Azly Rahman's Blog, page 14

Malaysia's two megadeaths in one week

by Azly RahmanWe died twice this week.First we agreed to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), approved at the level of ‘the Malaysian people’, taxed but without feeling a full representation. In times of Colonial America, that is called ‘taxation without representation’, a slogan that led to the American Revolution.Next, we heard of the official closing of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s case of the personal donation received from the Saudi Kingdom. We are yet to be told the truth of it all as well the real name of the person generous enough to throw us the cash that is supposed to cream and grease our elections or fight our home-grown jihadists.Preferably we hope that there will soon be an official statement from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia if indeed there was such a donation and if the kingdom does give money to other countries in order to influence internal politics of those countries.We had two megadeaths in a week. We are told to move on - perhaps like a dead-nation walking, not knowing which way to go to arrive at this so-called ‘high-income nation’ when our national coffers are being emptied.A partnership of slow deathWe can’t even handle its own economy and keep the people’s money safe and now wish to play the game of the sharks and vultures of corporate America who hold the power of international legal instruments to destroy nations. But congratulations, the votes are in for the TPPA for Malaysia.Good luck. May we not become another Mexico, Greece, or even Turkey, if not Vietnam of the 60s. At the rate of what is happening with the country's cleaning up to coffers and laundering money, getting huge donations from UFOs and aliens, we might as well ask Donald Trump to run our country by Skype, if he loses the presidential race.Those who voted ‘Yes’ for the TPPA do not understand American history and the power of the multinational corporations. The voted perhaps because they were told to. Their understanding of the anatomy, physiology, ideology, and the colonising and imperialistic tendency of the corporations is probably minimal, limited by what some neo-liberal governmental think-tank advised them.Knowledge is power, said Sir Francis Bacon and this goes the same with the need for a comprehensive, critical and constructivist knowledge of this complex agreement such as the TPPA. Do our parliamentarians have knowledge, that would help differentiate between signing a national suicide note and saving an economically ailing nation and treating and healing it from within?And here’s another story of our megadeath - the donation from a foreign nation to influence to outcome of our election.Do the Saudis give such a donation, by the way?“... A Saudi government official, while declining to comment specifically on the prosecutor’s statement, said the Saudi ministries of foreign affairs and finance had no information about such a gift and that a royal donation to the personal bank account of a foreign leader would be unprecedented. Representatives of the royal family couldn't be reached for comment.“Critics of the Malaysian prime minister said it was implausible the money had come as a personal donation...” says a recent report on the Saudi donation to Malaysia.But isn’t Saudi Arabia allegedly an ally of Israel? Isn’t this country with poor human rights record, ruled in part by mad mullahs? And Malaysia is letting a donation from the royal family dictate her politics? What a shame? Don't we have a sane philosophy of foreign policy?Can the opposition leaders now accept donations from foreign governments in order to win the next election and fight against race-based politics, religious bigotry, and the re-election of massively corrupt political parties? Have we legalised something we declared illegal? Something bordering on treason, is this not?In addition, didn’t Malaysia, alongside other countries, ban foreign donations for political campaigns, as reported below?“ ... As of 1995, countries banning foreign donations included the following:“Brazil, Canada (partial ban), France, Germany (partial ban), India, Israel (partial ban), Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, United States, Ukraine.”(Sources: Library of Congress, Law Library, Report for Congress: Campaign Financing of National Elections in Selected Foreign Countries. Washington D.C.: July 1995, LL95-4,95-1354, Table 5 and Association of Central and Eastern European Election Officials (ACEEEO), Election Law Compendium of Central and Eastern Europe. Kyiv: International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), 1995. For Albania, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Moldova, Romania, South Africa and Yemen: Yves-Marie Doublet, Le financement de la vie politique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Second Edition, 1997, p. 24.)The supreme god called MoneyThe cause of Malaysia’s two megadeaths this week is the will of the god called Money. It is now worshipped alongside the regular personal god ascribed in the belief system of one’s religion. It is in fact as supreme as the Supreme Being in the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie - a being close enough to that creation called man that has turned evil.When money, too, becomes god’s angels, become god’s prophets, messengers, becomes the bank vault to pay scribes to write the scriptures, and when money and more money is used to have people believe in the verses and use them to legitimise getting more money so that more gods would be create, worshiped, and ultimately be used to become both the chair and the chairperson of the day of judgment - at a time like, even more I become a cynic sceptic, a misanthrope, bohemian, and the most radical existential anarchist rooted in the tradition of stoicism and yearning all the more to be freer that Nietzsche and his superman combined.In other words, I am totally sick of how politics which is supposed to be a noble enterprise is now controlled by those who not only worship only money but wish to become gods of money. That is what Malaysia is now.Welcome to our well-crafted Armageddon, before you step into the pearly gates of paradise, choose your gods wisely.How many more deaths we can bear as we crumble depends on how much more intense our leaders worship the gods of money and how much closer these gods are brought to the jugular vein.

Read more: https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/328683#ixzz3ybtE9WIL

In Malaysia, things falling apart, the center cannot hold

 by Azly Rahman



We are living in a Bolehland-Chanduland, high on the remnants of the hegemony of Mahathirism and drowned in the ganja-smelling vapes of neo-liberalist promises of Najibonomics.

Today the dominant discourse of change is that of ‘Either-Or’; discourse framed as exemplified in the ongoing debates on the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), limiting our agreeing to be suicidal by agreeing to play the game of American cut-throat greed of American corporate interests.
Gleefully we will conclusively sign the agreement as we aspire to become an apprentice-enslaved-economy of a future-President-Trump-empire of a Casino Economy of Atlantic City. Our leaders are happily playing the game, out of the respect of the Obama Empire’s expansionism into Asia.

None of Malaysia’s economic leaders and advisers seem to display much understanding the political-economic-geopolitical-strategic-militaristic underpinnings of the TPPA, let alone the complex dynamics of the arms race and trade in Asia.

Consider the way we talk about liberalism.

Our leaders are agreeing to anything “liberal, liberalism, and liberalisation” (because these words sound liberating to the Malaysian ‘neo-liberals’) bankrupt of knowledge in economic history or historical materialism, but lack the understanding of alternate and humanistic systems of human and social engineering.

The education of our leaders have helped create such experts in economic planning; our vocabulary limited to those embalmed in textbooks written by children of Von Hayek, Friedman, and Reagan, and Thatcher and later perhaps, Donald Trump.

We therefore see our economic planners smile confusingly as President Barack Obama squeeze-shake his hand twisting our arms for us to sign the long-term Malaysian and TPPA living will of futuristic-euthanistic proportions. This means signing a Kurt-Cobain-of-Nirvana-fame Grunge band-type of suicide note for generations to come to figure out life’s outcome.

We do not care if the instruments of international law governing trade will favour the primarily US-based multinational corporations to even sue us if their cigarettes, greasy burgers, or toothpicks do not sell well because our natives will protest against the killing of our children or the destroying of our rainforests with those useless and unhealthy stuff globalisation and McDonaldisation makes.
Our leaders have this sense of wonder of being treated as little brown brothers obsessed with selfies and photo ops at TPPA-like high level meetings meant to make them accept modern slavery with style, pomp and pageantry. We have not changed in the way we have been trained to think. As the Algerian thinker would call our leaders: the oppressed have become the oppressors.

