Embracing the ship metaphor

YEARS ago, the then rector of International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Prof Mohd Kamal Hassan, used the metaphor of a ship to describe the university.

The ship metaphor has precedence in Western literature. In Donne and the Ship Metaphor (1961), D.C. Allen of Johns Hopkins University states: “The image of a ship caught in a storm and struggling to make harbour was to the fathers of poetry a superb way of expressing the life course of a hero or the political fate of a state.”