March 15, 2006	Wednesday	Safar 14, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, March 14: Muslims have reasons to suspect and distrust the West for the many wrongs done to them but they cannot blame the West for all their present day ills.

This was stated by Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibarhim in an interview with Dawn which centred on the lecture he gave here on ‘Democracy in the Muslim World’ last week as a guest of the Institute of Policy Studies.

“Muslims are also at fault. We lack sophistication. We are so disorganized, so blatantly corrupt and so repressive,” he said when asked about his view that Muslim communities needed to build institutions first before going for electoral democracy.

But are the Muslim communities free to correct themselves in a globalized world dominated by the West politically, culturally and economically?

In reply, Mr Ibrahim narrated his ‘personal experiences’ when he served as his country’s minister for education and finance in the 1980s with such success that he was made deputy prime minister in 1993.

“First we wiped off deficit and balanced the budget. Then we built a surplus and ceased depending on the World Bank. I could use the (surplus) money on ostentatious buildings — as (Dr) Mahathir Mohammad later did — but I used it on alleviating poverty, public housing and billions and billions on education. The West did not stop me from doing that nor sabotaged my efforts,” recalled Mr Ibrahim who was disgraced and jailed in 1998 in a power tussle with the anti-West Mahathir.

“I disagree with them (the West) in many things but I engage with them,” he said, referring to his interactions with the West as a minister and now as a scholar at the Georgetown University in Washington where he moved after the Malaysian Federal Court set him free in September 2004.

Of course his western interlocutors made an issue of Islamic state and Islamic laws. “But, sure of my priorities, I tolerate them. I am a practising Muslim. They had as much right to espouse their views as we Muslims have.”

Though the West may not have been “necessarily fair” in its dealings with the Muslim world, there were “some good people in the West who are sincere in a dialogue”, he said, wondering if the Muslims could claim “moral high ground in negotiating with the West?”

“Don’t think that all the ills of the Muslim world, or Pakistan, are because of America — as many of my friends here think,” he said.

Asked to comment on the fears of Norwegian Muslim scholar Lena Larsen that the Muslim societies would lose their youth to the West if they did not change their rigid ways and became rational, the Malaysian leader agreed that the western cultural onslaught was “very pervasive” but said protection against it should be provided by the family and not the state.

“If they wish to sport a particular hairstyle, let it be so. But they must have character. (Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali) Jinnah dressed smartly and had great character,” he said.

How could the rigid mindset be changed, given the tribal and feudal nature of the Muslim societies? he was asked.

“Give them education. They will change. Will a graduate be willing to behave like a slave?,” he said.

“Can they be changed? Yes. Are they changing? No. Education should be an obsession,” he said, adding that foreign assistance could be put to improving education.

When told that foreign aid comes with conditions to change the curricula to soften the so-called Islamic militancy, he agreed with the condition.

“I don’t say the donors don’t have designs. But do we want to soften militancy? Yes. Do we want to lose our Muslim identity? No,” he said, dismissing fears that accepting aid would mean accepting donor’s ideas also.

“What ideas?” he asked. “They say freedom, I say yes. If they say no more religious instruction, I say, no.”