Abdul Razak Hussein’s biggest mistake

But here is the bigger picture of why we are falling apart and why our centre can no longer hold and why we are plunging into a quagmire never before seen in our recent history, since Abdul Razak Hussein made the big mistake of turning our economy into one tied to the world markets - as in the Felda scheme that signified the earliest intention for Malaysia of the 70s to be suicidal at a young age, playing the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank liberal economics game of lose-lose for banana republics.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s triple pronged-policy - Privatisation, Malaysia Incorporated, and Look East Policy - opened up to the liberalisation of the economy, with Affirmative Action and race-based politics kept as jokers and trump cards. Herein lie the systematisation and the technologisation of a backwater partially-peasant sustaining economy integrated into the world market linked to the major financial capitals of the world.

Herein lie the birth of a ‘modern Malaysia’ that was still growing up juvenile and scared as a child of neo-colonialism; growing up retarded of the ideas modernisation embalmed in McLellandian, Rostowian and Tayloristic ‘modernisation perspectives’ and their attendant ‘nAch viral-infected Modernisation illness’ in which a full-fledged democracy and a thinking middle-class was not there to kept the country developing with economic, educational, and social sanity.

Abdul Razak, the second prime minister, thought he understood Rostowian stages well and thought that progress is a linear trajectory. He thought he could run the marathon with the best and brightest of the Kennedy Era.

He thought the post-May 13, 1969, Mageran (Majlis Gerakan Negara or National Action Council) agenda was strategised to even turn Malaysia into a great society with as sound economy with all races living in perfect harmony, even if Mahathir ruled for more than 20 years happily and draconianly, and even if later down the line Najib (a good student of Mahathir) will also be winning the game of power play ala Candy Crush and Minecraft and Mortal Combat combined.

So now, William Butler Yeats has a poem for us, ‘Things Fall Apart’. The Africanist Chinua Achebe, using Yeats’s line, could have well written about our predicament, as we nervously see how the centre is collapsing , We are now seeing the showdown and a countdown to our bungee-jumping plunge into the quagmire largely of our making.

Both Mahathirism and Najibonomics are crumbling. This is happening as a consequence of this sumo-wrestling of the two forces battling for power and wealth. It is already here: Malaysian’s own ‘Star Wars’ episode of the ‘Clone Strikes Back’ or of ‘The Rise of the Jebat and Jibaok Storm Troopers attacking the Republic of Cyberjaya’; a republic that never did fully embrace the ethics of a republic of virtue.

What then are we seeing, as we as a society crumbles to the sea like the last scene of mass drowning in our own Odyssey made into a Quentin Tarantino movie?

"Quantum Islam: Towards a new worldview"

by Murray Hunter and Azly Rahman 

Introduction

In concluding our essay on Tawhidic-Singularity as a new philosophy of Islam, we proposed that Muslims need to interpret the core teaching of One-ness from a kaleidoscopic perspective. We asked readers to reflect upon the applicability of Chaos or Complexity Theory to view Islam as an organic and living religion inviting its believers to look at the concept of One-ness as the manifesting of Many-ness.

In this essay, we go deeper into the discussion of the soul of the Quran itself and how Muslims could perceive and read it as a postmodern text with multiple-level meanings based on his/her unique life experiences. We wish to propose the worldview of ‘Quantum Islam’, as a new way looking at this cultural belief system. We invite readers to think of Islam as more than just unquestioning faith and rites and rituals but as an evolving text to be made alive.

The idea of a ‘living Quran’ is a means of perceiving and feeling one’s existence as a world of interconnectedness. This world of deep personal connectivity is a world of the physical, emotional and spiritual self as it exists in the realm of the Universal self as a world designed as a Quantum being in itself.

Multiple universes and the Quran

Islam is about what cannot at present be explained intrinsically through the science we know today.
The Qu’ran is a deeply layered book of meaning. However, the majority of Muslims have tended to take literal views. The Quran has also foreseen many scientific discoveries and defined the nature of our realities.

Such a view of the cognitive and metaphysical nature of the text has been dominant at a time when Islamic philosophy was being conceived, especially in the debates between scholars trained in Greek philosophy with those trying to rid the influence of rationalism in epistemologising the meaning of existence.

The Quran and Hadiths have shaped the worldview of 20 percent of the world’s population. But Islam today is viewed as a singular reality, embedded in ‘Arabism’ and ‘hellfire’ paradigms, coercing Muslims to follow literal views, within a ‘carrot and stick’ enlightenment and fear syndrome.
As a consequence Islam has not been the means to a higher level universal wisdom that the Quran can facilitate, if read with this understanding.

Allah rabb al-àlamin, the Lord of the Worlds indicates a multiverse with parallel realities. There are parallel universes mentioned within the Qu’ran that we don’t have access to. These worlds are widely talked about within the Qu’ran, the world of the jinns, as in the verse ”And the jinn race, we had created before, from the fire of a scorching wind” Quran (15:27)
The 99 names of Allah also suggest multi-existential paradigms.

Challenges of constructing this multi-universal view

The first challenge is to escape the unipolar world and live in, and transcend to the multipolar world the Qu’ran describes. i.e., atoms can be both a particle and wave and thus be in multiple places at the same time. True realities are multipolar dynamics, rather than unipolar statics. Thus, to understand the complexity of the environment, we must develop both our personal self-awareness and social awareness.

So where reality is multi-layered and kaleidoscopic, layered and deeper meanings can be derived from the chaotic environment we exist within through contemplating the layered intricacies and meanings within the Quran.

Muslims viewing the text of the Quran as a living and evolving one, can find a meaningful guide to life and the universe, which we propose is what Quantum Islam means. What one sees with the naked eye, a phenomenon to be studied is just a level of Reality that we construct cognitively.
However as one reads deeper into the meaning of the Quran, one may find the signs and symbols manifesting themselves in newer ways, which we digest and make meaning of through our self-awareness or spirituality.

The second challenge is that we must understand that we are not at the centre of the world. We must override the assumption that modern humankind has adopted in that humans can control nature and nature is here to serve us. What we think and the assumptions behind our very thoughts may not actually resemble reality, and may not be the truth.

Once we shed this egocentric view of the world, we come to realise that we cannot control nature and we must nurture nature. In the Quran it is said: ”Say: He is Allah, He is One, He is Eternal He Begets not nor is He begotten and there is none equal unto Him” Surah Ikhlas (112.)

Muslims engaged in a cognitive and metaphysical reading of the Quran may propose that human existence is both physical and conceptual, and that as a Platonic view would content, we are both Forms and Appearance, and that if the self is an invention/creation to manifest the ‘truth’. There is a larger truth of ‘being and nothingness’, in another world of the ‘unseen’.

This is the idea of corresponding reality of existence. Islam proposes that this view of Quantum state of beingness can only be understood if one understands the meaning of ‘selflessness’ or the ‘destruction of the Ego’, and to allow the self to be liberated from the confines of a physical and mechanistic world.

The third challenge is to read the question from a ‘culturally-neutral’ perspective. This means stripping the notion that all that is Islam is Arabic and with fallacy, to believe that religious belief is not cultural. This is to begin to believe that to be a Muslim, one need not aspire to be or to become an Arab. If Islam is a universal truth, it is not ‘Arab-centric’, and many of the rites and rituals cannot be universal, if for example, Islam was to the truth on another planet like Mars.

What would Islam be like without the cultural anchors that have grown around it and almost strangled the truth? If, as the last message of Prophet Muhammad would contend - that Islam promotes a universal message of peace - and be viewed as the “final revelation,” and that only 20 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are speakers of the Arabic language, what has been the consequence of Islam as religion that has been too much caught in the semiotics of Arabism?
Simply put, why is being Muslim today synonymous of being or looking Arabic?

