Chapter 3: An Academic Firmament Episode 4: Conference of the Birds

Conference of the Birds - ud-Din Attar

In the epic Persian sufi poem, Conference of the Birds, the writer Farid ud-Din Attar described the birds’ of the world search for a king, and led by the hoopoe, the wisest of them, at whose suggestion they went to look for the Simorgh, a legendary bird likened by the phoenix in western literature.  Flying over seven valleys (representing life’s struggles), thirty of them finally arrived at the dwelling of the Simorgh, there for them only to find a lake in which they could see only their reflection.  The allegorical poem is a reference to human qualities and failings (represented by each of the birds), the journey being a test of character for anyone to attain enlightenment (tauhid). It reminded me of events that propelled a life through a logic only the Divine can fathom because He ordained it.  The two strands of thought and action that wound through events in my life, one set academic and the other political, were brought together over the coming decade of my years in USM.  This intertwining of the professional and the political in my career only became unwound, only just, during the time I was at the Malaysian Institute for Policy Research, MIER, still ten years away.  Before then, it was as if I inhabited in two minds, sometimes in conflict sometimes in cahoots in determining the path of my life and career.  It was T. Jefferson Parker in his 1996 crime novel, The Triggerman’s Dance, which I was reading who quoted Aeschylus, “Man grows wise against his will”.  I had hoped that the USM experience would have made me wiser.

It was while I was still the deputy dean in the humanities school that I entertained the idea of staging the Conference of the Birds with the involvement of the fine performing arts faculty and students, but never got around to it as my duties increased.  The performing arts students then included Kee Thuan Chye and Marion d’Cruz, who went on to chart their own famous careers after graduating from USM.  During this time I was encouraging the setting up of a program in film studies in the Cultural (Studies) Centre, and had hired Sujiah Salleh to head the initiative.  Jins Shamsuddin, the actor and Malay film director, visited USM as resident scholar, and he produced and directed the film “Ali Setan” using USM as his setting, which became popular among the student set on campuses.  But for me things had moved quickly away from these diversions.

I had a chance with political engagement when I was invited to join the Bukit Bendera branch of Penang UMNO, the dominant Malay party in the ruling BN coalition.   Abdullah Hassan, who by then director and later to become a professor in Bahasa at USM’s  language centre, in which my would-be sponsor Razak Ismail worked as a tutor, had the experience of rejection in a similar situation in Semanggol.  This is a particular political cultural trait in the party, bordering on anti-intellectualism or more correctly a crass survivalism.  It was a lesson I learned (but later lost) that kept me away from getting directly involved in politics at that early stage. 

But this was during the early days of the implementation of the New Economic Policy.   It was inevitable and unavoidable that any Malay academic would be drawn into the spiraling circle of politics that will have considerable influence on the path of political and economic development in the country.  I was drawn into this political spiral through UMNO Youth in which Ghani Osman, while still in the economics faculty in University Malaya, was active under the tutelage of Musa Hitam.  Through Ghani I got to know a young Muhyiddin Yassin, Padil Haron, Najib Tun Razak and was reunited with Tajol Rosli  in Perak.  My involvement was in the various seminars and workshops organized by the youth wing of UMNO which gave me an opportunity to articulate the development and policy issues underlying the NEP.  These sessions were educational and motivational for the young politicians.  But, enticing and enjoyable at the same time, I still refused to join the political fray, wanting to remain independent and detached to maintain my professionalism.  After all, that was what I was trained for. 

I had the opportunity to return to my roots in Semanggol sometime in 1975 on the invitation of Zainal Abidin Zain, who was MP for Bagan Serai, and a distant relative.  I was asked by the parent-teachers association and Zainal, who later would become a Deputy Minister in Mahathir’s administration, to officiate at the Prize Day of the local secondary school in Simpang Empat, where many parents, teachers and students from Semanggol and Sg Kepar were present who remembered my family. As it turned out I arrived late to see, at considerable personal embarrassment a waiting guard of honour made up of students and teachers.  After delivering my speech which focused on the importance of education, I met with many of the Semanggol villagers who remembered my family’s time in our kampong before we migrated to KL.  It was such a happy and proud reunion.

