(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
• He would ‘Look East’ to catch up with the West.
• He personifies his class by personifying his race.
• He believes in History but is ‘terrified’ by it.
However, In reading The Early Years we must be cognizant that European history is part of
our history. Dr.Mahathir deals with both his own society and that of its Other, the ‘Occident’
– a rare word used in popular discourse at that time. Surely Dr. Mahathir’s consciousness
then was configured by a variety of diverse forces. The Early Years writings embedded in
the nascent Malay political identity surging from the erstwhile ‘placid history’ and
colonialism makes a pertinent study contributing to a further understanding of the man as
integral to the nation’s history.
On European Civilization and the Western Media
Dr. Mahathir’s first article appeared with the title “Malay Women make their Own Freedom,”
Straits Times, 20 July (Published in the Early Years 1995, pp.1-5.). I cannot help but be
reminded of Syed Sheikh al-Hady’s novel, Hikayat Faridah Hanum (1925-1926), bearing the
modern theme of women emancipation. But upon closer inspection, the article and
subsequent articles are responses to a new world, to a milieu – to modernity and
development. It is a response to European civilization and at the same time, a product of
European and Western influence.
In the article (to be followed over the next six odd decades), Dr. Mahathir offeres a dialogical
construction of the world. He promotes the West writing through a semantics that is not
always familiar in the Malay context – ‘political bodies,’ ‘economic and political progress’,
‘constitutional problems’ and the ‘Occident.’ Dr.Mahathir delves on the “disturbing
question of social reforms,” and when the time comes, “the thorniest question will be the
emancipation of Malay women.”
Taking this article as an example, Dr. Mahathir declares his perspective on the world. He
calls for the adoption of Western culture like the Chinese after World War I. Dr. Mahathir’s
sense of tradition and reform was illustrated in his reference to
(T)he dewey-eyed ‘Lotus Flowers’, once so provokingly shy, were emancipated and
became the objects of envy to Malay boys and girls. For a time Malay parents stuck
to traditions and eyed with severe disapproval any modernistic trend among their
children.
Dr. Mahathir unambiguously chastises the Malay response where
(R)eligious teachings were intensified and a campaign was started to make the word
‘modern’ as odious as possible. Vernacular papers took up the cry against the
wickedness of Western culture and it was not uncommon even to hear stage
comedians satirising a few unconventionalities that had become evident.
Dr. Mahathir manifests the tradition of self-criticism, like what we know of Abdullah
Munsyi. He describes the refusal to change among ‘orthodox Malays’, and set the political
changes during the formative years of UMNO, as set against “the placid history of the
Malays.” He makes comparisons with the West and at the same time describes to his readers
how the West was. In illustrating that Malay womenfolk can equally be useful to the
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