a day in malaysian history............20th september 1998

20th september 1998 was  for all  malaysians, a day of infamy.
2 top leaders at loggerhead with each other for months on issues of how to tackle the east asian economic crisis came  to a head.

i came to know from a pdrm mounted 'police kaki' much later,that on that fateful night, numero uno, dr m was riding his favourite mount, going round and round the field in bukit kiara equestrian club, right smack around half kilometres away from anwar ibrahim's house, whom had to contend with a visit by armed special branch police, and arrested for corruption on account of him using his influence to disrupt police investigation on the  alledged homosexuality charge.

dr m could not have done better. he should know. horse riding is a panacea for great stress. it is a great de-stressor. i know this as well, just fresh from a rigorous endurance ride win at upm 2 months earlier and readying myself and my mount, boss, an ex-race thoroughbred on the same venue dr m was riding, for the world endurance championship scheduled to be in dubai that coming december.

it is akin to riding a superbike but with a brain of it's own. you think you are in control but you only remain on top as long as 'ms gedebe' think you are her guest and master....that is the endorphin high in horse riding. the uncertainties....like life itself.

but even riding could not contain my personal anger as an ordinary raayat then. anwar in jail was no love lost for me. i never liked him as an upstart finance minister, given  the cushy job on a silver plate by the senior politician and mentor, i found him too cocky. even then i have a soft spot for people like hadi and nik aziz and anwar was rather rude to both these chaps who were in politics not for 'the money' nor 'the  fame'.

i have  a chronic sensitivity to people with excessive power  and  and excessive wealth obtained rather unfairly via being umnoputra nominess.
and love the underdogs, always whatever their persuasions.
it become almost a character fault  in my life.
i can say on record i have never  voted the incumbent government in my life.

in my university days, and that  was in mid 70's ,and my  first voting in a general election, it was obvious the general election was just going to be an 'erection' of some sort. hussien onn then just created  the newly energised 'barisan national' after closing down 'parti perikatan' and all thinking citizen knew there was not going to be any creditable opposition apart from dap in the next parliement.
all politicians wanted to wanted to be ministers in the next government.
admittedly this was going to be the 1st general election after the national operation council governance post 1969 May 13th. 
so everyone were tip toeing very carefully.



i never like kit siang and his politics either. he was very disruptive then and even now.
asri  and hasan adli brought pas into the fold of the new 'bn'.
in kelantan there were an assortment of  independent candidate, coming under the banner of '.parti bas'.
some of them akin to the character of 'lord suuch' of the 'loony party' of britain.
elsewhere nation wide there were only dato bagindo kampo rajos' parti socialist raayat and lim kit siang's dap wanting to form the opposition. the young kassim ahmad was also there.

the idealist in me voted for for 'parti bas' in kelantan.
there was no creditable opposition.
almost all lost their deposits.!

'bn' won across the country hands down.
asri and hasan adli became ministers, a first and probably last time for 'pas'.
[  'pas' now is more a chicken without a head. 
'pan' its derivative are all 'heads' without a body.  ]
...and that was 1975/6 political history........


dr m, i never like his brand of politics as well. up to a point i thought he was doing well but in the mid 90's when his children were turning from being teenagers to becoming young adults, dr m's politics changed significantly. i may be wrong but that was how most people felt on the ground.

that was the beginning of his fall......

across the pacific, you have ronald reagan and nancy. their only son was a dancer and he remained a dancer. here back in malaysia, dr m's eldest son, in his 20's became genius in business all of a sudden.
abdul daim zainuddin and his boys became filthy rich!....and for most  of them filthy poor [ woth still millions of rm secreted in foreighn banks ...the likes of ahmad sebi, amin apakahnamadiadah etc etc and etc ]suddenly as well thanks to the bursting of the bubble during the east asian economic crisis!

from corporate wizards right to being corporate lizards, all disappearing in to the 'wood work', in their overseas homes
so many of them with private jets  and homes in london and new york etc and etc
that was also history.
some struggled back and make it . 
the rest disappeared into the sunset to enjoy their ill gotten cash deposit in foreign banks.
but this is another story worth writing another blog on.

