The journey in life is never a straight line (PART 1)

I delved deeply into religion and two years later, in 1982, I went to Mekah to perform my Haj (pilgrimage). There I met up with the late Haji Fadzil Mohd Noor (the PAS President who died in office in June 2002). I also linked up with Tok Guru Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, Mustafa Ali and a couple of other top PAS leaders from Terengganu.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

When I was in my teens I never suspected that life is actually quite complicated. Then, I would live day-to-day. I lived by the motto ‘tomorrow never comes’, which is quite true because once tomorrow comes it would be today, if you get what I mean.

Life was all about enjoying yourself -- eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die. And, if you can’t avoid dying, then go with a smile on your face because once you die you die, that would be the end of everything. Hence have fun while you still breath.

Then my world, as I knew it, came to an end. My father -- the only breadwinner in the family -- died. And we were all still in school -- all four siblings. That was probably the first greatest shock of my life -- other than the 13 motorcycle accidents that I had prior to my father’s death.

My father was only 46. Surely that was too young an age to die, especially when my mother was only 38 and the four of us kids were still at school. That could be considered as the first ‘injury’ in my life. And, to add insult to this injury, the hundreds of friends and family members that my father had suddenly ‘disappeared’.

You see; my father was a ‘big man’. That was why I could afford the devil-may-care lifestyle. However, once the ‘big man’ had gone, no one wanted to know us any more.

I remember the first Hari Raya after my father died. When my father was still alive, the road outside our house would be jam-packed with cars. The place would be almost like the venue of an opposition ceramah -- crowded with people. That first Hari Raya after my father’s death, however, not a single person came to our house.

My mother stood looking out the window and cried. I did not know what to do so I phone my father’s ‘best friend’ -- a man I call Uncle Cedric and who now lives in Australia. Uncle Cedric came over to console my mother. Thereafter our days of the Hari Raya ‘open house’ ended. We realised that now our father had died we no longer have any friends or family members.

It hit me then that we would have to pick up what was left of our lives and get on with it. I got a job that paid RM250 a month and got married soon after that. I was forced to ‘restart’ my life (or ‘reboot’ in today’s terminology) from the bottom. And it was a long and hard battle to get back to the top, the position I had always known until my father died.

Then the second blow of my life hit me nine years later. My mother, who was only 47, died. She had earlier left Malaysia and had gone back to England. She could no longer live in Malaysia, which was giving her so much ‘pain’.

That was in 1980 when I was 30.

My father had died age 46 and my mother at age 47. I was 30. How much longer would I live before I too would die? What was the purpose of life if all it means is you are going to leave this world and cause your family so much pain by your death?

I needed to console myself with the fact that life was not a total waste and that we are all here for a purpose. And to find that answer I turned to Islam. No doubt I was born a Muslim but I was never really a Muslim. I ‘became’ a Muslim much later in life.

I delved deeply into religion and two years later, in 1982, I went to Mekah to perform my Haj (pilgrimage). There I met up with the late Haji Fadzil Mohd Noor (the PAS President who died in office in June 2002). I also linked up with Tok Guru Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, Mustafa Ali and a couple of other top PAS leaders from Terengganu.

I spent almost a month in Mekah and Medina where I also mingled with the Iranians (who had just had their Islamic Revolution three years before that in 1979). I even joined the Iranians in their anti-Saudi/anti-US demonstration in Mekah that attracted about 100,000 protestors.

A year before that, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had taken over as the Prime Minister of Malaysia and that same year I did my Haj (1982), Anwar Ibrahim had joined Umno. So this was the ‘hot’ discussion in Mekah and Medina.

Part of the reason I became a ‘radical’ Muslim was because of Anwar Ibrahim. Before he joined Umno in 1982 he was the President of ABIM and I attended a few of his ceramah, all organised by PAS, of course. It was in a way Anwar who made me ‘see the light’ that the future lay with Islam.

Umno was evil. Umno was unIslamic. Umno was a creation of the ‘kafir’ British. We must oppose Umno and ‘turn’ to Islam. And turn to Islam I did, in a very big way, even believing that the future was in an Islamic Revolution in Malaysia a la Iran.

Killing and dying in the name of Islam was an acceptable option. This was what I learned during my Haj trip and in my association with the Iranians. This was also what the President of ABIM, Anwar Ibrahim, had been telling us.

But now Anwar had abandoned the Islamic cause to join Umno -- the very organisation he had condemned and had told us to oppose to the death. Anwar was now with the ‘infidels’ in Umno. Is it, therefore, also halal(kosher) to kill Anwar?

TO BE CONTINUED