PETALING JAYA (Dec 5, 2006): Instead of shielding society from books and ideas deemed offensive or pernicious by banning them, there should be more effort to train society to have the critical skills to deal with such information, a literature professor said.

It is futile to stop books from entering Malaysia when people can gain access to a wide range of materials - pernicious and innocuous - from the Internet, said Prof Lim Chee Seng, who teaches literature at Universiti Malaya's (UM) English Department.

"Why try to ban these books?" he told theSun yesterday, referring to the Internal Security Ministry's efforts to bar the entry of books and other publications it deemed "offensive" or "not conducive" to Malaysian society.

One book store owner and some distributors have complained that some imported publications had been barred from entering the country by ministry officers in Johor Baru.

Silverfish Books owner and director Raman Krishnan said he was unable to stock up on several titles because they were being denied entry by road in Johor Baru.

These include books by Kahlil Gibran, Salman Rushdie's award-winning Midnight's Children and Shalimar the Clown, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, as well as classics such as Anthony Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Silverfish Books' website has listed 109 titles so far which have, throughout the year, been prevented from entering the country (see http://www.silverfishbooks.com/RestrictedBooks1.htm).

Some of these books, like Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, are part of the post-colonial literature syllabus in local institutions such as UM.

Lim said many of the books on the Silverfish Books' website list were harmless but also stressed that shielding society from ideas deemed pernicious was not the right approach.

"In a democracy, you should be training people to be able to deal with these books - that is if they are pernicious - to argue, to resist error and to stand up, and not try to keep the books away as if they (society) are children," he said.

Lim said, borrowing a line from British literary critic and theorist on literature and education I.R. Richards, that "A book is a machine to think with".

In theSun's report yesterday, the ministry's secretary of the publications and Quranic texts control division, Che Din Yusoh, said the minister could use "absolute discretion" to gazette "undesirable publications"as banned under Section 7 of the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA).

Responding to enquiries from theSun, he said some of the books which had been barred entry into the country may be "offensive" or "not conducive" to Malaysian society.