The Collected Works of Ziad Hafiz Razak

This question has been vexing me for some years now: what does it mean to live a Good Life?

In many ways, the life I lead now is by all means, especially when seen from the eyes of a stranger, a rather charmed existence. I have a good job, a boss that I respect and admire, colleagues who are smart and hardworking and kind. My mother is still alive and well and healthy; we try to see each other for breakfast every weekend. I share a life with an intelligent, kind, whip-smart woman who continues to teach me so much about the important things in life. I have my books, and a lovely and cosy home; I have my health and my friends and my sanity. Nothing much to complain about, really.

And yet, perhaps it is a natural affliction for those who enter into the fourth decade of their existence. When the hairline starts thinning out, when the fertile soil of your youthful ambitions have settled down into the rutted pathways of a life lived more than halfway through, that question will emerge: Is this all there is? It can be an incessant and sometimes deafening question.

The problem with trying to live a Good Life (well perhaps one of the many problems associated with that aspiration) is that we are all often too easily seduced into wanting things that we never truly need. Money, Power, Status, Lust: these and many other prized possessions of what we consider to be the essence of modern existence, they all too often will ring hollow in our hands when all those years of grasping finally brings the desired prize into our hands.

Not more than a year ago, my father-in-law passed away, when I was into the final days of a glorious transcontinental trip across Asia and Europe. It was morning in Brussels when I found out that Ayah had died. He was someone I really looked up to: a man who made a fortune for himself by climbing up the ladder of life, and made something for himself out of the scant endowments of his impoverished youth.

His passing, so sudden and so unexpected, knocked me sideways. I suppose we all deal with grief in our own ways. My own response to Ayah’s passing was to question my own sense of existence, and to bring me closer to an awareness of mortality.

We all know we will die some day. But that fact really scares the living daylights out of us. Death is scary. And so we busy ourselves with board meetings and skiing holidays and newfangled bicycles and shiny sports cars: anything to take our minds off from that impending moment of inexorable finality.

I don’t know how much time I have left of this earth. None of us really do. But Ayah’s passing has made me more determined to find a way to a Good Life. Not a life that is obsessed with amassing Goods – the jewels and baubles of a modern capitalist economy. Nor a life that is obsessed about chasing for Greatness, clamouring for the accolades of a fickle audience or hurling oneself unthinkingly into the Sturm und Drang of Promethean desires. But a life that is calm and quiet and fulfilling. A life filled with goodness and good works.

I am still trying to figure out what this all means, and more importantly, what such a life might mean in the context of my own existence. But I am increasingly convinced that living a Good Life is about finding your path through life, as true and as authentic as you can be to the person you are always becoming, even as Life keeps throwing stuff at you that often feels too much to handle.

As I get older, I get more easily irritated with charlatans who try to sell you some easy Indomee formula to life. As if all you need to succeed and thrive and be happy in life is some neatly-packaged life of Habits, or merely to be able to uncover some secret Law of existence, or simply to be able to decode some sort of Universal Conspiracy.

Life is messy. Buddha said that Life is Suffering. Even Muhammad, resplendent in his moral majesty, “frowned and turned away” in a moment of weakness that was quickly put aright by Revelation.

We can only muddle through as best we can. And this is true, even for the best of us.

For some years now, I’ve avoided performing my Friday prayers at a masjid that is run by State authorities, be it JAWI or JAIS or some other such organisation.

At first, it was merely a matter of style. Such masjids, from my perspective, have come to embrace a very officious, bland and staid form of khutbah. Always, the topic revolves around some “moral” that the state wants to have inculcated amongst the public. Sometimes khutbah airtime is taken up by some commemorative occasion: “Hari Polis” or “Hari Pahlawan” or “Hari Kemerdekaan”. Often the khutbah would conclude with “these are the key lessons for this khutbah”, assuming of course that the audience doesn’t have much by the way of critical thinking, and that such key takeaways needed to be served on a silver platter, week after week. Sometimes the khutbah would dwell on something absolutely banal, like “kepentingan menjaga kebersihan”, especially when all that anyone can talk about is some controversy like the 1MDB scandal. And almost always, the khatib themselves would deliver these committee-drafted sermons in one of either two modes: the self-important, declamatory tone of “I Am The State”, or the disinterested, flat drone of a bored bureaucrat just eager to tick the box for the week.

Later, as cultural and religious differences began to become more prominent in the bloodstream of Malaysian politics in more recent years, I began to detect a growing willingness amongst the religious bureaucracy to use the weekly Friday khutbah as a platform to wage their side of this growing divide. Sermons began to specifically denounce acts seen as “un-Islamic”; words like “liberal” and “human rights” became increasingly used as bogeymen to be sneered at and denigrated. The khutbah has become a political weapon. (In this sense, perhaps I am being somewhat naive. I am pretty sure that the weaponisation of the Friday khutbah has been going on for centuries and centuries throughout Muslim history.)

I began to miss the Friday prayers which marked my time during my undergraduate days in the UK. The sermons then felt more raw, more urgent, more sincere, more real. Students themselves would organise and deliver sermons touching on issues of real and immediate gravity to the audience: the challenge of being a good Muslim in a secular society; the adab of studying, the responsibility of da’wah.