i did the unthinkable the next day in my consultant suite at subang jaya medical. 
on an official sjmc letterhead with my own name screaming on it, i wrote direct in my usual ineligible, scribbled hand writing a short nasty letter to datin sri dr siti hasmah:

" marm.....i am very disapointed with your husband and with anwar. why can't both of them settle their issues in the proper correct manner!?....blah blah blah....blah blah blah

your husband is already well into his seventies now and about to meet his maker any day now. i hope your husband is right about anwar, because if he is wrong, how is he going to answer to his god?

and truly marm if anwar did what he did, i do not care what the rule of law in this country is, he deserved to be hanged by his balls!...."

i swear that my house phone sounded muffled for a good week. i was not using a hand set yet at that time, so any changes to my house phone i could perceptibly feel.

then out of the blue, i reserved a registered mail on the 6th day, coming from seri perdana.
a legibly handwritten letter from datin sri siti hasmah!

" dear dr nik,

my husband and i are very sorry and can understand that you and many of your friends felt that way.
we are also very disappointed to say the least. to say we are disappointed is actually a gross understatement. we are heart broken.

it is not economic, dr nik.
if it is economic it would be easy for my husband to handle.
it is related to anwar's behaviour. my husband got feedback from special branch and he has to do what he did...."

datin sri dr siti hasmah graciuosly ended her letter with , " only god knows, dr nik.."

yes , on the issue of dato anwar ibrahim, only the principal players know : dato anwar himself, probably datin sri azizah, dato zulkiflee the special branch boss of that time that went to see dr m along with his boss,  tun haniph omar....may be a couple of junior police officers on the round.

dato zul is a long time patient of mine.
a perfect gentleman.
a decade later i asked him, 'did you see it dato..'.
" no, doc, just a report from my boys! "....

in the now famous words of tun dr siti hasmah, " ..only god knows doc nik...".


if only the east asia economic meltdown did not occur.
if only anwar did not ruffled his boss that badly..
if only....
so many if............so many 'iblis' if's:
if all those did not happened, then we would not have a clown running the country now...

all said and done, tun dr siti hasmah, in my humble estimation, is the best first lady malaysia had ever have.

i continued to write to her, oftentimes in anger, complaining of dr m's occasional excesses.
she never replied thereafter but i knew i was not exactly in her 'bad book' because i was invited to sri perdana a couple of years later, just sitting next to the maintable. if i recall correctly during one of days when the 1st couple invited some gpms members for dinner in their house.
i was not a member. all these peole , cari makan type of characters , and amenu youth type  as well.

at magrib, i prayed next to dr m, but my anger was still simmering. i could not bring myself to say hello or shake his hands! we remained silent.

but with dr siti hasmah it ws different.
later  in 2002, when i ran out of sponsorship for another world cup endurance championship in herez , spain she arm wrestled stingy  hasan merican to come up with 100k rm as a petronas sponsorship deal.
i was representing the nation anyway. i cannot be using my own money riding the likes of shyakh maktoum on his million euro horses at a world championsghip.
stingy hasan could not refuse her even though he told me he was already up to his nose with formula one.

malaysia is currently in its dying throes in this current sand of time.
anwar ibrahim and dr m have both buried their many years of differences, political and personal, to overcome  that monumental inertia to change for the better.
otheriwse we all will 'rot' forever.
that is the choice on the other side.
.
it is a great shame on all of us malaysians  to burden this only on the frail shoulders of a 90 plus year old!
...and a decrepit old man nearing his seventies surviving on nasi kawah in sungai buluh for years .

shame on all you guys!!

dr kassim ahmad in memorium......

the late dr kassim ahmad is a  black blot in my world view of things. his politics does not interest me , much less his position on hadith and islam. i always thought a chap who claimed, and been acclaimed to be a scholar, could have done much  much better than  being  'anti hadith' man. with all the scholarship and the hardship he had gone through his entire political life, i would expect him, of all people, to get not lost of the light at the end of the tunnel.

islam is, in the final analysis, about closeness and mahabatullah.
and one cannot get close to allah without knowing and loving his messenger, muhammad [pbuh].
just because there is a wide spectrum in the practice of islam due to the varying ways people perceive and accept the sunnan of muhammad [pbuh], does not mean one , in order to simplify and unify things, one can do away with sunnah rasullallah.

one do not burn one's grandfather's "reban ayam that is old but still working, just because one cannot get along well with one's dad! "

just look at what the young turks had done to PAS just because tghh had gone bonkers and PAS now seemed to be running around like a headless chicken!!

differences are mercy and rahmah from allah , not a scourge.
just look at the rainbow! how pristinely beautiful it is........

