Two months in the Islamic heart of Malaysia

During my master studies I spent two months doing an internship at a university in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. The city of Kuala Terengganu is in the northeastearn part of the Malaysian mainland, the most conservative and Muslim-dominated area of the country. The city itself is not small, having a population of about 400,000. But the university is located about 20 km outside of the city, and there is no public transportation going back and forth.

So unless you have a car or motorbike, you are pretty much stuck. Your best bet is to attach yourself like a leech to the nearest friendly college-kid with a motorbike. It won't take long before you start getting invitations to go see the crystal mosque, visit a Hindu temple service, or try some tasty Indian food. Make sure he has an extra helmet and hang on tight.

The first thing that struck me about the university was the diversity.

I'm no stranger to diversity. During my bachelor studies in Vancouver, Canada, I made friends from all over the world: Venezuela, Indonesia, China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, South Korea, Pakistan. During my master studies in Kiel, Germany, I continued this trend: Turkey, Brazil, Malaysia, Nigeria, India.

But somehow I hadn't expected it in the Islamic heart of Malaysia. Nonetheless, there it was. I made friends from Ethiopia, France, Nigeria, Indonesia, even a country called Somaliland. I'd never heard of it either, but they have a population of 3.5 million and their own currency. It turns out it can be quite a pain in the ass to be from a country that no one's ever heard of, as the immigration officers in many countries haven't heard of it either.

The locals themselves are also quite diverse. Malaysia has a large population of Indian (mostly Hindu) and Chinese (mostly Buddhist or non-religious) immigrants, and Kuala Terengganu is no exception.

For the most part they get along fine. While the country is officially Muslim and its citizens are expected to abide by the rules of Islam, the Indians and Chinese (and other non-Muslims) are exempted from this.

Everyone at the university, locals and international students alike, seemed to get along well and were friendly and open. The Muslim girls generally acted shyly toward me in public, but in the more relaxed atmosphere of a group outing or just eating together at one of the restaurants across the street, many of them proved to be quite straightforward and open.

In one surreal experience, a young Muslim girl I'd known for about 10 minutes started telling me the story of her struggle with a disease that affected her reproductive organs (no, not an STD, but it still caught me off guard that she would talk to me so openly about her disease).

The university had a weight room and a swimming pool. This temporarily had me imagining college girls in hijabs and bikinis, and I thought that the university must be quite progressive. Alas, these areas were segregated by giving access to men and women on alternating days, so I never found out whether hijabs and bikinis was a real thing.

Screenshot from MBC drama "Man Who Dies to Love"


Free wifi was available in the dorms, but I used it with caution after getting hit with an ominous warning message while browsing, something to the effect that my attempts to access pornographic websites had been reported to the university authorities. That left me a little indignant, as I hadn't been attempting to access pornography at all. It seemed that the overly ambitious censorship team had blocked any website suspected to contain, link to, or even mention pornography. Then they blocked a few other random sites just for good measure.

Honestly, the whole operation was a bit naive. No one is more resourceful than college students when it comes to finding porn on the internet. And the internet is a big, big place...

Fortunately no one came knocking on my dorm room door, demanding to know why I'd been attempting to view internet pornography. Without being able to access the site, I had no way to prove that it wasn't true. And while I was relatively certain that attempted pornography viewing was not a jailable offense, I couldn't imagine any punishment that I would enjoy.

My workplace was at an aquaculture institute, as I was doing an experiment with a group of tropical aquarium fish called gourami. It was literally a few feet from the beach. I just had to step outside of the building and there was the beach. You can probably guess where I took my breaks.

Unfortunately it was extremely dangerous to go in the water, as the waves were like angry, thrashing sledgehammers and demon-like riptides coasted beneath the churning, sand-darkened surface, hungry talons waiting to grab brave little swimmers and yank them into the depths of the sea. Two unfortunate students drowned by exactly that method during my stay there.

It always felt a bit weird, though, to venture onto a beautiful beach in the mid-day heat, and find at most 1 or 2 (fully-clothed) people hanging out there. On the other hand, I didn't mind having the beach to myself. In my current city of Kiel, Germany, as soon as the sun appears and the temperature is over 20C the beach is packed with eager, half-naked sun worshipers. Germans are a beach-loving bunch at the best of times (they also like to be naked, but that's another story), but in Kiel we get about 2 weeks of summer a year.

Malaysians do not worship the sun. They hide from it. There were covered walkways leading from building to building throughout the most trafficked parts of the university. I sauntered along beside the walkways in my shorts and t-shirt, face turned upward, trying to soak up every ray. They thought I was crazy.

I thought they were crazy. They had the sun I've been lusting after most of my adult life, and they weren't using it!

Probably because they have it all the time. Literally. I was there for two months and it rained once, for five minutes. The rest of the time it was 35C and sunny. Every. Single. Day. Being a weather forecaster there would be the easiest job in the world. Record once: "Today there will be a low of 33C and a high of 35C. It will be sunny all day with a few short cloudy periods." End recording. Then set it to replay every day and stop showing up for work. No one would notice.

That was the dry season. I know that because I checked, but I also know it because I've seen the wet season. I visited Kuala Lumpur on the west coast. There it was wet season. In wet season it rains every day, at least twice a day. You are out for a walk and suddenly the swimming pool in the sky turns sideways and empties onto your head. Everyone scrambles under the nearest overhang for 10 minutes, then it's over. Resume your walk through flooded streets. Repeat two hours later.

Originally I intended to talk about what it's like to do science in a developing country, but I got sidetracked. I'll aim to tackle that one in my next post, but no guarantees!

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Other articles by me:
Intolerance is fear of the unknown
The old man on the bench (a flash fiction story)
Empathy workshop, part 1: Why the world needs more empathy
Empathy workshop, part 2: How to increase your empathy
Empathy workshop, part 3: Getting better at understanding people you dislike or disagree with
Empathy workshop, part 4: Putting your empathy into action