The Star Online (http://www.thestar.my)
THE THIRD SPACE, 28 September 2008
By NEIL KHOR and KHALDUN MALEK
An early newspaper in Kelantan helped create a civil space within which a state anchored in Islamic principles could develop.
THE Thai Railway Commissioner, a relation to the Thai monarch, arrived safely in Kota Bharu. At hand to receive him was the British Advisor, who conveyed him to the Government Rest House. The next day, the Railway Commissioner was granted an audience with the Sultan of Kelantan.”
Any reader of the above newspaper report from the turn of the last century would get the impression that the Kelantan people were playing host to their colonial rulers: The Siamese Commissioner conveyed into the heart of Kota Baru by Western technology and greeted by the British Advisor, the power that made the railway possible.
The impression given is obvious. The people of Kelantan needed to modernise and they must look beyond their own shores if they wanted to succeed. This newspaper, the editor tells his readers, will be the key to the outside world. The world of technological progress that has allowed the British to usurp the authority of the Siamese while Kelantan merely sits in repose.
Perhaps it is not surprising at all that the main sponsor of Pengasuh, Kelantan’s first Malay-language newspaper where this news report appeared, was the State Islamic Council (Majlis Agama Islam).
Unlike on the West Coast, Kelantan was a heavily Malay majority state in which, apart from the Sultan, religious leaders played a crucial role in shaping civil society.
In fact, the writers at Pengasuh were well-travelled and were reformers with rather cosmopolitan views.
This is unsurprising considering the fact that Kelantan and Patani (in southern Thailand) had long had established reputations as centres of Islamic thought. The 18th century Muslim thinker al-Palimbani had remarked that the sophistication of Islamic education in Patani at the time rivalled what he had found in Mecca itself.
In that same 1918 issue of Pengasuh, a feature article about the development of the printing press and the role of newspapers was also published. Both Egypt and China, two Old World giants, may have had at one time been initiating some primitive form of newspapers but the West had overtaken them.
The writer Mohammad Said laments that there were too few Malay newspapers. He exhorts his readers: “When in actual fact the pool, lake, river and sea of knowledge is always full and overflowing! Why can we not drink that water? Who is preventing us? Other than our own lazy nature!”
Masjid Kampung Laut, said to be one of the country’s oldest mosques, stands – rather appropriately – in Kota Baru, a reflection of the important role religioin played in shaping Kelantan’s civil society. – File photo
While newspapers in Europe developed in tandem with commercial interests, Pengasuh had a moral and religious agenda. By the 1920s, it was apparent to its well-travelled contributors that the West had began to abandon Christianity and commerce had effectively become its new ‘religion’.
An article by Mohammad Ghazali Ariffin describing the magnificent expense of the wedding celebrations of European royalty and American industrialists may have been aimed at making the newspaper popular but there were subtle hints that Western leaders had descended into hedonism.
Near the end of the article, Europe’s most extravagant wedding dress belonging to the Tsarina Alexandra was said to have contained “7,000 ornaments”. Readers were made aware that the Tsar had been deposed.
The article ends with a description of the wedding of J.P. Morgan’s daughter. The American industrialist, it said, transformed his home into a palace. Out with the Tsar and other feudal monarchs, and in with the capitalist, the Western world’s new royalty.
Would British intervention in Kelantan, which began in 1909, some nine years before the publication of Pengasuh, bring about similar changes? For the railway not only brought Siamese Commissioners but also all the associated materialism that made technological progress necessary.
The railway was more than merely symbolic, it made the exploitation of Kelantan’s natural resources more efficient - all to feed the extravagant tastes of the J.P. Morgans of the Western world.
If Pengasuh was to be useful to the people of Kelantan, it needed to do more than merely inform. Like other Malaysian reformist periodicals, such as The Straits Chinese Magazine (1897-1907) or the Singapore-based Al-Imam, this magazine aimed to inspire change.Its platform was an interpretation of Islam associated with stoicism, endurance and perseverance, something it shared with other reformist type publications around the Islamic world.
Western society might have been powerful at the time but it had already begun to be consumed by materialism. In its pursuit of modernisation, it was growing slowly but surely more distant from its religious roots.
If Kelantan society was allowed to go down the same track, what would happen to Islam and its place at the core of Kelantanese identity? Pengasuh’s writers asked, “Is this the kind of so called ‘progressivism’ that would benefit Muslim societies at large?”
Of course, Pengasuh’s reach was limited. No more than perhaps a couple of thousand people would have read it. But in a semi-feudal society, its influence among socio-religious elites was substantial.
What its editors achieved was the creation of a public sphere, one where important civil society issues could be presented and discussed. Sensitive issues, especially those affecting the royal family, would be subtly hinted at.
This weekly periodical contained domestic, international, and Malay world news. It had a representative in Singapore, the new centre of administration now that the British had taken over from the Siamese.
Readers were also made aware of the fact that most periodicals were published in the English language and that the British ruled the world’s largest empire. Pengasuh was thus in the thick of the action.
If Al-Imam derived its inspiration from Egyptian reformism, Pengasuh was spreading Islamic reformist ideas through a local lens. Kelantan could do this because there was already a strong local Islamic tradition.
Home-grown Islamic scholars like Tok Kenali, Tuan Tabal, Daud al Patani and others who had been studying in Mecca brought to bear forms of Islamic thinking both cognizant of developments in other parts of the Muslim world and still retaining a strong sense of rootedness in their own local circumstances.
Gradualism was also what made Kelantanese reform more successful. A highly developed theological perspective sensitive to local conditions resulted in the emergence of an Islamic civil society that was culturally and intellectually sophisticated and self-confident.
In a way, this meant that the schisms that afflicted Muslim-Malay thinking across the Titiwangsa range - issues such as “being Malay vs being Muslim” - never affected Kelantanese society to the same degree.
While in the states on the West Coast a schism emerged between the Kaum Tua (traditionalists) and Kuam Muda (reformists), Kelantan society adapted to changing times on its own terms.
The formation of a public sphere, one dedicated to debating Islamic reform as well as the challenges of modernity, strengthened Kelantan’s Islamic civil society, which was centred in Kota Baru and specifically around the Majlis Agama Islam. Islam here was more open to change and more cohesive than anywhere else in Malaysia.
Today, Islam continues to be an anchor for the Kelantanese. It inspires political organisation as well as civil society gatherings. For this, the people of Kelantan owe a debt of gratitude to the State Islamic Council and its rich, historically-nuanced Islamic heritage.
So by the time the Siamese Railway Commissioner said his goodbyes two days after arriving in Kota Baru, Pengasuh could confidently report that he left their “country” safely. For in the mind of its readers, there existed very definite ideas of what their country should be - a state anchored in Islamic principles.
Neil Khor read English at Cambridge University and Khaldun Malek read Philosophy at Oxford University; they are both currently attached to Universiti Malaya. They both believe that social reform begins in opposing views discussed with civility.
© 1995-2008 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)
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