The Raid

I can’t recommend The Raid: Redemption.  It’s an Indonesian action movie that has won some acclaim internationally.  I watched it because I’d seen Merantau, by the same director (Gareth Evans) and starring the same actor (Iko Uwais).  Merantau wasn’t bad if you are a martial arts fan: the production quality was high and the pencak silat was great.  Silat is the Nusantara’s indigenous martial art and it draws on Islam for its spiritual discipline in the same way that the more famous martial arts of Northeast Asia do with Buddhism.  Merantau has several memorable fight scenes including an extended duel in an elevator that shows off silat’s close, compact fighting style well. The crowded alleys of Jakarta and the hillside kampongs made good backdrops too.  The plot was predictable and the acting strictly average but you could forgive it that if you came for the silat.

So when I heard The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan Maut) was even better I gave it a chance, hoping they’d stepped up the plot and the acting. They … went in a different direction. The plot was a 30-second contrivance to set up an hour and a half of grisly non-stop murder and mayhem inside a broken-down Jakarta tenement.   It was truly gruesome, with a lot of the open hand stuff replaced with gun, knife and machete slaughter.  Even my 14-year-old boy was disgusted, though I confess we both sat it through to the end.

What struck me though were the subtitles.  The sergeant says “Diam!” and the subtitles read “Shut the %&$* up!”  Diam just means quiet, nothing more. The hero calls the villain “Anjing!” and the subtitles read “%&$* you, you #*%!”  Anjing just means dog, the same word for dog you’d see in a see-the-dog-run children’s book.  And it was just relentless: the subtitles were inserting all this vile English profanity that just wasn’t there in the Indonesian.  Here was the goriest, most brainless bloodbath of a movie, and no one uttered a four-letter word.

Maybe I missed a few, since the movie was in rapid-fire Indonesian.  But the more I thought about it, I realized, in the nearly ten years I’ve been here, I’ve never heard a single word of profanity uttered in Bahasa Malaysia.  I’ve seen people get angry, get frustrated, suffer an injury, but I’ve never heard them curse.  I know the words exist, I know what they are, but I’ve never heard them used.  I know, I know: I’m a boring middle-aged homebody with religious proclivities.  I’m sure if I hung out with glue-sniffing teenagers under the bridge it would be different.  But I think it is fair to say that vulgarity and profanity are simply not as pervasive and accepted as they are back in the States. 

But so yeah, I can’t recommend The Raid.  If martial arts aren’t your thing but you want to try some Indonesian cinema, 9 Naga (Nine Dragons) was good.  Watch that instead.  Of course, I'm not really very knowledgable about local films.  Next up for me is Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa.  Any good? If you have recommendations for Malaysian or Indonesian cinema, I’d like to hear them.

Commercialization of Sacred Space

There is no call as important as the summons of the Lord

The masjid is a sacred place, a house of God, and among the ways that sacredness is respected is by refraining from idle talk while inside. Handphones have been a terrible scourge in this regard, with phones ringing, even being answered, in the middle of congregational prayer. No doubt this is why signs have proliferated all over the country bearing the message Tiada Panggilan Sepenting Seruan Ilahi: There Is No Call as Important as the Summons of the Lord. A lovely thought well expressed. But the moment I saw this sign, I became troubled, because there at the bottom, in large font, are the logos of the phone company and cellular provider who have paid for and distributed the signs. Now ostensibly to curb noise disruptions, we have corporate advertising inside the prayer halls of our masjids for the first time. In my neighborhood masjid, the sign is posted at eye level just to the side of the minbar!

I felt sure this was bad precedent, and indeed it was not long after that I spotted first one, then another masjid with a corporate-sponsored signboard. The company in this case is Bank Rakyat, a cooperative bank (akin to a credit union back in the states) that has been innovative and successful in the Islamic finance market. I bank with them myself. But having a mosque signboard emblazoned with a prominent logo is extremely problematic in several ways, not least is the danger to the company of compromising their own charity.

