The Nightingale

If you spend less time for beauty, truth and reading, your valuing of beauty and truth will diminish. It’s that simple. Multiply this by the number of people in our population, and it is no surprise that the practice of skim-reading texts on social media has been implicated in the rise of the post-truth media environment — with all the ugliness and anarchy it brings.

When I look at maps of Singapore from the 80s and the 90s, I see that the Changi wood and the Bedok Reservoir wood were actually tiny. But they meant so much, and their value incalculable. These slivers of wood are gone now. Also gone are the ecosystems they sustained and the life force they reverberated.

The covenants clearly outline that the lives, property, wealth, and faith of the non-Muslims are all to be revered. Non-Muslims living in Muslim societies must always be treated with kindness and abusing their rights is a big sin before God.

The Wardah Books Calendar

Perhaps this new translation of the Sejarah Melayu will remind us that we are not marooned and cut off from the deep culture and heritage of the wider Malay world. We are very much a part of it.

This was a good year for Children's Books, and as promised, here are our bookseller picks for this category.

To wrap up the year, our six booksellers present the books we consider to be Wardah Books of the Year 2020

What a difference a few decades make for today ‘hiboran’, or rather ‘hiburan’ to use the modern spelling, more often than not means sitting in front of the television or gazing at a screen: more distraction than activation