Dr. Farish A Noor is rather unclassifiable. He is a historian, a collector of Malay antiques, a chain smoker, a progressive Muslim who fasts assiduously although he doesn’t fuss about it, and a keen proponent of Malaysia’s varied past who writes as many articles as he can to propagate his ideas.

In his mid thirties, you suspect it wouldn’t be beyond him to commit some of the pranks he must have committed as a little boy, and has been known to ruffle some feathers with his direct approach to sensitive issues like race and religion. But that is where he is precious: he openly discusses politically incorrect topics such as race and religion, and backs up his arguments with strong historical evidence.

I wanted to ask many tricky questions about Malaysian identity such as “why does being Malay seem to be reduced to being Muslim in Malaysia?”, “why do many Malaysians seem to be out of touch with who they are”? I couldn’t understand why Malaysians had to go to the US or the UK to study their own traditions such as makyong or gamelan, and why many urban Malaysians don’t have a family house to go back to in the country on week-ends, like people do in other places in the world.

Here are his answers:

K: You are very Westernised… but you know a lot about Malay culture. How come?
F: I was in Malaysia until I was 19. In a way I’ve got to explain my family background. I discovered in my early teens there was a whole history to my family that was seldom discussed. It was a large middle-class Malay family. They were government servants, so there was a transition from commerce to the bureaucracy. I knew we were mixed. So I wondered why all the time there was an emphasis on us being Malay. Malay as in Peninsular Malay. And then later on through my mother I discovered out about family history and that we actually came from Indonesia.

What little I’ve been able to gather (the record has been lost) my great-grand parents were actually from Java, they migrated to Sumatra. My great-grand father died very young in Medan, he’s buried there, and my great-grandmother migrated then to Penang. I can’t prove any of this, but he was probably one of those Javanese who the Dutch employed to subdue the Acehnese. He died very young at the age of 19, and judging from his title (he was called Raden Ismail), that would suggest some connection with the Javanese royalty. That would make sense, the Javanese elite were working hand in glove with the Dutch at the time in parts of Indonesia, particularly Sumatra, Sulawesi, places like that.

It raised a question for me: why even in my own country was there a denial of the past, of the diversity within the country itself. My father is of Malay Indian stock, also from Penang. Again the Indian element is always played down, they’re treated as Malays. And then it made sense when I looked at the family in the fifties, sixties, where Malayness was such an important factor. The down playing of being non Malay was quite important for my relatives. So that set me going, I wanted to know about the family past. And then at 19, I started my studies in England.

K: You grew up in KL?
F: No. I was born in Penang. In my second year we moved to KL. It was all about growing in a Penang environment in KL, where we were speaking with a strong Kedah dialect. Which I still do, I can’t speak normal Malay, I speak Kedah Malay.

K: People understand you?
F: Everyone understands, but there is a very obvious dialect, an accent there. So there was the idea of being dislocated.

Then in my early teens we spent four years in Sabah, in East Malaysia, where you see a different side of Malaysia, which is again not part of the mainstream image of Malaysia that’s being sold. For example today when you look at the tourist industry, the way it sells East Malaysia, it’s almost like “dances with wolves”. The Ibans, and the Kadasans are almost like Red Indians, the idea of the exotic East, and when you’re West Malaysian in Sabah at that time, in the eighties, the resentment against West Malaysia was very, very strong. Partly because there was this sentiment that somehow the best students in East Malaysia were brought to West Malaysia, then they were sold short. Then West Malaysians were given prominent positions in the bureaucracy. My father was in charge of telecommunications in East Malaysia.

For me it was interesting to see West Malaysia from the point of view of East Malaysians.

The circumstances were such that they forced you to look at yourself from a different point of view. That prepared the way to inquire about the past and one’s own identity, etc, etc.

