Malaysia Leader Urges Modernization to Foil Muslims' Oppressors : Mahathir Tells IslamTo EmbraceTechnology
International Herald Tribune
June 28, 2000
Thomas Fuller

Exhorting Muslim leaders to reduce divisions among themselves, Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia urged government officials and diplomats from around the world Tuesday to embrace science and technology and combat those who "oppress" Muslims.

"Technologically backward and economically poor, we will slide further and further into depending on others for everything that we need," the prime minister said, addressing a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a grouping of 56 Muslim countries.

"We are behind the rest of the world," he said. "Knowledge other than Islamic knowledge is condemned by many of us as secular."

A Malaysian official described Mr. Mahathir's speech as an attempt to remake the battered image of Muslim countries and said it cut to the heart of a notion debated throughout the Muslim world: that Islamic countries need to switch their focus from religious teaching to science and technology in order to progress economically and compete with the West.

"Malaysia is trying to show the world that you can be Muslim but at the same time embrace modernity," the official said.

Mr. Mahathir's speech covered themes he has repeated over and over to domestic audiences, but his comments had special poignancy in light of recent developments in Southeast Asia, where ethnic strife, chiefly between Muslims and Christians, has flared up in eastern Indonesia and the southern Philippines.

The prime minister's comments came two months after a radical Islamic group kidnapped 21 people, many of them foreign tourists, from a Malaysian diving resort, an incident that officials here say has helped to further tarnish the image of Islam in the region.

"Islamic countries are always perceived as illiterate, terrorists, under-developed," Syed Hamid Albar, Malaysia's foreign minister, said before the meeting began Tuesday. "This is an opportunity to produce something that can give a better perception and view of the OIC," he said, referring to the Islamic grouping.

Delegates at the conference, most of them foreign ministers from member countries, praised Mr. Mahathir's speech for its focus on science, technology and economic development.

"When people say there is a contradiction between science and Islam, they don't understand true Islamic teachings," said Ali Naggary, Egyptian ambassador to Malaysia. "The message of the Koran is 'Read! Learn!"' In his characteristically blunt and confrontational style, Mr. Mahathir denounced undesirable side-effects of globalization. He was both self-critical and scathing of detractors "who do their very best to weaken us and in many instances to destroy us." He spoke of the "muck and filth" found on the Internet. And he spoke in terms of "us and them," railing against the world's corporate giants.

"Mergers and acquisitions have made them so big that sovereign states are comparable only to a department of these giant corporations," he said. "They will be able to swallow up all the tiny banks, industries and businesses that we possess. In the end we will be like banana republics where the managers of the plantations are more powerful than the presidents of these countries."

Delegates defended Mr. Mahathir's strident words.

"He's not saying we have to wage a war against globalization," said Sheikh Tidiane Gadio, foreign minister of Senegal. "What he's saying is, 'Why not defend ourselves?' We are able to unite. Let's not blame globalization."

There were distinct echoes of Mr. Mahathir's own political troubles in his speech. After several years of emphatically embracing the use of the Internet, for example, Mr. Mahathir has found that the global network provides his critics with an avenue of dissent that did not exist in the country's tightly controlled print media. Some of the most dedicated users of the Internet in Malaysia are opponents of Mr. Mahathir's government.

"The spread of knowledge is now unstoppable," Mr. Mahathir said. "But information is not always about knowledge. It is about muck and filth and unmitigated lies spread by people wishing to undermine the development of human society."

More broadly, Mr. Mahathir spoke in elliptical terms of his own political dilemma. Politics in Malaysia, one of the Muslim world's top economic success stories, are pulling the country in two different directions, with conservatives focusing on the importance of a religious education, head scarves for women and prohibitions on alcohol and gambling.

Mr. Mahathir denounces what he calls "quibbles over Islamic credentials" and says Muslims should return to the early days of the religion, when the Islamic world was known for its scholars, libraries and scientists.

Mr. Mahathir also emphasizes the role of economic development and nurtures a generation of Muslim business leaders in his country.

Azeddine Laraki, the secretary-general of the Islamic grouping, commented Tuesday that Islam and business had been complementary for centuries.

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