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The
question is not impertinent. People merely want to know:
Who is he really, or what is he to us?
Born in
Penang (pre-Malaysia) in 1947, he has mostly lived and
moved and had his being in that country which has become
famous for having a serious territorial problem with us
and for having helped our government conduct peace talks
with our own secessionist rebels.
But who
is Anwar Ibrahim? Is he really the
Malaysian counterpart of Ninoy Aquino? And what do we
mean by that, exactly?
 When
I first met him in 1974, in
Kuala Lumpur,
he was already a famous young man, having formed three
years earlier the Muslim Youth Movement (or ABIM, for
Angkata Belia Islam Malaysia).
I was
then based in
Bangkok, Thailand, and we
were in the process of organizing a regionwide NGO that
subsequently came to be called
ACFOD, or the Asian Cultural Forum on Development. The
aim, quite frankly, was to conduct and institutionalize
the inter-faith conversation and cooperation on the
values of religion, revolution and development.
The
regional head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization, Dr. Dioscoro Umali, Filipino of Los Baños
fame, and his NGO outreach officer, the Sri Lankan
Chandra de Fonseka, had earlier offered Anwar a UN
position, which, unfortunately, Anwar had to let pass
because the rules did not allow one to be assigned to
his home country. He was at that time already the
president of the multi-ethnic National Youth Council.
At the
hotel where I stayed in KL at that time, at Jalan Ipoh,
Anwar came over for our dialogue and to check out why I
was recruiting him to ACFOD. He mentioned some Filipinos
he had already known: Christians like Arturo Tanco and
Muslims like Jun Alonto.
I
remember informing him that from Indonesia, my friend
Abdurrahman Wahid of Nahdatul Ulama had already agreed
to join, as had the Buddhist Sulak Sivaraksa of
Thailand,
the Hindu Swami Agnivesh of India and the monk Thich
Nhat Hanh of Vietnam.
Before
long, however, I learned that for championing the cause
of hard-pressed poor farmers in a northern Malaysian
state, Anwar was suddenly detained without trial—an
incarceration that would last almost two years—in the
same years when the practice was also common in my own
country.
Anyway,
that day in KL, I vaguely remember, his mention of the
prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, was already accompanied
by words of foreboding. Then the TV in the hotel dining
room, where so many other people were having tea, came
on full blast, and the serious Anwar and I stopped our
conversation. Like everybody else, our keen interest
went somewhere else—to the tube that was bringing on the
“rumble in the jungle”: popular Muhammad Ali was making
a comeback by decisively beating the much younger George
Foreman. Ali had converted to Islam earlier on.
Time
flew so fast. The Indochina war came to an end. Anwar
joined the ruling party, UMNO, and in quick succession
occupied various Cabinet posts.
But not
quite known to his compatriots, Anwar had a secret
inspiration—the Filipino pioneering patriot, Jose
Protacio Rizal. Like Mohandas Gandhi before him, and
Pandit Nehru, and Tagore and Sun Yat Sen, Anwar Ibrahim
saw Rizal as among a few who belong to no particular
epoch, who belong to the world, and whose life has a
universal message. Although Rizal’s field of action lay
in politics—which he bore in the cause of duty,
rendering him a rarity in human affairs, a leader
without ambition and a revolutionary without hatred—his
real interests lay in the arts and sciences, in
literature and in his profession of medicine.
It is
now known to many that Anwar Ibrahim, too, is a
voracious reader à la Rizal and Ninoy, most conversant
with an entire corpus of Eastern and Western literature.
For instance, while rereading the entire works of
Shakespeare four-and-a-half times, Anwar also delved
into Islamic theology, philosophy and law.
More
than a hundred years after Rizal’s martyrdom, while he
was Malaysia’s deputy prime minister, Anwar quoted this
line from the Noli: “In the history of human suffering
is a cancer so malignant that the least touch awakens
such agonizing pains.”
The
dedication of the first Southeast Asian novel (according
to Anwar) “stirred a critical awareness of the
fundamental problems of colonial society. Its setting
was the Spanish-ruled Philippines, but the book could
have been about any nation in Asia. Rizal noted that
healing must begin with honest diagnosis. ‘I will lift
part of the veil that conceals the evil, sacrificing all
to the truth, even my own pride, for, as your son, I
also suffer from your defects and weaknesses.’”
Anwar
explained: “In a closed society, lifting the veil would
be taboo. Indeed, Rizal’s social diagnosis was
tantamount to subversion. In his time, the closed
society was identified with colonialism, but that was
only a cloak that wrapped it for a time. A century since
Rizal was executed, Asia has had five decades of modern
nationhood. But the cloak of colonialism has been
replaced by coverings of various fashions and
thicknesses, including dictatorship…we must remove the
veil hiding our shame. More than ever, we need courage
of Rizalian proportions to be honest with ourselves.”
And
still more from Anwar of the Malay race: “The Philippine
revolution, the first of its kind in Asia, opened the
floodgates of liberation against Western imperialism.
