ABSTRACT
As Malaysia celebrates its newfound “fame” as a model Muslim society in a post-September 11 world with the inception of Islam Hadhari (or Civilizational Islam), there seems to be an increasing need (especially on the part of the nation-state) to maintain a set of morals and ethics to accompany a “global mindset.” In seeking the people’s mandate, the country’s prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi introduced Islam Hadhari during the 2004 general elections, giving emphasis to the building of a “progressive” nation through “mental revolution and cultural transformation” in order to embrace the challenges of globalization. These recent changes and challenges within the political sphere of Malaysia resonate through the country’s media industry, which is still subjected to state control and which continues to serve as a pedagogical and propaganda machine of the nationstate (albeit more subtly than before). Indeed, media (especially television) programs are incorporated into the rhythm of everyday life, where values portrayed through the media create family values, which then become new national values. While Ko Fu Yen (2007) describes a similar phenomenon in Taiwan during the sixties, I am suggesting that Malaysians are still experiencing such a phenomenon through state-led imagination and transformation into modernity. If the television set served as a symbol of civilization in the sixties, the reality genre today becomes a tool for Malaysians to revisit its own “civilization,” to undo and correct “past mistakes,” to re-learn the notion of civilization, and to re-educate the nation towards forming a new generation of “civilized Malaysians” in line with the much celebrated concept of Civilizational Islam.
