Author: admin

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On Religious Men

For most of those in my generation, we grew up amidst a time of great change. Our parents were a guinea pig generation: young men and women who were wrenched out of their villages and kampungs, thrown up into schools and universities far away from their origins, and then told to keep their heads down and rebuild a young nation, still reeling from the ashes of racial unrest.

This social upheaval, this march towards the utopia of development, wreaked a heavy cost on those who had to live through it, and I think it is not unfair to say that for many young Malaysians living through this period, many of them suffered through their own individual crises of faith. For some, the white heat of science and technology was so searing that faith was no longer something to be indulged in. For many others, the frightening pace of change meant that religion was not only a custom to remain loyal to, but a safe harbour for the mind and the soul.

My own version of living through this period of great social change was that I was sent to religious school in the mornings, prior to attending government school in the afternoons. A middle-aged ustaz, white turban ever-present, would be holding his thin sliver of rotan and teaching us to recite the Quran, and while the rotan mostly never did anything more than thwack down onto the Quran that we held in front of us when we missed a step, the threat of it was always heart-stopping. We learnt everything by rote: the letters of the abjad. The short verses of the juz amma. The fundamentals of Sunni theology: the pillars of the Faith, the pillars of Islam, the twenty attributes of God.

Like many of us then, I was taught to give due deference to the ustaz and ustazah. The implicit principle was that religious education was also supposed to purify you, to give you a moral grounding in what it means to be a good Muslim and a good human being.

Now, as I am older, I think this assumption around the morality of religious preachers is fraying. Although the phenomenon of using religion as a means of waging politics is not new, it is telling that the Malay language now has a phrase for it – “penunggang agama“. And we can see the penunggangan taking place across the spectrum of contemporary Malay society: using religion to sell TV entertainment, using religion to sell tudung and telekung, using religion to sell bottled water. Religious preachers being arrested for lewd behaviour, for social abuse, for rape.

When I survey this sordid state of affairs in the religious life of the country that I live in, I am reminded again of that hadith narrated by Imam Malik in his classic work, Al Muwatta’: “I have been sent to perfect good character.” The implication here is that all your ritual, all your praying and almsgiving and Haj-going would be for naught, if at the end of it all, your personality and character remains untouched by His Message.

And it is this principle that has guided my interaction with others, especially with religious men and women. I try my best to read their character, searching through the tone of voice, the timbre and weight of words said, the nod of the head and the flick of the hand. How the words match against what is done.

Of course, for many of us, it is easier to just keep to a more basic heuristic: kalau pakai jubah or serban, mesti lah alim kan? And the next step: kalau alim, mestilah baik kan? But our experience surely must teach us now, that we need to look beyond the superficial. And the ultimate test of goodness, of morality, must surely be that your character reflects the dignity of your soul and the depth of your learning.

Harder to do, yes, but surely necessary in these troubled times!

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Familiar Ties

And so we go on like this, pretending
As if nothing has and will ever change
Not one of us fully comprehending
Why these ties that you bind are now fraying, estranged

You think that if we all just walk blindly
Close our eyes and ears to Justice and Truth
Somehow we can look back at this fondly
That Love alone can somehow meekly soothe

I reject your compulsive Forgiveness
I object to your purblind Compassion
I want Love that is grounded on Fairness
Not one based on evasive omissions

Avert your eyes, if you will, to all this
And pretend like we will somehow forget
But there is no going back to your imagined bliss
Only hearts overfed with putrid regret.
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On Wokeness and Privilege

There is a lot of talk now, not just about wokeness, but also about a so-called anti-woke movement – a counter-revolution.

For my part, I try as hard as I can to listen – really *listen* – not just to what people are saying, but also to what I am feeling as these things are being said.

For one, I think it is important to understand the motives underlying – and the emotions flowing through – these conversations. In many instances, of course, the recent rise of “wokeness” is a legitimate uprising against injustice and oppression. Indeed, it is part of a long-running moral arc of struggle – for the right of the slave to be free, for the right of the woman to vote, for the right of the poor to live dignified lives.