I think being abroad in England also feeds your sense of nostalgia as well. You’re cut off from home. I never felt homesick, I spent 13 years there, and I enjoyed myself very much, but it’s more that being in England I started collecting antiques, particularly Malaysian antiques, anything related to Malaysiana. I found stuff which you could not get here in Malaysia, so I started collecting old books, old maps, items of Malay antiquities, Malay art, gold, silver krises. Bit by bit it became a pathological obsession for me, to want to reconstruct this home I had left, but I was reconstructing a Malaysia that doesn’t exist anymore. All these books and krises, I saw images of a Malaysia which I barely recognised, because so much of Malaysia today has changed. And that again prepared the ground for the interest I would develop at university. Particularly early Malay history. It was probably to reabsorb this connection with the past, particularly the pre-Islamic past, the Indian connection with the Hindu-Buddhist era which is being forgotten rapidly in Malaysia today.

That’s something that strikes me about this country, the ability of Malaysian society to have this collective amnesia, this willful erasure of the past I find very, very alarming.

When I was in England, I was reading the early Malay hikayat, all the epics where all the pre-Islamic elements are so strong, so pronounced. At the same time, it was obvious these 17th, 18th century writers were comfortable with this.

K: Hikayat?
F: Hikayat means story, or epic. It’s a whole genre, you can include in that fables, courtly epics, tricks, it’s a genre writing which emanated in the courts. It’s the way the court brings a narrative, legitimises, rationalises its existence. All the early accounts of the formation of Kedah, the formation of Pattani, the formation of Kelantan are in the form of hikayats. They go back as far as the 16th century. But in the style of writing, images, you clearly see evidence of the pre-Islamic past. All the hikayats that we were taught at school, the hikayat munshi abdullah, hikayat Melayu, the story of the formation of Malacca, these would be the basic texts that most students of at least Malay litterature would have learnt. What struck me about these texts, particularly when you’re in England and you’re cut off, and you’re trying to re-establish a link with what you’ve left behind...
it’s interesting to approach it through the means of the hikayats, because it gives a sense of historical depth, which you don’t get in contemporary writings of Malaysian history. Malaysian history today is so flat, there’s no historical depth whatsoever. Partly because the writing of history now is so politicised. But the hikayats were very political texts. They were enmeshed in the political environment of the transition from Hinduism to Islam. But it was done in such a skilful manner, compared to the way it’s done now. They were Muslim writers who were able to deal with the process of transition in a way which was sensitive to the pre-Islamic past - which at the time was not that far behind-. This was early Islamisation, Islam had only taken root for about 100-200 years.

K: When did Islam take root here?
F: Around the 13th century. Between the 13th to 15th you began to have Islamisation in earnest. Islam has been around for 500 years. The sort of Islam you have now is very new, with ABIM, Anwar Ibrahim and all that.

You want some examples?

K: Of what?
F: Of the hikayats?

K: Yes…
F: I’ll try to quote off-hand here. What you find in a lot of hikayats is a way of describing the process of islamisation itself. They hold back on a number of literary devices, but the actual process of conversion itself is hardly touched upon. The coming of Islam is always explained in miraculous terms, magic… This was a society which could not explain why there was change, they had to use rhetorical devices.

Farish digresses here on a few hikayat stories, obviously a favourite subject. You can find them in articles he wrote for Malaysiakini.

K: Would you say that Malay culture is quite subdued here, when you compare it with Indian and Chinese culture, especially when you compare it with Malay culture in Indonesia. And what is Malay culture?
F: It is partly subdued because of this. So much of pre-modern Malay culture, this includes the Malay hikayats, are regarded today as being politically incorrect. So much of Malay culture carries with it its pre-Islamic elements, which in Indonesia they are aware of, but they celebrate. You can have for the celebration of Eid at Hari Raya a wayang performance, which would be inconceivable in Malaysia today, because wayang is seen as being Hindu.

