Of Beards And Terrorism:
Making allies of prejudice and fear
By: MGG Pillai - This is my column in the latest issue of Harakah - Issue 15-31 October 2002
The Malaysian Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, has a well-known aversion for beards. After 11 September 2001, and like President George W. Bush, he sees a terrorist in every Muslim beard, When he addressed a gathering of faculty and staff at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, his handlers ensured no one with beards or goattees sat in the front rows. There must be reason for this prejudice and fear. He orchestrates a tirade against bearded terrorists in his midst, Muslim to a man, helped with allegations and unverifiable 'facts' from Singapore and Washington, unverifiable at the best of times and with only assumptions and stray links that may not prove anything.
In Malaysia, Dr Mahathir is reduced to intrude his prejudice about beards into his sanity, and act promptly, more in fear and political expediency, so his governance continues to be unchallenged. Yet his phobia for beards is of recent vintage: as a medical officer in Langkawi in the 1950s, he sported a beard which would have made the Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Omar, proud. (photo: from M@RHAEN's archives) That many of his political opponents, in PAS and Keadilan and even DAP, -- and some critics too: I sport a full flowing now white beard! -- could account for his aversion ...
A bearded terror named Osama bin Laden reduced President Bush's leadership of Western political dominance to quivering jelly: using American planes to crash into America's citadels of commercial, political and military power. It was an act of, perhaps misguided, brilliance; but it evened scores, with hints of more. President Bush is made impotent, his administration is made impotent, every speech or policy or move he or his administration shows how impotent, and unsettled, it is. He tries to seize the leadership yet again with his bumbling response to it, with his simplistic and naive demand that if the world did not go with him, then the world is his enemy. It was a gut reaction of a terrified leader whose feet is now certified of clay. He reacts to vent his anger on "Muslims", all who follow the Islamic faith.
When the enormity of that struck him, various seemingly intellectual opinions are proferred to suggest that those who bombed the Pentagon and World Trade Centre are irresponsibe and bad Muslims; while those who do not indulge in such acts of terror are responsible and good. At the time, in the immediate aftermath of 11 September, President Saddam Hussein was a good Muslim. The alleged ringleader is no where to be seen. So he targets President Saddam, not for his role in the attacks, if indeed there was one, but for holding on to the stock of biological and other weapons Washington, in happier times, had allowed him to buy and accumulate. It is another sign how frightened and unsettled the Leader of the Free World is. But there is a link: both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are Muslims.
Both Mr Bush and Dr Mahathir are caught up in hidden prejudices and fears which they convert into policy to survive. Every man, tribe, race, group has its prejudices. Most of the time they are well contained and these revealed by inference and action than irrevocable fact. So governments and leaders. In Malaysia, for instance, there prejudices are real. Each race have its own prejudices and fears, which increase when the government of the day take steps that each sees as attempts to rein them in. When this happens, the inbuilt prejudices and fears rise to the surface. When nothing is done to resolve it, it worsens.
The government's attempt to introduce English in the school curriculum is subject to these fears and prejudices, worsening with each official insistence it would be rammed down their throats. The racial perceptions of each race is, suitably toned down as occasion and politics demands, as intense as it was in the early days of their presence in Malaysia. Each race has its prejudice and fear of the other. It is kept in check, but when one race is seen to take advantage of it, the others react in vehemence and anger.
It is a form of cultural stereotyping. During the Emergency, police road blocks targetted all Chinese for special checks and rough treatment: all Chinese then were deemed, in official eyes, to be Communists. Today, it is the Indian: for it is now an unmentioned fact that all Indians are gangsters. The government sees the Malay who does not back it as a potential terrorist. This fixation of bearded Muslims is one manifestation of it. What makes all this frightening, in today's context, is that these fixations are spread with lightning speed. In older days of slow communication, there was time to revise one's opinion before it is made public. Today, with instantaneious communications, and especially the Internet, these prejudices spew out at fearsome speed, and which cannot then be retracted when prudence and self-respect demands it be.
So, when President Bush deemed, in effect, all bearded Muslims are terrorists, others jumped on his bandwagon. Singapore finds Muslim groups hellbent on destroying it, and finds these groups involved in wanting to overthrow the governments of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. It now threatens to destroy the Muslim view inimical to it as surely as it did the Chinese view that challenged its political control and hegemony. No proof is offered. The latest Singapore government missive about the dastardly acts of these fundamentalist Muslim warriors accuse some of those arrested recently to have been members of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network in 1990, when that network was a figment, if at all, of his imagination! Unmentioned is that then Osama bin Laden was a favourite of Washington.
But views like these are not challenged. For challenging it suggests -- a la Bush -- that you are ipso facto a supporter of Bin Laden. And therefore a likely candidate for detention without trial. So, no one raises a whimper. With the press only prepared, or allowed, to parrot the official line -- look at the Singapore newspapers with its frequent scare articles of Islamic fundamentalists in its midst for the fear psychosis it creates, and you know what I mean -- it helps to unleash a collective hatred for whomsoever the government wants hated, not because it is a threat to national security, but that it threatens to put the government in a spot.
What is frigthening in all this is that the more self-serving adventures like these are unleashed, the more blase and questioning the impact. This is not to say that the terrorist fears are not real. The threat is real. But how it is made out to be gives it an importance it perhaps does not deserve. When a religion is viled as a target of evil, those who worship it, even if they believe it is justified, will rush to protect it from further harm at any cost, thus bringing to fruition a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes it is deliberate. In Singapore, this crackdown of Muslim terrorists comes with it a barely inaudible fear of what would happen to it if UMNO loses political power in Malaysia, or if President Megawati Sukarnoputri is replaced by a fundamentalist Muslim cleric.
This fear psychosis in Singapore comes with it the political baggage of fear the government wants its citizens to accept. So, in Malaysia. But here it is not as forthright as it would have been, say a decade earlier. The government has lost its marbles, yet it demands to all and sundry, it has them. The people know it does not have them, and look elsewhere for their comfort. So prejudices and fear are brought to bear on all who disagree with it. It does not matter if you are President Bush, Dr Mahathir, Mr Goh Chok Tong, whoever: prejudice and fear is used so they could continue to remain in power. It is helped by the speed with which these prejudices and fears can be tanslated into national policy.
MGG Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.myhttp://www.mggpillai.com/article.php3?sid=1513
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