OVER the last 50 years, Malaysia's leading social scientist and thinker Professor Datuk Syed Hussein Alatas has been collecting data on the West for a book he is working on.
Essentially, Syed Hussein is exploring the meaning of the West to the non-Western world. It is an evaluation of Western achievements and its way of life.
For more, you will have to wait till the book hits the stores but you can expect an illuminating account of a subject that has occupied the man's thoughts for a good part of his life.
In the light of the current interest in Western studies amongst local academics following the founding of the Institute of Occidental Studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, the sociologist's work-in-progress is not only exciting but relevant to all Malaysians especially those investigating the Occident.
Syed Hussein, 75, is known among academic circles here and abroad for taking the road less travelled; if others are content with accepting with minimum resistance accepted assumptions put forward by Western writers and academics, the scholar has made it his trade mark to refute them.
His thinking and writing are a rebellion against subservient and imitative scholarship.
They reveal an attempt to establish an independent scholarship for the non-Western part of the world, a preoccupation that developed at the University of Amsterdam in Holland where he did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the early Fifties.
"During that period, on reading Ibn Khaldun, I was told that art could not develop without artists. By the same token, an autonomous tradition cannot develop without the commitment of an intellectual, creative and independent group striving for that goal," Syed Hussein, now a principal research fellow at The Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation (better known by its Malay acronym, ATMA) at UKM, once wrote.
"I then raised the question: what were the factors conducive to the birth of such a tradition and what were the serious impediments? In order to liberate, one must first understand the condition of bondage. This led me to the problem of the captive mind."
It was a concern that engaged him for a long time, resulting in its elucidation.
Syed Hussein defines a captive mind in the non-Western world as one that is parrotlike and non-creative and whose thinking is based on Western categories and modes of thought.
The captivity is self-induced and it is the result of the overwhelming preponderance of Western intellectual influence on the rest of the world.
"This intellectual captivity is fertile ground for the implantation of intellectual imperialism (which means the domination of one people by another in their world of thinking)," he observes.
The captive mind has "significantly multiplied throughout the non-Western world and has occupied various positions in society". "Its influence is strong and pervasive."
"The important thing is not to imitate," says Syed Hussein, who, as an undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam, displayed his characteristic independent streak by rebuting the theory of history of a well-known professor in an essay which was published in the students' journal.
He is not advocating "closing our mind to genuine knowledge from any part of the world".
Indeed, "we should assimilate useful knowledge from all sources but we need to do this with an independent critical spirit without turning our back on our own intellectual heritage. The phenomena of servility and intellectual bondage are not the same as genuine creative assimilation from abroad," he noted in a recent discourse.
The philosopher - frequently described as a man ahead of his time - has continued to produce journalistic pieces and books which mirror this belief.
For someone who has been resisting all forms of imperialism since his youth, Syed Hussein - whose fields of interest include sociology of corruption, modernisation, intellectuals in developing societies and Islam and Southeast Asia - is amazingly objective about the Occident.
If he is painfully aware of its shortcomings, he is also appreciative of its contributions in the domains of social change, scientific development and humanitarian reforms.
"I am for the civilising role of Western civilisation in this aspect but this is to be distinguished from the colonial articulation of superiority and the right to rule.
"By civilising role, I mean the improvement of human conditions such as health, social justice and the betterment of social life via the tremendous achievements in science and technology," says Syed Hussein.
He urges the non-Western world to seriously adopt a positive attitude towards the West as a civilisation struggling to overcome its various problems (as a result of rapid development).
The existence of harmful elements in the West such as gunboat politicians and crime bosses should not deflect "our attention from the intrinsic value of the West as a civilisation", he says.
Syed Hussein, who is continuously studying the damaging influences of the West and the resistance to them by Western thinkers themselves, has a good reason for making this point.
He worries that Malaysia's drive to study the West would be turned into a forum to bash it.
