Remembering
“Tok Guru”
Tuan Guru Haji Nik Abdul Aziz bin Nik Mat (1931 – 2015):
A Personal Memoir
We go back a long way together, Tok Guru and I.
To the beginning, each of us after his own prior
apprenticeship, of our ensuing public careers in our closely intertwined fields
of work.
Two synchronous starts
His work, that is, of pursuing and exemplifying an
identifiably “traditional” and committed Islamic life within the modern
political world; and mine –– born of a conviction, held against the grain and
bias of prevalent academic attitudes at the time, that efforts such as that of
Nik Aziz to “make Islam real in modern political life” needed to be understood
–– as a scholarly analyst of and commentator upon such things.
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I was convinced that the new, and newly assertive, politics
of Islam within, and even against, the modern world had to be studied, not
dismissed as a mere relic of an earlier, now waning pre-modern political era.
He, on his part, believed that that kind of Islamic politics needed to be
pursued and deepened. Both of us took the matter seriously, and each of us was
committed to his own part of that task.
The two parts were complementary, but not symmetrically so.
His side of the challenge did not need me or mine; my part made sense, and
could only exist, in relation to his.
Our careers came together as they began. As we began those
two public journeys and careers, he as a noted Islamist politician and I as a
student and observer of Islamic politics, in Kelantan in 1967.
By then I was at last getting down to the project of field
research that I had begun to think of in about 1962: a ground-level
village-based anthropological study of the sources of the then unusual, even paradoxical,
mass support that the Islamic party PAS had managed to mobilize and retain in
Kelantan from shortly after Malaya’s achievement of national independence.
In 1959, PAS had dramatically won –– at the expense and to
the great discomfort of UMNO and its Alliance Party coalition –– 28 of the 30
seats that then comprised the Kelantan State Assembly. In defiant opposition to
the national federal government, PAS had captured state power in Kelantan.
And, after many delays and setbacks, I was by July 1967
beginning what was to become about two years of field research centred in
Kelantan’s Bachok district, leading up to and beyond Malaysia’s fateful 1969
elections.
1967, a busy year for PAS
And 1967 was to be a big year for Islamic politics in
Kelantan. PAS had survived the 1964 elections, held at the peak of Indonesia’s Konfrontasi
against the new, expanded Malaysian Federation, and, though with a
significantly reduced majority, retained its control of Kelantan.
But, with its improved position, UMNO was now hopeful of
defeating PAS, and “seeing it off” from the national political scene, at the
next elections due in 1969.
This guaranteed that politics in Kelantan between the two
rival parties competing for popular Malay support (and the political
credibility and legitimacy that it provided) would, in the interim, be keenly,
even tenaciously, contested.
The entire Malaysian opposition, especially the parties of
the radical left, had been accused (notably in a government “white paper”
entitled A Plot Exposed) of sympathy with and complicity in
Indonesian confrontation and –– based upon the connection of PAS through its
President, the pre-war radical leader Dr. Burhanuddin Helmy, with the “old
Malay left” –– PAS too was under enormous pressure. In him, the radical or
“populist nationalist” side of the PAS leadership was “put out of play” and
detained as a risk to national security.
Meanwhile, the more Islamically-minded (or “ulama”)
side of the PAS leadership had also been dealt a savage blow from which it had
not yet recovered. The party’s pre-eminent Islamist political intellectual,
Ustadz Zulkifli Muhammad (born 1927), rising from his connection with the new
Kolej Islam in Kelang, and while serving as the federal MP for Bachok, had been
killed in an automobile accident in 1964.
The party had fallen into the crisis custodianship of the
Islamically educated radical nationalist Kelantanese politician, Mohamad Asri
bin Haji Muda (1923-1992).
As 1967 began, the religious side of the party’s leadership
was, if not in disarray, then in eclipse. There was a gap there be filled, an
opportunity to be seized.
