Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (75 page)

He was Anwar’s private secretary for seven years. In those seven years Nasar shed his phobias and doubts. He met people of all sorts; he saw the workings of government from within. And Anwar never ceased to treat him as a friend, never ceased to give him confidence.

Nasar said in his boardroom, where we were talking over lunch, “I will remember that forever.”

After seven years he resigned as Anwar’s secretary. He went to England again and did a two-year law degree. When he came back he became the senior vice-president of a Chinese conglomerate. His government experience helped him get that job. After two years there, getting knowledge of “real business,” he left, and went on his own.

I asked about the ideas of 1979, Shafi’s ideas about the goodness of kampung or village ways, their joint ideas about religion.

Nasar said, like a man who had prepared his case, “Shafi was a businessman. But he had failed as a businessman. Hence his romantic view of the kampung. In those days we talked about religion theoretically. Now we are talking about Islam as a way of life in practice. Now I confront the real
world. My previous knowledge helps me—what I can do, the limit of my freedom, to what extent I can adhere to a mere capitalist philosophy. I am involved in some government contracts, and business outside the government. There is a certain kind of behavior which I will not condone. Corruption, giving commission under the counter, taking people out, giving them ladies, condoning immoral actions to get contracts. That is the test. The test for a Muslim is when they are confronted with reality and a choice to make. Until then they are always right. Utopian.”

He might have been thinking of Shafi. I said, putting words in his mouth, “And they can make trouble because they feel they are always right?”

“They can make trouble. When I am in the business world I am being confronted with choices, problems, people—of a kind I could not have imagined. People wanting a stake in your company—in return for a project. In the real world of business competition knows no bounds. At that juncture they contradict the values we want to create in the society.”

Nasar felt he had been educated by the Muslim youth movement; and he remained loyal to that education. Power and authority might have brought out his latent qualities and made him what he was; but it had also to be said that religion had given him the important first push.

Nasar said, “The Malay no longer has an inferiority complex. He is no longer like the frog under the coconut shell.” That was a Malay saying: to the frog the underside of the coconut shell was the sky.

One Saturday I went by the new highway to the town of Kuala Kangsar. The famous Malay College was there. It had been founded by the British for the sons of local chieftains, on the pattern of similar schools in the Indian subcontinent. Boys of all ranks went there now. Many important careers had begun at Malay College. Anwar Ibrahim, whose grandfather had run a village restaurant in Penang, and whose father was a male nurse, went to Malay College. He had to sit an entrance examination; boys of royal family at that time didn’t have to.

Kuala Kangsar was also the seat of the royal family of Perak. There was a big new palace, white and rich and rhetorical, with an air-conditioned throne room. There was also an old timber palace, really a traditional long house on pillars, narrow and dark, with much decorative fretwork, thick floor planks, and a cooling cross breeze. It was a museum of sorts now. But one could easily in imagination strip it of its framed photographs and charts;
and—dark and cool and protected inside, bush and dazzle outside—it could take one back to buried childhood fantasies about the house and safety.

On a hill overlooking the Perak River, and almost at the entrance to the royal enclave, was the house of Raja Shahriman, a sculptor and a prince, distantly related to the royal family. It was an airy house of the late 1940s, and it was furnished in the Malay style, with rattan chairs, brightly colored fabrics, and cloth flowers.

The sculptor was small, five feet six inches, and very thin, in the pared-down Malay way. There was little expression on his face; the nature of his work didn’t show there. He worked with found metal; there was a forge in the yard at the back of the house. He created martial figures of great ferocity, two to three feet high, in clean flowing lines; and the effect of the black-metal figures in that house, with the pacific, restful views, was unsettling.

The sculptor, in fact, lived in a world of spirits. He also made krises, Malay daggers; it was part of his fascination with metal. Krises found out their true possessors, the sculptor said; they rejected people who didn’t truly own them. He had a spiritual adviser, and would have liked me to meet him; but there wasn’t time. The world of Indonesian animism felt close again. In more ways than one we were close here to the beginning of things, before the crossover to the revealed religions.

The sculptor had a middle-aged Chinese housekeeper. She would have been given away by her family as a child, because at that time Chinese families got rid of girls whom they didn’t want. Malays usually adopted those girls. The sculptor’s housekeeper was the second Malay-adopted Chinese woman I had seen that day. It gave a new slant to the relationship between the two communities; and it made me think of the Chinese in a new way.

