I write in response to the respected Dr M Bakri Musa's article, 'Competition - the right vaccine for bumi students' (May 21).

I would agree with a lot of what the good doctor proposed but I fail to understand what the author means by "Malays today, with their fondness for Malay and Islamic Studies, are behaving just like their counterparts in China during the Cultural Revolution".

Perhaps this is due to my own shortcomings or because of my frame of reference. The writer seems to imply that the cause of the problems facing Malays is a lack of interest in science and their over-interest in the arts and Islamic studies.

Certainly this is not the case; in recent years more and more Muslims are abandoning their religious education for a more secular one.

To de-construct this notion that the reason for Muslims' backwardness is due to their 'over-interest' in religious studies, we have to look at our past. Muslims were the forerunners of science, technology and were responsible for bringing 'modern' science to Europe.

I need not cite any reference, even any western history book acknowledges this. One also has to look into history to find that almost all of the great scientists of the Muslim world were themselves religious scholars and possessed a religious education background.

So what is the problem then? For part of the answer, perhaps we have to go back 200 years, to the beginning of the colonisation by Western powers. It is to do with how 19th century Europe viewed non-European nations.

They divided the world into two broad categories; the civilised and the uncivilised. Thus, they justified colonisation as a 'civilising project', in which they claimed that they brought civilisation to the East.

This discourse broke down with the breakout of the first and second world wars in Europe, which was considered to be the worst and most inhumane wars in history, in which millions where killed and brutally tortured. Consequently, Europe lost its moral ground for dictating social norms to other nations.

Nonetheless, with the end of the world wars, colonisation was coming to an end, and a new kind of movement arose in the colonised world. This movement was called nationalism. On the surface, the nationalist movement was good and empowering.

However, as time went on, most of its advocates, particularly among the political elite, were neo-colonialist themselves; being educated in the West, they took on Western paradigms.

They saw that the problems facing the colonised world were mainly due to their countries lagging behind in the industrial revolution, sweeping Europe at the time.

As a result, they adopted a strategy of 'catching up' and modernisation which mirrored the West, with little consideration of local and indigenous needs and circumstances.

These are to me the biggest problems faced by modern political and reform movements in the East, which seem to copy the West to such an extent that they become more 'Western' than the West themselves.

Thus, the method used in the West for their modernisation process, one of which was the separation of state and church, may not work and may prove disastrous to the East, especially to a state like Malaysia.

However, advocates of this type of reform seem to promote it with such enthusiastic fervour that they lose perspective of local needs and concerns. The result of which are such ills like hedonism, corruption, low morals, disrespect to elders, disregard of simple values and ethics, wanting the 'quick and easy' method and many others as already apparent today.

These sicknesses, as a result of 'mirror modernisation' of the West, without its proper context, has resulted in ourselves becoming worse, than the originator of the method.

The best way to tackle the low achievement of the Islamically inclined Malays in science would be, in my view, to make science and technology more in compliance with Islamic ethics and principle.

This should be followed by encouraging more Muslims to take it as a serious alternative to helping their fellow mankind as the Muslims of the past did, with the likes of Albiruni and Ibn Sina; all of them were well versed in the Islamic sciences.

Furthermore, by re-establishing this link with the past, one could argue that it could empower the Malays to rediscover their rightful heritage and enable them to compete on equal footing with their non-Malay brothers and sisters.

After all this is exactly what the Chinese have done: By maintaining a strong link with their past, they have succeeded in their worldly endeavours.

This blatant dismissal of those studying Islamic science could have the opposite effect and is an insult to most Muslims, with myself not being an exception.