title: "Why aren't you a Muslim?"Pride and prejudice through Gunawan Mahmood's teen fiction
creator: Lim, David C. L.
subject: DS Asia
description: This essay examines the role of the dominant Malay intelligentsia in imagining Malaysia, using as platform for discussion two contemporary teen novels by Gunawan Mahmood: This Land (originally published in Malay as Tanah Ini in 1996; out in English translation in 2002) and Namaku Ayoko (My Name is Ayoko; 1994). The chosen author and texts are little known outside of the Malay literary world, which alters not the fact that Gunawan is a multiple award-winning, state-affiliated writer who, like many of his Malay-Muslim contemporaries and predecessors, believes that “those with knowledge ought to write” and “literature should educate, awaken and inspire society” (in Mahmood, 1993:x). Gunawan is an ‘intellectual’ insofar as he participates in the production and distribution of knowledge, as someone who professes a vocation for the art of “representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (Said, 1996:11). (Text by author)    
publisher: Brill
contributor: Lim, David C. L.
date: 2008
type: Book Section
type: PeerReviewed
identifier:   Lim, David C. L.  (2008) "Why aren't you a Muslim?"Pride and prejudice through Gunawan Mahmood's teen fiction.   In:  Social Sciences in Asia, Volume 19 : Overcoming Passion for Race in Malaysia Cultural Studies.   Brill, Leiden, NLD , pp. 63-82.  ISBN 9789047433705     
relation: https://library.oum.edu.my/repository/577/