Anwar Ibrahim’s ‘Postnormal Times MADANI Exhibition’ Aims to Change Malaysia’s Conversation

[ad_1] Since making huge electoral features in 2022, Malaysia’s Pan-Malaysian Islamic Celebration (PAS) has invested closely in historical past and historiography to provide new, exclusionary narratives that undermine the authority of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s multi-ethnic coalition. These narratives assert that Malaysia’s majority Malay group and its Islamic religion are beneath risk, whereas the nation’s minorities, notably Chinese language and Indian Malaysians, are unentitled to the political rights inherent in citizenship.

In distinction, Anwar’s authorities has shied away from issuing principled rebuttals to PAS’s claims. In two latest state by-elections in Kelantan and Penang, it challenged PAS solely tactically, the place it did so in any respect.

There may be, nevertheless, a extra strategic side of the ideological contest now unfolding in Malaysia, targeted not on rebutting PAS and its allies – which skilled advocates typically think about a type of unfavourable campaigning – however on steering the nationwide dialog in a unique path by setting an alternate political agenda. That's Anwar’s newest funding in his “Malaysia MADANI” marketing campaign, via which he has sought to advance a imaginative and prescient of a civil and inclusive nation fairly than participating in divisive debates over race, faith, and the character of citizenship.

That funding is on show within the Postnormal Occasions MADANI Exhibition, now exhibiting in Kuala Lumpur’s Berjaya Occasions Sq. Mall. Scheduled to point out for a minimum of one other 12 months, the exhibition builds on a earlier, 2023 iteration held on the Kuala Lumpur Jazz and Artwork Centre, and on the themes contained in Anwar’s 2022 ebook “SCRIPT for a Higher Malaysia.” (SCRIPT stands for Sustainability, Care and Compassion, Respect, Innovation, Prosperity, and Belief. MADANI is the Malay model of the SCRIPT acronym.)

SCRIPT, which I've mentioned elsewhere, is a framework for setting out Anwar’s start line for multi-directional “polylogues” – as distinct from two-party “dialogues” – on a variety of complicated and contradictory phenomena now participating residents and policymakers alike. These phenomena embody the exhibition’s themes: the post-truth media, the AI revolution, genetic modifying, the local weather disaster, the worldwide COVID-19 shutdown, and degraded programs of presidency – all of which the exhibition argues characterize our “postnormal instances.”

As outlined by the exhibition’s creator, the outstanding Muslim mental Ziauddin Sardar, who additionally heads the Centre for Postnormal Coverage and Futures Research (CPPFS), these instances have us all residing awkwardly suspended between the “now not” and the “not but.” Paraphrasing Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Sardar has outlined in his writing that at current, the “outdated orthodoxies are dying, new ones haven't but emerged, and only a few issues appear to make sense.” Sardar, a key mover in futures research, was Anwar’s training adviser within the Nineteen Nineties, and can also be a one-time Muslim pupil activist, former professor of postcolonial research, and a former commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Fee in the UK.

Sardar, like Anwar, seems to have developed an understanding that creating viable futures for postcolonial peoples won't entail creating autonomous zones or knowledges for purportedly discrete and distinct “civilizations” – like Muslims – to endlessly discover their variations.

Relatively, Muslims, like all different postcolonial peoples, are a part of a single, planetary civilization, and subsequently should settle for residing interdependently with others, interacting with openness to create a good, equitable future for all. That is the perspective that infuses the Postnormal Occasions exhibition, which is genuinely glorious, consisting of a sequence of chambers put in by Rock, Paper, Scissors, a Kuala Lumpur branding, design, and advertising and marketing company.

Co-curated and written by Sardar and CPPFS Assistant Director Scott Jordan, the exhibition’s multimedia shows provoke viewers with questions, statements, pictures, and movies designed to push them into some discomfort, whereas additionally reassuring them by speaking with them in English and Malay, utilizing imagery that's each world and native.

Not like exhibitions within the Nationwide Museum or any of its state counterparts, Postnormal Occasions is daring, fascinating, communicates instantly with folks of all ages, challenges them to think about points past their day by day, native battles, and factors out that there are not any straightforward solutions.

