
Sponsored Article
Dina Zaman’s new book, Malayland, will be released by co-publishers Faction Press and Ethos Books of Singapore in November 2024. Dina, one of the founders of IMAN Research, is represented by the Sivagurunathan and Chua Literary Agency.
Malayland is a reflective book that asks the question: what does it mean to be a Malay in the 21st century? It begins with the writer’s memory of the birth of Reformasi in 1998, a movement that changed the political landscape of Malaysia and birthed a new form of Islamic revivalism.
Excerpt from “Prologue: In the Beginning”
In 1998, the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, was arrested for alleged sodomy. I remember a flurry of discussions at work, on the office intranet system, now heated up by mentions of Islam and Anwar. I knew that Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, was angry with him, but over what exactly, I didn’t know.
I didn’t feel good that morning, and once I was deep inside the Commissioning Department and Production team of the fledgling broadcasting station where we worked odd hours, it took a different medium for the news to reach me. When I picked up the newspapers declaring “Anwar Liwat!” I had to shoot off an innocent email to a friend.“‘Liwat’ tu apa?”
I was apolitical then, very much like many young women in Kuala Lumpur who wanted to earn good money and marry men with similar family and economic backgrounds. Perhaps one difference was wanting, and failing, to write the Great Malaysian Novel, and so I was awaiting the results of the Chevening scholarship, having applied for a master’s in creative writing. But the unsettling news of Anwar’s arrest and its possible implications refused to abate as I drove back home that afternoon from Seri Kembangan, where the drivers all seemed to be looking upwards. Helicopters. The menacing sound of their whirring blades droned into my car as I entertained the thought of one of them crashing into me.
We lived a few roads behind Anwar’s house in Damansara Heights — swarms of people and cars had almost choked off all access; many held placards demanding his release. Leaving my car near someone’s house, I ran uphill back home, pushing my way through the crowd. Inside, I found my mother speaking into the orange telephone with its gaudy Telekom sticker, rehashing the news with her sisters.
Meanwhile, my sisters were shouting. “Bah, Bah, what is ‘liwat’?” Like me, they did not understand what it meant.
My mother hung up and turned to my father. “What was going on?” she demanded. “How can the papers write ‘liwat’ on the front page? We are Malays. We do not use such words. There are students, young people reading newspapers.”
My father, normally a calm and quiet man, snapped. “If you mention that word again, I will rotan you. That is a bad word!”
He rolled up the papers and struck the dining table. Our cats ran off and the maids retreated into their rooms at the back of the house as he sat down on the sofa, cradling his head with his hands.
“Today is the day we Malays have lost our moral compass.”
He looked at us steadily.
“Your mother and I lived through the Japanese occupation, our Independence, and May 13. And now this. I cannot believe this has happened.”
–
When I think of the conclusions of the focus group discussions that we conducted for IMAN Research since 2016, my memory of my experience that fateful day always returns. Our focus groups had found that the overwhelming consensus among young Malaysians was one of disempowerment. Where did all this negative sentiment come from? How did we get here? The answer is tricky to pin down, but the rise of the Reformasi movement in Malaysian politics, and the turning point of Anwar’s sodomy accusation, form key components.
The Reformasi movement that began in the late 1990s — during a period of unrest and acute financial crisis — was a direct response to the previously hedonistic and materialistic ferveor that had swept the country. Money and success were king, and the Bumiputera commercial class dominated media and gossip in Kuala Lumpur. I think almost every Malay person then had high hopes of making it big, or at least joining the middle class. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Dr. Mahathir Mohamad — the prime minister that spearheaded many economic drives to create Bumiputera millionaires since taking office in 1981; whose mode of governance relied less on the social welfare and affirmative action policies of the past decade, and more on the advancement of the commercial class.
However, such “progress” had several faces and was steered at Mahathir’s whims. As Sonia Randhawa writes, “[It was n]ever attached to democracy, Mahathir found in neoliberalism, particularly when married to neoconservatism, an ideological ally”. In the nineties, before the Reformasi movement kicked off, conservatism was completely alien to us in 1990s Kuala Lumpur. Women taking to the tudung were shunned as backwards — indeed, the privileged and the professional danced at clubs like Tin Mine, Regine’s and Scandals, owned by the nightlife impresario Rhona Drury. The younger set, many of whom benefited from government scholarships and support, danced their nights away as well, and went to work nursing hangovers in a city flush with money, success and great pride; all taken in by the notion of national success. Perhaps Professor Shaharuddin Maaruf was correct in a prescient assessment, written at the start of Mahathir’s ascendancy, when he argued that the elite were less enamoured with Umar Ibn Khattab or Jose Rizal than they were with the Rothchilds. Religious belief, national pride and personal fame were nowhere as valued as financial and material wealth. Meanwhile, men like Halim Saad and Samsudin Abu Hassan could remain shrouded in mystery, but none dared to ask more questions because they were Bumi billionaires.
Launch & Meet-the-Author
Dina Zaman’s Malayland will be launched on 15 November 2024 (6pm) at National Library Singapore. She will also make an appearance at Book Bar (57 Duxton Road, Singapore 089521) for a meet-the-author on 16 Nov (2pm).