The three challenges above, namely that we are living in a multipolar world, that our existence is not central to the Universe, and that religion is a cultural construct to present ways for Muslims to view Islam differently. The Quran, in its very first few words of revelation, “Read... in the name of thy Lord who created Thee...” is a clear enough proposition for believers in this religion to “read oneself and to read the world on is living in.”

It is an invitation for readers to not only “read the world” but also to “write” a story of one’s life, based on one’s own worldview and to unshackle oneself from being defined by others.
The challenges above are existential in nature, given by the Quran to the readers.
“Verily in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are indeed signs for men of understanding; Men who remember Allah, standing, sitting, and lying down on their sides, and contemplate the creation of the heavens and the earth (with the thought) Our Lord! Not for nothing have you created (all) this. Glory to you! Give us salvation from the suffering of the fire” Quran (3: 190-191)

The ummah as singularity in multiplicity

The ummah is an interconnection of oneness, not segregated tribes who are at war with each other.
We are left to reflect upon the multiplicity of worlds that were created and understand that we are only a tiny part of it.

This opens up wisdom, develops humbleness, and increases empathy towards there being something greater than ourselves. The quintessential and foundational chapter of the Quran, Al Fatihah, or The Opening offer this idea of mercy, peace, gratitude, and wisdom in choosing between Good and Evil.
It introduces the reader to the idea that the path of righteousness or the ‘Siratul Mustaqim’ is the path of peace that will guide human beings in this journey through the bountiful and merciful world created by The Lord of the Universe. This path is a challenging one, as we can see that even the world ‘Islam’ can be used to strike terror in others as well as create untold magnitude of destruction.
The emergence of the Isis ‘Islamic State of Syria and Iraq’ or Isil, the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Levant’ or the Daesh (Darul Islamiyah) and the globalisation of terror has is an example of how the word of Islam and the tawhidic message of peace can be misrepresented and be a guide to the path of ‘those cursed’ as the last verse of the Al Fatihah reads.

This takes us into the ‘tawhidic-singularity’ realm of Islam with the idea of Gnosticism factored into the belief system - of the ‘alam al-ghaib’, the concealed dimension of reality

We are told within the Tawhid to submit to Allah and be part of the greater universe. Yet the behaviour espoused by Islam scholars today tends to deem that OUR humanity is at the centre of the universe. It puts humankind above the natural laws of the universe, in a state of arrogance, detested in the Quran itself.

Today we see many political Islamic ideologies that seek to dominate all.

This is contrary to Allah’s scheme of things within the Quran.

The continual return to referencing Allah as the Merciful and the Compassionate reminds us of the need for humility, not hostility and cruelty to humankind.

Choice is open to humankind within the teachings of the Quran. This implies man can choose the realities he wants to exist within:
I control what I perceive
I control what I think
I control how I act
I am responsible for the consequences.
(13:11)

This must occur beyond the bounds of ego-centric consciousness and the assumption that there is only one possible reality.

The action upon literal translation of the Quran is a denial of the true realities that the Quran lays out in front of us. Literal scholarly understanding of the Quran has shackled our understanding to the cultural metaphors that have bounded Islam to its Arabness that we see today. This has blinded us to seeing the deeper dimensions of Islam and the messages of transformation towards Tawhidness.
The Quran is a dynamic book, talking about change. It’s been interpreted as static dogma and doctrines, losing the central message about our journal of transcendence to the state of Tawhidness.

The paradoxes of metaphoric and material universes

The paradoxes of the Quran advise humanity not to be too self-excessive and egocentric. Our greed, and other negative emotions, narcissism and other neurosis, addictions, pleasures, accumulation of wealth, and how we treat others is a quantum introspection that we are taught within the Quran, in order to assist us seeing other realities (universes), that we have choice to enter and exist within.
Only through this open awareness can we experience the realities of the world around us, learn to submit to the greater universe around us, which is called Allah. Our essence of purity through the state of spirituality is the only paradigm we can use to understand the deep meaning of the Tawhid and its greatness, far beyond any person, society, or time.

Thus the Tawhid provides humanity with a meaning of life; that of being part of a greater existence; a worldview that accommodates not only the multiple worldviews of existing belief system but also respects the process of constructing emergent new ones.

The introspection of a literal Allah is a neurosis that blinds us to Allah’s true greatness and our true appreciation of this. This is the true reality.

In Islam, worldviews such as that proposed through Sufism takes Muslims away from the ordered mechanistic world view. The world can be seen for what it is, complex in almost mystical ways, as even the laws of nature itself can be seen beyond cause and effect, beyond karma which is too simplistic to explain reality.

This is the Quantum view of Islam, which can also be found in the way Buddhism views the self, Reality, and existence.

Buddhist ideas such as the self as non-existence and constantly evolving as the ‘being and becoming bodhisattva’ journeys towards ‘nibbbana or Nirvana’, and constantly being aware of the impermanence of the self and the ephemerality of physical beings, and to live a principle of ‘non-attachment to this mechanistic and material world’, and finally to view that life is a process of samsara or the evolution towards liberation, perpetual happiness, and next to enter the realm of ‘being and nothingness’ - this view is where the similarity of Quantum Islam and core metaphysical teachings of existing cultural philosophies lie.

Perception and feeling become more important than any form of quantitative measurement in understanding reality. The Quran itself is not a quantitative work. It is a compendium of propositions inviting readers to think of multiple interpretations of the meaning of texts, subtexts, and cultural contexts. It is a postmodern text that has not proper arrangement or a sense of story of creationism.
In other words, it is not a structured story about the metaphysics and physics of creation and Man’s place in the universe. The Quran, in short is merely a set of annotated readings inviting the reads to deconstruct meanings. It is a book about representations of alternate realities in which even the ‘speaker’ or ‘narrator’ of this grand text utilises shifting pronouns in telling stories and passing down decrees.

Reality and Quantum Islam

The perception of reality is about awareness as the Quran teaches. It is about how individuals transcend the universe through a journey towards a destination and seek the final reality.
Mathematics breaks down in any view of reality, i.e., mathematics cannot explain 10% of infinity. Science cannot explain reality; as if we look at an atom we are not sure whether it’s a particle or a wave.

There is a duality to everything, i.e., atoms can be in more than one place at the same time. Half of what we look at is in decay, so the ‘Schrodinger’s cat’ is both alive and dead at the same time. There is a duality of consciousness that we must understand. It is both psychic and physical, full of emotion and emotionless, black and white, good and evil, hot and cold, attracting and repelling.

Reality is thus an inter-connectiveness of nature and a web of relationships between humanity and spirituality, that makes up a unified whole within us.

The form of our realities is the product of our observation of this. A tawhidic consciousness is therefore so important in our interpretation of reality.

Seeing this is the order within the chaos that shrouds our minds by focusing too much on the poles of the existential paradoxes. Paradoxes can only be understood through balance. Then one can see the truths within people, relationships, and events.

Many Islamic writers resorted to using poetry to enhance the understanding of non-linear world.
The Quran talks of a transition to a level where the duality of mind and body cannot be distinguished. We shift into a singularity where there is no time, no space, just a transcendence or universal oneness. We transcend the four dimensions that we understand into further dimensions which the Quran speaks of but we have no direct prior experience. This is the state called Syurga.

The direct experience of reality is a psychic and emotional breakthrough to what Islam calls Al-falah.
The only tool needed to see reality is a tawhidic transcending awareness, which is the key to openness and seeing something greater than our selves.

This is why we rely on rituals such as Zikir (where prayer is incorporated) which builds up higher levels of consciousness. Zikir should help us create an empty mind so all thoughts are cleared to enable us to see the greater universe free of our own egocentrism.