Two more events in 1967 were soon to shape dramatically the
political contours of Kelantan and PAS. First, in July, the “firebrand” PAS MP
for Pasir Mas was murdered outside the PAS headquarters in Kota Baru. There
were murmurings of political conspiracy, but personal animosities may well have
been the main motivation. A heated by-election was held to replace him.
No sooner was that by-election completed than the member for
Kelantan Hilir (or “down-river” Kota Baru), one of the old PAS ulama
(religious scholars) also died, and in November a by-election was held to
replace him.
The candidate that PAS, somewhat surprisingly, produced was
Nik Abdul Aziz bin Nik Mat, a well-known and widely respected religious teacher
in the area but, until then, not a man publicly identified with PAS.
On the contrary, he came to PAS candidature from his
previous employment as a co-ordinator of programmes of rural extension (“adult
education”) religious teaching offered by the UMNO-led federal government
through Kemas, the Jabatan Kemajuan Masyarakat (or Department of Social
Development), generally seen as a kind of government-housed UMNO rural outreach
instrument. All Kemas employees, it was assumed, were either explicitly
pro-UMNO or else decidedly neutral and non-political.
With his emergence as candidate, Nik Aziz –– to the surprise
of many, since he had been a conscientious but politically undemonstrative
servant of Kemas, but amid grumblings about disloyalty and deception from some
UMNO functionaries –– declared his true political colours and allegiances.
Starting gradually, Nik Aziz, or simply “Tok Guru” as people
would come to refer to him, over the following years became a major political
personality in Kelantan, a high-profile PAS identity nation-wide, and a
powerful force and focus of the reassertion of the ulama presence and
their power within PAS.
Nik Aziz and Bachok politics, 1968-1969
From the time of his election to parliament and as the 1969
elections approached, Kelantanese politics became increasingly heated. Partly
this heightening of tension reflected national-level developments, as Malay
discontent grew and found expression in agitation over such issues as Malay as
the national language, education policy, and the obstacles to Malay bumiputera
economic advancement.
But it was also in response to local, village-level
developments too. In Bachok district it certainly was. In 1968 the State
Assembly member for North Bachok died, and another by-election had to be held.
As I have noted elsewhere, “In this, the third by-election
caused within a year by the death of a PAS incumbent in Kelantan, the UMNO was
again eager to capture a PAS seat and thus promote a flood of defections to its
side before the approaching general elections of 1969. Though it had twice
increased its share of the vote in PAS strongholds, the UMNO had been denied
the dramatic victory it sought. Rating its chances better in North Bachok than
in the earlier contests, the UMNO decided to pursue victory aggressively” (Islam
and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838-1969, Cornell U.P., 1978,
p. 151).
And it proved brutal.
UMNO deployed enormous power and resources in this third
contest, now concentrated within a small, state assembly constituency area. It
brought to bear a full range of government instrumentalities, an enormous
government-provided “war-chest” to fund offers and inducements, and overbearing
social pressure as well.
Humble villagers were approached on a near daily basis by
teams of UMNO operatives and “grandees”, who sought politely to “win their
hearts” but also socially to cajole, shame, humiliate and overwhelm them. To
pressure them to say, just once, as a way of getting some relief from the
sustained onslaught, that, yes, they would vote for UMNO.
Once they did that, they would find it difficult, under
unrelenting daily reinforcement, not to deliver their vote on the day; and,
meanwhile, having promised to do so, they would often find themselves cut off
and shunned by their fellow villagers who, having resisted such blandishments,
still supported PAS.
And, when PAS people tried to persuade those who had wavered
and wilted that they might still vote their own minds and consciences, they
would find the prospective defectors surrounded and protected by young UMNO
supporters and “enforcers” who were determined to keep the “new recruits”
isolated from their own village friends and to keep PAS operatives away from
them.
In these circumstances, interpersonal tensions rose rapidly,
and soon escalated into overt violence. When that happened it was generally the
UMNO side that found its position upheld by the police, and the PAS partisans
found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Things became very ugly. Especially in certain villages
identified and targeted by UMNO as “ripe” for breaking open and capture.
