The model we saw in Malaysia

In my last column I mentioned a Turkish diaspora in Malaysia. It is a diaspora formed largely by those who, during the 28 February process, set out to seek a future for themselves because of the headscarf and coefficient victimization. In that period thousands of students sought abroad the educational opportunity they could not find in Turkey, and in this way the formation of a Turkish diaspora was brought about all over the world. Besides European countries such as Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, the US and Canada became destinations of educational migration for Turkish students.

However, for those who could find educational opportunity, the problems still did not end. For female students, the problem of finding a job after school while wearing the same attire, and for all students, the problem of the equivalence in Turkey of the schools they attended, continued to await them. In this period YÖK began to behave extremely stingily about granting equivalence to the schools of other countries. It revoked the equivalence of many schools whose equivalence it had previously accepted. YÖK refused to grant equivalence to some American universities. Just in case an imam-hatip graduate might have accidentally managed to slip in from there.

By revoking the equivalence of many schools, especially in Malaysia and Islamic countries, it planned to track down and finish off even at their destination the work of those who had in effect been forced to "flee" there. It is truly painful to learn that the many professors who ran YÖK in that period sat down and devoted so much working time to nothing other than carrying out this purge and annihilation. One finds it hard to believe that such a hostile approach toward the country's children could have been displayed, but it was lived as a fact.

The International Islamic University in Malaysia, as we said before, is a university in whose founding Turkey took part as a state, but in this period its equivalence was revoked.

I thought the equivalence problem had been resolved these days, but I learned that while granting equivalence to it, YÖK imposed a condition on it that I cannot make any sense of. It apparently stipulates that, in order to award diplomas to graduates, especially of the Islamic Sciences Departments, courses be taken from the Faculties of Theology. I could make no sense of it, because no such condition is put forward for granting equivalence to any university of any other country. Moreover, as I also told the students themselves in a mutual conversation meeting with them there, the student profile is definitely of much higher quality than the one in Turkey. If possible, they deserve two diplomas instead of one. First of all, they are raised under an international vision and cross-cultural interaction, and the university environment has direct access to a great deal of information. Everyone I talked to speaks and writes extremely fluent English and Arabic. I can say that students raised under these conditions are very advantageous compared with those raised in Turkey.

In fact, the great journey these students undertake for the sake of educational opportunity gives them a great experience that a bachelor's diploma could never provide. When they complete this journey, they come to have an extremely open horizon on the world. Indeed, although the conditions that force people to study abroad no longer exist in Turkey today, I see benefit in keeping this educational channel open. I think that this journey, which is hard to undertake because of its distance and the exile it entails when there are no compelling conditions, has brought a great deal to Turkey.

In fact, I had also planned to write in this column a little about Malaysian society, again in the context of migration. The native population of Malaysia, the Malays, make up nearly 60 percent of the society. The Chinese are around 25 percent, yet it is said that nearly seventy percent of the economy is controlled by the Chinese. These figures appear differently in different sources, but it is certain that there is a disproportion. "The Chinese superiority in the economy" may also be overstated, as an urban legend, beyond what it is.

Never mind. That is not important. What is important is how the Chinese manage to make this difference. Moreover, the Malaysian state's official policy prioritizes being a state of the Malays and openly practices positive discrimination in favor of the Malay race, which at the same time corresponds to the Muslim element. Practices such as more taxes on the Chinese, tax exemption for the Malays, and likewise quotas in favor of the Malays at universities are applied to increase the weight of the Malays in the economy. Yet all these policies are not enough to make the Malays more successful in the economy; on the contrary, it is said that they make them lazier and lead them into complacency. By contrast, the Chinese, conditioned to achieve more under more disadvantageous conditions, work much harder.

The impression I got from my meetings with the Turkish businessmen living here, each with a separate story (some of which certainly include a marriage to a Malay), led me to draw a similarity between this situation of the Chinese and that of the central capital that has done business for years in Turkey under state support and protection.

First of all, even if the Chinese were brought to Malaysia by the British in order to create their own de facto situation there, they came and settled in Malaysia as a result of a migration. The spontaneous dynamism of immigrant generations gives them a great advantage in holding on here. On top of that, the discriminatory treatment they encounter further reinforces their productivity. This illustrates very well what kind of sociological model the policy of encouragement or deterrence rests on.

We were not able to find anything about the Malaysia model that was talked about quite a lot in Turkey 3-4 years ago this time either, but we found such a "sociological model." A success model through migration. And this, frankly, cannot be considered a new model..