be wrong but it seems like so.

To all Muslims out there, seriously, be sensible. The first thing to do is to realize that it’s a rightwing paper that started this, not Denmark the country. Differentiate the two and then comprehend that the Danish government can’t censor that paper. Blaming and targeting the Danish government and its people for things that they didn’t do only complicates the matter at hand and bring about a much unneeded clash of culture.

So Denmark, I stand by thee. But definitely not by Jyllands-Posten.

Public domain. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flag_of_Denmark.svg

I will not treat a country that believes in green energy unfairly. So, buy Danish!p/s – stupid, stupid. This is way beyond overreacting.

pp/s – despite all this, it doesn’t change the fact that there is hypocrisy involved. This comic aptly captures the hypocrisy.

Fair use. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Arabcartoon.jpg

Quoting Wikipedia: Cartoon from Jordanian newspaper Al Ghad. Counter-clockwise: “This one is anti-semitic”, “this one is racist”, “those fall under free speech”.

Categories
Liberty Society Sports

[703] Of real Devils worshippers are not black metal fans!

So yeah, some narrow minded and paranoia people in local authority arrested hundreds of people for attending a black metal show near Kuala Lumpur about last week. Moral police that have nothing else to do but masturbate on their supposedly moral superiority, instead of using it on real crime, used up precious police resources to harrass black metal fans. These moral police insist that those fans are worshipping the devils. Well, moral police are wrong. They are attacking the wrong group.

How do I know? In The Star today:

scanned by Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Fair use.

Moral police should act against the real Devils worshippers. This cult must be stopped immediately!Our hope in stopping these misguided souls that also pray to manure now lies in the hand of our heroes the moral police! Moral police! We need you!

Praise Burton Albion for doing God’s work in holding the Devils down. This might give time for Malaysian moral police to get their act together!

Manchester United fans, watchout. Believe it or not, you might be next.

p/s – alert, alert! Stupid moral police on the loose. Kosmo! editors and the article’s author need to resign on ground of stupidity.