Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • What's in a Greeting?

    When you learn how to speak Indonesian/Malaysian, you have to learn two different ways of greeting people.  The first is the non-Islamic way of greeting someone whom you run into on the street.  While you could be technically correct and say selamat pagi/siang/sore/malam ("good morning/afternoon/evening/night"), the idiomatically correct way to greet someone is to say mau ke mana? ("where are you going?").  In Malaysia, the words are different, but the meanings are the same for this non-Islamic greeting.  Another way people sometimes greet someone is to say sudah makan? ("have you eaten yet?"), but although we learned this in our classes, we have never heard this as an actual greeting.

    The Islamic way of greeting someone is to say assalamu’alaikum, which is Arabic for "peace be with you".  The response is walaikum salam, which seems to mean basically the same thing.

    You wouldn’t think that a greeting would be such a big deal, but it can be.  When we learned Indonesian, we learned that when you arrive at someone’s house, you always announce your presence with a loud assalamu’alaikum, no matter if the house belongs to a Muslim or not.  When you meet someone on the street, you probably will use a casual non-Islamic greeting.  Two devout Muslims might use assalamu’alaikum, especially at a mosque or during prayers, but that’s it.  As far as we can tell, in Indonesia these social conventions are still at work.  Also, as far as we can tell, this is how things used to be in Malaysia before about three decades ago.

    However, the social conventions around greetings in Malaysia have been in flux since the 1970s, with the rise of the dakwah or "religious awareness" movement in Malaysia.  The best example of this is a story related in an article by Michael G. Peletz ("Sacred Texts and Religious Words," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35(1), 1993), an anthropologist who lived in a Malay village from 1980-81 and again from 1987-88.  When he first arrived in 1980, his fellow villagers told him that it was considered very proper and polite for him to use assalamu’alaikum when greeting Malay villagers.  Yet by late 1987, he was being reprimanded by local government leaders for being a non-Muslim who used this Islamic greeting.  Of course, his efforts to figure out the rules, so as not to offend anyone, were fruitless; he describes, for example, the problem of what to do when a Malay villager greets him with assalamu’alaikum–is he supposed to respond with walaikum salam or not?

    Although this is the case, we have yet to hear anyone in Malaysia use the traditional Islamic greeting.  This is probably because we live in KL and have spent no time in villages.  Everyone we meet here just says selamat pagi/tengah hari/petang/malam (the Malay equivalant of the Indonesian above) when addressing us.  In our attempts at evesdropping on Malay greetings, we normally just hear "hello" or something suitably Anglicized like that.  It’s good that we haven’t had to deal too much with the assalamu’alaikum problem, because it seems like it could be a source of hurt feelings.  We have had a sort-of similar experience with the phrase insy’allah, which means "God willing" or more generally, "hopefully".  There is a non-Arabic expression with a similar meaning that it completely non religious (mudah-mudahan), but people rarely use it.  In Indonesia, our Muslim acquaintances always used insy’allah with us and made it clear that we should use it too.  Here, sometimes people seem to accept it, and sometimes people seem not to like it.  We’ve reverted to mudah-mudahan.

    There’s a series of related stories regarding Islamic words in Malay.  Since the mid-1980s, the Malaysian government has progressively strengthened regulations banning the use of "Islamic words" in Bahasa Malaysia when the context is non-Islamic.  This is most contentious in Bahasa Malaysia translations of the Bible and the Adi Granth, the Sikh Holy Book.  The government in several cases, most recently in Sarawak, has banned the publication of these books because they use "improper" Arabic/Islam derived words.  So even though the word for "Bible" has always been al-Kitab ("the Book") in Malay, the government has declared that Malay translations must call themselves Baible.  We don’t know much about the problems that Sikhs face, but other words considered improper for Christians include nabi (prophet), firman (believe), Allah (God), and about twenty-five others which have to be replaced with a non-Arabic/Muslim equivalent.  Our position on this is naturally that such laws are unbelievably stupid and not a little petty.  Apparently the government is unaware that in the Arab speaking word, Arab Christians almost always use the word Allah to refer to God.  Why?  Because the Arabic language precedes Islam.

