By SH Lim

History in the textbook doesn’t tell all, so SH Lim reads and talks to itinerant scholar-historian Farish A Noor to get the dirt.

During the writing of this feature, these news items broke: in Detroit, USA an attempted blowing up of a plane; in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, a suicide bomb attack; in Peshawar, Pakistan, another suicide bomber drove an explosive-loaded truck into a crowd on a playground; in Copenhagen, a 27-year-old Somali attempted harm on Kurt Westergaard, Danish editorial cartoonist.

The wages of George Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
And it doesn’t take much to appreciate the dangers of visiting some parts of Asia where this war is being waged. Through his travels Farish A Noor offers ‘Qur’an and Cricket’ as an accessible primer on Asia’s continuing conflicts. In these travelogues-cum-history lessons, subtitled ‘travels through the madrasahs of Asia’, he writes that ‘being a political scientist and historian, I needed to prove that there’s another side to the madrasah culture…that deserves to be told’.

Without denying the fact that some of these madrasahs are indeed recruiting grounds for jihadists, Farish underscores that there are also others with deep roots to scholarship. (In Pakistan alone ‘there are more than 20,000 [madrasahs]…with thousands more that don’t even look like proper schools’.) Citing Ahmed Rashid, an authority on the Taliban movement, Farish writes that some madrasahs ‘provide much better education than government schools. …They produce real religious scholars and priests, just like theology schools in the West produce Christian priests’.

And scholars are nothing to sniff at. The writer recounts the meeting in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, between the students of Dar’ul Uloom Deoband – an institution that dates back to the mid 19th century – and students from a downtown business college. While initially both groups contemptuously eye each other like the Sharks and the Jets, the business college boys soon back away. Farish observes: ‘For while the boys of the business college will one day join the ranks of the commercial classes in India, and while their future seems bright…the boys of Deoband have one thing that no business degree or diploma in communications technology, accountancy, computer engineering can give you: cultural capital’.

He continues, ‘It is this knowledge that despite their humble beginning and their meager prospects in the future the boys of Deoband will one day graduate to join the ranks of the learned Ulama that gives them the self-confidence, dignity and sense of purpose that makes them what they are: gentlemen-scholars who hold the keys to Islam’s patrimony and theology. Even Harvard cannot do that for you’.
That’s one of the several stories of the madrasahs that needs to be told.
Because the popular mainstream press doesn’t offer that perspective, because popular culture’s broad strokes paint only one picture, because school teachers don’t tell all. A point that the writer takes up again in ‘What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You’.

In this book, he discusses six emblematic issues: the keris, race, leader-adoration, gender and sexuality, PAS and Hang Tuah. He shows how these are appropriated and defined to fracture and divide the citizenry. For instance, Farish traces the history of the keris, which ‘emerged and assumed its form during the Hindu-Buddhist period that spanned more than a thousand years in Southeast Asia’. He details how it has been reduced to become ‘a signifier of identity for one particular ethno-religious community’ and ‘a profane weapon of deadly seriousness’. Perhaps with an understanding of history, we can re-appropriate and celebrate the keris in all it artistic, sacred and sexual attributes. However, reading the writings on the wall, Farish anticipates that ‘the cult of the keris will invariably be marginalised if not expelled altogether from the records of Malay history’.

From ‘Hikayat Hang Tuah’, the author highlights the hero’s latter adventures, recasting him as a pacifist. Farish says, ‘[A]ll I did was read the darned book to the end for heaven’s sake! Now if that complexifies… and sheds new light on how we can read and understand his character, all the better’. Implicit in his assertion is that this other history about the great hero must become just as much a part of our shared knowledge. Not just the ‘comic-book hero whose own homicidal tendencies are praised and lauded as exemplary models of behaviour for those who seek service of the apparatus of the state; to kill upon command, to act unthinkingly, to deny one’s conscience and sense of justice’. Now with a different perspective available, ‘It’s up to the comic illustrators, film makers, producers, playwrights etc to do as they will with the material now,’ Farish says.

Farish reiterates, ‘The point I’ve been trying to make for ten years now since I started 'The Other Malaysia' is that Malaysians need to reclaim their history and engage with it. Otherwise history dies and becomes just a political orthodoxy, a static monologue of sameness ad infinitum’. History can be rewritten.

Farish A Noor’s books ‘What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You’ (RM40) and ‘Qu’ran and Cricket’ (RM40) are currently available for sale.