Homeless: the Malay Left Rehabilitated?

Reviewed by Hishamuddin Rais The Edge June 2008

When I was in secondary school in 1969, I used to pin on my locker a self-made mini poster of Sidang Roh, Kassim Ahmad’s controversial poem, as decorative art. It was Kassim too who introduced me to Yusuf in A Common Story, about a kampong boy who went away to study at a university in cosmopolitan Singapore. Yusof I thought was almost the alter ego of Kassim. He was the narrator of the young kampong boy in angst over religion and worldly affairs.

I was young, innocent and growing up, looking for ideas and reference points when I stumbled into Kassim, whom I thought then was an engaging Malay intellectual. When I entered University of Malaya in 1971, Kassim was already the party chief of the Kepala Lembu [Cows Head] (the popular name for Party Sosialis Rakyat Malaya. Kassim was often invited to participate in various student activities. Without fail, I attended almost all his forum and debates. Unfortunately, I came to realize that the Kassim I admired was not an eloquent speaker; he was boring and unimpressive in person.

Reading Mencari Jalan Pulang, Kassim’s autobiography, one is left with a similar impression. The engaging Malay intellectual I once thought I knew does not sum up his life experience by making coherent the events that mattered to him. This is the writer who reedited the Hikayat Hang Tuah and brilliantly introduced Jebat as the icon for a progressive Malay society, but he does not reevaluate and to furnish us with the participant’s details of what really happened while he was the main player in the Malaysian political landscape. One would have thought he might at least give readers his version of those events – or Kassim Ahmad’s definitive interpretations.

His growing up in rural Kedah, the poverty that surrounded him; growing up during the Japanese Occupation; the war of liberation against the British; these are major events that must have played a major part in shaping his proto-left leanings, but all are dealt with a touch and go manner.

There is no penetrating analysis of what brought about the birth of Kassim Ahmad, the homo sapien that took over the leadership of Party Rakyat from Malay nationalist Ahmad Boestamam. Nor is there ‘cerita dalama’ [inside story] to explain why he decided to turn a broad-based Malay nationalist party into a scientific –socialist one. Readers would want to find out the historical internal debates amongst his ‘comrades’ or party memebrs when he ‘ousted’ Ahamad Boestamam – the first Prime Minister we never had.

I remember clearly the major schism that developed in the Malay left as the result of Kassim’s scientific socialism, his Marxist-Leninist and also Maoist school of thought. In my second year at the University of Malaya as a member of the Kelab Sosialis, I was no longer a fellow traveler. Though I could still follow the ideological debates, reading material had become limited. Thus I was hoping some of the convoluted debates of that era would be clarified here, but there is nothing about them in Mencai Jalan Pulang.

Kassim touches on the Asian, African and Latin American struggles for independence against the background of the Cold War, but without his own ideological and critical analysis. The Sino-Soviet conflict, as I recall, was the cause of the major debates among Kelab Sosialis members, but it is not on the orbit that Kassim has chosen for this book.

The subtitle of Mencari Jalan Pulang, Daripada Sosialisma Kepada Islam, aptly describes a confused soul who was sesat jalan – lost on his way to a nowhere place, headed in a nowhere direction. Why did he become a born –again Muslim after he had embraced scientific socialism as an ideology? What was his criticism of Marxism? The pertinent question was answered by a Palestinian comrade whom Kassim and I knew well: the fear of death is lingering as one gets older. I can subscribe to part of that argument, but a shallow understanding of that ideology may be the core reason, because Kassim almost turns name-dropper in Mencari Jalan Pulang – names of ancient and modern thinkers are liberally sprinkled, so much so one begins to wonder if Kassim really understood what all those were about.

Sometimes in the early seventies, I read Kassim’s review of Maxime Rodinson’s Muhammad. It was an elegant, rationalist study of the life of the Prophet by the French Marxist historian and sociologist. In conclusion, Rodinson regarded Muhammad as our Arab brother. Kassim, in concluding his review, considered Rodinson a brother too. I should conclude my review of Kassim’s autobiography by saying that may be Kassim after all his sesat years is trying to be a brother.

Kassim Ahmad’s rebuttal:

8 July, 2008

This is obviously a case of an ex-fellow-traveler not wanting to be an ex when confronted with the reality and truth of his error. It has been well-said that truth is bitter, but it is the truth that will set you free, as Prophet Jesus said. What courage Hishamuddin had arrogated to himself by claiming that I did not know what I was doing when I criticized Marxism and that I was confused, and further landed myself in this confusion because of the fear death, “as one grows old”! What a profound observation!

I was 53 years old when I published my Hadis – Satu Penilaian Semula, a book that shook the foundations of Muslim orthodox theology which after twenty-years is still being debated. Was I afraid of death when I wrote that book? If orthodox ulamas have their way, I would be an apostate, not meriting a decent Muslim burial! What a way of choosing to die for this fearer of death!

Marxism was a revolutionary doctrine in those days, and young people, anywhere, should be imbued with revolutionary fervor. In the University in the early 70-ties, Hishamuddin was one, indicating, rather flatteringly in his review, how he followed my intellectual development However, it must be said, that many fail to see through Marxism’s fundamental error, being a materialist doctrine, rooted in the old classical materialism of the Greeks and carried forward as a false philosophical strain into modern Western philosophy. Anyhow, Marxism is history today, and Hishamuddin and his likes had better accept this reality and bitter truth. Any intellectual worthy of the name must be prepared to confront the truth and deal with it.

That said, however, the valid legacies of Marxism and socialism are there to be carried forward to the New Just World that is being borne, as I said in my book.

This anarchist reviewer is, however, not interested in truth. I hear that he runs a philosophical class somewhere in Bangsar. One of these days, I might attend the class and listen to his definition of truth. I am not likely to waste my time with such likes, though. My memoir explains briefly, but clearly, my almost life-long intellectual journey, including my early ideological make-up and my short, rather naïve, idealistic plunge into scientific socialism, but the ideologically-blocked, Hishamuddin included, can and will never see the truth. Obviously, he has not read the book carefully, having concluded before he began that the writer was a confused person, lost and homeless.

That, sadly, is the truth of the matter of Hishamuddin’s critical review of my book; not that I dislike criticism, having had to handle criticism at every step of my life. What is dislike in his review is falsehood and dishonesty masquerading behind a facade of intellectualism.