Malaysia Matters Podcast

To say that Melaka is amazing is to understate its impact. After nearly a week in Kuala Lumpur, with occasional excursions to Putrajaya, we were ready for an escape into an entirely different Malaysia. Not that Malaysia’s capital, or its ersatz capital, were unsatisfactory. Putrajaya is a marvel of a major planned city — a sort of Asian Brasilia, without Brasilia’s awful architecture and shoddy construction. Its glass and stone facades gleam in the tropical brilliance, and its clean, broad boulevards would be the pride of a latter-day Haussmann. Kuala Lumpur, for its part, is obviously older, but not old — its monumental architecture is a sort of mishmash of Brutalism with Islamic motifs, and the lovely Petronas Towers (far more lovely than the lamented World Trade Centers in New York City) are the magnificent exception to the aesthetic rule. Both cities are post-facto creations: meant for the seat of governance of a Malaysia, and before that a Malaya, already in being.

To see the Malaysia that came before, we traveled to Melaka.

The verdant landscape of southeast Asia in the rainy season rolled past us as we rode, passengers of a driver named Mior, for two hours from Kuala Lumpur to Melaka. Immediately outside the capital, the vegetation had the look of a plantation: thick trees in rows upon the hlls, ready for harvest — or perhaps, as this was Malaysia, tapping. Suburbs planted in the once-empty stretches between KL, Putrajaya, and the improbably named Cyberjaya dotted the roadside. But for the Malaysian flags and the odd architectural touches, they could have been faceless, nameless developments outside Miami. The middle classes, it seems, demand much the same of their living spaces the world over.

The changes as we approached the coast, and Melaka, were subtle. The vegetation changed from ordered to anarchic, till we were driving down a four-lane highway through what looked like deepest jungle. The infrastructure changed, too: the adequate drainage outside the government towns yielded to overflowing culverts, and as the rain hammered the landscape, we joined a line of vehicles careening through deep rushing torrents surging across the asphalt. Civilization began to reassert itself. The odd roadside shop appeared; a gas station; then a mall, seemingly stuck in the middle of nowhere, and advertising Islamic fashions. At once we were in a city — Melaka! — but there were the same concrete facades, and the same featureless shop fronts. From the window I watched in dismay, until –

– Mior swerved about a bend, and there we were at the foot of the hill that overlooked old Melaka. To our left, the 300-year old Christ Church. Upon the hill, the ruins of a 400-year old Dutch fort. To our right, across the river, the old city with its Chinese spires and temples. Before us, a full-scale replica of a Portuguese ship, just like the ones that cruised in to this harbor nearly 500 years ago. This was Melaka — or, should I say, Malacca — and this was what I came for.

Empire is an impolite word now, suggesting the subjugation of peoples and the crushing of liberties. Cities like Melaka and their historical memories are testament to empire’s beneficence, and indeed its glories. This old Malay sultanate was colonized by Chinese from Zheng He’s great fleet in the 15th century, who probably also brought Islam to the peninsula. Following the Chinese were the Portuguese, who lost the port to the Dutch in the following century — but not before planting there a community of Roman Catholics that survive today. They number in the thousands now, still call themselves Portuguese, look like Malays, and speak Kristang — Christian — a patois with Malay grammar and old Portuguese vocabulary. The Dutch presence was impermanent, and gave way to British rule as other Dutch outposts, among them Cape Town, were also falling under London’s protection from French revolutionary designs.

The result is Melaka now: a thriving, colorful, vivid city of many faiths. Within one square mile, one finds a Tamil Methodist parish, a Roman Catholic parish, an Anglican parish, multiple mosques, Hindu shrines, and more Buddhist temples than one can count. Quite nearly all races are there, and it’s a rare adult who is not trilingual. This is a fruit of empire — and it is to Malaysia’s credit that, in stark contrast to most other post-colonial states, it has seen fit to leave it undisturbed.

We parted ways with Mior and his cab, and vanished into the warren of streets, alleys, and byways of the old port….

To be continued in part two.

I’m back from Malaysia. It wasn’t my first time to Kuala Lumpur, but I felt like it was the first time I began to understand the country’s uniqueness in today’s world. A slideshow I blogged contains some photos of the trip, especially to Malacca, which is about 2 hours south of Kuala Lumpur. Walking along one of the streets, we passed a Chinese temple, then a Hindu temple, a Mosque and then a Buddhist temple. Posted on MyDD (you can view the slide show there), through the photos, you really get a sense of the diversity in Malaysia, through this old city.

Also on MyDD, I posted some thoughts on Malaysia politics, the blogging scene in Malaysia, and blogged on the interview we held with Zaid Ibrahim, the prominent reformer that is heading up the judicial reform in Malaysia.

While I was in Malaysia, a story broke about a Judge that told of threats and intimidation attempts, which highlighted the need for reform. Also happening while I was there in Malaysia, was the rise of gasoline prices, with the government allowing the price to rise by 40 per cent, which will add to the instability inside the country.

I was also able to attend parts of the conference on the divide between the Muslim and Western worlds. I found that the Malaysian PM Badawi’s held a very inclusive and pluralistic viewpoint on religion, but there are points of tension. The Imam Feisal Rauf, chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, had an article up on the “Clash of Civilizations”. You should check out the comments in that thread too, to see the clash in action. I’ll post more on this when they release the “Kuala Lumpur Accord.”