"We cannot be one-sided. We have to assess any civilisation in its totality - both its beneficial and destructive qualities. We cannot just isolate the negative ones and then label that particular civilisation as evil," he says.
Those who are given to denigrating the West should reflect on the following.
"We have been talking so much about the materialistic West yet we never pay attention to Westerners who are against materialism; they are much more sophisticated and enduring than we have been able to show," says Syed Hussein.
"All the religious leaders of Asia and Africa put together cannot hope to approach by a hopping distance what Western thinkers have achieved in their fight against materialism as the thousands of books highly critical of the phenomenon attest," he adds.
Syed Hussein offers another example: communism - a problem shared by many Asian countries.
"Let us search for the critical studies on communism by Asian scholars; how much do we know about communism? Almost all the leaders in the Asian countries could not write a term paper on the issue; where are our thinkers on the subject?"
The point? Do not BLINDLY attack the West.
In welcoming the setting up of the Institute of Occidental Studies at UKM, Syed Hussein says "the sooner work begins the better".
"Actually, I have been discussing and hoping for this for the last 30 years. It is definitely necessary to study Western civilisation.
"Can you imagine the world today without the West? If certain parts of
the world were to disappear, we could imagine that the world would continue.
But we could not picture the world without Western civilisation because of its
significant contributions in many aspects of life," he adds.
When Syed Hussein arrived at the University of Amsterdam in 1948 to enrol at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences as an undergraduate, he found that it had a programme on American studies.
"The Dutch were already studying the Americans then. Now, we don't have programmes on American and Russian studies. It is very good that we want to introduce Western studies. At least a start has been made," he says.
Never mind that very few Malaysian scholars are currently involved in such studies.
The good news is that The Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation at UKM is already linked to Europe through a series seminars - among others, The Dutch and the Malay World, Germany and the Malay World and Norway and the Malay World - initiated by director Professor Datuk Shamsul Amri Baharuddin.
"I am now researching European colonialism," says Syed Hussein of his work at the institute.
"I am studying the origin of colonialism, how it was organised in this part of the world and the beginning of modernisation which was our contact with Europe," adds the scholar, whose major intellectual influences were his two teachers - W.F. Wertheim, a well-known scholar of Southeast Asia and T.ten Have, a leading Dutch educationtist whose work has been translated in English in the United States - at the University of Amsterdam.
The institute is the first research centre for Malay Studies in Malaysia. Its main purpose is to gather scholars from over the world to build up a comprehensive collection of information and knowledge about the Malay world and civilisation.
To Syed Hussein, the purpose of studying the West is to pave the way for constructive relations between Asians - as partners rather than as servile attendants - and Westerners at the total level.
By this he means the various areas of knowledge and social development expanding to the entire welfare of man.
It is apparent that Syed Hussein has had a productive relationship with the West; it is based on his own criteria of relevance from the regional standpoint.
His upcoming book on Western civilisation will reveal his long-time involvement with Western thinking; his doctoral thesis which was completed in 1963 is titled Reflections on the Theories of Religion which deals with the theories of leading Western thinkers such as Durkheim, Freud, Jung and Malinowski.
The book project is a labour of love for a scholar whose intellectual pursuits are based on a rational and moral foundation and guided by a great yearning for the truth.
It is an endeavour unconnected with his work at the universities, past and present.
The Malaysian scholar has long blazed a trail in the fields of social sciences and historical studies. It is up to the others to carry on the tradition.
Note: For further reading, refer to the list of publications above.
* Started at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka as head of Research Section in 1958
* Part-time lecturer in philosophy at University of Malaya in 1960
* Lecturer and head of Cultural Division at University of Malaya's Department of Malay Studies from 1963 to 1967
* Professor and head of the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore from 1967 to 1988
* Appointed University of Malaya Vice-Chancellor in 1988
* Professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's Centre for General Studies in 1995 and, at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology from 1997 to 1999.
* Currently principal research fellow at the Institute of the Malay World and
Civilisation at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.