By Dr. S.M. Rahman

Napoleon said that "it required more courage to suffer than to die". The Muslim World, it appears, is in the predicament in which suffering is a way of life. A stoic sensibility makes it immune to the pain it encounters. Its miseries do not always flow from its failings, faltering injudgment, perception and making faulty decisions. The irony is that success often becomes its greatest fear.

Take the case ofMalaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad - though by profession a medical doctor, has prove a legendary social engineer, who with remarkable dexterity mingled with vision, speeded up his country's progress and prosperity to that theoretical curve which Rostow has termed a take-off stage.

A momentum so built altered the economic image of Malaysia to be one in the den of the Asian tigers. From the traditional exporter of raw material, it has emerged as a manufacturer of sophisticated electronic merchandise, telecommunication and electrical equipment, besides machines, textiles and other products, which are the hallmark of industrialized nations.

The achievements have been, the maintenance of a speedy growth rate around 8% or more, and keeping inflation well within control, not exceeding 3-4%. It was quite remarkable that by 1993, Malaysia's foreign exchange reserves shot up to US$28 billion and its outstanding external debt liabilities had come down from $21.4 billion to only US$15.4. The Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE), acquired a position of such magnitude that: it was ranked the fourth largest in Asia.

A climate of prosperity prevailed all over, and it was not limited to the privileged elite. Major funds were channelled into agriculture and rural developmental programmes. Production alone was not the objective; it was harmoniously blended with distributive justice. A sense of relief and economic well-being found vivid manifestation in all segments of Malay society. It was indeed through a visionary and dynamic leadership of Mahathir that social integration and cohesiveness was achieved and tensions which had resulted in racial violence between the Malaysians - the Bumiputras and those of the Chinese origin, were quite imaginatively brought to an end. Through an economic glueing of the nation, the Malaysian leader, vividly demonstrated that the real spirit of pluralistic polity can be maintained through sound planning.

Malaysia thus become a model for impoverished nations for investing into human resources and improving the quality of the lives of their people.The success was perceived as threat by the ardent proponents of capitalist system and the multinationals started exerting pressures, so that Mahathir's image as model to emulate was tarnished and he was brought into disrepute, through the powerful western media systematically mobilized for the furtherance of the economic hegemony.

The rapacious multinationals are thus working as dissolvent of nations' independence,

struggling to determine their indigenous policies, priorities and plans. In fact, the multinationals are the new version of 'imperialism', striving to keep the wealth and resources of developing nations under their grip, so that the affluence of the developed world can be sustained.

In fact, what the erstwhile East India Company had done to deprive the freedom of the people of the sub-continent in the nineteenth century establish the British rule, the multinationals today are doing the same in more refined and sophisticated ways, where political sovereignty of small nations are maintained as mere ceremonial entities while there is no freedom in the real sense of the term.

Total subservience to the dictates of the supra-economic bodies is a vital necessity. Economic choices are very limited within the parameters laid down by these bodies. Any venture to transgress it, trigger the manipulative mechanisms to bring the recalcitrant nations back to compliance and subservience.

Mahathir, with the zeal and enthusiasm to accelerate the pace of economic development of his country, created a very facilitative climate of foreign investment, which in turn, resulted in the activation of the multinationals' designs. They launched a vilification campaign against the Malaysian Prime Minister so that he is removed from the power base, and is succeeded by Anwer Ebrahim, the Foreign Minister. This way the economic resilience which Malaysia has gained would be subjected to a regressive process. Mahathir's fault is that he was forthright and candid in expressing his opinion about George Soros, who is the contemporary economic Machiavelli under the garb of so called globalisation, acting as the main disruptor of the South East Asian economy.

The western media unfortunately is all out for Soros to be projected as a hero and Mahathir as the devil. It goes to the credit of the Malaysian leader that endowed with the moral force of his conviction, he is single-handedly braving the onslaught. It is the bounden duty of the developing world to unitedly lend support to Malaysia in this hour of its peril. If such a robust economy of Malaysia, could be subjected to treacherous manipulations through the process of so called privatization and globalization, what would be the fate of relatively weak nations, who economically are not so sound, such as Pakistan, is a point to ponder.

Mahathir rightly perceived that the road to glory was through gaining economic strength. It is primarily for this reason that the Muslim World is not allowed to mobilise its collective efforts and to make a combined move towards gaining economic viability without which independence has no meaning and substance.

We have seen how manipulatively the Muslim World is being atomised and divided. First, the Iraq and Iran war was engineered so that their military and economic strengths are diluted through infighting and their national resources are squandered away. The so-called Gulf War, not only broke the back of Iraq, but most of the oil wealth of the region was brought under foreign control. Thailand and India are being patronised in the South Asian region and countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan are being marginalised.

If the so called 'fundamentalists' are maligned and condemned for their radical and extremist view, the liberals in the Islamic world are also not spared. Malaysia is a test case. Despite its liberal and modem values it is not being allowed to come at par with the developed nations of the world. In the "peeking order" of the world, the Muslims must remain at the lowest end of the continuum.

The oppressors will oppress, but the oppressed must realise that discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. Lincoln said: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it."

[Top of Page]

© DAWN Group of Newspapers, 1997