'anti hadith' and a specie belonging to the same genus, liberal islam , to me is just the preserve for prematurely retired arrogant young cardiothoracic surgeon, still wet in between the ears young journalists, retired ambassadors who should know better, daughters of ex ministers, generally angry middle aged ladies etc etc and what not, who wished to bath in  glamour and at the same time revel in their  utter ignorance of their ugama for public viewing . 

i always put dr kassim ahmad  much higher on the pedestal  than these such lowly vocation.

but alas! life is always like that . when you least expect, the best that you thought of a person somehow turns out the other way round. 
it is a disappointment really.

'anda bukan saja sesat ......bahkan anda menyesatkan!', this harsh sentence still ring loudly in my ears, coming from one ex brigedier general  cum dg of ugama, brig general [rtd] datuk zainal abidin, many years back during the very public inquisation of the shaykhul al arqam.

so one fine day some two years back i was surprised when this fine elderly gentleman, very frail looking, was pushed into my consultation room.

i was elated actually. for years i was trying to get to see him personally to give him some advice on the 'hadth' thing. many young professionals with mainly secular education and little else , have been misled  on a wrong path.

and there he was, being wheeled into my consultation suite.
it is as if the 'mountain has come to muhammad!'.

'anda bukan saja sesat..bahkan anda menyesatkan!', i pushed that aside.

after a brief examination and an echocardiogram and xrays, i came to term with his condition:
'this 82 year old veteran politician is a candidate for sudden cardiac death, any time. he has a large failing heart, hardly moving, with severe aortic stenosis probably of rheumatic origin  in childhood [ probably his difficult  'marhein' childhood had contributed to that since repeated streptococcal throat was endemic during his time with his poor childhood back ground ], and most probably compounded by additional ischaemic cardiomyopathy as well..
surgical risk is plus plus...medical treatment is just symptomatic at best. a candidate for sudden cardiac death!' 

that was my 'internal conversation' and 'executive summary' on him.
at my hospital, and in my practice, it did not take long to arrive to such summary.
one visit, at the most two.

'doctor kassim. the outlook is grim. you have a big failing heart with you main valve needing to be replaced as well. additionally before a surgeon can do anything operative  on you, they would need a road map.....an LV angiogram and coronary angiogram.....and even that itself , in your present state, constitute high risk'

'doc i just need  two years to complete my work,  after two years i can close my eyes'

in my mind i wished i could tell him that even that two years is a tall order, but i kept my mouth shut.
too much bad news and awe for the old man already. 40 years in the practice tells me that shock in small doses over time can be taken more easily.

in his very frail condition i will be lucky if i can find a very senior brave surgeon to replace his valve and do bypass grafts as well. the possibility of 'dying on the table' is just too high!
no surgeon worth his salt would want that to happen!

we spend the next ten minutes discussing his new book plan he was writing.

'frankly dr kassim, if you were to ask me, and i am a fan of hamka and tafsir like you as well.....your position on hadith is islamically not defensible. i do not think at this juncture in your life you should concentrate on that......there is not much time left, frankly.'

' but doc, you are wrong! those people  from jakim dont have ilm. they are cocooned in their own ignorance..'

' well, dr kassim you are more well read than me,but the little i know about islam tells me that you are on the wrong path...you should come back to the right path. you are not only lost. many young people got lost as well following you. some of them i know personally'

that was my parting remark.

the week after, dr kassin ahmad did not turn up for his scheduled follow up visit.
i assumed he went for a better second opinion.
see some young cardiologists elsewhere who know how to keep their mouths shut!

may his taubat, insyaallah, be accepted by allah rabbul jalil. 
may his soul be placed amongst the blessed!

inna lillah hiwainna ilai hirojiun.