How was PAS to respond to this onslaught? It lacked UMNO’s
vast material resources, its access to government infrastructure, and its
ability to rely on police support.
It could turn only to what we might term “moral resistance”.
To hold the situation, and hold their supporters together
(and out of UMNO’s easy reach), PAS sent out to those “beleaguered” villagers a
number of its religious teachers and ulama operatives –– not just for an
afternoon’s pep talk but to stay and live with them, in their houses and
villages, for days on end, until polling day.
These men would stay with the PAS-supporting villagers,
provide a focus of attention and activities, talk with them and tell stories,
lead prayers, give religious lectures and offer personal assurance and advice.
They came to be and also stay with their party’s local supporters, holding them
together in tight social and political cohesion, bound together in exemplary
Islamic terms by what many were ready to regard as “the rope of Allah”, of
divinely encouraged Islamic solidarity.
The Nik Aziz political paradigm
Under the guidance of the party’s ulama emissaries,
the Kelantan villagers came to see and experience themselves as part of the
core drama, and moral paradigms, of Islamic politics and Islamic struggle, not
just in Kelantan in the 1960s but at all times and places. They became, in
their own eyes, true believers engaged, in full standing, in the defining drama
and struggle of Islam itself.
As I have noted: “What had happened in their parish, they
were instructed, was no obscure dispute in a remote village on the fringe of
the Muslim world, but part of the whole fabric of Islamic history, woven from
the warp of unending oppression and the woof of a responding intransigence.
Islamic history was not simply the ancient, almost legendary events of distant
Arabia, but a process in which, through unyielding commitment, they had
participated on a basis of salvationary equality with all who have suffered for
Islam. ‘What is Islam,’ mused one villager, ‘but a community of suffering? We
here in our own way have been fully inducted into the ranks of the Faithful’” (Islam
and Politics in a Malay State, p. 155).
And it was –– in the year or so following his election as
Kelantan Hilir MP and based upon his experience as the programme organizer for
the Kemas adult education and outreach activities –– Nik Aziz who
conceptualized, devised, headed, developed and promoted those live-in ulama
teams, their modus operandi and techniques. And what we would today call
their persuasive “form of discourse”.
Nik Aziz did not just devise and personally oversee this
programme of Islamically-informed “moral resistance”, of modern Malay politics
in a locally accessible Islamic idiom. In doing so, he created or recreated
himself as Tok Guru. As the prototype and archetype of the Kelantanese and
Malaysian Islamic politician. As the persuasive template and identikit of the
Islamic man of faith in action: not in the madrassah or in party
political conclave but “out in the world”.
A lot of facile nonsense is uttered these days about “public
intellectuals”. Well, Nik Aziz was something similar but also entirely
different. And, of that specific social type, he was “the genuine thing”. He
was the living epitome of the “public alim”: an exemplar of “ulama
politics” who personally embodied and projected a powerful vision and doctrine
about how the everyday challenges of Islamic politics –– of “being and doing
Islam in the world” –– were to be faced as a single, coherent, ubiquitous and
paradigmatic form of struggle.
How did he do it?
From Ustadz Nik Aziz to Tok Guru: it was a remarkable
transformation or image “remake”.
How did he do it?
My answer to this key question comes not from talking to the
man or any similarly close and privileged insight into him in those years but
from observing him publicly. From watching and being fascinated by his
presentation of himself and by his projection, through his austere persona, of
his political outlook and message.
And I was not alone in seeing him as this often remote,
aloof and ascetic yet compelling man or living symbol. A leading international
journalist who stumbled upon one of his political rallies in a Kelantan kampung
during the 1986 national election was similarly struck –– but in his published
report greatly offended his admirers by likening Nik Aziz, his aura and
demeanour to “Uncle Ho”, Ho Chi Minh.
It has become a commonplace for people to tell their stories
of how modest, open and approachable –– often to their great surprise –– they
found Tok Guru on meeting him.