This is where insight come from as we experience ‘eureka manifestations’ of both personal and universal nature. Einstein wrote of this epiphanic moment in his journey to construct the ‘theory of relativity’.

Our intellect is developed through our experience, which gathers knowledge and interprets meaning for us. The heart of all knowledge for a human is experience. For example, we cannot know what it is like to scuba dive, without actually scuba diving. One hundred hours in a classroom cannot give you the same knowledge as a few minutes under the water.

Without experiencing the universe we are blind. This blindness can only be overcome through being open and empathetic to the world around us. Blindness to the universe is a human neurosis.

Science, sense, and soul

A quantum view of reality puts an end to materialism. It is within this paradigm Quantum Islam that one need to look at reality in a different light, taking into consideration that life is not entirely founded upon Materialism.

The Tawhid espouses us to transcend materialism. The non-physical element of our life is our existence, not material things, only their images and symbolic meanings within our minds. This triggers our emotions which create Al-fasad realities for humankind, bringing humans to a level of personal destruction through greed, etc.

This also has repercussions in thought and future actions, and can be considered ill-intentions, contrary to what the Quran espouses. This is our mystical jihad of finding our true uncorrupted existence.

The worldly realities mediate and shrivel over our Tawhidic consciousness, which tells us what is right. Going against what is right is sin and our physic destruction.

Tawhidic consciousness is the true universal wisdom, just as quarks within atoms possess energy which has its own consciousness described for example, by physicist such as Freeman Dyson. Like quarks, we have the capacity to make free decisions.

The non-physical, all embracing empathetic and compassionate mind is what we can develop through Tawhidic guidance. This takes us into the realm of Allah and Syurga.

Allah exists within our higher levels of consciousness, as we are told many times within the Quran.
The narratives of the Quran are concerned with both individual and social (universal) consciousness, the yin and yang of our existence.

This has great implications which haven’t been discussed within the Islamic world. Most are restricted to reading from the literal universe of the Quran, and clinging to this unipolar universe.
To see reality, we must discard the concepts of language and images. Structure gives bias and shackles our ‘knowing’.

Higher intellect cannot be obtained through the processes thinking within mechanistic realities. This blinds us to the understanding of the essential nature of the universe. With a literal understanding of the Quran we are in a paradigm lock within a singular universe of nature.

Without paradox, we cannot see meaning, as paradox is the only way we can interpret. Paradox is the language above all other languages, the only way we can create benchmarks within our mind, in order to interpret the universe around us.

However, these paradoxes are ruled by personal emotions, of which we both project and introspect with the dualities that define our world. It is within these dualities that we define ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘virtuous’ or ‘sinful’.

Islam and particularly the Tawhid is a field of potential. It is a reality beyond our materialistic reality, and our consciousness which is intertwined with our ego-self. The Tawhid can only be entered into, discovered, or become an awareness through humility on the inside and compassion filtering to the outside, without the ego-self bounding us back to our materialistic existence.

This dimension is a field of human and universal purity, full of wisdom; al-Falah. Islam is really about how we transcend the lower earthly dimensions of ourselves into the higher dimension of Tawhid-purity.

This is Quantum-Islam; the potential to be, the choice that has been given to all humanity within the Quran.

Conclusion

Exploring idea of Quantum Islam, as the name suggests, requires the mind of the Muslim to engage in the phenomenological and metaphysical experience of conceiving worldviews beyond the mechanistic view of the personal and physical self and move toward a higher plane of quantum physics and metaphysics.

In other words, Muslims should raise the level of understanding Islam from mere doctrinal and cultural to philosophical and muti-universal and multi-dimensional. This requires a new understanding of what god is, beyond how this concept of a creator is understood. A Kuhnian shift in Islamic metaphysics and ontological evolution is needed, as how the idea of a Heisenberg Principle of observing Objectivity was conceived.

Muslims need to explore the semiotics of believing itself and venture deeper into the meaning, and constructing the meaning of reading their ‘book of readings’: The Quran.

***
MURRAY HUNTER is an Australian academic, entrepreneur, researcher, and writer who has spent more than 35 years within the region. He is a contributor to a number of international news sites around the world. DR AZLY RAHMAN is an academician, long-time columnist for Malaysiakini, an author of seven books on Malaysia and the complexities of hypermodernity and globalisation, and teaches courses in Global Politics, Culture, American Studies, Education, and Philosophy. He currently resides in the United States.

One Malay village, ganja-vaped

Azly Rahman         

I grew up with many adults in my village who were stoned either on ganja imported from Thailand or ecstasy pills or "pil khayal" bought from some pharmacist in the town of Johor Bahru.
Had I not got hooked on books and slept with them and run around the kampung exploring the world carefully, I would have ended up as another "Mat Gian" or Joe Addict, getting high all day all night sniffing glue, smoking gangsta ganja, or drowning my sorrows with bottles of Tiger Beer or Carlsberg or Guinness Stout I would need to swallow my "pil kuda" or those horse-powered pills with.

I would have died sitting down near a corner of the Johor Bahru bus station. Or I would be as sure dead as I could with my face buried in a plate of rice and gangsta chicken curry late at night, overdosed as overdosed as a gangsta ganja ghost could be.

I would be a dead Malay boy high on life, unexamined.

Yes, that was what my kampung was about. A village always flying high. A Malay village of high flyers. Every five or six households would have a son or daughter who is a drug addict at varying degrees of addiction, and untreated.

A family with Mat and Minah Gian. Malays. Kids always with "kepala best" or "good high feeling” all day. Their eyes would always be small and as if in Nirvana every nano-second of their life.
Yes, Mat Gian, who I would love sitting down with and listening to their stories and theories and worries about the world. "Gua story sama lu haaa... Gua cakap sama lu haaaa…" would be either their opening line or closing line.

"I tell you... let me tell you..." they would say with eyes as steamy and dreamy and chinky as Betty Davis' and Cheech and Chong combined. Eyes of enlightenment. Eyes that will tell you stories of how one would be chasing dragons all day, round and round the kampung.

I love these Mat Gian, though. I learned a lot from them, especially on how the world works. I felt like I was Al Pacino, learning how to act by going undercover and learning how to think and feel like a drug addict, ready for my role in a sequel of Dog Day Afternoon. A cool feeling, as if I was an anthropologist studying the Mat Gian of Johor Bahru or Sin City JB.

"Lu ada sen, tak? Paw sama gua seposen?" a Mat Gian would be asking me if I had 10 sen to lend him. "Gua tak makan lagi la, brader” I have not eaten anything yet. With open palms but half-closed eyes he would ask me for money. He would also be shaking.

"Wa bayar balik lu laaa..." I'll pay you back, he would promise. "Gua promis lu gua tak beli barang la Mat. Bole ka?" I promise you I will not use the money to buy ganja or pills, he would say.
Sometimes I would just run away, laughing, after pushing him away. "Lu pigi mampus lagi baik la, Mat" You are better off dead, I would laugh at him.

There was also this time when I heard of one of them who was so high he threatened his mother with a machete and when the kampung folks intervened, he ran out of the house.A few minutes after that, as I was told of his fate, the Mat Gian was hit by a fast approaching Vespa, His left leg was severed. He could still yell and cry, although he was high on drugs.

Instant karma, as John Lennon would say of the Mat Gian who cursed and threatened his mother. Because his mother would not give him the many sen needed to buy his "barang", so that he could get stoned and steamed and high and "make his kepala not just best but the bestest".

My village. My growing up years. My people. My teachers in life.

