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Today's Topics:

1. RE: The future of ‘progressive Islam’ Farish Noor (talib ul-Haq)

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Message: 1
From: "talib ul-Haq" 
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [Progressivemuslimsnetwork] The future of ‘progressive Islam’ Farish Noor
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 13:29:12 +0000
Reply-To: [email protected]

If I may tag on to the brief discussion on Farish Noor and Progressive 
Islam... Here is an article recently written by him. Wonderfully personal 
and insightful.

Talibhaq

ps. Anyone going to WSF in Mumbai?



Of Lost Fathers and Broken Men

By Farish A. Noor

The younger generation often finds itself at odds with the older generation,
and every era is not without its generational divides and conflicts. This is
true of us living in the present as it has been throughout human history,
and there is nothing to suggest that things will change in the future.
Perhaps it is human nature after all, for the young to stand above the old
and to pronounce their judgement on the past and the way things were,
dreaming aloud of how things could be otherwise - until, of course, the time
comes when age makes us wiser and more humane, and we come to realise that
one day we too will be judged by the restless heralds of the coming age.

As we walk on the stage of human agency otherwise known as history, we
should remember that ours are but bit-parts, to be played only momentarily
before we move on. The characters may change but the paradigm remains, every
generation being the inheritor of the role of Hamlet, yearning and looking
for lost fathers, wary of becoming broken men themselves.

This was certainly the case for me, and if some of my columns have tried to
uncover the hidden elements of the past it may well have much to do with a
longing to return to a less complicated history, a time of epistemic arrest
when words and ideas had simpler meanings that were arrested with certainty.
But certainty is a luxury that few of us can afford, and for societies like
ours that have been in a state of convulsion and rapid modernisation, all
truth has melted into thin air and we grasp desperately for even a semblance
of it.

My struggle to rediscover the past of Malaysia has as much to do with the
desire to uncover the marginal aspects of our national imaginary as it has
to do with piecing together the dispersed fragments of my own personal life.
It has to be said that some of it was motivated by the need to re-discover
the father I did not really have, much less know.

On 24 December 2003 - Christmas Eve, in fact - I received a phone call from
my mother while working alone in my deserted office in Berlin. She called to
tell me that my father had passed away that morning. I would be lying if I
said that I broke down and cried, for I did not. The truth is that I simply
did not know what to feel and how to react. The news that a man had passed
away would normally elicit some sympathy and emotion from me, and I have
cried for others whom I did not know but whose passing I sorely regretted.
But this was a man whom I should have known, for indeed his blood still
flows in these veins of mine. Yet the truth is that I felt nothing, could
not feel anything and could not bring myself to feel even if I wanted to.
All I could do was to take out the photo of my father that I carry with me
and look at it closely, scrutinizing every detail - its yellowed dog-eared
corners, the cracks and wrinkles on its surface, and the face, hidden behind
dark glasses, that stared back at me. He was once a handsome man, proud,
virile and manly. He had one hand on his hip and a cigarette clasped between
his fingers in the other, held with a cavalier flair that spoke of supreme
self confidence, machismo, even panache.

The photo was taken when he was in his mid-thirties, the same age I happen
to be now. In grainy black-and-white, small enough to be kept in a wallet,
it was nonetheless a bold testament to a man who was once proud of being
what he was, and whose pride was ultimately his undoing.

I never really knew my father. He was born in the 1930s and lived through
the post-independence era where everything seemed possible and there were no
limits to one's expectations and dreams for oneself. He was away when I was
born and showed up two weeks later to pick me up, take the obligatory
paternal photograph, and then disappeared again. He was one of the first
agricultural scientists in Malaysia and at one time was even described as
the 'blue-eyed boy' of Tun Razak. During the hey day of the Green Book
development plans of the 1950s and 60s, my father was one of those who was
prized by the government because of his knowledge of agriculture and
fisheries.

My father joined the Malaysian Radio services (RTM) and spent much of his
time in the countryside touring farms and development estates, teaching
farmers and fishermen how to improve their agricultural techniques and
producing radio programmes to help educate farmers and improve agricultural
production. The politicians loved him - in many of his old photographs I saw
him walking along with the Tunku and Tun Razak on their tours of the Malay
rural heartland. Unlike the other civil servants of his generation he did
not want to spend his time in the cities, but rather preferred to work in
and on the field, where his heart really was. As a child, I would look at
the photos and marvel at how he would go to the farms and villages, live and
work there with his portable radio kit, even during times of flood and
draught. I remember the photo of him holding aloft a microphone as he
interviewed a farmer, chest-deep in flood water as the rain fell on them
both without respite.