A sincere contribution

The etiquette of charitable giving in Islam, sadaqah, is for it to be as anonymous as possible, to protect the dignity of the recipient and to safeguard the giver from compromising his gift with worldy motives of pride, or worse, material benefit. And how can we not avoid seeing this as precisely the latter when the sign says Sumbangan Ikhlas, a sincere contribution, followed by a huge logo and then bank pilihan, a bank of choice? An signboard in exchange for advertising is not sincere charity, it is quid pro quo no different and no better than the Nescafe or Celcom-branded awnings adorning the sides of every other kedai runcit and kopitiam in Malaysia.

Posting a corporate logo at the front of a masjid amounts to an endorsement by the masjid. Presumably the acceptability of this branding (and the value of the advertising to the contributor, let’s not forget!) rests in the fact that this is a mosque and the bank provides Islamic finance. It is not hard to interpret it as a sign of preference over this or that other bank which may have Islamic banking products as well – CIMB Islamic, Maybank Islamic, etc. Let’s not forget, Bank Rakyat’s products and services may all be shariah-compliant, but that does not mean that this profit-making enterprise is somehow more holy than a Gardenia or Taka Bakery which produces halal breads and pastries. If we can accept a bank’s logo on our masjid, why not a bakery’s logo, or even a Nescafe awning like the kopitiams? Nescafe is a halal-certified product after all.

Hap Joo Grocers, brought to you by Stayfree Maxis

But if for nothing else, our state Islamic departments and the hardworking brothers and sisters on the neighborhood masjid and surau committees should view the matter seriously for the sake of the humble worshipper for whom the masjid is a place of refuge from the affairs of the world, a place to turn to Allah and glorify His name, to leave aside all else. The masjid is virtually the only public space free from the intrusions of the marketplace, and that is worth defending.

Read the Books Your Father Read

Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an influential theorist in the decade I was born. I had heard of his most famous work, Deschooling Society, and it had been recommended to me more than once I’m sure, no doubt because I homeschooled in the 6th and 12th grades. But I had only a passing awareness of the man and his work when I stumbled across Medical Nemesis, his critique of modern medicine and its role in society. I was thunderstruck. Reading Medical Nemesis I discovered a scholarly explanation and defense of the values I was raised with, ideas that I accepted and took for granted as just the way our family lived, yet ideas I was aware were and still are in fairly stark opposition to most people around us. Reading this book, I realized: my father and mother had read this and were influenced by it, and no doubt many of their friends, the parents of my closest and truest friends. This book shaped an important part of who I am, although I had never read it.

In any time and place there are a cloud of active ideas wafting around, some are elevated and canonized, some are cast down and ignored by the larger society, but those spurned ideas perpetuate through generations even after their originators and their books are long forgotten. Maybe I’m making a lot out of a simple truism. But like a lot of cliched proverbs or expressions, the depth of meaning doesn’t appear until you “taste the salt”, as the Malays have it. Des’ree was probably just heralding wisdom from her mother when she said, “Read the Books Your Father Read”, but I heard it from her first, and now I think I know better what she means.
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A great deal of Illich’s work is available freely on the web.
A recent review of Illich’s ideas about technology in The Atlantic

Minnows Nipped My Flesh

Mount Kinabalu

Took a trip to Sabah around the turn of last year. Mount Kinabalu, the tallest mountain in Malaysia, was impressive: you can see the rocky top with two spurs sticking up like horns on a giant beast. The top of the mountain is above the tree line, and was glaciated long ago. It isn’t cold enough to get ice nowadays, although there are mountains with glaciers in the tropics even now, in nearby New Guinea. I didn’t realize how thin my blood had grown; I was shivering and blue on the trip into the mountains although the temperature was probably not much below 50F. We didn’t have time to go inside the park,

Medinilla sp

which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the hillside rest stop was nice, and I found this lovely Medinilla on the road to the park’s front gate.