In 1979 I had been looking mainly for Islam, and I had seen the Chinese in Malaysia only from the outside, as the energetic immigrant people the Malays were reacting to. Now, considering these two gracious women, and their fairy-tale adoption into another culture, I began to have some idea how little the Chinese were protected in the last century and the early part of this, with a crumbling empire and civil wars at home and rejection outside: spilling out, trying to find a footing wherever they could, always foreign, insulated by language and culture, surviving only through blind energy. Once self-awareness had begun to come, once blindness had begun to go, they would have needed philosophical or religious certainties just as much as the Malays.

Kuala Lumpur was fabulous for the visitor: so rich, so new and glossy, so full of new public buildings and splendid new interiors, so full of energy. There was a new bank in a new building. It had been created by two Chinese brothers. They were only in their forties, and their beginnings had been quite simple. So far as vision went, one brother was all sparks, a talker; when he talked his face became flushed. The other brother was calmer, with glasses, a listener, with the manner of a physician. Yet I felt that when the time came the calm brother would be the more daring. They made great projects appear very simple, a matter only of logic. For both of them money had ceased to be simply money; business had become more an expression of energy, and vital for that reason.

It was Philip who introduced me to the brothers. Philip was the secretary of their company. He was Chinese, too, and as young as the men he worked for. He was easy of manner, humorous, quick, immensely attractive. There seemed to be an unusual depth to him; and I was to find that his serenity, which was part of his attractiveness, was something he had had to work for. It overlay great childhood unhappiness.

Philip’s father had two families. Philip belonged to the second family, and he felt that his mother had been badly treated. He didn’t like what he had seen as a child. He wished to put matters right for his mother, but he was adrift emotionally, until his conversion to Christianity in his fifteenth year.

It happened at his school. It was a mission school run by the Plymouth Brethren, who had been in Malaysia for about ninety years. He was at a very low point when one day, quite by chance, he went to a chapel service. He was dazzled by the teaching that God was a loving father. He felt it gave him a place in the world.

Philip said, “It’s ironical, because I would have thought I would have rebelled against that kind of religion—coming as I did from a broken family, where I didn’t have a father since age eight. And the direct teaching about grace—in the parable of the prodigal son, where the father waits, and hugs and kisses the returning son. Grace: unmerited love and favor bestowed upon an undeserving person: it was something very powerful.

“I owe a lot to the faith. It gave me a certainty and belongingness, identity. It had all been confused. Who am I? Chinese, but not Chinese. In a Chinese cultural program I would be lost. English, but not English. I’ve never been to England. The Scriptures gave the original impetus to my love and passion for reading, which exists at this day.”

At that time, 1966 and 1967, Islam was not the proselytizing force it now was. It was only one religion among others. At the time of his conversion Philip was thinking more of his future. He wanted very much to be a lawyer, a professional man.

“I remember my mother saying to me, ‘It’s so hard to deal with lawyers.’ I thought one day I’ll be a lawyer and give the time of day to my clients. I wanted to compensate for the family shortcomings. My father’s first family had doctors. The second family, to which I belonged, hadn’t done well at all. So I wanted to vindicate—to win back face for my mother.”

She was a worshiper of Chinese idols. People like her had now moved to a new form of Japanese Buddhism.

“It’s quite common, the Chinese family throwing away their gods and joining this new Japanese Buddhism, which is based on strong humanistic traditions. I’m happy for them that they’ve liberated themselves from those kitchen gods.”

People who knew about his faith and his intellectual inclinations wondered how he could work in a bank. He told them, “My understanding of Christianity is that we don’t deny the world. We are in the world but not of the world.”

His mother’s honoring of the kitchen gods was mainly a matter of habit. She would light joss sticks to them and place offerings for them; it was part of the routine of her day.

“Even as a child it had no meaning for me. When the time came to discard it we just got rid of it like old clothes. We weren’t worried that the gods would come and punish us. When I was fourteen or fifteen I felt a lack. A void, an emptiness. It cannot be articulated. For me it was serendipitous that I chanced upon a chapel service. The second generation of Chinese had to anguish over the fact: Who am I, beyond my shelter, my diploma, my degree? These questions were more real to the second generation. The first generation was much too busy. For the Chinese there is inherited wealth, inherited circumstances, but also the query: Am I only my father’s son?”

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