At the same time, I also recognise that as a straight Muslim Malay male, I am part of the dominant narrative in the land where I live. Many of the institutions and incentives are kindly predisposed (if not outrightly rigged!) – if not in my outright favour, then at the very least in the favour of those who look like me, who sound like me, who have names like mine.

It is too easy, I think, to simply dismiss “wokeness” – and the often-frustrating polemics that have arisen in the wake of its ascendance. Much of it can be grating, ingenuous, or even plain outrageous. But I think “wokeness” is, or should be, something that speaks to the core of what it means to live a moral life: to be just in our dealings with others, to treat others with dignity and respect, to do unto others as we would like others to do unto us.

One of the most gratifying aspects of my faith, for me, is that Islam was born in the deepest reaches of the desert, and that the message resonated most, in its earliest days, with the enslaved, the poor, the marginalised, the downtrodden, the oppressed. Muhammad did not pander to the rich, and indeed he refused riches when it was offered to him by the great and the good of Makkah, if only he would shut up on all that God business.

And Muhammad taught us that everyone had access to Him through His Scripture: there was no need for a Church or a Rabbinate to intercede or to mediate on behalf of the believers. Salvation was offered to anyone and everyone, and we will all be judged on the content of our character and the good works that we do on this Earth.

So whenever I get annoyed at reading something that someone had written or said, I try to remind myself that “wokeness” is, at the heart of it, a plea for justice. Yes, there will be those who try to profit from “wokeness” – either from what they stand to gain from through what is demanded, or merely from the satisfaction of being up on the moral high horse of performativeness. But we still have a duty to enact and perform justice by ourselves, in the acts that we do in our own small circle of existence.

That is all that anyone can truly ask for.

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On Adventures in Reading

I only started reading fiction seriously after I got married to Kat.

For most of my childhood, my reading diet was a mix of encyclopedias (my favourite was this absolutely gorgeous set of Peanuts encyclopedias by Funk and Wagnalls – oh how I loved Snoopy and Charlie Brown and their friends!) and game books (Lone Wolf, Assassin, that kind of thing). A chance encounter with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire (Bel Riose! The Mule!) in my cousin’s room set me up for science fiction for the next 20 years of my life. (I haven’t read much sci-fi since my late 20s).

In high school, a growing fascination for politics led me to a steady – and so far unquenched – milieu of reading political biographies. One of my most treasured memories of a book is a hardcover copy of Shaw’s Tun Razak biography that was gifted to me by a high school senior who had won it in the national-level Perdana Quiz competition. I graduated to harder stuff in university – Locke, Machiavelli, and a procession of biographies and autobiographies on Churchill, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair, and other luminaries of the 20th century.

By the time I graduated, I took on heftier tomes in the tradition of political biographies in my 20s: Robert Caro’s excellent biographies of Lyndon Johnson. Schlesinger’s hagiographies of JFK and the Camelot era. In one of my most memorable feats of reading, I finished the entire 1,000-page biography of Truman by McCullough in one week, while recuperating at home after having four of my wisdom teeth removed.

Alongside these political chronicles, I started reading more corporate stuff. I must have been one of the earliest buyers when Jack Welch’s Straight From The Gut appeared on the shelves in Kinokuniya KLCC. Classic works by Porter and Christensen. Graham and Buffett on value investing. Cringe-worthy titles like “How to Think Like a CEO”. (Kat judged me hard for that latter one!)

So when I got married at the age of 30, I was very clear about what kind of reader I was: a realistic, grounded reader (kununnya!) with a twin passion in politics and business – all this, of course, preparation for that glorious career that I imagined I was going to have, in those years when I was naive enough to think that intelligence and hard work was all it took to get to the top.

Marrying Kat was, in hindsight, opening a door to a new vista in my own intellectual and emotional education. Not only because of the usual delights and challenges of sharing your life anew with another human being, but particularly because while we were both avid readers, our formative reading experiences were so very different. Both of us grew up wandering through the shelves of bookstores and libraries (something we still enjoy doing today, together), but while I was content with gobbling up facts, with a side helping of sci-fi, Kat’s own childhood reading was almost exclusively literary fiction – Dickens and Austen and the Bronte sisters and all that.