The language of highness

Stoned. Steamed. Stim. Fit. Hisap fit. Kena fit. Tarik fit. Hisap dam. Hisap barang. Tarik Tarik barang. Tarik dam Kena dam. Kena barang. Sedut. Sedut benda. Telan pil. Telan barang.Tolak barang. Ayam Kena ayam Main ayam. Sambar fit. Sambar barang, Push. Pusher. Blues. Kepala blues. Kepala stim. Stim kepala. Kepala bagus Kepala best Kepala best - SIAL!

These are some of the words associated with smoking pot/ganja and taking ecstasy pill that I have heard used often. I heard them from the adults who were either on mind-altering substance, or from those un-stoned, talking about those stoned and getting high.

Those were the slang words used widely in Johor Bahru, the Southern Sin City where dragons puff into each other’s face while singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. While the rich collect luxurious cars and sip wine and champagne in faraway lands, the underclass in the village smoke grass and pop pills to escape from the harsh realities they are in.

Those words fascinated me. I was child roaming around the village, peeking through cracks in wooden walls of the dilapidated homes of my neighbours, wondering what those older than I were doing. I picked up those words and phrasal nouns. These slang words would live in my head for days as I tried to figure out what they meant.

I especially love the phrase "chasing the dragon". I would imagine smoke coming out of the nostrils of those creatures and I would imagine them running around in my village.

I had read plenty of stories about dragons in those books about myth and legends from faraway places. I had read about the dragons of Lake Chini in the East Coast state of Pahang (Naga Tasik Chini) and had also seen a Malay movie of that title.

Magical and comical

I knew what dragons looked like and knew that they would only bob their heads in and out of the sea and that was it. I never knew that ganja-smokers in my kampung would also know about dragons and even be chasing those magical ones.

"Chase the magic dragon." Hahaha, I would laugh and imagine those Mat Gians or Joe High or Joe Ganja or Joe the Puffing Dragon, in their state of mind of ganja-highness and close-to-Nirvana, would be chasing dragons.

Hahahaaa, I said, with all due serious. Magical and comical. I had also read a story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which a dragon was slain. I had also heard a song by the British singer Rod Stewart and former grave-digger, who sang about a dragon being slain as well.

So, the Malay men in my village were chasing dragons. I suspected that some of them even turned into dragons and died as those creatures too. A life unexamined chasing dragons, getting high and never taught to question things. Any way the wind blows didn't really matter to them, the late Freddy Mercury of the awesome rock group Queen would probably say about these Hippie-Days Malays.
So, the Malay men in my village were chasing dragons. I suspected that some of them even turned into dragons and died as those creatures too. A life unexamined chasing dragons, getting high and never taught to question things.

And while I was made to swallow a coconut in order for me to be silenced, older people in my village were made to swallow pills and chase dragons in order for them to be taught not to question Reality.

I asked myself: what do all these mean?

Ganja - opium of the masses? Of my kampung folk? Who was feeding them with these? Who threatened me with that coconut?

Just thinking of those questions made me high. And I was still a child, aged 11 or 12 years. I was screaming and yelling and, like a younger Harry Houdini, trying to wiggle myself out of the grips of those foul-smelling Segget River-bathing men in uniforms.

Now that’s a different, but related story of a society vaping ganja.
And I could imagine my mother crying. Profusely this time. Bless her soul.
Read more: https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/325922#ixzz3wcEtAuXs

MALAYSIA'S 2015: Year of Governing Arrogantly

 by Azly Rahman


There is so much to talk about the horrible state of Malaysian politics one does not know where to begin to analyse it.

We leave 2015 with a stronger government with all the tools and instruments of repression it needs, a nation almost bankrupt, a helpless populace drowned in their daily struggle amid the rising cost of living, reading stories upon stories of massive corruption amongst the leaders of the ruling party, increasing violence on the streets, rising tension between youth of different ethnic groups, talk of Johor, Sabah, and Sarawak leaving Malaysia, a broken-down-opposition coalition, a still unresolved issue of the 1MDB, and a range of other issues that will usher our beloved nation into yet another hateful year.

One issue that caught my attention, as it relates to the relationship between the ruler and the ruled or between the rakyat and the those who elected them, is the increasing sense of arrogance politician are imbued with.

While the talk today is for the rakyat to save money, be prudent, and be thrifty in spending, and to even use second-hand stuff to survive in these harsh economic conditions, one advice given by a minister is to get us to work two to three jobs to make ends meet.

For politicians to be telling the people to take up two, three, four jobs to survive in this cut-throat, dog-eat-dog Malaysian economy, is not just being arrogant, heartless, and ruthless but to also a way to give them permission to urinate on the rakyat and tell them to go to hell with their problems.
These kinds of statement usually come from politicians who not only have 10 or nine jobs themselves, sitting on board of directorships of companies paying them perhaps a hundred thousand ringgit per seat. This is the kind of statement made by those whose lives are filled with filth and do not see that for the poor to take up two, three, four jobs would mean drawing up a plan to destroy the family.

We have come to a point of NO RETURN in the way we have allowed the politicians - those sweet-talking jive-talking vote beggars at every election - to get the rakyat to vote them into power, only to be be betrayed by the ‘Yang Berhormat’ urinating on the rice bowl of families who are now having problems not only buying pens and pencils, and schoolbooks, but also putting food on their table.

What is there to worry about?

The politicians, be they from the ruling party or the opposition, have always been fed well. This goes the same to the CEOs of government-linked companies (GLCs) and corporations, and of course the royal families. What is there to worry about except to choose what rhetoric to use, what promise to make, and what bread and circuses to make and give the poor in order for the many to still keep the few in power.

What me, worry? as the MAD magazine character Alfred E Neuman would say.
Let the poor suffer, their children go the worst schools, young girls and women salivate watching those televised weddings of Malaysia’s rich and famous, and let the men and women work 10 jobs till they drop dead before the time comes for them to retire gracefully. Let them die a slow death under the weight of these political rhetoric while the a million-ringgit-a-month rakyat-paid politicians pee and defecate on the food of the poor.

Is this not insanity of the society we have created?

Who cares for the poor?
Who cares for those dying, breathing poison in Kuantan?
Who cares about the hills being shaved bald in Kelantan flooding away the lives of the poor who are now still rendered homeless?
Who cares about the increasing number of cases in which the poor had to steal food or money to buy food?
Who cares about the growing number of population of the homeless?
Who cares if that handbag made of the crocodile that died in the Straits of Malacca during the times of Parameswara is worth as much as the cost of stopping the poor from marching to the walls of the Bastille, because they are hungry?

Who cares about the anger between the poor of the different races - anger fuelled as a strategy to keep the nation divided, conquered, and clobbered - after the Oppressed have become the Oppressor, little brown brothers become emperors?

Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?

Let the poor eat not just cake, but their own vomit...
for this is all the rich cares about the poor!

Is this what Malaysia is all about? A society of master and slaves? Where is compassion - even in the words politicians use to talk about the “poor” of all races?

What are our elected representatives going to tell us in 2016 - in order for us to not drop dead working three jobs? What are they going to lecture us about in an economy destroyed by those who not only are robbing the nation dry, but also plans to sell the country to foreign investors? How are we to believe that those who begged for our votes, being put into power, are doing these in the name of patriotism and national development, as they say?

Should we even bother to wish each other Happy New Year?

What then must we do?
Read more: https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/325222#ixzz3w7W8787f

Create Christianophobia, we must not

by Azly Rahman



Malaysians are angry and deeply bothered by the recent issue of Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) organising what was reported as an “anti-Christianisation” conference.

There is nothing new about the need for such institutions to train students to fear themselves and non-Muslims and non-Malays especially. It is a natural programme to instill fear as part of a culture to defend the existence of race-based ideology. It is part of an apartheid strategy of Malaysian education I have written about in many articles.