But, early in his public political career, I did not find
him easy to approach. Though generally of gentle and withdrawn demeanour, he
could be fierce, even terrifying –– especially when denouncing UMNO and
inveighing against what he saw as the arrogance and abuses of those who
represented it and projected it into village life.
In those days, to be honest, I suspected him of being a
committed but quietly spoken fanatic. When our paths crossed, as they often
did, in the Bachok villages, I suppose he wondered what I was doing there,
suspecting that, whatever my purpose, I was (from his point of view) up to no
good. And I also recognized that, given his politics and attitude to the kind
of thing that I was doing there, he was probably right to think so. Hence I
always felt awkward in his stern and forbidding presence.
So I did not pester or intrude upon him. I simply observed
and listened to him, watched his “performative” social presentation of himself
and attended closely to his words, their patterning, their subtly calculated
and accumulating, even cascading, effects.
Until his election to parliament in 1967, Nik Aziz was what
was technically known at the time, via the standard Arabic term, as a mubaligh,
meaning not just a religious teacher or “propagandist” but an exponent of balaghah
–– of the arts of rhetoric, argument and persuasion.
Balaghah has always been a key component of the
curriculum of the so-called Sekolah Arab religious schools in Malaysia,
as elsewhere. Mastery of the traditional skills and art of public speaking and
argument, of balaghah, has always been fundamental to PAS campaigning,
and has long been the basis of its persistent ability to “out-argue” and
“out-persuade” UMNO on the ground in kampung-level Malay politics. In
its title, one famous prewar guide to Kelantanese argument characterized this
verbal jousting as Tikaman Bahasa, as stabbing with words, or
verbal dagger-work.
Ustadz Nik Aziz was a master of those verbal skills. These,
in his own case, had been further sharpened by his overseas studies, in this
aspect more significantly at the formidable Dar Ul Uloom Deoband Academy in
India than by his later studies at Al-Azhar in Cairo. As he now emerged as Tok
Guru, he created and defined himself through their masterful deployment within
the brutally uncompromising intra-Malay politics pitting PAS against UMNO in
Kelantan in and from the late 1960s.
Rhetorical style and technique
When Tok Guru addressed a Kelantan village audience, he did
not only speak in the local Kelantan dialect. He also adopted a “folksy” ––
replete, elaborated and locally accessible –– narrative style. (Some insight
into these processes is provided by Farish A. Noor, “The Localization of
Islamist Discourse in the Tafsir of Tuan Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat …”, in
Virginia Hooker & Norani Othman, eds., Malaysia: Islam, Society and
Politics, ISEAS, Singapore, 2003, pp. 195-235.)
As he talked about, and drew political lessons from, the
life of the Prophet, the stories that he told became “real” and immediately
apprehendable in local terms, to local audiences. Related in a recognizably
Kelantanese Malay “verbal register” and style, the struggles of Mekkah and
Madinah centuries ago became recognizable to Kelantanese, in ways familiar to
them.
This narrative technique not only had the effect of placing
his Kelantanese listeners in the midst of the conflicts that shaped the
Prophet’s career in Arabia; it also, as he told those stories in richly
Kelantanese idiom and style, brought the Prophet and the whole cast of
characters from his life-story into Kelantan. They became people just like the
neighbours of these Kelantan villagers. It made sense in a new way to many
Kelantanese, a familiar and recognizable Kelantan kind of sense.
This narrative technique produced –– as in that villager’s
comment about the impact of the brutal North Bachok by-election –– a merging, a
collapsing and folding together, that worked in two directions, not just one.
It transposed the painful and harrowing conflicts of a small and remote
Kelantan village into the heart of the Islamic world and experience, into the
formative events and meanings of Islamic history. And, as presented by Tok
Guru, it also brought that history, its events and validating meanings and
messages to the PAS-supporting faithful in those far-off villages, making those
struggles coherently graspable and endowing the lives of those caught up in
them with rich Islamic meaning.
