General Templer's Lesson For Anwar Ibrahim

 General Templer’s Lesson for Anwar Ibrahim

M. Bakri Musa

July 27, 2025

[Excerpt from my Qur’an, Hadith And Hikayat:  Exercises In Critical Thinking will resume next week]

Nothing demonstrates the irony if not outright lunacy of Malay politics than Saturday’s July 26, 2025 “Turun Anwar!” (Down with Anwar!) street rally in Kuala Lumpur.

            It was pathetic to see so many young and not-so-young Malays who could not find anything better to do on a blistering weekend than to demonstrate. Led by far-from-charismatic ageing leaders, the rally was less a display of political assertiveness, more desperate impotent rabble rousing led by has-been leaders out for their last hurrah.

            The only economic impact was on ice cream, goreng pisang, and Bangla custom T-shirt vendors who had a brief selling spree. For luxury hotels it was business as usual, again reflecting those demonstrators’ economic clout, or lack of one. Hence their frustrations!

            Prime Minister Anwar would have been better off to have remained silent and ignored the event instead of offering his gratuitous best wishes to those demonstrators for a safe trip home, and thus back to irrelevance. His earlier announcement of a gift of RM 100 per citizen was comical. More impactful to have given that to local schools.

            The rally was visibly supported by the Islamic Party PAS. Less than a decade ago those Islamists would sniff at Mahathir, sneering his jarring subcontinent tajweed (accent) on reciting the holy text. Last Saturday they embraced him, not enthusiastically but embrace nonetheless.

Those demonstrators should ponder this raw ugly reality if not utter stupidity. If Mahathir could not achieve for Malays and Malaysia in well over two decades of his earlier leadership when he was much more vigorous, what hope is there for him now? More relevant, he was humiliated by his home voters by not only losing the last election but also his deposit.

Most unforgivable was Mahathir’s responsibility for four of the most corrupt, inept (or both) Malays becoming Prime Ministers after him. Malaysia has yet to recover from those blows, and now he is back with his old mischief. 

Then reflect the irony. Anwar Ibrahim had long been the darling of the Islamists and Malay nationalists, having established his standing with them since his school days. Mahathir had earlier co-opted Anwar into Mahathir’s administration in part to ride Anwar’s coattails with the two overlapping groups.

Anwar is the only leader who could take on the Islamists and Malay nationalists. He should have used that to knock some raw realities into them. Instead, Anwar humored them, thus stirring their appetite. He should have emulated Lee Kuan Yew when he took on the Chinese chauvinists. Lee did it because that was the right thing to do.

The critical challenge facing Malaysia today comes not from communalism, specifically the old Malay-versus-Chinese rivalry that gave rise to the brutal 1969 race riots, rather the far more dangerous intra-Malay schisms. History (and elsewhere) has shown that civil wars are the most vicious.

Anwar can learn much from an earlier leader during Malaysia’s colonial era when the country also faced a similar lethal challenge posed by one race – the communist insurgency supported by the Chinese in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The British took that threat so seriously that they chose a former military commander to be the country’s top administrator.

Unlike the American generals also combatting a similar communist threat in South Vietnam, General Templer opted for non-military solutions. He brought developments to the Chinese in the form of New Villages, English schools including those by missionaries, and recruited young Chinese to join the Police Force. That made bright Chinese aspire for Oxford and Cambridge instead of “fighting for freedom” in the fetid jungle. With that, Templer broke the back of the insurgency.

It was not coincidental that those Malays at Saturday’s rally came from the poorest states on the peninsula. Capitalize on the Chinese-built East Coast Rail Corridor to spearhead development in Kelantan and Terengganu. Bring the medical school in Penang to the teaching hospital in Kota Baru; expand the maritime university in Kuala Terengganu. Establish modern industries and Western institutions there, emulating the Gulf States. Develop Kota Baru Airport to rival that of Kuala Lumpur, as Cancun Airport is to Mexico City’s, to boost tourism.

It is not accidental that young Arabs in the Gulf States are busy studying for their MBAs from American campuses there instead of demonstrating on the streets, or reading Imam Nawawi’s Forty Hadith. No surprise also that Emirate and Qatar Airways are the envy of the world while Egypt Air and Iraqi Air, well, they have to have national airlines.