What is new is the question: how do we dismantle this system and work towards peaceful co-existence?

I do not think the Christians and Catholics in Malaysia appreciate being bullied endlessly. I do not think they want to be branded as “evil people trying to spread false and dangerous message threatening Islam”.

I do not think they need to be associated with the Crusade War a thousand over years ago, or even linked to the brutality of the Christian-imperialist army who were chanting “guns, guts, god, and glory” before annexing cultures and massacring the natives of Latin America, Africa, Asian, and even Northern America - so that the Crusaders carrying the order of the European monarchs can built churches while sucking the blood, sweat, and tears of the natives they enslave.

I don’t think the Christians and Catholics in Malaysia want to be known as inheritors and carriers of the sins of their fathers. I think they just want to live, work, and worship in peace and be ensured that their safety in an majority Malay Muslim country be guaranteed.


Why do institutions such as UiTM need to instill such a fear and to unnecessarily turn young and hopefully not-yet-Daesh/IS radicalised students into hating the Christians and Catholics? If Muslims in predominantly Christian nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia can help protect the safety of Muslims from Christian extremists-wannabe-terrorists, why can’t Malaysia do similarly by not allowing conferences that promote hate to be fed to students?

Why not encourage education for peace and conflict resolution? Why not teach empathy through ongoing good dialogue amongst Malaysians of different faiths? Why warn them of the “dangers of Christianisation” and not expect some lunatic fundamentalist groups to take the warning one step further and translate it into violent action, sanctioned and legitimised by the authorities?

What education should look like

Haven’t we heard the word ‘Islamophobia’? Why create ‘Chistianophobia’ at a time when the world is bipolar, violent, and plagued with all kinds of phobias?

Let us come back to our senses. Here is my thought on what education should look like if we are to prevent racial and religious riots in future:

The education of today's bumiputeras via the special privileges given to them in all aspects, from preschool to postgraduate - especially the education of Malay Muslims through the racially-based institutions linked to the ruling party - has one objective.

It is to produce more and more members of the Malay-Muslim-bumiputera privileged class who will ensure that the non-bumiputera-non-Muslims be kept outside the gate of equality, equal opportunity and meritocracy, even though they are the rightful citizens of this country whose parents and grandparents have laboured for this country so that the most privileged class of Malays and non-Malays can continue to be created to enslave the labour class of all races.

No need to have a complex understanding on Malaysia's philosophy of education, national development, frameworks of class evolution, politics of curricular studies, interplay between race, religion, and ideology, or any other complex theories of neo-feudalism to understand this simple fact of education and social reproduction in Malaysia.

We need to turn the system upside down and renew prosperity of this country, based not on the advancement of this or that race, but the simple human logic that each and every one of us is a human being with dignity and an important part of Humanity.

UiTM was different back in the days, especially in the 70s and early 80s.

There is a vast difference in the way Malays were educated in the institution. It was a place to harness the creative energy and problem-solving gung-ho cognitive capabilities of students who had so much energy than just reading books only, so that they may further their studies and contribute to the development of the nation's post-independence.

This is because the leadership knew what education and human liberation meant. Because the first prime minster was a firm, fair, and wise man. A good man. The best we have had.

However, beginning in the mid-80s till today it is looking like a place to engineer the development of totalitarianism and fascistic mono-ethnic thinking of a mill used for political means by political masters only concerned with their own survival and vainglory, in all the excesses of political authority and one-dimensionality instilling fear of others instead of promoting diversity and the love for ethnic differences and cultural beauty.

The difference between our premiers

All these - and not much about the plain honesty of creating a generation of Malays able to see the true nature of their own potentials and be ready for an ever-changing world of globalising predatory.
Because today’s prime minster is a very weak and unwise man. Not a good man at all. The worst we have ever had, many are saying.

That's the difference, if we agree. How then must the rakyat reclaim those once admirable institutions?

Wake up, speak up, alumni and all. Education is the art and science of creating the free man and woman.

“A multicultural, multi-vocalic, multidimensional understanding of Malaysia's complex society.” This is what we need. This is a major theme on global education and international and intercultural understanding that Malaysian institutions such as UiTM need. This is it, rather than ones that continue to stupefy the students with themes that divide and insult the human intelligence as they relate to race and religion.

These institutions are not fit to be called universities and educational institutions if they continue to nurture cognitive-pathological thinking in an institution that is already mono-cultural. This is not necessary for an institution that denies the opportunities for the students to work together with students of other races, befitting of what Malaysia is and ought to be about.

I hope this misguided paradigm of educational progress and intellectual attainment can be changed with a gradual change in leadership; one that understands what in the broadest sense of the word means.

Whilst universities the world over are taking pride in being globalised and oftentimes scrambling and racing to make their campuses truly diverse and multicultural, UiTM and Mara elite secondary schools i.e. Maktab Rendah Sains Mara (MRSM) are still taking pride in defending the rights to be exclusively one-race, one religion, one-myopic vision at the expense of the development of the students' minds yearning to be multi-intelligent and able to develop multiple talents.

This has to change. Malaysians need to push for this change - because education is matter of national interest.

Enough of Islamophobia. Enough of Christian and Muslims massacring each other the world over. Let us not create another version of Chistianophobia or Islamophobia right here in Malaysia!

Kuantan, Darul Bauxite?

by Azly Rahman


Why is Kuantan, Pahang looking like the planet Mars these days? Why is it now a red planet with a Red Sea with the Kuantan folk living in fear of a red scare of dying en masse from contamination if not from cancer? Who are the culprits responsible for turning the town into a red river valley with red streets producing red dust, as if the city is a place for the next shooting of a sequel to Hollywood’s ‘Interstellar’?

I love the town. ‘Kuatagh’ as it is called by the folks. A slangish way to call this now reddening town which does not even have a single brunette/redhead walking around Jalan Alor Akar, for example. Yes, part of my teenage years were spent there. I went to school there. It was a lovely place with lovely people and back in the mid-70s, only kids like me and my friends were responsible for painting the town red.

Now I will call it Kuatagh, Darul Bauxite. A town with red alert flashing daily. A town that is strip-mining bauxite and those big gins and big guys with big profits to make will earn from the production of aluminium.

So, now Kuatagh will be the Capital of Heavy Metal with the CEOs of those mining companies and the politicians producing Kuatagh’s death metal music playing in the streets and the rivers and the valleys of the town, and filling the airwaves for Kuatagh folk to breathe the satanic metal air.
Filthy business of progress isn’t it?

But who cares? Do the leaders and the rulers care? Money rules, OK? That’s the game. The key word is profit. The goal is to make those quick bucks, those Ringgit Ke Syurga - that money paving the stairway to heaven for the Kuatagh folk.

Who cares about the lives of the Kuatagh residents? Who cares about those environmental impact analyses, those protests by environmental groups, those folks breathing poison that will go into their lungs and they die still wanting to vote for the government.

I love the town. A place where I mastered the art and science of speaking like a ‘Kuatagh’ person. A place that taught me about life in exile at a tender age of 13. I learned a lot from the kampong folk, the shopkeepers, my teachers, from escaping the dormitory and spending nights in town, watching Kung Fu, Yankee, and some Hindustani movies. Those nights include roaming around Telok Chempedak.

No - I was not trying to measure the length of the beach. Just appreciating the fresh breeze of the South China Sea and hoping that mermaids would appear, if not the great dragon of the South China Sea coming out of the ocean to play. Or simply to stare at the site of sunken battleship Prince of Wales and wonder if there are hidden treasures inside. I was just curious.

