The Puerile Pursuit of Decolonization Studies

 The Puerile Pursuit of Decolonization Studies

M. Bakri Musa

August 26, 2026

The puerile obsession with “decolonization” studies among contemporary Malay academics is not just an intellectual dead end; it is a profound distraction from the urgent work of nation-building.

With the notable exceptions of such intellectual titans like the Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and the Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi, most of what passes for decolonization scholarship today is little more than academic navel-gazing. This is especially true of the Malaysian variety. One immediate, telling observation: although British colonial rule shaped all Malaysians, this decolonization obsession is overwhelmingly a Malay phenomenon.

These self-absorbed studies suffer from two fatal flaws. First, they paint imperialism with a broad, lazy brush, ignoring the stark as well as subtle distinctions between, say, French rule in North Africa and Dutch hegemony in the East Indies. Even within the British Empire the Malaysian experience was vastly different from that of the Indian subcontinent. Yet, despite the undeniable scars and trauma of colonial history in South Asia, more than half of the residents on the subcontinent would board a flight to London tomorrow if granted a visa.

Second, these scholars lack historical perspective. Centuries of Western domination in Malaya—first under the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British—did not come close in sheer brutality, deprivation, and terror to the 44-month Japanese Occupation during the Second World War. Yet, when Mahathir introduced his Look East Policy in the 1980s, Malaysians enthusiastically embraced Japan as an economic and cultural role model, entirely unburdened by historical grudges.

Colonialism, after all, was merely one vector of Western dominance. Consider how the United States laid waste to Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century, or dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or incinerated the Korean peninsula less than a decade later. Today, Japan and South Korea stand as Washington’s premier regional allies.

Vietnam presents an even sharper lesson in pragmatic realism. Despite fresh memories of My Lai and the enduring curse of Agent Orange, the Vietnamese chose to focus on the future rather than wallow in victimhood. Current leaders and intellectuals in Hanoi display zero appetite for “De-Americanization” crusades. Instead, Vietnam has transformed itself into a prime destination for American capital and tourists. Their logic is as simple as it is practical: the war was horrific and the scars remain raw, but the priority must be building a prosperous future for the next generation rather than burdening them with the grievances of the past.

For Malaysia, the legacies of British rule are undeniable, pervasive, and—most inconveniently for the decolonization crowd—instrumental to our leadership. Of Malaysia’s ten Prime Ministers, seven—including current Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim—benefited immensely from British educational institutions or traditions. The nation’s founding father, Tunku Abdul Rahman, was educated at Cambridge. Anwar Ibrahim, while not an alumnus of a British university, was nurtured at the Malay College Kuala Kangsar—an institution explicit in its mission as an “Eton of the East”—where his headmasters were colonials for whom he has written with fond nostalgia. Later, to escape Mahathir’s wrath, Anwar spent years in the West, intellectualizing at Oxford and Johns Hopkins.

By contrast, the three Prime Ministers who were locally educated and thus lacked British tutelage offer little to boast about: Abdullah Badawi’s tenure was largely forgettable, while Muhyiddin Yassin and Ismail Sabri now face severe corruption charges. Najib Razak, British-educated yet responsible for the staggering 1MDB scandal, stands as the tragic, ignominious exception to my observation.

It may sound perverse to contemporary ears, but when Tunku Abdul Rahman negotiated Malaya's independence in the mid-1950s, his main obstacles came not from the British Colonial Office, but from his own Malay Rulers, who fiercely guarded their feudal prerogatives.

My own experience reflects this era. I spent my early schooling under the British system, where most of my teachers were foreigners or colonials. My sixth-grade English teacher was an Oxonian—the equivalent of having a Yale graduate teaching at an elementary school in Los Banos, in California’s Central Valley. I sat for the exact same Cambridge examinations as students in England. When I earned an A, I knew I had not been graded on a curve; I had bested the blue-blazered public school boys in Old England on their own terms.

Rather than tilting at windmills and chasing imaginary demons in the name of “decolonization,” Malay intellectuals would be far better served absorbing the lessons of the West—learning what to emulate, and just as critically, what to avoid. When the great scholars of the Islamic Golden Age built their intellectual empire, they did not reject the works of atheistic and polytheistic Greek philosophers; they studied them, translated them, and built upon them.

If ancient Muslim luminaries could fearlessly and enthusiastically learn from pagan Greeks to ignite an Islamic Renaissance, why should modern Malay scholars cower from engaging with the legacy of their former colonizer? That is a thought worth pondering as Malaysia marks the 69th anniversary of Merdeka this August 31st.

Excerpt from my Qur’an, Hadith, and Hikayat:  Exercises In Critical Thinking will resume next week.