We visited Tenom Agricultural Park, a well-maintained arboretum with a nice ornamental plant collection. The visit was part of a field trip from my workplace. Those are my plantation and nursery coworkers throughout the photos. It was my favorite part of the trip; in fact, I would have been happy to have spent the whole time there. Among the highlights were a large orchid area and a great fruit tree collection including a few non-commercial fruit trees I’d never seen before.

Near the orchid house
Pandan Laut, Pandanus tectorius
Tanduk Rusa, Antler fern
Rubber tapping
Orthosiphon, Misai Kuching, Cat’s Whiskers
At the Sabah Dairy
Giant Lilypads, Victoria sp
Forgot what this was
Nice Bark
Calliandra sp
Cannonball Tree! Fragrant flowers, terrifying fruit.

On the way down from Mount Kinabalu we stopped at a Kadazan-Dusun village that has developed a tourist attraction popular among locals: a fish spa. The river had a number of wading pools, each with schools of trained fish. Stick your foot in the river with a handful of fish food and the fish swarm around, nipping at your skin and brushing against you with their scaly selves. Sit down in a deeper pool and you get a full body massage of sorts. It was extremely ticklish, and there were constant shrieks and giggles in the air. Our guide was the head of the village and the developer of the water park, which is run as a village cooperative. He told us the fish were well trained – different schools keep to different pools and they never swim away down river.

Tagal Sg Moroli
Minnows nipped my flesh at the Tagal Sungai Moroli

This particular village was muslim, although the Kadazan-Dusun like the Melanau back in Sarawak are religiously mixed. The village surau was built up the hill adjacent to the park. It was a simple structure, with a large yard for community activities. Check out the rainwater-fed ablution area.

Kpg Luanti Baru
Outside the Kpg Luanti Baru Surau
Inside the Kpg Luanti Baru Surau
Kpg Luanti Baru Surau rain-fed ablutions area

There was a dusty wooden shack next to the bus stop, which I assumed was one of the ubiquitous little roadside stalls that sell snacks and produce. But looks can be deceiving. Here it is from the outside.

Roadside stall… or is it?

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But on the inside?

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Roadside Cybercafe

A cybercafe, with teenagers playing online shoot-em-up games for a ringgit or two an hour.

It was my first time in Sabah and far too short. I’d like to make a road trip through Sarawak to Brunei and on to Kota Kinabalu with the family, but at the moment my minivan isn’t big enough on its own and my old Proton isn’t roadworthy for such a trip. What I need is one of them church vans. One day…

New Stumps

My students and I dug up several promising new Duranta stumps from the same failing hedge I got my last one. Here they are, freshly dug. They’ve all leafed out by now but you can see the character of the gnarled wood better when they are bare like this. I have only the faintest idea what to do with them after this, but at least I have a year to think about it while they put on some growth.

KakAndak starts school

KakAndak starts schoolMy fifth child started school this year. She’s going to a different school from her siblings. It is a Ma’had Tahfiz, a school focusing on Quran study, that only started primary school last year. Now they have first and second graders enrolled. They memorize Quran in the morning, and have a normal school day in the afternoon. It’s a long day for a little kid, but they have nap time in the middle, and being a much smaller school it is less chaotic. Perhaps the best thing about it is that it is housed in the lower level of the Sarawak State Mosque, Masjid Jamek. (The Masjid Jamek is a simply gorgeous Central Asian style complex that I’ve photographed and written about before) That means they get to use the main prayer hall for some of their learning activities, and have their playtime on the wide marble veranda. On Saturday mornings they have extra Quran recitation, followed by Tae Kwon Do. Many families come to picnic on the veranda while the students practice their punches and kicks. It makes for a pleasant morning. It’s only temporary, though. There is a brand new facility that has been built next door for the school, since it will outgrow the Mosque’s space when it adds third grade next year. The new place should be opening in a month or two. It looks nice so far from the outside, but it will be sad to leave the Mosque behind.

Tae Kwon Do at the Mosque