Since making big electoral gains in 2022, Malaysia’s Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) has invested heavily in history and historiography to produce new, exclusionary narratives that undermine the authority of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s multi-ethnic coalition. These narratives assert that Malaysia’s majority Malay community and its Islamic faith are under threat, while the nation’s minorities, particularly Chinese and Indian Malaysians, are unentitled to the political rights inherent in citizenship.
In contrast, Anwar’s government has shied away from issuing principled rebuttals to PAS’s claims. In two recent state by-elections in Kelantan and Penang, it challenged PAS only tactically, where it did so at all.
There is, however, a more strategic aspect of the ideological contest now unfolding in Malaysia, focused not on rebutting PAS and its allies – which professional advocates often consider a form of negative campaigning – but on steering the national conversation in a different direction by setting an alternative political agenda. That is Anwar’s latest investment in his “Malaysia MADANI” campaign, through which he has sought to advance a vision of a civil and inclusive nation rather than engaging in divisive debates over race, religion, and the nature of citizenship.
That investment is on display in the Postnormal Times MADANI Exhibition, now showing in Kuala Lumpur’s Berjaya Times Square Mall. Scheduled to show for at least another year, the exhibition builds on a previous, 2023 iteration held at the Kuala Lumpur Jazz and Art Centre, and on the themes contained in Anwar’s 2022 book “SCRIPT for a Better Malaysia.” (SCRIPT stands for Sustainability, Care and Compassion, Respect, Innovation, Prosperity, and Trust. MADANI is the Malay version of the SCRIPT acronym.)
SCRIPT, which I have discussed elsewhere, is a framework for setting out Anwar’s starting point for multi-directional “polylogues” – as distinct from two-party “dialogues” – on a range of complex and contradictory phenomena now engaging citizens and policymakers alike. These phenomena include the exhibition’s themes: the post-truth media, the AI revolution, genetic editing, the climate catastrophe, the global COVID-19 shutdown, and degraded systems of government – all of which the exhibition argues characterize our “postnormal times.”
As outlined by the exhibition’s creator, the prominent Muslim intellectual Ziauddin Sardar, who also heads the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies (CPPFS), these times have us all living awkwardly suspended between the “no longer” and the “not yet.” Paraphrasing Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Sardar has outlined in his writing that at present, the “old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have not yet emerged, and very few things seem to make sense.” Sardar, a key mover in futures studies, was Anwar’s education adviser in the 1990s, and is also a one-time Muslim student activist, former professor of postcolonial studies, and a former commissioner for the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom.
Sardar, like Anwar, appears to have developed an understanding that creating viable futures for postcolonial peoples will not entail creating autonomous zones or knowledges for purportedly discrete and distinct “civilizations” – like Muslims – to endlessly explore their differences.
Rather, Muslims, like all other postcolonial peoples, are part of a single, planetary civilization, and therefore must accept living interdependently with others, interacting with openness to create a decent, equitable future for all. This is the attitude that infuses the Postnormal Times exhibition, which is genuinely excellent, consisting of a series of chambers installed by Rock, Paper, Scissors, a Kuala Lumpur branding, design, and marketing agency.
Co-curated and written by Sardar and CPPFS Assistant Director Scott Jordan, the exhibition’s multimedia displays provoke viewers with questions, statements, images, and videos designed to push them into some discomfort, while also reassuring them by communicating with them in English and Malay, using imagery that is both global and local.
Unlike exhibitions in the National Museum or any of its state counterparts, Postnormal Times is bold, interesting, communicates directly with people of all ages, challenges them to consider issues beyond their daily, local battles, and points out that there are no easy answers.
As such, it is pedagogical rather than didactic, as many government-run exhibitions tend to be, which is the reason schoolchildren do not attend them with much enthusiasm. In this case, according to conversations with the exhibition team, thousands of secondary school children have responded positively during their visits, as have most civil servants, schoolteachers, academics, and other groups who have toured it since it opened in May of last year.
Others, however, have responded with concern over the exhibition’s challenging nature, including visitors associated with the nation’s religious bureaucracy, which consists of organizations like JAKIM and the state Islamic agencies. As they are often criticized for being too big and out of control, Anwar appears to be attempting to encourage these agencies to engage with bigger problems than controlling Muslims’ everyday behavior, including by placing JAKIM representatives in every government department.
Ultimately, the exhibition, like the book SCRIPT, is frank with Malaysians about the fact there is no specific formula for addressing the nation’s, or the world’s, multiple, interconnected challenges. It does, however, ask Malaysians to be guided by the “moral compass” that “Malay, Chinese, Indian, Dayak, Orang Asli, [and] Eurasian” citizens all share, including the values contained in the SCRIPT acronym.
Given the exhibition’s pedagogical as well as artistic focus, I ask why it is tucked away in such an unassuming, even timid, location – the top floor of one of Kuala Lumpur’s many shopping malls. While easily accessible by the public, it is nevertheless at some distance from the nation’s main cultural institutions, any of which could reasonably serve as channels for a national intervention sponsored by a serving prime minister, and all of which should have active marketing and social media strategies.
These institutions, such as universities, museums, film production agencies, schools, publishers, and research funding agencies, all appear, precisely as Sardar warns, stuck between the old and the new. They are either largely unresponsive to Malaysia’s ongoing political and social transformation, or actively driving narratives that open opportunities for PAS. The National Museum, for example, appears frozen in time, with its overarching narrative linking the Sultanate of Malacca’s putatively glorious past with the developmentalist policies of Malaysia’s once-dominant United Malays National Organization. Meanwhile, PAS-friendly films and YouTube channels about other, suppressed histories, usually centering on Malay Muslims and their alternative anti-colonial traditions, are booming in popularity.
Nor are the national institutions easy to change, with proposed overhauls potentially triggering racially charged debates about the language and content of museum exhibits and education curricula, and indeed debates about who deserves to speak for Malaysia, or even consider themselves true Malaysians. With Anwar’s “Madani” coalition of coalitions constantly needing active political management to keep all its members singing the same tune, such changes stand a chance of setting parts of the government against each other.
Meanwhile, without further public elaboration, civil society organizations like Bersih have raised reasonable concerns that MADANI might remain an empty slogan.
Like the government, the MADANI exhibition has a blind spot where history is concerned, despite the field of futures studies recognizing that efforts to heal historical traumas – for example, around the meaning of Malaya’s anti-colonial rebellions, its communist insurgency, and its race riots in 1969 – are the key to orienting publics towards discussing shared futures. These are precisely the historical episodes that PAS is deploying to its advantage via its highly effective social media outreach.
And yet, given how hard it is to transform institutions, this exhibition will have to do for now. At the very least, it is generating conversations. One visiting government minister wanted one of its light sculptures on display in every mosque to encourage worshippers to think of bigger issues than national political positioning. Other, less admiring, comments have included suggestions that there will be a new government, with new priorities, in power in a few years, so why bother paying attention to Anwar’s latest pet topics?
One reason for doing so is that the contrast between the approaches of PAS and Anwar provides a study in strategic communications, including the question of whether political competitors should compete on the same ground, directly rebutting each other, or stake out separate territories and discourses in a bid to “change the conversation” instead. With Anwar’s intervention contained within a shopping mall, however, one must ask if they are competing on the same terms.