  • The Cats of Pantai Panorama

    Pantai Panorama is our apartment complex, and there are a bunch of cats who live here.  It’s not like Indonesia, where there was one dominant cat (Tika Splotch) whom we regularly saw and that’s it.  For some reason, while we occasionally saw other cats there, we didn’t see any cats regularly enough to name them.  Here, things are different.

    So, because we are sort of lunatics when it comes to cats, here we go.

    • Teddy Bear  Teddy Bear is the alpha male at Pantai Panorama, and the first one with whom we made our acquaintance.  He gets his name because he has a funny shaped head that is reminiscent of Abyssinian cats, which kind of reminds us of a teddy bear. He’s also big and burly like a teddy bear.  Teddy Bear is always prowing around the complex, putting his scent on things as only an un-neutered cat can do.  He is perfectly willing to stare us down when we fuss at him, because after all, he’s in charge.
    • Fraidy Cat  Our realtor lives just across the hall from us and has a big fat orange cat who is terrified of people.  He always bolts away when he sees us, but we often hear him wailing outside of our neighbor’s door.  Our other neighbor once scolded the owner while we were all in the elevator together for "getting in my door and eating all my potatoes".
    • One Eye  One Eye gets her name because she’s blind in one eye.  You can tell because it’s all cloudy and stuff.  She’s rather talkative and lives right at the exit of our building, often sitting under cars to escape the heat of the day.  Sometimes she lets us pet her.
    • Father and Daughter  Father and daughter seem to be just that: a medium sized male cat who is always being trailed five yards behind by a smaller female kitten.  These two are just big babies, though.  Every time we see them they run over and meow at us, but they don’t like to be petted.
    • Two Tone  This cat gets her name from her totally weird coloring.  She is stripey like many cats, but for some reason the base tones of her stripes are splotchy, half black with gray stripes and half orange with white stripes.  We’ve never seen anything like it in a cat before–splotchy cats like calicos normally aren’t tiger striped, but Two Tone is.  Two Tone is unfortunately not very nice.  Sometimes we’ll be walking to the pool and we hear an annoying yowl from under a tree.  That’s always Two Tone, who says that she does not want to play right now.
    • Preggers  As you might imagine, Preggers is always pregnant.  When we first arrived, there was a white and black cat at the base of the hill to our complex who was pregnant.  After a couple weeks she disappeared, and about a month ago a very similar looking cat appeared, also very pregnant.  Sometimes she has a hanger-on, a little kitten, maybe from the last batch.  Just today she ran up to me (TP) and meowed and rubbed against my leg looking for food.  I petted her stomach trying to feel the babies, but I couldn’t feel anything because she was purring too loud.
    • Guard Cat  Guard cat lives at the guard post at the entrance to Pantai Panorama, and he wins the prize for laziest cat in the history of cats.  When you walk past him and make noise, he won’t even open his eyes, he’s so lazy.  He must be very used to the guards down there, even though we’ve never seen them pay any attention to him.  He’s like the alpha male at the bottom of the hill, but we assume that he gets handouts from the guards so he’s not as manly at Teddy Bear who fends for himself.
    • Dirty Kitty  Dirty Kitty lives way at the bottom of the hill under the cars near the train station.  We actually don’t know his gender, so we are just using "he" in the gender-neutral sense.  He doesn’t like people very much, but he’s big and fat because he lives amid a whole bunch of food stalls.  We call him Dirty Kitty because he looks like a white Siamese who rolled around in mud too much, but he has pretty eyes and a cute black nose.
    • Sasquatch  Sasquatch is the great unknown of our neighborhood.  In case you don’t know what a sasquatch is, he’s the giant, hairy, mythical ape-beast who lives in the Pacific Northwest.  We’ve only seen him twice, but he is definitely gigantic, the biggest cat we’ve ever seen.  We are positive that he is not a dog, but he seems to be about the size of a large poodle or small pit bull (for this reason, I object to tp’s name for this critter; I like to call him Dog Cat -jm).  We are not even kidding, he’s immense.