It took me awhile to get it, but after several years of Kat waxing lyrical about the joys of literature, my reading habits finally turned a proper corner in 2014, when we were both spending the year in Boston. I was back to being a student again, and while the course load and getting to know my fellow graduate students was a constant source of fascination and intellectual stimulation, I realised that I had the time and mental space now to start cracking on all those classic reads that I had wanted to get through. After a few aborted attempts to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I finally got to finish it during my year in Boston. Kat and I both got ourselves a Kindle each, which kickstarted a new phase in our reading habits.

I began to realise, around this time, that reading fiction was not just about baca seronok-seronok: literature was Art as a mirror to the realities of our daily lives, a simulacrum of human experience in which pithy and poignant observations of philosophy and existence can sit cheek by jowl with the most poetic depictions of nature and life and sadness and joy and peace and pain.

Another milestone in my ongoing transformation as a reader probably occured about a year or two after coming back from Boston. I got myself a copy of Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader. His memoirs were remarkable to me, and such a milestone in my reading life, for two reasons.

The first was that while I had of course known about the publishing industry and its denizens – the publishers and editors and literary agents and authors and proofreaders – reading Gottlieb’s account was my first deep encounter with the idea that you could spend a lifetime, and make a decent living, out of reading. Professionally. This alone was already mind-blowing.

But the other discovery was even more astounding for me: the idea of reading as a feat of achievement. One of the most vivid episodes in this book, was how he spent an entire week, during his time as a graduate student in Oxford, reading through all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I remember him writing about this episode in his memoirs with the relish of a schoolboy who had scored the winning touchdown in a championship football game, or a college boy who managed to score a date with the prettiest girl in school. It was an amazing idea.

It was this latter discovery that spurred me on to my own bouts of Olympic reading. Hugo’s Les Miserables. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Conrad’s Nostromo. A Samad Said’s Salina. Stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy and Cheever and Maupassant. Poems by Whitman and Dickinson and Chairil Anwar. My proudest achievement in my reading list is definitely reading the final five volumes of Proust while on cross-continent train journey across Asia and Europe.

Along with these deep dives into the classics of literature, I also began to dabble with literary criticism. Bloom’s polemical exposition of the Western canon. G. Wilson Knight’s essays on Shakespeare. Lydia Davis and James Wood.

The joy of reading is also tinged with the sorrow of knowing that any one human life would never be enough for a person to read through everything there is to be read. Every minute of one’s reading is an opportunity cost against reading something else that could turn out to be majestic or educational or life-changing. But there is also comfort in this knowledge of life’s limitedness, knowing that for the rest of one’s life, there remains an ocean of literary delights to be explored and enjoyed.

If you are reading this, and you start thinking: that’s all very nice, but have you read this one yet?? – Drop me a line, anytime – from your ocean to mine!

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Tentang Siakap (dengan Pohonan Ampun Maaf buat Tongkat Warrant)

Siakap senohong gelama ikan duri
Bercakap bohong besar-besar jadi menteri.

Kerapu ikan merah parang keli tilapia
Makan harta rasuah boleh ke Putrajaya.

Nuri barat-barat aji-aji buntal cermin
Curi duit rakyat boleh jadi Ahli Parlimen.

Kerisi kunyit-kunyit bilis pari sesirat
Menteri perut buncit rakyat hidup melarat.
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Tentang Keputusan (atau, Luahan Hati di Gigi Sungai Cam)

Sampai di sini, kau dan aku
Empat tahun tersisa lesu
Kandas di jalan yang bergergaji
Ikatan jiwa terputus sepi

Bertalu talu hujan tuduhan
Kau dakwa aku berselingkuhan
Warkah yang datang berhukumhakam
Sanak saudara merejamtajam

Seminggu aku merenungredam
Seluruh jasad terpakudiam
Hanya mushaf menjadi teman
Menadah tangis jiwa yang rawan

Allah yang lebih mengetahui
Gema tempik rontaan hati
Gelungan janji terurai lepas
Tinggal aku remuk terhempas
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On the Oldest Dream

It was darkness. Pitch black.