But in Indonesia you can, because Indonesians see the whole point of having a link to their history, and Indonesia is proud of having a history as old as India, going back 4,000 years. Now that was the case in Malaysia up to the sixties, but since the seventies now with Islamic resurgence, things like hikayats which gave us a link with our past were regarded as Unislamic or tainted or corrupted. Even today we still teach the hikayats, but at the university level, and the common appreciation of these hikayats has totally gone. As opposed to Indonesia where your average Indonesian will be able to quote you phrases from various Indonesian babad (the Indonesian word for hikayat). No Malaysian can today do the same here.

K: Why do Malays in Malaysia seem so much more insecure than Indonesia?
F: There are many reasons, but I would include in that the whole racial dynamics. Malaysian society is so communalised, race is so important, particularly to maintain the distinction between Malays and Indians. In Indonesia there is no attempt to equate Indonesian identity with Islam. You could have Malay Indonesians who are Christian, or Hindu, but nonetheless are regarded as Malays, or Indonesians. You cannot have that here. If here you had a Malay who was Hindu, he would not be regarded as Malay anymore. It’s the politisation of racial categories.

K: Did that start when Chinese and Tamil migrants came to Malaysia to work on mines and plantations?
F: Yes, that was about one hundred years ago. It really intensified when the British introduced the colonial census, because the census divided the Malay world into ethnic and religious groups. The very early colonial census, in the late 19th century, did not equate race with religion, and the idea of race was much more mixed. Under Malay you had sub-groups like Malay, Rawanese, Acehnese, Bugis, it was very complex. As it progressed, in the thirties, all the sub-groups were lumped into one group, the Malays.

That was the British's doing. By the 1931 census, they were shocked: “oh my God, what have you done, these people [Malays] are now a minority in their own country”. There were then policies to evacuate the Chinese. A lot of them were men, so it was easy to move them back to China... Encouraging the Malays to have bigger families, encouraging Malay migration from Indonesia, Sumatra in particular. It was very easy for a lot of Sumatrans to come here and settle here.

K: But that was Dutch at the time?
F: Yes, but there was a lot of movement. Despite the Anglo-Dutch treaty in 1871 - there was a formal recognition of boarder differences between British Malaya and the Dutch Indies -, the volume of body traffic and commercial traffic was enormous. For example a lot of the paper plantations in Sumatra were owned by Malays here. The Dutch could not stop it, the British could not stop it because people were just going across, it’s a six hour journey by boat, even then. They did not openly encourage by saying “come here”, but those who came were very easily processed and accepted as Malays.

What the census did was that it reduces all these internal differences, and created the image that the Malays were a homogeneous lot. There was pressure from the royal families as well. The deportation of migrants was something done by the British tin and rubber companies, the Malay sultanates were not involved, it’s not as if the Chinese came and were given residency permits by the sultanates.

Small digression here on the history of kapitan Cina and India.

K: The creed seems to be “As Malays we are threatened, we have to strengthen our position and make our identity stronger, and Islam is what we stand for”. How did that all happen?
F: That came about when Malaysia was about to become independent. Both Malay and Chinese cultures experienced a radical loss, particularly in the plastic arts, around the twenties and thirties. You see the baba culture which almost wiped itself out as a result of modernisation, and having to compete with urban life styles and threats. In the baba community, you can see the photographs, men start to wear suits, for example, and so all the traditions are seen to go out.

The arrival of Western rule brought with it not just political control, but also societal control. You had new notions, understanding of hygiene, decorum, privacy. The architecture of Malay houses begins to change. Malay houses used to be much more open, suddenly you see more walls coming in. Dietary habits change. Betel nut chewing is slowly eradicated.

The elites were the first to take on board these things because it was a sign of modernisation. Because these elites were the patrons of the plastic arts, the plastic arts begin to suffer. If you look at silver production , production by 1905 had almost halved. The royal court stopped ordering betel nut sets, they were seen as backward, primitive. Suddenly all the silversmiths had no work because they were all maintained by the court. Like the Chinese peranakan silversmiths in Malacca and Penang, they were maintained by the wealthy families. When the wealthy families stopped doing these things, it had an immediate impact on the production of betel nut sets, traditional woven cloth. It is interesting if you look at songket, tekat, sireh sets, all of them were wiped out nearly at the same time, in the 20s and 30s.

