Professor blunders: Lacks historical perspective

COMMENT Let us begin by stating the obvious.

When there was no Malaysia, no independent Federation of Malaya, the seeking of ‘Merdeka' could not have been the seeking of Malayan or Malaysian Merdeka.

Professor Khoo Kay Kim (right) is talking here of a time when the notion of a greater Malay world or Alam Melayu - not just as a cultural construct or vague geographical notion but as a potential political community of common fate - was not fanciful but in fact "in play politically" and hence, in a way, very "real".

That idea - even if it was of a potential or hypothetical political community rather than one that then existed as an internationally recognised sovereign political entity - had a political reality and life at that time that our more recent (and then still to be fashioned) political ideas, in the nature of the case, did not have and could not then have had.

We are taking here of a time long before anybody ever dreamed of the Alliance Party or BN, and of a Malaysia that would include two Borneo states but not Singapore or Brunei, or whatever it is that we all, and especially the distinguished professor, may now take for granted today.

And, it should also be noted here, that notion of a broad regional Alam Melayu, as a cultural and historical construct and prospectively more than that, is still, even in our own times, considered plausible and sustainable, especially among partisans and champions of what is now the "dominant historical consciousness and narrative".

It is not only popularly accepted in our own present age, but is also officially endorsed. Over the years, the Malaysian government has sponsored a number of conferences and other initiatives to launch, promote and support this very idea.

So it is not one to be simply "pooh-poohed": dismissed as a naïve failure, an irrelevance, an error of simpler times.

The seeking of Merdeka, or national independence and self-rule, at that time could be situated - indeed, naturally had to be - in that conceptual context, within that horizon of current political thinking.

That was, and is still now to be seen in hindsight from the present, as just as plausible and "natural" as any other "national independence" or Merdeka project that might then have been pursued and promoted.

Certainly, it was one that had more grip upon and foundation within the political realities and thinking of the times than any political project, including certain "Malaya-centric" or "peninsular-focused" notions, that might be grounded in ideas and concepts that were yet to be created and given effective political life.

Khoo has blundered

The historian's task is to chart and explain how concepts of that later kind were developed and ultimately came to prevail over the older, broader, and in many ways more deeply rooted notions of a ‘Malay World' or Alam Melayu with a common or cognate cultural inheritance and, at least prospectively, a common political fate.

It is not to read back the "taken-for-granted common sense notions" of the present into earlier times, when they would have been as foreign to contemporary consciousness as a handphone or text messages.

In other words, the veteran professor has blundered. He has committed the most elementary of historiographical errors: an unwitting and unacknowledged anachronism.

His view is the equivalent of faulting the ideas of the French Revolution, of saying that the thinking of the republican revolutionaries of 1789 to 1792, are to be rejected and reviled on the grounds that they fail to anticipate - to see the possibility, to couch themselves in the political idiom and to address the political concerns of - the age of Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterand, Jacques Chirac or Nicolas Sarkozy (left).

There may be other, more appropriate grounds for analysing those ideas, for finding fault in the ideas of that earlier time and declaring them "lacking".

But that kind of critique is, and would soon be seen as, ridiculous, and ridiculously unhistorical. Simply inadequate, and at any university examination, a failure.

It is the same here in this case.

From the nation's leading and most celebrated historians. people, and the nation, are entitled to expect a serviceable, functioning historical consciousness and attitude.

HANG BABEUF is a Malaysiakini subscriber.