Several years into my working life, I discovered the masjid at ISTAC on Persiaran Duta. Sometimes the professors would give the khutbah, sometimes it would be someone who looked like a student. Often we’d have foreign imams who have come to Malaysia on speaking tours, who would be invited to give the khutbah. One week, we had a Uighur imam from Australia come to give a khutbah on oppression, and drawing a direct line from the Prophet’s mission to undo the oppression of the Quraysh, to the ummah’s responsibility in 2019 to speak out against the oppression of the Chinese government on the Uighurs in the northern province of Xinjiang. Tears rolled down my cheeks as the imam evoked the sadness and grief of a Muslim people suffering under the yoke of Chinese tyranny.

I am grateful that amidst a sharpening of religious discord in this country, there are oases of religious independence and liberality where the State is kept at bay; where being Muslim does not necessarily mean being treated as “sheeple”.

Is it too much to hope that such oases shall grow in influence in the years to come? Can we try to foster a more tolerant, open approach to Islam; one that emphasises Mercy amongst fellow Muslims as well as amongst the citizens of our fragile nation? Perhaps the Friday khutbah ought to be a good place to start.

MH 370. MH 17. And now, QZ 8501. 2014 is shaping up to be an annus horribilis extraordinaire for Malaysia. Inevitably, there has been a number of conspiracy theories flying around: how can it really be a coincidence, they say, that we are observing such a succession of calamities, one after the other, over the course of a year?

Obviously, the odds are very slim for such a succession of terrible coincidences to take place, all within a year, all relating to a country whose two airline carriers boast one of the best safety records in the region, prior to 2014? It is all very befuddling, confusing, and for some, rather intriguing. Perhaps there are hidden hands, pulling the strings of cosmic malfeasance which has led to successive tragedies in this year which is slowly coming to a close?

Unlike some of my compatriots, I prefer to keep a calmer perspective. There are myriad reasons why God tests us, and sometimes those tests can come thick and fast. This is what I believe, anyways: that the hands of God can easily giveth and taketh away, and sometimes we may be left in a daze, trying hard to understand the reason and rationale behind the calamities that befall us.

Obviously, these pontifications are all cold comfort for those who are losing friends, siblings, parents, children. To them, my sincerest condolences and commiserations. The most wrenching pain often comes without much warning, or even meaning. Human souls are often left asking “why”, trying to make sense of tragedies.

The human mind is always restless, always searching for that faint thread of narrative that will somehow “explain” our lives and our sorrows. This is how our mind works: we grapple with the disconnected bits of reality and try to fashion some semblance of meaning, even when the random occurrences of reality may actively resist such neat explanations. Maybe such “meaning” will always be elusive. Maybe God wants us to continue to marvel at His Majesty, be it in triumph or in tragedy.

It was only the second week of our “Leadership in a Livable Cities” class, I think, and we were face-to-face with former Mayor Thomas M Menino. From the readings, I pegged him as another typical “Mahathirist” politician – strong, bold, transformative.

He was all that, and more.

He wasn’t a “fancy talker”, as he plainly put it, and sometimes I strained to hear him clearly. But what clearly jumped at me was his passion for his city. His love for the art of politics, his delight in the privilege of representing the people.

So it was a shock to me, when word went around that Mayor Menino passed away, last Thursday. Several of my lecturers would start their classes with a remembrance of his legacy. The day after he passed away, the pages of the Boston Globe were plastered with eulogies of Boston’s longest-serving mayor; loving anecdotes mixed with soaring praises of the many transformations which he brought to Boston during his long tenure as Mayor.

And when I took the bus home, the day after news about Menino’s passing spread across Boston, the bus driver was telling me about how Menino had approved funding for his neighborhood’s block party, and proceeded to show up for the party himself!

It is always inspiring to see leaders who truly embody the spirit of the people, and not just blithely claim to be “pemimpin berjiwa rakyat” just for “sedap hati”‘s sake. Hopefully Menino’s leadership will inspire many others to follow in his footsteps…

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle recently with regard to the nature of Prof Datuk Dr Redzuan Othman leaving UM: was he asked to leave? Did he resign? Was it really a matter of his contract running out?

Underlying all this is reference to recent polls run by UMCEDEL, one of which asserted that support for the Pakatan Rakyat has increased, while support for the ruling Barisan Nasional has remained stagnant.

Of course, one can dispute such findings, which is well within the realm of healthy political debate. And the Ministry of Education has come out to say that the Professor is being let go due to his expiring tenure, rather than due to any intent at censoring or punishing the latter for his work with UMCEDEL.

We can dispute the technicalities, and we can also dispute whether the Professor deserves the opprobrium for the methodological shortcomings of UMCEDEL’s work.

My comment here goes towards the nature of academic freedom. While we may dispute the UMCEDEL’s methodology and conclusions, we should allow space for interlocutors such as UMCEDEL to inject a more evidence-based approach to Malaysian politics and public policy. We might not always agree with the conclusions or their approach, but we should respect the work of academics striving to improve the quality of public debate in Malaysia. It is always tempting to shoot the messenger, rather than deal with inconvenient truths.

Also, if what has befallen the professor is indeed, as suspected by some parties, an attempt to shut him up, then it certainly goes counter to the “political transformation” being touted by the Prime Minister. Political transformation entails a willingness to debate; a tolerance for diversity of views; a readiness to marshal facts and data to achieve one’s aims.

It will be the continued intent of the political opposition in Malaysia to paint the Prime Minister’s transformation efforts as mere lip service, superficial and insincere. If the Professor’s travails are indeed political in nature, then it marks yet another discordance in the Prime Minister’s stated agenda for transformation.