Anwar Ibrahim told a human rights forum in Oslo last Friday that detention without trial was an experience so desolating that only reading great literature and contemplation of the higher ideals of the human spirit could sustain him through the “long, dark night of the soul where it's always three o' clock in the morning.”Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an NGO devoted to freeing humankind from arbitrary fetters imposed on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the Malaysian opposition leader said of his two experiences of detention under the ISA:
“Deprivation of freedom is not something one can readily get used to. Yet, when contemplating the larger issues that went beyond my own world, loneliness and despondency gave way to a renewed zeal and hope for better days to come.”
Anwar said that when his second experience of ISA detention segued into a six-year span of confinement for sodomy and corruption, the texts that helped sustain him were Ibn Tufail's 'Hayy ibn Yaqdhan', Shakespeare's tragedies, and Solzhenitsyn's parables of Stalinist grotesqueries. As is his wont, Anwar suggested that Ibn Tufail's 12th century work in which a person's enforced solitude enables rejection of distractions and the search for the true and the beautiful, was the precursor of Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe'.
Islamic precursors
Anwar is fond of suggesting Islamic antecedents for intellectual currents made famous in works by European writers and thinkers during the Enlightenment. The last two years of his public pronouncements at conferences and seminars in the West have seen Anwar attempt an interpretative synthesis of Enlightenment currents with what, Anwar has claimed, were their Islamic precursors. This attempt has been marked by a feeling for the dialectic of ideas and events. This was evident in the themes Anwar briefly explored in remarks to the Oslo Freedom Forum which this year invited some 30 world famous victims of unjust detention to air their experiences.
Anwar of course talked about his experience under ISA detention in 1974 and much later in 1998, the second spell followed seamlessly by a six-year span for sodomy and corruption. Anwar told the conference that the primeval view of freedom as something conferred on subjects by a sovereign was no longer valid despite its resuscitation in recent times by authoritarian leaders who, in pushing for economic prosperity, imposed as a condition for freedom's conferment the good behaviour of citizens.
As response to this thesis, Anwar argued: “I am neither an anarchist nor a libertarian if by these labels we mean a belief in absolute freedom and minimalist government whatever that really means.
“But I do believe that certain liberties are so fundamental that no sovereign or state or power should be allowed to take them away.”
Judicial mangling
Anwar said attempts to divest a body politic that has constitutional structures of the yeast of freedom would necessarily entail the deviation of the judiciary from its purpose of impartial referee in disputes between rulers and subjects.
“When the law is subjected to the tyranny of politics, the administration of justice becomes both farcical and perverse.
“The judiciary is then transformed into principals in the destruction of the very process they were entrusted to protect.”
Citing the Malaysian experience of judicial mangling, Anwar said: “Decisions favourable to the people are overturned on appeal to the higher courts as integrity and moral conviction are thrown out the judicial window.”
Anwar said the crux of the problem was that the law will not make people free in Malaysia. Quoting Henry Thoreau, the opposition leader held that it is the Malaysian people who have got to make the law free. - Terence Netto
source:malaysiakini
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