I was watching Point of View, a talkshow on Malaysian TV2 on Friday night when I was truly impressed by their insightful yet accessible exchange on the challenges of modernity to Islam, and how they should cope with it. They covered historical, sociological, psychological, political, philosophical and religious grounds. It was brought up that the current Islamic practices are influenced by the prevailing culture of the times when Islam was introduced to Malaysia.

At one point of discussion, the speakers brought up the importance of technical knowledge. The host was particularly impressive when he brought up the challenge to define knowledge, and the many senses of knowledge in Islam, following with a statement that says that the producers of knowledge may not be neutral, having hidden agendas for their genesis.

I do not believe that any talkshows in Singapore ever brought up the questioning of our norms, or the validity of the knowledege that is fed to us. We are passive consumers of information, as with a lot of other things. The people swallowed the recently constructed myths and legends surrounding the Merlion without chewing. Our national identity is constructed on our consumption and our forgetting, our forgetting of what is, of what was, of an accurate history, and filling the gaps with newly constructed images. Singaporeans, thinking themselves as cosmopolitans, located in one of the centres of trade in the world, having a degree of access to the external world, think themselves open-minded, international, citizens of the world.

Perhaps in a way, we are becoming Americans.

For Islam, knowledge is basically divided into two categories. One belonging to the technical and vocational sphere, the other belonging to the spiritual and religious sphere. The main fissure came during colonial times where the pursuit of "worldly" knowledge was given to the colonial masters and the locals were given the pursuit of spirituality.

Nostalgia, according to them is an impedance to progress. Always looking back to the golden ages of the Ottoman Empire or their prophets is somehow equivocal to our reminiscence of the illusion of our "kampong" days, days which we never lived through and probably never existed. The wonderful past propagated is often an abstraction from events, generalization of phenomenon, to form a hazy and perfect image.

A degree of theology from an university of Malaya would require an undergraduate to take modules in Greek, Medieval, Islamic and comparative philosophy. The last being recently and superficially offered as a third year module in the National University of Singapore. While not all embracing, I would say that their syllabus do offer a certain range and diversity of materials.

I was glued to my TV set, reluctant to move nor answer Nature's calls because the program does not seem to have commercial breaks, trying hard not to breathe, blink or drift away, for I, as Aerosmith puts it best, "don't want to miss a thing".

After this unique experience, perhaps I could say that their media enjoy a higher degree of political freedom, and this talkshow is certainly more insightful than many of our own. Perhaps an abstract below will show you what I mean.

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From http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/3878/quotes.htm

4 June 1999
Mr Robert Loh, Chairman of the National Council of Social Services
in a Straits Times interview:

ST: Why did the National Council of Social Service decide to join in the debate on what a family ought to constitute?

Mr Loh: "Well, what constitutes a strong, healthy family? Actually, a happy family is a strong, healthy family.

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I think you all got what I mean.