It’s very similar to what happened in my family in the 50s and 60s, when we were young we had all this old wood furniture, suddenly “vroom” modernisation comes, and people say “Oh, we don’t want teak anymore”, and literally throw it in the fire.

With that, the genre of the hikayat died as well. The last hikayat was written in the late 19th century, one of the last ones is the hikayat indera jaya, written in 1871. With the death of the hikayat come new forms of writing, they introduce the novel. By 1910, 1920, we see new forms of writing, pedagogical novels like the hikayat faridah hanum. We called it hikayat, but it is not in hikayat form anymore.

Everything from writing to language to music, to dress, all these things get wiped out at the turn of the century. It’s not unique, it happened all over the world.

In the case of Malaysia, the importance of race and religion only takes up in the late 50s, early 60s, in the last decade before independence. By then, particularly after the loss of India and Pakistan, Malaya had to be given over to Malaysians. The Malays then for fear of losing their privileges fought the Malaysian independence on an understanding that Malaysia was the land of the Malays and that the Malays should be accorded special privileges. This bringing together of Islam and Malay identity was important, it had to be mutually exclusive. At that time, there was a fear that large numbers of Chinese would convert to Islam so Malayness was there. You needed Islam because if you didn’t have Islam, you could have Malay Hindus, and we didn’t want that either. In Indonesia next door you had Malays who were Hindu or Christian. Also the Philippines have Malay Christians. Filipinos are Malays, like us. We are of the same genetic stock.

The idea was to stay within the confines of a particular group who was Malay and Muslim at the same time. In the 50s this is not so problematic, people weren’t playing the religious card, and you didn’t have this “hollier than though” race going on. The only opposition party at the time was PAS. PAS in 1951 was so weak, and hardly had any influence in the peninsular.

So it was not much of a problem. In fact UMNO was going around the whole world saying it was the biggest Islamic party in Asia. You have a phase after 1957, up to the late 60s, during the time of Tunku, Malay identity is given new emphasis, the elite at the time is not so apprehensive of the pre-Islamic past. If you look at the state of Malaysian art and culture at the time, there is a very strong revival. When we were young we watched wayang kulit on TV.

All the best books written about Malay culture were written at this time. If you read [Tan Sri] Mubin Shepherd’s books, you see photos of performances carried out at Dewan Bahasa [Pustaka], these things were celebrated.

The concept of race, “ras”, does not exist in the Malay, it is a new concept, so you have to deal with it somehow. There was an attempt to forge a kind of Malaysian identity and culture, Malay culture was the dominant, but it included other elements, like the non-Malay communities and the pre-Islamic past.

The state promoted things like makyong, like the Indonesians, saying “we too have a lot of history”. There was a rivalry between Malaysia and Indonesia. Indonesians, especially the Javanese, have always been very proud of their pre-Islamic past. Their empires predate ours by thousands of years.

From the late 60s the model collapsed, partly because the combination formula between UMNO and the non Malay parties broke down, leading to [the riots of] 1969. 1969 did not create sour relations between Malays and non Malays but what it showed was that the inter-elite compromise between UMNO and MCA and MIC was paper-thin. That despite all the calls for integration of the Malays in the national economy etc, none of that really worked. In 1957 the total Malay direct equity ownership of the Malaysian economy was 2%. By 1969 people expected changes. This was all promised and agreed upon on paper but it was never executed because the Chinese community was very protective, and Malaysia didn’t want to antagonise the foreign business community by nationalising everything like the Indonesians did, so they were caught.

By 1969, Malay ownership was only 5%. The impact seen through the lenses of secular politics, is that it lead to the NEP, so new policies aimed at economic corrections.

