Western thoughts are 'anti-Islam': Scholars
JAKARTA (JP): Modern and post-modern Western thought, which dominates international literature and art, is against tradition and religion, including Islam, a leading Malaysian scholar said yesterday.
"If you review at least three founding fathers of modern western thinking, you will have such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin. Their thoughts are very much anti- religion, for that matter anti-Islam," Salleh Yaapar, the dean of the School of Humanities of the Malaysia Science University, told The Jakarta Post.
In Western thought, God has become a "laughing stock", Salleh said after presenting the keynote address at the opening of an international poetry reading festival being held at ongoing Istiqlal Festival of Islamic Arts and Culture here.
"We here still very much believe in the existence of God. Don't' we? But in the West, the notion of God is something that they laugh about. 'What's God? Where's God? Have you seen one?'" Salleh said.
He said that Indonesian and Malaysian intellectuals had, unfortunately, also been affected by that kind of thinking, something which he attributed to the colonial past.
"Although you may say that, we are Merdeka (free) now and are no longer being colonized, but culturally, we are not much independent," he said.
"Culturally, I think it is very difficult for us to become completely independent. Like here you have parabola. You cannot stop children from watching foreign programs."
Noted Indonesian painter A.D. Pirous, addressing the opening ceremony, also warned about the dangers of the dominance of Western thought -- either modernism or post-modernism.
"The dominance of Western thought, either on behalf of modernism, like secular humanism, social realism and other related thought, or those who consider themselves to represent post-modern thought, like feminism, deconstructionism, post- colonial thought and others -- all have pushed us into a climate of intellectual uncertainty," Pirous said.
"Under such conditions, any thinking that has some religious connotations will easily be targeted as a laughing stock and met with sarcastic remarks," he said. "It is now opportune for us, Muslim poets and writers, to stand up and take our pens and sharpen our minds to express our intellectual and cultural aspirations as well as our esthetic views."
The festival, which will go on until Oct. 22 at Taman Ismail Marzuki, will feature 42 poets from 14 countries.
Indonesian poets participating in the event include Acep Zamzam Noor, Abdul Hadi WM, Agus R. Sarjono, Ahmaddun Yosi Herfanda, A. Mustofa Bisri, BY Tand, D. Zawawi Imron, Goenawan Mohamad, Hamid Jabbar, Husni Jamaluddin, Ikranagara, Leon Agusta, Rayani Sriwidodo, Rendra, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Sitok Srengenge, Slamet Sukirnanto, Sutardji Calzoum Bachri, Taufik Ismail, Toeti Heraty and Warih Wisatsana.
Malaysian poets participating are A. Azis bin Deraman, A. Samad Said, Kemala, Muhammad Haji Salleh, Rizi S.S., Siti Zainon Ismail and Zaiton A. Djamain.
Other poets taking part are Ahmed Al-Bara Al-Amiri (Saudi Arabia), Abdul Razak Abdul Wahid (Iraq), Akhalaq Mohammad Khan (India), Ataol Behramoglu (Turkey), Ayesha Abdullah Scott (Britain), Ghassan Kholil Zaktan (Palestine), Iftikhar Arif (Pakistan), Imad Qfuf (Jordan), Khalil Mujhidin Al-Barada'i (Syria), Mas Osman (Brunei Darussalam), Mohamed Latif Mohamed (Singapore), Muhammad Elthohamy Sayed Ahmad (Egypt) and Suratman Markasan (Singapore). (31)