Sacred history and local anecdote became one. Ancient Arabia
and Kelantan –– Mekkah and Madinah and Bachok –– were fused together by a
unifying narrative. What was happening in Kelantan occurred, or so it was made
to seem, in the same time, place and moral space as the careers of the Prophet
and his companions. Accounts of their travails and triumphs were made to
provide object lessons, parables, and instructive precepts and action-paradigms
for Tok Guru’s listeners. He made what was happening in Kelantan seem a part,
or a refraction, of all that had happened elsewhere at other times, notably in
the life of the Prophet himself.
Mekkah and Madinah became, for Tok Guru’s listeners, places
whose challenges were not altogether unlike those faced by them in their own
villages and state. And, not that Tok Guru was in any way an image or model of
the Prophet, through his example and words people felt they might begin to
imagine how the Prophet might have lived and conducted himself.
It was powerful stuff, that, to be up against. If you didn’t
believe it you had only to ask UMNO, whose more locally attuned leaders and
operatives saw how hard this process was either to crack, on PAS’s side, or to
replicate on UMNO’s. And how hard, in fact near impossible, it was for them to
undo the profoundly adverse effects these processes had for UMNO’s hopes of
ever winning and holding onto Kelantan by ordinary electoral means.
In this way, via Tok Guru’s artful balaghah, the
Kelantanese were made to sit four-square within the formative and recognizable
history of the ummah generally; and that history, centering upon the
life of the Prophet –– thanks to his narrative ingenuity and agility –– was
brought to bear upon and sit with them in the midst of their tribulations in
confronting the massive and intimidating force mobilized against them by UMNO.
Tok Guru brought these often demeaned Kelantanese into the paradigmatic history
of Islam, and he brought that grand history to them, in locally comprehensible
verbal and moral idioms, to clarify, dignify and in that way also to strengthen
their struggle.
If Tok Guru could do this, could invoke and “make real” for
these poor Kelantanese the very essence of Islam –– make it an immediate and
almost palpable presence in their often deprived lives –– then who might
possibly and plausibly deny that PAS, through Tok Guru, was making Islam real
for them, literally making it “come to life” with clarity and compelling
coherence, in their lives?
Certainly not UMNO, with its all too “political” politicians
(so dramatically unlike the master “anti-politician” Nik Aziz) and its legions
of politically ambitious and self-regarding party-religious ideologues.
UMNO leaders and operatives never quite grasped that, for
the PAS-supporting villagers of Kelantan, the struggle of PAS was the struggle
of Islam itself: not (as UMNO always imagined) because of some lies or
misrepresentations or simply verbal tricks that PAS offered; but because
experientially, in those unrelenting village conflicts and through the power of
that narrative technique (identified above all with Nik Aziz), those villagers
came experientially to “know” and become part of and “at one with” Islam
through PAS. Hence they came to see PAS not just as toying with or “conjuring
up” the presence of Islam but in fact representing it. PAS somehow made Islam
real, for them, in their lives.
Focusing on Kelantan
Many of the accounts of Tok Guru’s career that have appeared
in the days since his death suggest that in 1986 he opted to abandon federal
politics and to focus exclusively on Kelantan.
This is inaccurate.
The 1986 elections –– held when Dr. Mahathir had risen high
in his early ascendancy, and before any of the major problems of his prime ministership
had asserted themselves –– was also the first election held after the young Shari’ah-minded
Islamists around Hadi Awang had seized control of the party from Datuk Asri
Haji Muda.
It was not a good campaign for PAS, and it was made worse by
the fact that it offered a strenuously Shari’ah-minded platform that
owed much to recent revolutionary events in Iran. And still worse,
unprecedentedly, it was held during the “haj season” when many devout
PAS-supporting Kelantanese were away overseas and unable to vote.
PAS had assumed that it could hold onto Nik Aziz’s
parliamentary seat (the old Kelantan Hilir, now known as Pengkalan Chepa) but
it wanted to make sure of winning neighbouring Bachok with a strong candidate.