But for the Islamists, particularly the younger generation, May 69 had proved the failure of the secular model. Their solution was not economic restructuring, but to push Islamisation further. This is where groups like ABIM come in. Groups like ABIM, especially under Anwar [Ibrahim]’s leadership (Anwar led it from 72 to 82), were pushing the idea of an Islamic state with a form of Islamic economics, where race would no longer be important and religion would be primordial. It created another form of communalism based on religion rather than race.

This created an incredible surge of Malay Muslims, especially in universities, saying “the model is discredited, the past doesn’t teach us anything, and we have to reinvent our society”. Very much as a Maoist cultural revolution. That’s when the erasure of the past really began in earnest.

I have photographs of PAS in the 60s, women are wearing kebayas and not covering up. Anwar’s wife, Wan Azizah, was the first cabinet minister’s wife to wear the tudong. Now they are all wearing it.

The Malay students in the 70s were saying “we don’t want to read these hikayats”, “we don’t want this talk about equality and inter-mixing”, “we want to follow our Islamist model”. And that’s when the shift began. Pakistan was the first country to become an Islamist state. All these guys were getting ideas from the same pillars. They were reading Ali Shariati from Iran, Maudoodi for Pakistan and India, Ismail Rag Faruqi from America, it was the same pool of ideas that was circulating world-wide.

Shifts came from ground up. Students start demanding changes in their curriculum, they start threatening to boycott lectures, certain books that contain pre-Islamic stuff, they begin to boycott performances like makyong and wayang kulit. It was the younger generation against the older generation. Here was a case of the mother not wearing a tudong, and going to joget on week-ends, and the daughter is going to classes with a tudong.

Ten years later, by the eighties, these guys are not at university any more, they are in their thirties and forties, they enter the bureaucracy and government. We begin to see the erasure of the past on an official level. The Islamic past is something that has never been censured, never been erased from the history books, it’s just less and less prominent. The Hindu element gets shorter and shorter. There’s hardly any mention of famous people, famous texts. You have less and less to anchor yourself on.

Malay history becomes narrowed down, reduced to this narrow period of about 500 years. And even in this period, the new generation of Islamic scholars like Syed Naquib al-Attas (who runs ISTAC, Anwar’s teacher, the mentor for the whole Malay Muslim activists on campus) rewrites the history of Malaysia and South-East Asia. If you read his book “Islam and secularism”, when he talks of the coming of Islam to South-East Asia, he describes it as a complete brick. We were Hindus one day, and the next day we suddenly became perfect Muslims, there was no period of negotiations, he completely pushes aside, marginalises the role of this very interesting period between the 13th to 18th century where you had all these hikayats explaining how Malay society evolved.

In the seventies, for some obscure reason, a whole generation of Malays feel very insecure about themselves. They have the need to say “we became Muslim overnight”. His [Syed Naquib al-Attas] writings feed into his paranoia: he presents an image of Islam being under threat, Islam in danger of being contaminated by other sources, in particular the pre-Islamic past. “Muslims must unite, and clean ourselves of all this pre-Islamic past”.

A lot of students internalised it and reproduced it whether they became academics, teachers, bureaucrats. In the past you had museums of Malaysian culture, now you have museums of Malay and Islamic culture. Three years ago there was a museum being built in Malacca, which I have not seen yet, of Malay and Islamic civilisation. Why not Malaysian civilisation? This is ridiculous.
You want to have a museum about the country. One, it does not even reflect the religious and cultural diversity. And two, it doesn’t reflect the historical diversity.

And all this came about because of what happened in the seventies. In Iran the same thing, they came to despise their pre-Islamic past.

For me culture is plastic. Cultures adapt, they change. Take a Malay wedding ritual, you have pre-Hindu elements, Hindu elements and Islamic elements. You see more and more young Malays opting for a very basic Islamic marriage ceremony done at the mosque. Take the henna painted on the hands, for instance. The Hindu significance has gone. It is a very weak link to Hinduism, to my mind a harmless one, but more and more Malays reject things like this.

