In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

23Sep08

Salaam Laylatul-Qadr.

We seek the last ten nights. We seek the contents of that most beautiful of nights in the most beautiful of months – even if, from the distance, it seems like uglier things have never played out in such a month as this.

Some people find a semblance of Imam al-Ghazzali from behind iron bars. Some people strive their way with good, honest effort (cheers, Sumeyye).

And most people find this the ideal month for change.

This piece by Dr. Azly Rahman says it like few can:

We have deeply racialized human beings that are running neutral machines. We have ethnocentric leaders running humane systems.  We have allowed imperfection and evolving fascism to run our system. We have placed capitalists of culture behind our wheels of industrial progress; people who have the dinosaur brain of ketuanan this or that. We have created these monsters and have unleashed them to run our educational, political, economic, and cultural systems.  We have Frankenstein-ised our Merdeka.

Azly Rahman
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/

Growing up in a Malay kampong in Johor Bahru, having been born in a British Military hospital in Singapore, schooled in Kuantan, Seremban, Shah Alam and moving from one realm of cultural experience to the next, living in from one enclave to another in the process of being schooled and in the process of being and becoming an educator, ending up in a town a half and hour’s drive from New York City where I have lived for several years, I sometimes wonder if all these makes me a “cultural construction” of “multi-ethnicity” or a “Malay” still? Or — how “Malay” am I still? Or — what is a
Malay”? as I would ask what is an “American”?

Here in the United States where I teach a course called “Cross-Cultural Perspectives” in which trying to engage my students in the works of Edward Said, Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo, and the like, I find myself again, having to interrogate my “subjectivity and objectivity” as a “culturally-constructed being” in my attempt to play the role of Socrates in dialogue with my students in our exploration of the multiple meaning of culture.

Each semester is a learning experience,  teaching me newer ideas of what “culture, race, and ethnicity” means. I look forward to the intensive classroom discussions by the “hybrid and hyphenated human beings” in my class — those whose family background present a rich tapestry of ethnicity in a sea of creativity called the human race.

I have had pure Afghans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Turks, Greeks, Irish, Australians,  Ghanaian, Nigerian, Russian, Israeli, Cuban, Iranian, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Australian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Jamaican, Egyptian, Bangladeshi, Saudi Arabian, and a hybrid of all many of these. There were Indonesians too. But no Malaysians yet.

My first question on the first day of class to them is: how multicultural are we? How do we see culture as a “construct” that will enable human progress towards peace, social justice, and liberation? These are indeed big words I have set them to explore.

Is race and ethnicity an illusion and a mental construction? Or is it real as real as body and flesh we fight with using and used by the rhetoric of nationalism in honor of our country right or wrong? How might education help bring about the desired changes in the way we translate concepts to practice?

Malaysians had just celebrated her 51st. Merdeka/Independence celebration and merely a few months after the most decisive and exciting by-election in history; one in which not only many are saying “the political fate of the country lies” but also one in which race and religion has become ever more prominent as a decisive factors.

Read the rest here.

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