As such, it's pedagogical fairly than didactic, as many government-run exhibitions are usually, which is the rationale schoolchildren don't attend them with a lot enthusiasm. On this case, in line with conversations with the exhibition crew, 1000's of secondary college youngsters have responded positively throughout their visits, as have most civil servants, schoolteachers, lecturers, and different teams who've toured it because it opened in Could of final 12 months.

Others, nevertheless, have responded with concern over the exhibition’s difficult nature, together with guests related to the nation’s spiritual forms, which consists of organizations like JAKIM and the state Islamic companies. As they're typically criticized for being too huge and uncontrolled, Anwar seems to be trying to encourage these companies to have interaction with larger issues than controlling Muslims’ on a regular basis habits, together with by inserting JAKIM representatives in each authorities division.

Finally, the exhibition, just like the ebook SCRIPT, is frank with Malaysians concerning the reality there isn't a particular components for addressing the nation’s, or the world’s, a number of, interconnected challenges. It does, nevertheless, ask Malaysians to be guided by the “ethical compass” that “Malay, Chinese language, Indian, Dayak, Orang Asli, [and] Eurasian” residents all share, together with the values contained within the SCRIPT acronym.

Given the exhibition’s pedagogical in addition to creative focus, I ask why it's tucked away in such an unassuming, even timid, location – the highest ground of one in all Kuala Lumpur’s many procuring malls. Whereas simply accessible by the general public, it's nonetheless at a long way from the nation’s primary cultural establishments, any of which may moderately function channels for a nationwide intervention sponsored by a serving prime minister, and all of which ought to have energetic advertising and marketing and social media methods.

These establishments, similar to universities, museums, movie manufacturing companies, colleges, publishers, and analysis funding companies, all seem, exactly as Sardar warns, caught between the outdated and the brand new. They're both largely unresponsive to Malaysia’s ongoing political and social transformation, or actively driving narratives that open alternatives for PAS. The Nationwide Museum, for instance, seems frozen in time, with its overarching narrative linking the Sultanate of Malacca’s putatively superb previous with the developmentalist insurance policies of Malaysia’s once-dominant United Malays Nationwide Group. In the meantime, PAS-friendly movies and YouTube channels about different, suppressed histories, often centering on Malay Muslims and their various anti-colonial traditions, are booming in reputation.

Nor are the nationwide establishments straightforward to vary, with proposed overhauls probably triggering racially charged debates concerning the language and content material of museum displays and training curricula, and certainly debates about who deserves to talk for Malaysia, and even think about themselves true Malaysians. With Anwar’s “Madani” coalition of coalitions continually needing energetic political administration to maintain all its members singing the identical tune, such adjustments stand an opportunity of setting components of the federal government in opposition to one another.

In the meantime, with out additional public elaboration, civil society organizations like Bersih have raised affordable issues that MADANI may stay an empty slogan.

Like the federal government, the MADANI exhibition has a blind spot the place historical past is worried, regardless of the sphere of futures research recognizing that efforts to heal historic traumas – for instance, across the that means of Malaya’s anti-colonial rebellions, its communist insurgency, and its race riots in 1969 – are the important thing to orienting publics in the direction of discussing shared futures. These are exactly the historic episodes that PAS is deploying to its benefit through its extremely efficient social media outreach.

And but, given how laborious it's to rework establishments, this exhibition must do for now. On the very least, it's producing conversations. One visiting authorities minister needed one in all its mild sculptures on show in each mosque to encourage worshippers to consider larger points than nationwide political positioning. Different, much less admiring, feedback have included options that there will probably be a brand new authorities, with new priorities, in energy in a number of years, so why hassle listening to Anwar’s newest pet subjects?

One purpose for doing so is that the distinction between the approaches of PAS and Anwar supplies a examine in strategic communications, together with the query of whether or not political opponents ought to compete on the identical floor, instantly rebutting one another, or stake out separate territories and discourses in a bid to “change the dialog” as an alternative. With Anwar’s intervention contained inside a shopping center, nevertheless, one should ask if they're competing on the identical phrases.