More than physical bondage, it aimed to break the chains
of mental captivity. In Rizal’s words: ‘We must win
freedom by deserving it, by improving the mind and
enhancing the dignity of the individual, loving what is
just, good and great, to the point of dying for it. When
a people reach these heights . . . the idols and tyrants
fall like a house of cards and freedom shines in the
first dawn.’”
Not long
after, Anwar Ibrahim would go to jail a second time—for
his unrelenting campaign against corruption and his
commitment to the Rizalian ideals of empowerment,
justice and equity. As acting prime minister in 1997,
for example, he introduced the controversial but
effective anticorruption legislation which held public
officials accountable for corrupt practices even after
their departure from public service.
Who is
Anwar Ibrahim to us? He is the Asian leader whose
understanding is that Jose Rizal’s program for
liberation was for all
Asia, and in following that program, himself became Asian of the
Year, per Newsweek International, 10 years ago. Anwar,
it was, who saw Rizal’s articulation of the idealistic
foundations of an independent nation—of liberty, human
dignity and morality—as unprecedented.
“These
ideals,” said Anwar, “resonate as powerfully as ever.
Though free, Asian nations still suffer from
intellectual dispossession and economic domination. . .
. The only justification for national self-government is
the restoration of the dignity of the people. But this
ideal will continue to elude us as long as abject
poverty, rampant corruption, oligarchs and encomiendero
remain. These evils will not be defeated until we
liberate ourselves from mental incarceration. Then we
can recover our own virtues and be, in the words of José
Rizal, ‘once more free, like the bird that leaves the
cage, like the flower that opens to the air.’”
Today,
as a prominent world Muslim leader, Anwar is again
showing these Rizalian features in his style. He
certainly does not shy from criticizing Muslim countries
for their failings. During a meeting of Islamic scholars
in Dubai, for instance, he condemned the torture of
Iraqis at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison, but he also
urged participants to scrutinize their own governments
for decades of cruelty in their own jails.
While in
prison, separated from his wife, Wan Aziza Wan Ismail,
and six children, Anwar tried to keep abreast of Islamic
fanaticism. He agonized over “what had gone wrong,”
remembering moments in history when there was “active
engagement and attraction between East and West.” He
grew up in a “religious and conservative” society, he
said, in the northern district of Penang. Every weekend,
his parents took their nine children to their ancestral
village for religious instruction, teachings not offered
in schools under British rule.
But he
also escaped to the small town of Bukit Mertajam to
watch Hindi and Hollywood movies. “We were pious, we
observed religious rituals, but we also felt easy with
the English language,” he reminisced. “We read
Shakespeare, the classics, Alexis de Tocqueville, and we
learned about April Fools’ Day.” Doesn’t he sound yet
like your provincial upper- middle-class compatriot?
Today,
Anwar is widely recognized as an advocate for moderate
Islam, cultural and religious tolerance, liberal
democracy and international collaboration. He argues
that Islam and democracy should be compatible, and
decries the use of violence and crime in the name of
Islam.
“It is a
moral imperative for Muslims to be fully committed to
democratic ideals,” Anwar has said. The “gross
misunderstanding” of the relationship between Islam and
democracy was fed by corrupt and unaccountable
governments in parts of the Muslim world, not by
adherence to true Islamic values.
Anwar
cites Indonesia as an example of a predominantly Muslim
nation that began as a democracy. The Indonesian
election of 1955 was relatively free and fair, but “was
hijacked by the secular nationalist Sukarno. People tend
to forget this fact: It was not hijacked by the Muslim
parties in Indonesia.”
Or
listen to his remarks that remarkably evidence the
east-west integration that has become his peculiar
charisma and moved Time magazine to name him to the top
100 most influential persons on Earth:
“Whether
it is Islam, Christianity, Judaism or other religions,
faith reinvigorated could lead not just to bigotry, but
may, when compounded with the elements of political and
social discontent, cause us to express ourselves through
violence and bloodshed.”
“But if
molded under the hand of the universal wisdom, it could
be a force to free us from ignorance and intolerance,
injustice and greed. To use the language of the Gospel
of Saint John, this perennial wisdom is the light that
‘shines in darkness,’ although ‘the darkness comprehends
it not.’ It is also alluded to in the Qur’an with
striking imagery: The light of a lamp ‘lit like a
blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the
West, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire
scarce touches it.’ Shouldn’t this be the light to
illuminate our path by imbuing us with ideals that are
universal: a message of truth, justice and compassion,
and, above all, of the liberty and dignity of man?”
Anwar
Ibrahim arrives today in
Manila
for a private visit. But how private can one be when the
whole world knows that he is Malaysia’s chief
executive-in-waiting. Like Ninoy Aquino, who was one
time barred from running for the presidency by age
technicality, Anwar, too, could not run in the last
Malaysian election as it was deliberately scheduled only
weeks before his requalification to stand for elective
office. But the people all the more rallied behind his
candidates and delivered a powerful message.
Anwar’s
group surprisingly won 82 of the Malaysian Parliament’s
222 seats during the last elections on March 8, wresting
control of five of Malaysia’s 13 states from the ruling
United Malays National Organization, which has held
power since 1957. His wife, Dr. Wan Azizah, who is party
president, and a daughter ran for Parliament last March
and won. |
