Leverage Islamic Studies To Make Malays Trilingual
M. Bakri Musa
October 17, 2023
In January 2023 Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim declared that Islamic studies in schools and universities be reviewed to emphasize universal human values. A decade earlier at a Symposium on Higher Education in Muslim Societies at the Wilson Institute, Washington, DC, he asserted, “The crisis in higher education in many Muslim countries is manifested in myriad ways. . . . Among the root causes are those related to choice, content, and quality . . . . Islamic education has not much progressed . . . [beyond] Qur’anic and hadith studies.”
Dispensing with rhetoric, I suggest using Islamic Studies to make Malays trilingual: Malay, English, and Arabic. As per modern neuroscience, multilingualism confers many cognitive advantages, quite apart from expanding your mind and worldview, together with conferring other advantages beyond mere economics. Non-Malay Malaysians are successful because most are functionally trilingual: Malay, English, and their native tongue. The Apek in Ulu Kinta who could speak only Hakka or the rubber tapper in Ulu Tiram only Tamil is unlikely to improve himself, much less contribute to the nation. Likewise the Malay fisherman in Ulu Marang who could communicate only in his Terengganu dialect.
In his 2024 Budget, Anwar allocated a whopping 20 percent to education, including and especially the resumption of government grants to religious schools, together with building new ones. The budget for the latter exceeds that for STEM improvements for the entire nation! Even the proposed Artificial Intelligence Faculty at Universiti Teknoloji Malaysia gets far less. Stop funding religious education, much less build new schools, until its roles and objectives are rationalized.
Islamic bureaucracy also gets a whopping allocation. The strength of Islam is with and in the people, not with massive bureaucracies and sprawling magnificent edifices.
There is a more fundamental issue with Islamic education. Muslim educators and teachers view it as less to sharpen minds, more to fill them with dogmas. Less education, more indoctrination. Syed Naquib Alattas put it more elegantly but the essence remains: to produce individuals with adab, the consequence of their having acquired knowledge (ilmu), and with that hikmah (wisdom). In Malay, adab means etiquette or good behavior. Know things and their proper place and role, as per the good Syed. For mere mortals, know your place!
Alas that’s the big rub. Who decides what is proper? Throughout history progress depended on those rare brave individuals who had challenged the natural order. In Islam, as per our Syed, that would be biadab. Challenge corrupt leaders as Hang Jebat did, then you would be far worse than biadab but derhaka(treasonous). Obey your sultan and you would be a hero, heaped with royal titles, and be venerated forever! You could even mess around with his concubines, as Hang Tuah did. On the other hand, had my late grandfather “knew his place,” I would today be a hamba (slave) at the palace in Sri Menanti.
Many dismissed modern education for being secular, devoid of values, good only for producing mere pegs for the cogs of the capitalist machinery. Pegs or not, the diligent worker who wakes up every morning to pick up your garage or attend to the electrical grid is serving his community. Spend all day at ratib (prayers) may get you to heaven, as per your reading of ancient texts, but you are not contributing to society. You are but a societal parasite. At least biological ones provide a useful service; they help tune up your immune response, that is, until they overwhelm you!
Munshi Abdullah likened a child’s mind to a parang, to be sharpened, not a dustbin to be filled with dogmas. Education is that sharpener. With a sharp parang you could hack yourself out of a jungle, or carve exquisite pieces of sculpture. All you could retrieve from a dustbin is what you had thrown in, minus what’s stuck at the bottom.
Anwar Ibrahim should ask some tough questions of his education ministers. Are our schools and universities for rigorous intellectual pursuits or vocational training to produce future ulama? Even if we were to opt only for the latter, at least produce thinking ones, not those who could only recite pat answers gleaned from moldy tomes when faced with today’s complex dilemmas.
