Reading your way towards change

THE power to change for the better always lies within the individual if he or she knows in which direction to change. That’s where reading books comes in. Permanent and meaningful change can come from a personal dialogue between the reader and an author who has decades of wisdom to share.

This week’s column is fulfilling a promise I made to a colleague who had invited me to speak on the subject of reading to inspire students and academics. However, I came down with a fever and could not make it on the day, and so I promised him I would write what I was going to say in that forum.

Among the thoughts I had planned to share at the forum was how reading became the power of change in me and made me who I am today. My colleague also asked me to address how today’s young generation can deal with the information overload they face and find enough time and mental space to simply read a book.

I began reading books very early, as soon as I began Primary One at SMJK St Marks in Butterworth, Penang. I started reading my brother’s Readers books left over from his early education as he was 10 years older. My brother had attended the same school but he went through the full English medium session while I began the hybrid Malay-English mediums session.

My brother’s Readers books were full of interesting tales of Malay, Chinese, and Indian boys and girls doing lots of fun things. My English textbooks, on the other hand, were downright boring.

In Primary Four, I was asked to help a teacher in the school library. There I stumbled upon the Bedtime Stories series. The books were hard-bound and the pictures of Caucasian children were beautiful. The stories were of children finding “miracles” in the trouble they had within Christian morality and prayers.

It was my first introduction to the world of the “other” as I was brought up a Malay and a Muslim. In Primary Six, a friend introduced me to Enid Blyton’s books and I was hooked on reading adventure and boarding school stories. I think I read about 100 of the British author’s books in the next two years.

As I went on to Form Two and Three, I began the adventure books of the Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, the Lone Pine series, Nancy Drew, and the science fiction series featuring Tom Swift.

But my favourites remained all the Blyton adventure and mystery series – the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, and others – and the school stories like the Malory Towers and St Clare’s series as well as other family stories. It was through them that I was exposed to the positive side of Western culture and the values Blyton espoused through her characters: honesty, tolerance, doing good to others, not being spiteful, and being selfless. All-in I would say that during my school years I went through easily 400 books.

I went to the United States for university thanks to a Public Works Department scholarship after securing six As while I was at SMJK Hua Lian in Taiping, Perak. My six American years were spent reading three kinds of books.

In my early university years, I was introduced to a new world of Islam by Malays at the university who belonged to the Malaysian Islamic Study Group. It was then that I devoured the writings of Islamic reformists like Abul A’la Maududi, Ali Syariati, Syed Qutb, Khurshid Ahmad, Hadi Awang, Abu Urwah, Hassan Al-Banna, and translations of the Quran and the Hadith. I read all nine volumes by Sahih al-Bukhari and four volumes by Sahih Muslim followed by the Muwatta of Imam Malik. I read Abdullah Yusof Ali’s translation of the Quran and also that of Muhammad Assad and Maududi.

These readings formed a concept of Islam as a social, spiritual and political force that made me the person I am now.

At that time, I was also curious about Hinduism, Christianity and Buddhism and read several books on these religions.

I believe that Muslims who are uncomfortable with my talks, writings and thoughts have read only a few books on Islam and none of the Hadith compilations, or books about other faiths.

The other type of reading I did during my American years was all about architecture. Most architecture students don’t read books and tend to turn to architecture magazines for inspiration, but I pored over the thoughts of those who originated much of the field’s philosophy -- Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier, and several historians on architecture.

When I graduated with my Master’s, I had read 20 books on the discipline. I wonder how many graduates in Malaysia can say that? Adding my Islamic readings, it would easily come to more than 50 books read cover to cover. None of these books, by the way, were reading assignments, I read them because I was interested.

By the time I graduated, I had a sound grounding in architecture, a sound position in Islam, and a sound foundation in respecting others. From my experience in local academia, I find most graduates nowadays don’t have a sound foundation in anything except in imitating practices and repeating information from their lessons. They do not stand on anything except their inherited narratives of race, religion, and politics through their upbringing and social isolation.

My third type of reading was mostly about self-reflection and Malaysian politics. Injustices I saw in our political system, civil service, and religious institutions not only sparked the Reformasi protest movement in the 1990s but also damaged my faith in my country. The destruction of my faith in all the institutions I had held sacred sparked a spiritual and political search for meaning in me.

At the age of 61, I am a product of easily more than 600 books. In the age of TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, I shudder at the callous way in which information is treated. In reading a book, one has a personal and intimate dialogue with the author who drew on his or her own life experiences as well as values and philosophies.

Yet, I find many PhD graduates have never read a book – even their supervisors with doctorates haven’t. The “journal culture” of reading abstracts and papers diminishes the sense of wisdom and the spiritual questions about life and humanity that books can elicit.

The decision on who to vote for or how to treat others is made based on a few seconds of information instead of after three weeks spent amidst the thoughts and ideas of a living person or a person who lived a hundred or several hundred years ago.

Our education is mere imitation. Our lives are mere repetition of tradition. Our careers are empty vessels of unthinking actions. If we never stop to question, if we never pause to wonder, and if we never pick up a book and settle into another reality of thought, what then can we say of living and life? Are we awakened souls or are we unconscious entities surviving on mere sparks of stimulation to our sensory system?

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.