But my father was my father only in the strictest biological sense. He
belonged to that generation of men who believed that their work came first
and that families - wives and kids - were secondary. It was not that he was
a bad man in any way: It was just that he, along with many of his
generation, were simply not sensitive to the needs of wives and children and
were not suited for married life. In the past I condemned him for that, but
perhaps now I understand him better. He was born at a time when marriages
were arranged by families and not based on love. My parents' marriage was a
family-orchestrated affair, and had my mother been given the choice she
would certainly have not married my father. But that was how things were
done then, when young women had few choices before them, and at one point in
my life I - along with many others of my generation I'm sure - condemned our
elders for their ways.

As a result of this arranged marriage, my brother and I were born into this
world. We certainly did not ask for it, nor did we feel that we owed the
world any favours. Neither my brother or myself saw much of our father when
we were young, and though I can count myself somewhat fortunate for having
been the object of some of my father's tenderness long ago, the same could
not be said of my brother who was dealt none of it. From our early childhood
we lived as children of a single-parent family and thought of ourselves as
such.

The generational gap between my father and I grew even more when I began my
religious education and took up religious studies under the tutelage of the
numerous Ustazs and Ustazahs that my mother sent me to. My father - again,
like many of his generation - was never a really religious individual and it
was my mother who first taught me the Quran, how to pray, how to fast and
all the other religious obligations of a Muslim properly. My father, on the
other hand, was the one whom I had to drag to the mosque on Fridays and Eid,
and many years later I reflected on the irony of the situation where I, the
son, had to teach my father how to pray and read the Quran instead. (A
situation made less ironic with the knowledge that I was not the only son to
have to do so.)

When I began my higher education and later went on to university, I, like
many of my generation, were swept along with the Islamisation tide that
engulfed the rest of the country. Though I was too young to be part of the
first 'ABIM wave', I was certainly pulled along the same current during my
student years in Europe. I experimented with a host of religious movements -
ranging from the Sufi/mystical brotherhoods to the neo-fundamentalist
Tablighi Jama'at to the downright hardline right-wing ones like the Hizb'ut
Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. (Those were the days when I, like an idiot, went
around calling people of other faiths 'kafirs', I'm ashamed to admit.)

Like many young Muslims, I felt that all that was wrong with the Muslim
world was due to the faults and mistakes of our elders. Having a lost and
absent father merely reinforced my own prejudices, and made me even more
intolerant than the rest. (So when I condemn religious intolerance today,
dear reader, rest assured that I know what I am talking about. I was once
one of those who would not hesitate to burn books or condemn others to hell
myself.) The gulf between the two of us simply grew so wide that it became
impossible for me to understand him, and him me. While I was reading Ibn
Khaldun and al-Ghazalli he was still listening to Boney M; Earth, Wind and
Fire and Kool and the Gang. His attention was diverted to popular media and
producing soap operas (during his retirement) while mine was occupied by the
killings in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. I, like many of the Pharisees of
my generation, looked upon our elders with contempt and loathing- though our
criticism was seldom directed at ourselves or our own self-righteousness.

It is tempting for me to re-write the past and blame my errant ways on my
father, the ever-absent scapegoat for my own mortal failings; and to say
that my exclusive and intolerant religiosity then was really a reaction
against my father's own irreligious ways. But I would be a hypocrite if I
did so, for I know very well that those wasted years were spent in idle
searching when I really should have looked closer to myself instead. The
first pitfall that lies in wait for those of new-found religiosity is the
trap of religious pride and moral arrogance. I, along with thousands of
others, fell into that trap without even realising it. My father, though no
fault of his own, became the excuse I turned to whenever I failed or proved
too proud in my own faith. Looking back at it now, I realise that my own
religiosity then - full as it was with talk of 'jihad' and curses against
the rest of the world - was mere prattle and empty rhetoric, similar to the
sort of nonsense we hear these days from the so-called Islamists who claim
to fight in the cause of Islam.

It was only much later, when I returned to Malaysia, that I saw alternative
ways for me to come to terms with my personality and religiosity that did
not exclude others. My contact with Chandra Muzaffar (who in a sense became
my intellectual father), whose broad and all-emcompassing humanity showed me
that Islam was indeed a universal faith that did not discriminate against
others, was one of the antidotes to my own religious exclusivism. My work
with Zainah Anwar and Sisters in Islam has also shown me how important it is
for Muslims to reform themselves, and how important it is for Muslim women
to be liberated so that injustices such as what was done to my mother will
never again be repeated. Most of all my own involvement with Islamist
activism gradually matured and developed in the direction of an activist
Islam that sought to defend human rights, democracy and uphold the
fundamental human dignity that we all share. Yet try as I might, my own
claim to fraternity and love for all encountered one limit that it could not
overcome: my past and my relationship with my father.