Up ahead, a glimmer of light. A heavy tome, its pages old and yellowed, sandwiched amidst thick gnarled leather.

Then suddenly, the book flies open, and the pages are flipped open in quick succession by an invisible hand. And all around, a raucous laugh, echoing and unremitting. Not laughing at anyone or anything, but delighting in the act of laughing, with just a hint of menace, a steel edge to the tone of rejoicing.

Then I wake up.

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On a Revised Budget

Like many Malaysians, I am looking forward to today’s announcement of a Revised Budget for 2023.

Not so much for the goodies, though. Alhamdulillah God has been kind to me, and I think I’m doing okay. But I know that many people out there are suffering, and for their sakes, I hope the Budget will address their concerns.

For me, rather, this Budget will be the Manifesto that never was: a statement of intent for a government cobbled out of the shattered pieces of the Malaysian political consensus. And it will be, to me, the ultimate litmus test for a Prime Minister who has spent the past 25 years talking about Reformasi. This revised Budget will be acid test of whether those proclamations of reform were of any real substance.

Mari kita lihat, siapa yang kena.

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On Speechwriting

For more than two years of my life, I was a speechwriter.

Speechwriting is one of those strange professions where your job is almost akin to being a translator: to bring forth someone’s thoughts and beliefs and intended promises, and wrap them all up in a speech that will helpful move, motivate, inspire. In politics, where the art of public persuasion takes its highest form (yes I am a romantic), speechwriters are the architects and the constructors of political promise and power.

Speechwriting is also strange because so much of the esteem that you may hope to hold in the eyes of others is really just reflected glory of whoever it was that was reading those words that you had worked on. No one wants to talk about the speechwriter to some aspiring up-and-coming town councilor in some rural state out in some third world country, but the speechwriter to the President of the United States of America will likely find his way into the pages of the New York Times, and into any dinner party in Washington D.C. that would have him.

I genuinely enjoyed the process and the craft of speechwriting. Of course it requires a love and appreciation for politics, but often it also requires someone with the patience and intellectual bandwidth for the minutiae of public policy. Every politicians needs to sell something, and the politician’s speech is the coin of the realm.

Add another interesting ingredient: poetry. The best speeches of our times – “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, or “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – are not merely words to tell or to promise, but a intricate dance between speaker and audience, a soaring orchestra of rhyme and rhetoric that carries a politicians’ words far above the realm of the sordid, and lifts its audience upwards, to animate and motivate and inspire.

Unfortunately, in Malaysia, speechwriting is still mostly an amateur’s art. There are a number of speechwriters who gain a sort of anonymous immortality through the political acts and speeches of their principals, and any politician worth their salt will often have their own preferred wordsmiths, especially for the “big” speeches: the policy speech at the upcoming party convention, or a nationwide telecast speech in response to an unexpected global pandemic. But for the most part, the recruitment of speechwriters in Malaysia is still very haphazard, and entry into the profession – if it can even be called that, here – is still very much on a who-knows-who, often serendipitous basis.

In such political environments, speechwriting is often for the young political aspirant – willing to accept poor pay and long hours in return for the chance to live out their “Bartlet for America” dreams, and to purchase entry into the knife-fight that is Malaysian politics.

What does it take to be a good speechwriter? I’ve touched on some of these earlier, but it is useful to provide a summary: An abiding interest and passion for politics and history. The patience and grit to dig into the details of public policy. Ability to understand the audience one would be speaking to. Empathy and understanding of the principal’s personality, interests, and political priorities. Intellectual bandwidth and breadth of knowledge, buttressed by lots and lots of reading. A passion for language, poetry and rhetoric – and in Malaysia, the ability to operate fluently in at least Bahasa Melayu and English. Capacity for hard work.

I would like to think I was a decent speechwriter. Sadly I was not one of the lucky few who could carve out a living – let alone riches or fame! – through speechwriting in Malaysia. But I will never lose that fascination for the art and the craft of political speechmaking. (Ok time for another West Wing binge soon, I think!)

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On Buying and Reading Books

Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.

Like, yeah, addicted to books.

I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)

So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.

But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.

And that is how my books at home kept piling up.

When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.

It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.

So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)

It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.

Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.