Kassim Ahmad, the hardened socialist and misunderstood Muslim

Syed Husin Ali (2nd from left) with others who shared their memories of the late Kassim Ahmad at the Gerakbudaya book store in Petaling Jaya .

PETALING JAYA: Veteran politician Syed Husin Ali still remembers the long discussions he had with the late Kassim Ahmad, when both were detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in the seventies.

Speaking at a weekend memorial to remember Kassim, who died last October, Syed Husin said the controversial scholar’s political and religious views became even more radical during the detention.

Syed Husin was detained for six years from 1974. He was released in 1981, when Dr Mahathir Mohamad became prime minister.

At the Kamunting detention camp, Syed Husin and Kassim would have lengthy discussions, often disagreeing over politics and religion.

These conversations did not go unnoticed by prison authorities. “Not long later, they separated us,” Syed Husin said. “They saw us having long discussions and thought that we were up to no good.”

That did not stop them from having secret discourses, for they were put in adjacent cells.

“The partition was made of zinc, and there was a gap below that partition. We had our discussions through that gap.”

Others who shared their memories of Kassim at the event, held at a publishing house here, were prominent economist Jomo KS and veteran trade union activist Syed Shahir Mohamud.

Kassim, famous for his banned book Hadith: A Re-evaluation, died last Oct 10 at the age of 84.

Syed Husin said Kassim was already vocal in promoting his socialist ideas during his student days at Universiti Malaya, where he was active in the left-wing University Socialist Club.

He soon joined Parti Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia, when Ahmad Boestamam was the president, challenging him to embrace more radical socialist views.

Kassim was appointed as president of the university’s Islamic body, and it was the beginning of his life-long research on the Quran and Hadith.

He made no secret of his admiration for socialism and communism. He became passionate about communist philosophies, such as those found in the writings of Mao Zedong, who chaired China’s Communist Party in the 1950s. It was a time when the student movements in Malaya were also heavily influenced by left-wing ideologies.

His political activism became more apparent when he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he set up the Malaysia Youth Socialist Club.

When he returned to Malaysia, Kassim joined Syed Husin in efforts to revive Parti Sosialis Rakyat Malaysia, and it was their vocal views on socialism that led to their arrest.

Recalling their days in Kamunting, Syed Husin said Kassim intensified his research on Islam and eventually rejected hadiths as sources of Islamic jurisprudence.

Syed Husin said he did not go along with this controversial stand.

Neither did he agree with Kassim’s embrace of radical socialism. “I didn’t agree because the government had been accusing us of being communists. To adopt this ideology, it would mean allowing them to easily demonise the party.

“Another reason I didn’t agree was that the existing party members were not ready. They could not even understand socialism. How did he expect them to understand scientific socialism?”

Syed Husin said he believed Kassim decided to reject the hadith corpus as a source of jurisprudence because of the existence of weak hadiths opposed to the spirit of the Quran.

Islamic scholars have traditionally graded hadiths under various categories, from “authentic” to “good” to “weak” to “false”.

Syed Husin clarified that Kassim’s rejection of hadiths as sources of jurisprudence did not mean that he didn’t recognise the authenticity of some of them, as he made clear in his book. But this did not stop his detractors from labelling him “anti-hadith”.

Syed Husin spoke of Kassim as a man who led a simple lifestyle, something which became a problem after he joined Umno in 1986.

“When the Umno people had meetings, it was normal to have food served and they would hold meetings at fancy venues. Kassim preferred having meetings at his home, and he would serve coffee but there would be no food.

“He was a very serious man, and he did everything very seriously. He had an expectation for the Umno members to work as hard as he did and to be disciplined like him. It was then that Umno said, ‘Goodbye, Kassim.’”

Syed Husin also spoke of Kassim Ahmad the romantic, saying he used his poetic talent to woo Sharifah Fauziah Alsaggof, whom he eventually married.

“One day he met Fauziah and she said ‘Hi!’ and that was the day that he went home and wrote a poem with the theme ‘Hi!'”

Kassim also wrote poems with political themes. One controversial poem was titled “Sidang Ruh”, which he wrote in 1960. It ended with the line “And God is dead.”

Syed Husin said it was sad that Malaysian Muslims had largely a negative perception of Kassim, which was felt even when died.

He said there were reservations by the local surau to allow the funeral prayer and he was worried that the Islamic authorities might even disallow his burial in a Muslim cemetery.

“Thankfully that did not happen,” he said. -FMT