The striking thing about Malaysia, when you first walk about its streets and byways, is the multiethnic cast of the country. This is something of a trope amongst its observers, so let me elaborate a bit: it’s multi-ethnic and multi-faith, and it generally works, and its workings are a testament to the beneficial failure — yes, failure — of the country’s foundational principles.

There’s no point in recapitulating the whole drama of Malaysian history here, but a synopsis would have to take into account its settlement by Malays, the Islamization of the land by Arab and Sindhi traders, the first Chinese colonies in the 15th century, the Portuguese colonies in the 16th century, the Dutch shortly thereafter, the British in the 18th century, and the flood of Indians and yet more Chinese that the British brought in. Colonization in western Malaysia especially, whether by Malay, Muslim, or European, was never a mere act of administration that left the composition and character of the local population unchanged. Travelers know well that the rule of British colonization in particular was not to settle, but to govern. (That the handful of exceptions are almost all among the major powers of the world is a coincidence that deserves examination another day.)

The Malay lands, having been settled time and again — to the detriment solely of the lonely aboriginal bands who survive in the forested interior even now — were governed, to be sure, but also settled in a fashion. This settlement was not accomplished by Britons themselves, but by people willing to do the work that Britons wanted done. Indians to trade, Chinese to mine, and Malays to farm: all played their part in the grand tapestry that made the former Malaya the jewel of the United Kingdom’s east Asian empire.

Malaysia’s road to independence was, as roads to independence are, rocky and at points bloody. Mostly Chinese Communists ravaged the country for twelve years from 1948, and as the nation moved inexorably toward sovereignty, the question long suppressed by London’s rule had to be answered: who owned Malaysia? Right of first occupancy meant yielding it to the hill tribes — an absurdity and impossibility. Ethnic minority leaders insisted upon a Malaysia for Malaysians, with the state being for all who lived within it, of any origin. Ethnic Malay leaders, and especially the ethnic Malay leaders of the UMNO party — which rules to this day — insisted that Malaysia was for Malays. Singapore, dominated by Chinese, was expelled from the young Malaysia for this reason. Through the 1960s, periodic race riots wracked the young country, and as that decade ended, the bumiputra system of Malay ethnic preference was formulated, and in time became national policy.

Malaysia, in the face of its rich multi-ethnic, multi-faith history, defined itself as a state of one ethnicity, itself defined by one faith — Islam. Then it instituted a system of economic preferences to enforce that vision.

Here is where Malaysia should have failed. Here is where so many of the post-colonial states of the 20th century went terribly amiss. Malaysia was not the sole polity of its kind. We easily forget that in 1950, Alexandria, Egypt, was barely half Muslim, and barely half Arab. We dimly recall that Istanbul, Turkey, was, until 1923, a city of mostly Greeks, Armenians, and other Christians. We barely remember that Kampala, Uganda, used to be a thriving center of Indian culture in verdant east Africa. We do not trouble ourselves at the disappearance of the 500-year old Portuguese communities of Goa and Mozambique. Those nations, in the throes of independence, defined themselves as Malaysia did — not as existing for all their peoples, but as preferential regimes for the majority, however slim that majority was. The minorities were assimilated, or expelled, or slaughtered.

Here, too, is where Malaysia did not fail. Malaysia implemented all the policies and preconditions necessary for failure, and then resolutely failed to fail. Its minorities did not leave, were not expelled — and after the strife of the 1960s, were not attacked. The bumiputra preferences did not impoverish the Chinese or the Indians against whom they discriminated. There were no pogroms, no ethnic cleansing, and no internal jihads. If it is too much to say that Malaysia was wholly just and peaceful by the standards of Middle America, it is not to much to say that it was both these things by the standard of its fellow post-colonial regimes.

The striking thing about Malaysia, when you first walk about its streets and byways, is the multiethnic cast of the country. The second time you walk about, you notice the same thing. The third time too, and every time thereafter. Malaysia’s faces are the faces of empire — not solely British, but empires of trade, faith, and vassalage across the centuries. Unlike so many vestiges of empire in so many places, they are not cruel reminders of subjugation — but tentative, hopeful, vivid visages of hope. Malaysia’s success is rooted in its failure to be what it threatened to be. As I walk about Kuala Lumpur in the thick heat of day, and the slick darkness of night, it seems to me that nobody wants it any other way.

Malaysia is undergoing a unique transformation of its means of communicating politically, and this has already had electoral ramifications. One of the key measures of Badawi has been presenting as an item of reform is the ‘freedom of the press’ initiative. Alongside the other major reform areas –judicial process, economic security, religious tolerance, and corruption prevention– a freedom of the press has been embarked upon in order to liberalize the licensing policies to allow opposition voices to use the traditional newspaper medium of communication, but the real ‘reform’ of the ‘freedom of press’ revolves around the internet.

Malaysia does not censor the use of the internet, and in talking with the Prime Minister, he made it clear that he intends it to stay that way. There are some 300-500K blogs in Malaysia, and many of them are political in commentary. Badawi mentioned that he read the blogs frequently, through press clippings by one of his staff members. I made a post over on MyDD yesterday about the blogging of the former PM, Mahathir Mohamad, whom the current PM Badawi said he doesn’t read firsthand, because “I already know what they are saying” on that blog. He mentioned MalaysiaKini.com as one of the sites he reads frequently, and other sites that were talked about while visiting the PM’s residence, during a traditional Malaysian breakfast afterwards, were MalaysianInsider.com and MalaysiaToday.com.