After the divorce of my parents I stopped seeing my father for good.
Seventeen years passed before I saw him again last year, though by then age
had taken its toll and time its costs. The man who was once for me the
paragon of all that was manly, robust and confident was very much the shell
of his previous self. In his younger days his skin was dark - burnt like
leather almost, thanks to relentless fieldwork that he obviously relished -
his hair shiny and resplendent, his gait and carriage sturdy and man-like.
What I found instead was a man broken and disillusioned, pale-skinned and
down-spirited, unable to stand properly, whose memory was fading and whose
voice broke as he spoke. That struck me the most, for his greatest gift was
his ability to speak and to communicate his ideas which he did with
astounding ease. Now the same man, my father, could barely raise his voice
loud enough to be heard, and when he did his words no longer made sense.

The final meeting we had last year proved indeed to be our last. If there
was one thing that I wanted to do for him before he left this earth, it was
to accompany him on a pilgrimage to Mecca where I hoped he would find peace
in himself and make his peace with God. After a life of denial and
self-abuse, he finally relented and said 'yes', as long as I went with him
and we could do it together. I thought that at least we could make amends to
each other - him for being a father that he never was, and me for being the
son who judged him too severely for things that were not entirely his fault,
but rather the ills of the age he came from and lived in. Perhaps then a
rupture with the past could be healed, and we could at least try to
establish a bond of sorts.

That opportunity, however, has come to pass and I will never be able to
retrieve it again. All that is left for me now is to look back at the past,
exorcise the ghosts that have haunted me for so long, and retrieve the few
memories of kindness, tender moments and closeness that I shared with my
father long ago. It has become a personal archaeology of sorts, and oddly
enough as my mind wanders back, I come across those rare moments that I
thought I had lost for good: I recall receiving a present of a
radio-controlled toy tank from him (when I was four years old) which he sent
from abroad, while on one of his long foreign trips to God knows where, with
a card that said 'I hope you like this present. When I come back we can play
with it together.' That we never did of course, for he was never back long
enough. I recall going up Mount Kinabalu in Sabah with him, and him
explaining the names of the different plants and flowers that I had never
seen. I recall him spinning all kinds of stories, including one of him being
a pilot in the Malaysian Air Force and him flying a bomber (which he drew, a
crazy machine with four wings, eight tires and twelve engines which made a
mockery of aeronautical engineering!), which was obviously untrue but
entertaining nonetheless to a child of seven.

If there is anything to be learned from all this, it is that life moves on
and that the young - impatient as they always are and have to be - should
remember that in their haste to construct a new world order they should not
demolish all that is past. The past remains with us, whether we like it or
not, and the mistakes of the older generation as well. In this day and age
where history is being erased and the monuments of the past bulldozed for
the sake of 'progress' (or more often than not, profit), holding on to the
traces of the past has become all the more important - no matter how
problematic that past may seem to us at the present. The younger generation
of Islamists in particular should heed this message, lest they make the
fateful error of burying all that came before them in their headlong rush to
build the world anew: if there is one thing they should remember, it is that
the same soil upon which the new world order they wish to build happens to
bear the imprint of countless generations before, whose own lives and
identities they are obliged to respect.

'The past is a different country; they do things differently there', so the
saying goes. My father belonged to such a past that I cannot possibly
identify with or even hope to comprehend, but I pray that wherever he may be
now his soul is at rest and he has found his peace. His intention (niyyat)
to go to Mecca was perhaps the closest he came to performing the deed, but
it did at least mean that in his final days he was still willing to change
and come to terms with his own self. I in turn have lost the father I never
really had, but at least I hope to know him better now. Whatever anger or
sense of loss and betrayal I may have held in my heart is long gone, and all
that remains is the simple wish that things could have been better for both
of us, young and old. And if the day ever comes when I finally do make my
pilgrimage to Mecca (but only after the present regime has been replaced
with a democratic government), I know that my father and his photo will be
there with me too. God bless you, father, warts and all.

In loving memory of my father, Ahmad Noor, 22 June 1930 - 24 December 2003.



----------------------------
Dr. Farish A. Noor (Badrol Hisham Ahmad-Noor)
Centre for Modern Orient Studies,
33 Kirchweg
14129 Berlin
Germany

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