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the aim was to ‘museumise’ this
culture.
Now, after a while, Malay culture
became very problematic for the
Malay body politic. They couldn’t deal
with its diversity and plurality and it
was also a time of Islamic awakening
and a strong Wahabi influence. In the
1970s there emerged a group called the
Muslim Youth Movement led by
Anwar Ibrahim, who has now emerged
as the major democratic voice in
Malaysia. The movement was rooted in
a certain understanding of Malay and
Southeast Asian culture—that it was
inferior and that it lacked an
intellectual tradition. In 1979, Anwar
Ibrahim was one of the few people
invited to visit Ayatollah Khomeini in
Khom, two weeks after the Iranian
revolution. The revolution was treated
with a great deal of joy in the Muslim
world, but it also caused much anxiety
among those who were threatened by
the rise of Shia Islam. They turned to
Saudi Arabia and to the Wahabi
school. What you see in Malaysia over
the past 30 years is the result of
Wahabi conditioning. A very
important tract has been written in
Malaysia by a well-known Muslim
scholar by the name of Sayed Najib al-
Attas. It denounces pre-Islamic Malay
culture and creates new historical
Wayang Kulit – Eddin Khoo
points as cultural references for the
Malays. So there is no more a sense of
continuity but very clear breaks in the
Malay Muslim consciousness about
how their history has evolved. Before
the coming of Islam you had no
culture: this is the standard argument
now for the Malay Muslim body
politic.
In Kelantan today, religious pluralism is
under threat. In the past five years,
segregation of communities has
increased. There is a witch-hunt going
on of those practising so-called deviant
traditions. One doesn’t know what will
happen to the Rama and Ravana
stories, ritual and puppet traditions, in
the next 20 or 30 years. I began by
quoting an Irishman and I will end
with an Irishman. One is constantly
trying to glean an independent history
from a history on which the shutters
are being drawn. I keep thinking of
what Eugene Onegin said, “There is no
future. There is only a past happening
over and over and over again, now.”
Eddin Khoo is a scholar, translator and
founder of the PUSAKA Foundation in
Malaysia, a non-profit organisation that
researches and documents indigenous
performance traditions.
The Maharisi Kala Api, believed by some Wayang practitioners to be the incarnation of Shiva, is the
keeper of secrets and presiding spirit of the Wayang Kulit Siam tradition.
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