In this swirling almost surreal circle of events at this stage in my life, I was awakened to the reality of things by a personal tragedy.  I was in Kota Bharu supervising the field work in the Kelantan case study led by Halim Salleh and Hashim Yaccob for the UNCRD study on rural-urban transformation and local-level development, that I received news of my sister Rafidah’s death.  I had known six months earlier that she had cancer of the mouth, at the time when I first took up the social science deputy dean’s job in 1976.  She had just joined the off-campus programme and would have come on-campus for her final year the next year; meanwhile she had started teaching and a family in Malacca.  Ever the optimist, I had put aside any mortal thoughts at the time; so it came as a big shock to hear she had succumbed so fast to the cancer.  I could not bear to read the personal journal she wrote during the final months of her life, notes that were kept by her adopted sister, Fauziah Sharom, who was then an on-campus student herself in USM.  Rafidah was a good person, and her passing was only the third death in my family after my parents, and she was only thirty-six.  Another lesson in life’s fragility, and as enjoined by Imam Ghazaly, the folly of long-range plans.

But the pressure “to be involved” in the national struggle continued in the politics of academia.  While circling Penang airport in his car, I was briefed on national politics and security issues by Pak Wan (Dr. Wan Ismail, head of psy-war, and later Anwar Ibrahim’s father-in-law) during the days the Biro Tatanegara was active on campus after the introduction of the UCCA in 1974.  I wasn’t sure then what that personal briefing was for, but it was made out as a personal responsibility for me to know.   By that time, end of 1978, Hamdan Tahir had taken over as VC from Hamzah Sendut, and Musa Muhammed was appointed the Deputy VC for academic affairs.  In 1979 I assumed the position of dean of social science, and embarked on consolidation of the development studies program.  It was then that I recruited Mei Ling Young as a lecturer, and continued to supervise her fieldwork towards her PhD on rural migration and to contribute a paper on the subject for the Malaysian case study for the UNCRD.

The UNCRD Conference held in 1979 in Nagoya  was a success and a worthy follow-up to the Growth Poles Conference in 1976.  I had followed this up by organizing an International Conference on Local-level Development in USM as a showcase for the development studies program in the social science school in the middle of 1980. Johan Galtung was the keynote speaker; he had been a consultant with United Nations University in Tokyo and had collaborated with Lim Teck Ghee.  I took the opportunity of his visit to jointly run a final year course on development and the new international  division of labour (NIDL).  My shift from orthodox development economics to dependency theory and Third World underdevelopment had started with the Urban Poverty paper  I wrote in 1976 as a contribution in honour of Ungku Aziz.  Interacting with Hashim Yaacob, who studied with Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins in SUNY Binghampton, my focus expanded into world systems theory in analyzing the industrialization process in developing countries and the rise of the semi-periphery, exemplified by the emergence of newly industrializing economies (eg. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong), of which in the 80’s Malaysia was being considered one.

Towards the end of 1980 I was promoted to full professor and held the Majlis Perbandaran Pulau Pinang Chair of Development Studies, one of two endowed chairs in USM at the time.  After seeing through the publication of the proceedings of the UNRD conference by Maruzen, Fu-chen Lo left UNCRD for good and joined the Population Institute at the East West Center in Honolulu in 1981.  There we linked up with Roland Fuchs, who was then professor of geography at the University of Hawaii and more importantly a vice president of the International Geographical Union (IGU), a professional organization of national associations of geogrpahers.  Together with Mal Logan, who headed the Australian Association of Geographers, at whose suggestion I was invited to co-chair with him the IGU Study Group on Urbanization in Developing Countries.   I was very happy to take this up because I would be brought into contact with some of the leading urban geographers in the world, scholars such as Terry McGee, Salah El-Shaks, Alan Wilson, Yue-man Yeung, besides the Australians Logan, Maude and Geoff Missen.  Since the headquarters was to be located in USM, we appointed Mei Ling Young as the group’s secretary.  Over the next ten years, professional meetings were held all over the world,  three of them held just prior to the quadrennial meeting of the IGU itself.   Mei Ling and I would maintain a newsletter as the means of communication between members of the Group in between the professional meetings.  We also ran a summer school for young scholars starting in Penang in 1982, and managed to conduct two more sessions after that.

