“Meditations on the ruins of Bujang Valley”
Azly Rahman
Melaka should no longer be considered the first Malay kingdom in the history of Malaysia; reportedly there was a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom called Kota Gelanggi in Jerantut, Pahang 1000 years old that was a Malay city-state of Hindu-Buddhist influence. Lembah Bujang is a testament of the great influence of Srivijaya, Majapahit, and other Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms. Melaka was not as great as Malaysian history textbooks painted it to be.
Instead of pushing this or that hegemonic history agenda and called it an Islamic history of the Malay states, the Malay colonial states and the Malay sultanate, right up to the Islamized Malaysian state, national pride and dignity and lies as well in the influence of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition that has worked very well in the form of syncretism ala present-day Indonesia re; the Panca Sila.
Islam came as a colonizer as well; a cultural philosophical colonizer, albeit through direct trade from Arabia (Hadramaut), so as the thesis on Hamzah Fansuri goes, and it came with a mission as well. i.e. to wipe off the Hindu-Buddhist cultural-philosophical tradition in vogue in Southeast Asia then.
From the 1970s Malaysia saw the beginning of the cultural contradictions in the form of a “clash” between the two civilizations; Malay syncretism and the advancing Arabist-Turkish-Persian tripartite Islamist ideology out to bulldoze the syncretism of the indigenous peoples ans well as the P.Ramlee- type of Malays.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Egypt’s Ikhwanul Muslim movement, the Malay consciousness was again bulldozed by the idea of Islamism as ideology, with the systematic program of Islamization that was going hand-in-hand with the new “Islamic Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism” (ala Max Weber’s thesis on Protestantism that pay tribute to the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies — that prudence is a virtue and capitalism is fine, and Jesus’ message of The Sermon on the Mount” to the wealthy must now be challenged).
Malaysia’s Islamization agenda went in tandem with Malaysia’s Thatcherist and Reaganist neo-capitalist agenda in the cultural mould of Mahathirism’s Privatization Policy, Malaysia Inc., and Look East Policy. Like the emergence of the state of Saudi Arabia at the turn of the 20th. Century, Malaysia had two instruments of change” its own Wahabbism and Prince Saud-ism.