Rainbow colour of my experience

Yes, the town of Kuatagh was not red then. It was green and the skies were blue. It was the colour of my experience - rainbow. As beautiful as the music of the rock group Rainbow.

Now it is simply red. It is the colour of communism. Of totalitarianism. Of exploitation. Of not letting the Kuatagh folk speak up against the deadly pollution and to stop the filthy rich allegedly poisoning the poor. To stop the town of Kuatagh from turning its nights into Nights of the Living Dead.

Who cares? But if the people yell and shout and protest, we’ll charge them with illegal assembly. We’ll use the newer Acts and call them environmental terrorists. We’ll stop them from stopping us from making profits.

Because when it comes to money, we will make sure we are unstoppable. We eat caviar and drink champagne and breathe the fresh air of the Mediterranean Sea for our holidays and let the Kuatagh folk eat red ikan patin all day, breath poisonous air and let their children listen to Death Music all their lives.

Who cares what the warriors Mat Kilau and Datuk Bahaman would say about Kuatagh folk. They are dead anyway. They don’t know what capitalism, neo-liberalism and the Pahang developmental agenda mean anyway. They don’t even know about the coming of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, do they?

But who cares? Who cares!?

I do. I grew up in Kuantan. As a Kuatagh. Now I am turning red. With anger!

Malaysian thoughts on an American Thanksgiving

by Azly Rahman




I have come to appreciate Thanksgiving not only as a non-denominational, non-religious, non-ideological American celebration but also a day to also reflect upon Malaysia, the beloved country I grew up in. It is a time to think about what I observed has worked well here in the Unites States and how they can be applied to the improvement of Malaysia.

Because my passion has always been education and the progress of nations, I believe that there are pitfalls that can be avoided. Let me first begin by presenting a picture of what America is today.

What is ailing corporate America?

It is a troubled nation and still struggling to make the republic work and democracy live its expectation. It is at another juncture of a change of leadership with the yet another intense upcoming campaign for the presidency.

It is not looking good if we look at the candidates pitched for the post of, arguably the most powerful man on Earth. What if Donald Trump (photo) wins? Or Jeb Bush? Or Ben Carson? Or even Hillary Clinton? Why not Bernie Sanders? These are the questions Americans are asking about what kind of president they deserve. Americans are already tired. The American Dream has taken a toll on their economic, emotional, and spiritual lives.

It is a troubled nation with troubled schools and youth are angry at the police. The movement of Black Lives Matter is an example of the ever-growing anger of the especially the African-Americans who are feeling not only criminalised but also targeted for profiling and police brutality, especially since the last five years.

It is a troubled nation with its continued massive funding for the state of Israel perhaps to the tune of US$5 billion per year and of the United State government’s blindness to the plight of the Palestinians. Voices protesting American funding of the terror state of Israel, however, are growing in the academia, especially amongst her anthropologists.

It is a troubled nation to when America is said to have indirectly created the Daesh or the Islamic State in the course of the US occupation of Iraq. America lost the war in Iraq and destroyed the country in the process. The Bush Family regime started the destruction which took the lives of a million Iraqis and created the refugee crisis as well as the global terror network.

Looking at today’s crisis viz-a-viz IS, here is a truth - besides from Russia and China, most of the weapons used by IS come from the United States.

It is a troubled nation when her power comes historically and presently as well comes from the barrel of a gun and the perfection of the US military-industrial complex. It is a warmongering country that creates and exacerbates world conflict in order to sell weapons.

Logically, why would one produce better killing machines and tools of destruction if there are no buyers? How would American weapons producers survive the business of mass murder when there are no conflicts to fuel and there is no need to create demand for weapons?

It is a troubled nation when a grand plan to force a predatory investment such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is an agenda forced upon gullible and kowtowing nations such as Malaysia, arm-twisted by President Obama and his backers, namely and primarily the global corporate backers?
These are what form the picture of what America is. At least the ugly side of America run by corporations and one in which the president and the Congress are rubber-stampers of what big businesses want.

Racism , capitalism, and militarism - three golden words or ones carved on blood diamond are what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr warned Americans of, as a nation on the road to destruction.

So, out of these three words and the lesson from the most powerful empire, what should Malaysians learn from?

Advice to Malaysians

It better focus on raising your children well in adjusting to a changing, globalising, and very diversifying Malaysian and global society. We must work harder to improve race relations, be stronger to fight corruption and power abuse, and be more intelligent in designing policies that will benefit the poor, the marginalised and the powerless.

We must teach our children to focus on ways to understand others, improving their English language skills, perfecting their moral compass, encouraging them to think well and good about children of other races and religion, to encourage them to make friends with people of other races, to be grateful that schools offer the great opportunity to love and respect teachers of different races.
Teach them to learn about the dangers of generalising, stereotyping, and projecting hate that would lead to mass deception, to encourage each child to learn about other cultures and religion, and to teach them that all of us in Malaysia are now Malaysians and not this or that group of immigrants.

We all are migrants in time and space and in history and that all of us are human beings with emotions, struggles, challenges, history of joy and despair, memory of pain and pleasure of living, and that all of us are merely of differing skin colour tone and born to speak different languages and to believe in different things about salvation and that we are all travelers in this life.

We cannot allow Malaysia to come to a point in which riots such those race-based against the police to take root. We cannot allow the Malaysian version of #BlackLivesMatter to be the impetus for urban violence.

We are all these and will not need moments of history where we cultivate hate for the bigger picture of oppression we do not understand. We may all be pawns in this great political game of big-time plunderers and multi-ethnic robber-barons skilled at mass deception and distractions. Today, the level of corruption and the growing cases of mass corruption and power abuse that are going unpunished have made Malaysia a critically ill nation.

We should be grateful that we are still alive and breathe daily and that we must think happily and joyfully like Malaysians in order for each and every one of us to prosper in peace. We cannot travel the path of America in which racism is on the rise and of late especially in places such as Texas, Islamophobia is brewing.

Malaysians, we need to come back to our senses. Our strength will still come from diversity and the respect and cultivation of talent. We should have rejoice and celebrate the achievements of this nation for that beautiful concept of unity in diversity; not to organise any rally that spews hatred and invoke the horrors of the May 13, 1969 tragedy.

Let us design a safer journey towards a progressive and harmonious Malaysia, beyond for example, the red T-shirt red-river of blood march of some mangled manufactured propaganda of Malay dignity.

My Thanksgiving wish is to see a saner and more peaceful America as well as Malaysia - two countries I have loved and will continue to love. Have a blessed Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans!

AKADEMIE RENAISSANCE: SCHOOLS SARAWAKIANS DESERVE

by Azly Rahman



Bravo. Bravo. Bravo. Three cheers for people of Sarawak for making English the state’s official language, besides preserving the status of Bahasa Malaysia. This move makes a lot of sense than the game the federal government is playing vis-à-vis the refusal to insist the teaching of strategic school subjects in the English Language.

I have written a lot on the issue of the radical educational reform we need for Malaysia to move forward and the importance of emphasising English language will always be my key interest.
Malaysian politicians and educational leaders know the importance of the English language but too weak to make a firm stand to counter the ill-informed arguments and politically-motivated educationally-unsound schemes of the champions of Bahasa Malaysia. We could have gotten two generations of citizens well-equipped in riding the oftentimes dangerous waves of globalisation, in our dream of becoming a ‘high-income’ nation.

Back to the intelligent decision by the leaders and the people of Sarawak. I think it is the beginning of the renaissance of Sarawak education, a platform to take off and to soar towards greater heights, leaving the world of heavily politicised and language-political-tribal dead-end of the policies of the Education Ministry when it comes to the use English as a language of instruction.

