Poachers should not become gamekeepers

These days whenever Anwar Ibrahim flicks a glance at present day adversaries while looking up his archive of past preoccupations, he detects an idea or two plucked by the former from the mental orchards of his youth.

Not that he owned the rights to those ideational plums, but he said it does hurt that those who do the pilfering lace their ingratitude with all manner of vitriol against him.

Yesterday, Anwar lamented this predicament at the hands of poachers-cum-gamekeepers while winding up a forum organised by the Penang state government on ‘True Moderation.'

Earlier, an intellectual cohort of his, Dr Siddiq Fadzil, reminded the forum that as long ago as the mid-1970s, Anwar in a presidential policy address to Abim had enunciated the concept of wasatiyyah,the Arabic term said to encapsulate the Koranic idea of a balanced approach to the question of Muslim outreach to the Other.

Essentially, the concept as defined by Anwar, would require engagement with non-Muslims that was uncompromising on the fundamentals of the faith but flexible on peripherals.

These days wasatiyyah has been dredged up by those driving Prime Minister Najib Razak new fangled initiative, Global Movement for Moderation, to explain the project's conceptual underpinnings.

"But don't claim you are forwasatiyyah on the one hand and then on the other cavort with types that want to play on race and religion to incite the people," sighed Anwar in his winding-up remarks to a crowd that had earlier heard renowned Indonesian scholar, Din Syamsuddin (left), espouse the view that Islam was inherently for moderation in belief and practice.

"There is no room for racial and religious pandering in Islam," said Anwar.

 Past encounters

He recounted past encounters with other religions and their leaders during which he said he never compromised on the fundamentals of Islamic belief while at the same time respecting the rights of others to theirs.

He said he understood this to be the wisdom of Muslim outreach to the Other but for all that, he was regularly berated by his detractors for promoting pluralism, among lesser strictures; of course, the more outrageous slings and arrows aimed at him by critics held him to be pro-Jew and pro-Zionist.

Anwar said Muslims, Christians and Hindus had offered prayers for his acquittal from the sodomy charge he faced and when he publicly pronounced his thanks for those offerings, he was denounced for "equating Islamic prayers with non-Muslim ones."

"Respect for others' religious beliefs does not entail syncretism in our beliefs. It is merely recognition of the pluralism of religious beliefs which is acknowledged in the Koran," said Anwar.

He expressed his amazement at the overnight prayer vigils held by the various religious groups on the morrow of his acquittal.

"Something like fourteen major Hindu temples held all-night prayer vigils for me," he revealed, dismissing his erstwhile detractors' suggestion that he was thereby acknowledging parity between the beliefs of others and Muslims.