I had been home and working in the university now for nearly eight years without leave.  So, towards the end of 1981, I decided to apply for sabbatical leave, which at that time entitled me to a nine-months paid research leave to go to any place I chose to go.  To my disappointment, Musa Muhammed, then deputy vice chancellor for academic affairs, for reason I became aware of and understood only later, only allowed me to take a three-months sabbatical. I wrote to Brookefield, the leading geographer in Australia, for a position as visiting professor with the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPS) at the Australian National University in Canberra, and agreed to work towards organizing during my stay a conference on regional underdevelopment, incorporating the ideas of Samir Amin and the post-dependecy theorists.  There was with Brookie a multi-disciplinary group of scholars working on the economic geography and critical social theory of urbanization and development, including Nigel Thrift, Michael Dear, Mike Taylor, Dean Forbes, Anthony Reid (a historian) and Gavin Jones, a demographer who was Mei Ling’s academic supervisor.  Richard Peet was also visiting at the same time.  It was an exciting intellectual milieu to spend my sabbatical.

Canberra was to be my academic base for the period of that sabbatical leave, short though it was. But I had also been invited to a conference of the Pacific Industrial Relations Association, a grouping of labour economists, in Tokyo during that time, and also to a conference on development at the OECD Development Institute in Paris.  I produced three papers during this part of my leave, one on new international division of labour issues for the OECD institute, another on industrial relations issues in the informal sector for the Tokyo conference, and a third on “Territorial Social Formation: a theory of regional under-development” as part of the RSPS conference on regional development, which was later published by Brookefield together with the other papers from the Australian scholars. 

By the time of my sojourn in Canberra, Fuchen Lo was also on the way to leaving UNCRD and taking up a position at the East West Center in Hawaii, to conduct a summer course on population and urbanization.  Mei Ling had also been invited to assist at this summer course.  Never having been to Hawaii before, I was persuaded to join them in Honolulu for the last month of my sabbatical leave, justifying my trip there by helping in giving some lectures to the international summer class of the Population Institute that year.  I was to make three more trips over the next three years, including a conference on households and population studies, in which Mei ling presented her “Critical Moves” paper which was to be part of her PhD dissertation.

In 1981, Mahathir had been appointed the country’s fourth Prime Minister on the retirement of Hussein Onn, and Musa Hitam was made his deputy.  Besides unifying the time zones between East Malaysia and the Peninsula, and launching his “Bersih, Cekap and Amanah” administration,  he formed the Economic Panel of Advisors which included several key members of his cabinet, including Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who had become the Finance Minister, and heads of the EPU, ICU, Treasury and Bank Negara, captains of industry and banking and several academics.  I was invited to join this Economic Panel and headed the Working Group on Economic Perspective and Management, which included Khadijah Ahmad, a member of the Brandt Commission and banker, Rais Saniman, then chief economist of Bank Bumiputera, Thillianathan from the FEA, Halim Ismail UKM economic faculty dean, later to become the managing director of the newly formed Bank Islam, besides myself.  Our job was to provide a second independent source of economic advice for the government in addition to the traditional government’s own inside sources.  The Economic Panel was part of the innovation introduced by Mahathir to bring alternative perspectives and therefore a more professional approach to economic policy and administration.  Under the Mahathir regime was thus set up the first of many future channels of consultation on development issues involving the private sector as complement to the civil service.  Civil society organizations were still very much outside of this consultation.  It also had other intended or unintended consequences one could not say at the time.  I was just quite happy to be part of the scheme as it brought me closer to the centre of national decision making in at least as far as economic policy issues were concerned.  It was the beginning of my direct involvement in economic policy as an academic that became more and more prominent in the coming years of my unfolding professional career.

As for the “Birds”,  I came to realise that I had also been on a journey to seek my own Simorgh and, not finding it, saw myself looking deeper into my own mythical “lake”.