Last October I attended the ASEAN-Canada Dialogue on Interfaith Initiatives held in Surabaya. The delegates were from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, Myanmar and the Ambassador and officials from the Canadian Embassy in Jakarta.
The Dialogue’s aims were to review concrete activities and initiatives in order to minimize social tensions and to object to the increasing rise of terrorism and radical encounters. It focused on the role of youth, education and media towards fostering better inter-religious and intercultural understanding among the young generations from the different religious groups.
Representing Malaysia at the event, I explained our position, rather unsatisfactorily though, mainly due to the time constraints allocated to me. I would therefore like to reiterate and refine some of my points here.
The term ‘youth’ refers to those between childhood and adulthood. Malaysia’s Youth Societies and Youth Development Act 2007 defines ‘youth’ as a person not less than 15 and not more than 40 years old-perhaps the only country in the world to prescribe such an age bracket!
The United Nations (UN) nevertheless defines it more realistically, as being between 15 and 24. Although I generally agree with the Malaysian definition, I prefer the UN’s definition.
Malaysia’s statistics show that that youth constitute about 20% of the total 27.5 million population, i.e. about 5.5 million. They shoulder the tremendous responsibility of shaping, leading and improving the future of this nation.
Our government has been introducing policies and implementing actions to mould our young generation towards a better future. The most fundamental prerequisite is the unity of all inhabitants resulting from a reasonable inter-religious and intercultural understanding of all religious and ethnic groups. This is done through education.
Education refers to the process of instilling ‘something’ into human beings. And that ‘something’ is the inculcation of values. It deals with self inner enhancement, the formation of right worldview and attitude, resulting in good behaviour, pointing to the fact that the purpose of education is to produce a good man, not merely a good citizen.
Education is not concerned with the teaching of skills or know-how knowledge because one can train a parrot to say ‘So and so is evil’ but the animal can never understand what that evil means.
In Malaysia, we have started our intercultural understanding efforts from a very early age with the Vision School Project for primary school pupils. The achievement of its noble objectives is commendable thus far. At the secondary level, the compulsory teaching of history, in which world civilizations are taught, has been done.
In addition, there is the 3-month National Service Programme specially designed for SPM students whereby inter-religious understanding, mutual respect, national solidarity and patriotism are apparently nurtured.
Although they were included in my paper, I was unable to tell the audience about the TITAS Programme, where world cultures are taught in greater detail in our universities.
I was also unable to highlight the roles played by other governmental institutions, like the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Ministry of Unity, Culture, Arts and Heritage (specifically the National Unity and Integrity Department) and the Institute of Islamic Understanding (IKIM) where discourses and programmes towards inter-religious understanding are regularly held.
Equally disappointing was that I was unable to mention the initiatives taken by various NGOs towards the same objective.
Amidst all the frustration, I managed to emphasize two things. Firstly, we must not attempt any dialogue which indulge on theological matters. We must agree to disagree in this area. No agreement is possible in that regard. We can only agree in terms of ethics and morality as there are obvious parallelisms in these realms.
Secondly, regardless of our religions and cultures, we can also stand united as far as rejecting secularism as it is opposed to all religions and value systems. Although I was unable to explain it in detail, its brief features elaborated on in my paper triggered admiration from the Singaporean representatives.
Now the time has come to ask ourselves-a question I deliberately did not raise in Surabaya. Have we done enough to foster the inter-religious/cultural understanding among the youth? Are our youth prepared to embrace such an idea? Many would agree that we are not, as our mutual understanding, and consequently unity, still looks fragile due to the fact that our youth are not properly guided in the desired direction.
Despite the best efforts of many, we have to accept the bitter reality that our educational system is still struggling to prepare our youth to develop within themselves a sufficient degree of intercultural understanding. Its success is questionable as we can still see the polarization of ethnic groups happening at all levels. Many are aware that real unity is yet to become manifest.
What can we expect if our educational system still maintains the policies of vernacular schools? Our political set up seems to provide room to entertain the demands of the three main ethnic groups in this country. While we are supposed to have only one type of national school in which all our children, regardless of race, may attend and receive their early education, we still defend these schools on the basis of race. Some of us tend to become fanatical and extreme in this regard.
It is still something very practical for all Malaysians to follow a real standard of education system while at the same time maintaining our ethnic identities. Our emphasis must be the formation of a better inter-religious and intercultural understanding within our younger generation. Early exposure to a mixed environment will facilitate understanding. The end result is real and concrete national unity to face the challenges of the world together as a nation, rather than struggle to face each other as a result of tolerable differences.