AZLY RAHMAN

I am so happy today. It is a real Merdekal Day for me. My first book in the beautiful Bahasa Malaysia and my fifth on Malaysian Cultural Studies will be out soon, entitled Kalimah Allah Milik Siapa?: Renungan dan Nukilan Tentang Malaysia di Era Pancaroba, due to be out in the Malaysian bookstores by Merdeka Day. I am elated.

A few months ago, when I was working on it, I wrote these, I am sharing with you wonderful and supportive readers since eight year ago when I first started writing for Malaysiakini. Here it goes:

My greatest moment of joy, in my years of writing, will be for my ideas to be translated into the Malay Language. I have often told myself that I will one day find that moment to celebrate I think this will be the moment.

To me, there is a sense of awe, mystery, magic and humility in this beautiful language I find enchanting as an effort to convey my ideas to Malay-speaking readers. I grew up in this language and my social and inner reality was constructed out of the tools and materials, artifacts and consciousness, offered by it.

This language will always be the beautiful bridge that connects me to the person I loved most in my life: my mother. She passed on a few years ago. My only regret is she did not get the chance to understand what I have been writing all these years.

Language constructs reality, alters it, shapes, it deconstructs it, or even destroys it to have it evolve into a karmic cycle. Throughout my life, my worldviews have vacillated and oscillated between these two worlds. I think in both languages and direct my consciousness to act in the worldviews of both.

There is a challenge, however. I write better in the English Language having been schooled in it since the day I set foot in an English-medium school in Johor Baru: Sekolah Temenggong Abdul Rahman 1.

The challenge is to express my thoughts to others in the Malay Language and to convey the meaning as accurately as I can by using metaphors, similes, examples, extrapolations, and clarifications in the Malay Language. The biggest challenge is to convey anthropological, philosophical, philological, and technological ideas to a speaker of the Malay Language.

In the case of my writings on the Allah Controversy, how, for example would the English language be able to fully convey the ideas of the nature and attributes of God when words such as ujud, qidam, baqa, muha-lafatuhu lil hawadis, walqiamuhu binafsih wahdaniat, kudrat, iradat, ilm, hayat, sama basar, qalam of ruh, jasad, zat, sifat, of the concepts addressing complexity of the ilmu kalam, and so on and so forth are to be translated or transliterated into the English Language?

Go here to read the rest:
A meaningful Merdeka Day for me!