Friday, December 7, 2007

Polite Mat Sallehs & Rude Malaysians II


Quoting from a comment,
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"I'm not one of those ppl our society so love to call 'kebaratan'. I really believe we have an abundace of good manners inherent to our cultures, just like any other culture"
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Exactly! I have no clue how 'barat' I am (in the eyes of our society) because I don't even know what scale/measurement form they use to determine 'barat'ness. But abiding by the smart principle of "Know Thyself", I know who I am...and a white man wannabe I am not!

I care about things like these precisely because I love our Malaysian/Malay/Asian culture. In terms of cultural achievements, I dare say that we have more than what the Mat Sallehs have, go back a few hundred years back into the past, and you'll find a period when the Mat Sallehs were barbaric, backward, and seemingly merciless and us Asians at that time were full of -kehalusan budi bahasa.

The Mat Sallehs developed and took their culture to new heights sometime during and after the Renaissance period, yes their achievement was not only intellectual, it was also cultural. After that they continued to grow exponentially (allbeit with sporadic wars here and there) and finally they got to where they are today.

Our forefathers had very big hearts, our culture was rich and our manners were exquisite...I wonder what happened to all that? Maybe we ought to have our very own Renaissance in the near future...

4 comments:

thinker bell said...

alamak. was i the 1000th visitor or not? for i, thinker bell nak tuntut hadiah u once mention. LOL.

47 said...

Haha! 1000th Hit! :P

thinker bell said...

yay! keting ketong keting ketong (me jumping left and right :D)

cepat. hadiah yang sebesar-besarnya.

anyway, yeah since this entry is just your part 2, my comments remains the same from the part 1 :D

and plus i should by now start writing on that 'globalisasi bla bla' thing. haha.

Lin Abdul Rahman said...

another good point. the west went into collision with the rising Islamic civiization and gave birth to the Renaissance.

Whereas our collision with western society/influences left us struggling through an identity crisis. It's a struggle that's never going to end until we stop looking to other people in defining who we are.

*so much rhetoric. maybe it's time for me to stop preaching for a while... :p