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Asia Buzz: Doctor Knows Best
Mahathir shoots for the stars
By
ERIC ELLIS
June
29, 2000
Web posted at 3:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 3:30 a.m. EDT
Malaysia wants to build a spacecraft? What an intriguing idea -- as
intriguing as what the Multimedia Super Corridor must've sounded like...
and still does. [The MSC, for those not in the know, is Mahathir's
four-year-old plan to build a high-tech society by wiring everything
from government to hospitals to schools, and drafting cyberlaws and
encouraging technology research.] I took a trip through the government-inspired
intelligent city of Cyberjaya recently, the part that actually exists;
a university of sorts and a hotel. Names like AMD and Intel weren't
screaming at me through the palm trees like they do further north
in Penang, Malaysia's real Silicon Kampung.
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The MSC is a bit like an Internet company that didn't expand when
the going was good. It had a good idea early (in Asian terms), saw
its stock take a bit of run, but didn't issue the paper while it was
flying high to see it through the difficult times. Now that the sector
has fallen closer to reality, the opportunity may have been lost.
The MSC is experiencing its own unique type of "burn rate," the palm
plantations being cleared for the day when the Titans of Tech are
somehow wooed into actually setting up a business there. I reckon
that if the MSC were a website, it would default to "HTTP 404 Page
Not Found." The MSC's not happening, not yet anyway. Which is not
to say that it won't be developed. And maybe a Malaysian moon shot
will happen too, if Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed gets his way.
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The good doctor has spent a noble past few days exhorting the foreign
ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference ( a grouping
of 56 Muslim countries) to embrace technology, or be left behind
in the mosque. Failure to embrace modern science and the New Economy
could usher in a new era of de facto colonialism, he believes. "We
are behind the rest of the world," he says. "By failing to develop
the Muslim countries, by failing to defend them and the Muslim people,
we are committing even greater sins from which our personal devotion
to daily rituals of our faith will not absolve us."
It's heady stuff, and he's absolutely right to exhort his audience
into action. There's nothing in the Koran that I have read that
says an embrace of Islam precludes a simultaneous embrace of knowledge
and science. As Mahathir reminded his audience, "Islam enjoins us
to seek knowledge. Enough of us must be assigned to the acquisition
of the necessary knowledge and skills of the Information Age so
as to enable us to catch up with our detractors and enemies."
This is classic Mahathir. With him there always seems to be a hidden
message, and I suspect that behind his pleas to Islamic technophobes,
there's an equally pointed message directed at his political opponents
at home. His characteristically confronting tour d'horizon also
speaks to the Malaysian states that have broken away from the Mahathir
yoke, to embrace Malaysia's more fundamentalist Islamic party PAS.
Kelantan and Trengannu states are two of Malaysia's poorest regions.
They are also the two states run by PAS, and which rejected Mahathirism
in last year's national election. Mahathir's message seems clear;
he equates PAS with those backward Islamic nations that reject technology
and scientific development as un-Islamic.
Mahathir doesn't say the Internet economy is the cure to all future
economic ills. In fact, he makes an extraordinary claim that much
of what is found on the Net runs counter to Islamic values. Half
of e-commerce involves pornography, he reckons. That's not true,
but at the root of his rant is a fundamental -- not fundamentalist
-- truth.
Eric Ellis is Southeast Asia and Technology Editor of the regional
finance portal AsiaWise.com
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