‘Malay renaissance’ at time of Great Flood?
Azly Rahman
I wrote these as my Facebook status the day I read about an upcoming gathering to restore ‘Malay pride’ with a proposed gathering of 20,00 people.
RESTORE POWER SUPPLY
RESTORE INFRASTRUCTURE in the CITIES
RESTORE FAITH IN HUMANITY
RESTORE CONFIDENCE IN NATION’S SAFETY
Here is my message:
If you can gather 20,000 prominent people and lock them in a stadium for one day for each to produce ONE great idea of social improvement especially in helping rebuild the lives of the flood victims, improve education race relations, ways to catch those big thieves, invent new and useful things for social improvements, suggest ways our youth can work together towards national unity, and many other useful ways to resuscitate our nation that is now bleeding and going through a near-death experience, I think you will definitely do a great service to the ‘20,000 towering minds’ in their twilight years.
And better still, if they are influential people with corporate connections, they can help raise funds for all these 20,000 great ideas to help the whole nation regardless of race and religion, benefit.
That will be an awesome idea of a ‘Malay renaissance’; a ‘renaissance’ as in Latin for ‘rebirth’, so that we will all undergo karma from the Dark Ages of Malay feudalism where the Malays were made slaves by their feudal lords and if this renaissance nation can last for 300 years (as the Renaissance Period between 14th-17th century took to mature) then we may have a period of Malay Enlightenment where you may see a rebirth of your Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the like of great minds, and then maybe that will pave a new era, from Enlightenment to the Age of Reason and maybe see the Age of Revolution emblematic of the French Revolution and the end of the Monarchy and the birth of the Republic and ‘nation’ and ‘state’, moving on to the birth of Science and Industrialism and so on and so forth… that is what ‘a renaissance’ means – a rebirth or a flowering of ideas, of cosmopolitan thinking, of the centrality of man, of the triumph of Reason, and Liberal Ideas or the ‘ars liberalis’. I repeat, Liberalism.
Yes, Liberalism that you ultra-Malays do not understand as an idea with inextricable link with Humanism, Romanticism, and the ‘arts and science of the free man’… renaissance an inheritor of the ideas of the Hellenistic Civilisation (of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian ideals) you ultra-Malay men and women find “dangerous to Islamism and Malay-ism”.
That’s my advice.
And by the way, one cannot call oneself a ‘renaissance group’. One has to live for 300 years as an idea, a movement, a force of liberalism and let scholars studying that era decide whether there is such an idea of ‘rebirth’ or a ‘renaissance’ that characterises that movement… it is not a self-naming act.. nor a gathering of 20,000 folks in their twilight years wearing head-gears and T-shirts and chanting slogans (We are Malay Renaissance – although there is a rock group of Annie Haslam by the name of Renaissance today based in Pennsylvania playing progressive-rock music).
Humbly I submit such an advice.
