On the 17th of March, 2009, the Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Najib Tun Razak launched The National Integrity Plan report, dubbed “Target 2008” (TEKAD 2008), at the Malaysian Institute of Integrity. The report, purportedly an assessment of the country’s progress in promoting integrity, among others recommends that all the five priorities set in…
In the Holy Qur’an there are several occasions where one can find some accounts of Adam’s encounter with man’s nemesis, Iblis. Carefully attending to those accounts with intelligence, sincerity and honesty can surely help Muslims derive useful lessons, insights and reminders not only about human strength and potentials but also human weaknesses and vulnerability. One such…
Power for its own sake. Budaya “kuasa” untuk “kuasa” kerana “kuasa.” Such is the Malay maxim uttered by the Regent of Perak, Y.T.M. Raja Dr. Nazrin Shah Sultan Azlan Shah, on Jan 15, 2009, in his Closing Address to The Third Islamic Economic Congress, to describe the epidemic besieging the Muslims in Malaysia, particularly the…
It is to be duly noted that one of the distinctive features of the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam, is the utmost care given to the correct and precise connotation and denotation of terminologies, a feature rendered possible by the root system of the Arabic language. As such, it is commonplace in this…
Should it be tadbir urus or urus tadbir? Those of us who have been reading some recent writings in Malay on “governance” or, more specifically, “good governance,” would have encountered the aforementioned two compound words, although not many of us may have thought it worthwhile to investigate which of the two usages is correct. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka…
By now, I strongly believe, we Malaysians are no stranger to calls for reform of our educational system. So often have such calls been made that they cannot but leave some general impressions. One such impression is that the system as well as its stake-holders is obsessed with examinations at the various levels of the…
In about another week Muslims worldwide will celebrate the coming of the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar, Ramadan, the month of obligatory fasting which is one of the five pillars of Islam. Deriving from the Holy Qur’an and the Prophetic Traditions, it has been an established practice among Muslims to remind themselves of…
Thinking, being an epistemic act, is an integral cognitive component of science. Since expanding the frontiers of human knowledge is one of the main concerns in science, creativity as a phenomenon of thinking is a subject which has drawn the attention of many researchers. In a number of attempts to account for creative thinking, one…
It has been a prevalent understanding in the intellectual tradition of Islam that man in his very constitution reflects what is there in the outer world. In other words, man is the microcosmic representation of the macrocosm, the universe at large. Some scholars of that tradition went even further to assert that what is outside…
April 4 began with what by now is an annual affair, the ten-day long Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair (KLIBF) at the Putra Trade World Centre (PWTC). Although it is one of the very few events worth attending by book lovers, it remains essentially an event for players with stakes in the book industry. The…