So the party found a new candidate for Pengkalan Chepa and Nik Aziz stood for
PAS in Bachok where he was widely known, respected and liked. But strangely, in
that very strange election, he lost, by a small margin but (despite the absent
pilgrimage people) on a huge voter turnout. Many newly enrolled military voters
may have been added, for the first time, to the Bachok rolls.
Nik Aziz lost in Bachok. Sad, but no matter. He did not
greatly like federal parliament, where his presence was largely decorative and
suited his adversaries’ purposes, not his own. So he was content to be the
state assemblyman for Semut Api, now named Chempaka, and to concentrate on
Kelantanese matters.
UMNO ended up paying a heavy price for defeating Tok Guru in
Bachok. With his energies now exclusively focused within Kelantan, he did the
groundwork that enabled PAS –– which had ruled Kelantan from 1959 to 1978 and
then been ousted from power by high-level UMNO manoeuvering using a disaffected
faction within PAS –– to return to power in the state. UMNO had won Kelantan in
1978 and then held it, in Dr. Mahathir’s first two national election campaigns
in 1982 and 1986. But now, Nik Aziz was back on the case. PAS once again won
control of Kelantan in a stunning victory in 1990 –– and so began Tok Guru’s 23
years as Chief Minister (and also Mubaligh-in-Chief, as it were) of
Kelantan –– and it has held onto the state through the succeeding elections of
1995, 1999, 2004, 2008 and 2013.
While many in PAS these days, along with powerful elements
within UMNO, eagerly look to the imminent possibility of a rapprochement
between UMNO and PAS to establish together a “Malay Bumiputera Islamic
government” whose preferred terms all other parts of the nation will have to
accept, within PAS Nik Aziz was an adamant and powerful opponent of any such
initiative.
He had basic disagreements within the Pakatan coalition with
the late Karpal Singh over the implementation of hudud law punishments.
But they were allied in resisting the clamouring from some elements within PAS
for it to leave Pakatan and make common cause once more with UMNO. Nik Aziz not
only remembered all too well the bitter partisan rivalries throughout the
Kelantan countryside of the 1960s. He also recalled with pain the treachery, as
he saw it, of UMNO’s co-opting and then betraying of PAS in Kelantan in 1978
and the years that followed.
Asked why he opposed pursuing any second rapprochement with
UMNO, his pointedly bitter reply was that it would be stupid “to allow oneself
to be bitten twice by the same snake coming out of the same hole”. A pithy
Kelantanese village locution once again.
Whether such a rapprochement will soon become irresistible
now that both Karpal Singh and Nik Aziz have departed from the mundane field of
political battles is one of the large questions of the present moment and
immediate, pre-GE14 future.
Tok Guru, my teacher too
Tuan Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat, or Tok Guru, will likely prove
unique in Malaysian political history. He was the product of a complex
combination of historical circumstances that are unlikely ever to recur.
He stands there, seemingly alone and on his own. As so many
people have said lately in so many different ways, you did not have to agree
with him to recognize his personal modesty and courtesy, his self-evident
integrity and his own authenticity –– all of them grounded in the Kelantanese
Islamic politics, society and culture of his time.
He became known almost universally as Tok Guru, and he was
my teacher too. He taught me a lot (though I am sure that it was not what he
would have wished me to learn from him and his commitments) that has stayed
with me throughout my life and career as a scholar for almost half a century
now, since I first began observing him and how he operated.
Above all, I learned from him, from his example and by
watching him carefully, about the great force that –– when effectively
personified and presented, performed and projected –– Islam can be and can
generate within, and also against, the modern world: against the distinctive
“package” of benefits and challenges and “trade-offs” that “modernity” may
present.
I learned from Tok Guru how, in the name of a faith and a
sacred history “made real” for everyday folk, the agenda of an over-confident
and heedlessly advancing modernity may be decisively obstructed and resisted.
Resource:
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and
Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Islam
and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838-1969, Cornell U.P., Ithaca
NY, 1978.