Cultures go through stages. You can have a revival. That’s why I write all this stuff. I feel that my role is very academic, so someone can come and water and bring it back to life, but at least I’m keeping the seed. I’m not a practitioner, I can’t dance or sing, and can’t perform for peanuts, so obviously I’m not going pretend I can do it. I can at least keep stories to life, and demonstrate their relevance to the daily context.

We do have it, but they are technically underground, I’ve been to many wayang kulit performances in villages, which didn’t have licences from the state governments. That to me is proof that despite the official line, this culture has direct and immediate relevance to the ordinary Malays. I went to one performance in Kelantan three years ago, there were 500 people out there, many young Kelantanese boys.

Malaysia is facing the threat from two types of globalisation. Macdonaldisation of Malaysian culture, and the globalisation of very orthodox, rigid, defensive form of Islam. Between these two, Malay culture is being squeezed. That’s why the understanding of Malay culture is so shallow in this society.

A part from me does not want to say that the state has to do something, because I hate the fact in this part of the world that everyone expects the state to do everything. And you know what’s going to happen, they will turn it into a museum, and that’s the best way to kill something.

Malaysian society is going through a very complex period at the moment. They’re soul-searching. I’m struck by the fact that when I go to the Temple of Fine Arts for example, I am the only Malay there. There are a lot of Chinese, a lot of Indians, of expatriates.

For instance, I can write about hikayats, but I can’t teach them at the university, because when I taught them at university, I was marginalised by my students and by my colleagues. They don’t touch these subjects. When even your own academics are scared of this, then something is wrong in the country. That means they themselves are carrying all these prejudices. The problem now is, it is difficult to revive. On the one hand you need a critical mass that can bring it back, but at the same time, this is not going to happen as long as this idea of pure Islamic culture is not debunked.

What strikes me as very sad, so many people (not just Muslims), still hold onto this idea of identity being something pure and uncontaminated. I’m struck even when I go to the Temple of Fine Arts. I love the performances, I admire their dedication. But they forget that what they call classical Indian dance is actually dance that was adapted here. There are elements of the dance here that you don’t get in India.

People are looking for homelands. The Indian community feels marginalised, isolated and thinks of India as its home land. Chinese, with the demise of the baba culture, go for mainstream Chinese culture. Likewise for the Malays here, they feel they have to invent a home land, which is this mythical, pure, Malay, Muslim class which never existed. Historically it’s impossible to show that there ever was a pure Malay Muslim culture, it never existed. These guys invented it in the seventies. But it’s a fiction.

Unless the society has a more relaxed attitude to its identity, I don’t see how this is going to change. As this defensiveness grows, this propensity to seek refuge in fictional narratives will grow stronger.

I think, coming back from the very beginning, my family doesn’t feel like that because from the beginning we knew we were mixed. That’s what I can’t figure out at all. In a society which is so creolised, where everyone is mixed. I can’t point to any Malay and say, I know where you’re from. You have a Bugis married to a Javanese, a Minang to an Acehnese, you have so many sub-groups. And yet you do not see that because the official narrative of the state is one where you forget your identity in absolute terms. The census simplifies everything.

K: The government is trying to revive wayang kulit, makyong through the learning institutions…
F: I think so. I think particularly this generation feels this sense of loss. They genuinely fear that in one generation all of this can be gone. It’s very interesting to see UMNO doing this, because UMNO feels it is the custodian of Malay culture and Malay identity. Now UMNO is trying to revive Malay culture because it feels it is its duty. PAS, of course, rejects this because from 82 when the ulamas took over they rejected any type of ethno-centered politics. They rejected ethno-nationalism as an ideology. So they would see the promotion of Malay culture almost as a mark of heresy. It would be promoting racial identity before promoting your religious identity because for them being a Muslim is more important than being a Malay.

The tape stops here, and so does the interview, shortly after.