As a global educationist interested in intellectualising schools and suggesting Radical Social Reconstructionism as a philosophy of schooling, I want to suggest the Sarawak government what could work as a new path to schooling; a path that should complement the decision to make English language its second official language.



Renaissance schools

I wish to see Sarawak educators and policymakers embark upon what I call ‘Renaissance schools’. Here is a concept that can be adopted by the chief minister. To honour the work of the philosopher Plato, I will call the new initiative, Akademie Renaissance.

The idea is for the government to collaborate in developing innovative schools of the 21st century proposed to be called ‘Akademie Renaissance’. This initiative will propel the state into a major phase of educational reform in its effort to showcase the nation and other countries a model of a truly global school that harmonises technology, culture, and total human development from the level of kindergarten to the university.

Together with progressive partners in education, groups will spearhead and steward this major innovation in Sarawak or East education providing the intellectual and education infrastructure (from planning to model building and architectural design to continuous evaluation process) to establish this new series of educational innovation efforts.

Akademie Renaissance (AR) will have its mission in preparing children to become global citizens and experts in the fields of study they will choose as a career, through a systematic process of schooling of the highest standards, from kindergarten to high/secondary schools.

The educational objective is to create ‘academies’ that will become ‘feeder schools of choice’ (specialised schools) to prepare students for entry into American, British, Australian and other universities of high standing in Europe and Asia in which English is the medium of instruction. The initial project should be the establishing of a secondary/high school.

AR will be modeled after the most innovative of educational philosophies whose vision is to create thinkers, innovators, and life-long learners who will be successful at all phases of learning and will contribute to the betterment of society and to Malaysia in general.

Global Schools for global citizenship



AR will be based on a curriculum that is distinct from the governmental school, focusing on English language as a lingua franca as the medium of instruction so that the students will be prepared for entry into the world’s top ranking colleges/universities whose language if instruction is English. A high level of proficiency in this language is therefore necessary as skills mastery.

Faculty members will consist of those from diverse local and international background skilled in the art and science of teaching and committed to the principles of highest academic excellence and global education, and student emotional and cultural growth.

AR will be the premier college preparation schools which will admission priority to the best and the brightest of children of the poor of all races in Sarawak especially, and in Sabah next.. The aim is to provide the best quality education to children who come from families who are in the worst economic condition and to give them the all the opportunity they will need to be successful enough to give back to their families and community.

A criteria is also to give priority admission to those whose parents have never had a college/university education and to orphans of all ethnic background.

The vision of AR Schools is to have a population that reflects the true composition of multiethnic Malaysia who will further demonstrate that they will still continue to succeed against all odds and be leaders with a conscience clear enough to contribute to one of Malaysia’s two noble goals of development: the alleviation of poverty regardless of race. The top priority, of course, is the educational advancement of the children of Sarawak.

AR Schools will not only be internationally-linked as ‘university-college-lab-schools of global-experiential learning’ in which the curriculum is based on cutting edge 21st century informational-society driven paradigm of learning and teaching and expected outcomes but also will be architecturally innovative; one that will harmonise not only the elements of living much needed in the 21st. century but also culturally-intellectually responsive.

In other words, AR Schools in East Malaysia will have a unique design that will harmonise tradition and modernity. For example in the proposed Akademie Renaissance - Sarawak campus, elements of design will be made to uniquely respond to the environmental-sustaining nature of the coastal state as well.

AR Schools will also be an educational facility for community education and entrepreneurial activities linking local production of cottage-industrial artifacts to the global market, utilising advanced digital, cybernetic, and virtual communication technologies for students to help the local community to participate in the global business.

In the area of community education, it will also house specialized galleries showcasing historical artifacts of from local-historical materials collected and curated by students, with the help of faculty.
Research-driven, culturally-intelligent

AR Schools will essentially be a ‘research-driven college prep schools’ in which at every level of learning, students will be employing primarily scientific thinking as a means to acquire and produce knowledge and to further create artifacts useful both for the advancement of theoretical knowledge as well as those practically useful for society.

AR Schools will also be culturally-driven in which the intellectual-cultural heritage and the philosophy of development that harmonizes with Nature will be one of the core principles driving this radical and progressive educational reform. Ideas of ‘ecosophy’, or the imperative of balancing material and spiritual progress centering on the preservation, and progressive hybridisation of cultures will be emphasized in all aspects of the curriculum.

In essence, Akademie Renaissance (AR) will be a 21st century school showcasing best practices in global and local-cultural education and will have the Sarawak state as the sites of its first set of campuses.

I hope this suggestion will be the beginning of the new Sarawak Initiative in education, one that can also be adopted by the state of Sabah and consequently by those in West Malaysia in need of a serious reconceptualisation. The state will progress well for generations, given this idea of international collaboration that will benefit Malaysia in general and the people of the state specifically.



We cannot leave education to the hands of those only interested in political survival. We must bring in educational futurists and globalists to chart the best long-term and short term strategy for change, in a work both precarious and promising, in which English is widely spoken.

Bravo, Sarawakians! You have chosen the road not taken; one that will make all the difference, as the American poet Robert Frost would say.

ON THE PARIS MASSACRE

ENOUGH is ENOUGH

of shouts of "ALLAHU AKBAR" to accompany the shooting of innocents.

Muslims know that this is the battle cry of a cult of those desensitized and their mind held hostage to the evils of perhaps the most sophisticated, well-funded, and wealthiest terror group ever created by the imperial forces that invaded countries rich in oil.

ENOUGH is ENOUGH of linking Islam with terrorism

Amongst Muslims, themselves there are peace-makers and suicide bombers -- with radicals, moderates, liberals, fundamentalists, literalists, and fascists ... and many more. No one Muslim is the same.
ALLAHU AKBAR -- the greatness of god lies in the bountiful of mercy and love, not a cry of victory as one randomly shoots the innocent with AK47s, Kalashnikovs, or Chinese- made assault rifles.

But in "realpolitikal" terms, retaliation and a world in perpetual war may explain what is happening. From the bringing down of the Russian plan, the suicide attacks in Lebanon, and now the massacre in Paris, it is all about a world at war in which cities with innocent people are targeted, in response to the Russian, and its allies strike on the kingdom of ISIS.

Europe is no longer safe -- the terrorist network has gone global, with hundreds of ISIS fighters/jihadists from France, returning home to "fight the ISIS war" right there in the urban areas. With the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe, with 800.000 in Germany and over 250,000 in France, in a decade, what will European cities look like?

Welcome to the post-informational, bipolar neo-liberal world order where world peace will always be a pipe dream.

My heart goes to the French people for the tragedy and to those innocent men, women, and children displaced and whose lives destroyed not only by the decades of American occupation and planned destruction but also by the NATO and Russian-led strikes in the war against ISIS shouting ALLAHU AKBAR for the deadliest reasons.

And Malaysia, here's a question for you: Will you stop your political bickerings and silly drama and start checking on the radicalization of your dispossessed youth and see if your ISIS- jihadist returnees are monitored enough to stop any kind of radicalization happening? -- ar


IN EACH COUNTRY EACH CITIZEN 

must reach out to each other and condemn senseless attacks in the name of this or that religion ... the worst thing that one can do, inviting more retaliation, is to blame this or that community for the atrocities done in the name of this or that religion -- -when the members of that community themselves fear the such terrorist acts and terrorists in general.
This is what that MUST NOT BE DONE to the Muslim community: blaming them.
Let peace be the language of all. It is a violent world we are living in , with more violence uses as modus operandi to get to "peaceful" agendas.
-- ar