Kamal Salih My Story: Chapter 1 Episode 1

This entry: 7th December 2014

Chapter 1: Episode 1

Kamal Salih my story episode chapter semanggol abu bakar al-baqir taiping bagan serai

The Little Boy on the Fallen Coconut Tree

A 6 year old boy stood, no more than three and some feet tall, on the trunk of a fallen and truncated coconut tree, extending out at a twenty-degree angle to the ground, right at the corner of the village road.  To my left the road, an unsurfaced laterite track really, extended westward further into the village passing the women’s barrack of Ehya as-Sharif School and going beyond to Kampung Tua, another interior village along the foot of Gunung Semanggol.  To the right and northerly the village road ran another one and half kilometers, longer from the perspective of a child, to Pekan Semanggol, or as the locals called it, “batas,” a Malay word for bund.  

Pekan Semanggol stands at the crossing of the irrigation canal that flows south from Tasik Bukit Merah through the pekan and onwards west  to Selinsing and the Straits of Malacca, and the main road that links Bagan Serai with Taiping, roughly twelve kilometers each way from Semanggol.  The canal formed the southern boundary of the Kerian Irrigation District, providing precious water to the padifields to its north. From the pekan, the village road which had been tracking the left bank of the irrigation canal southwards, bifurcated away from the bund, right in front of the classrooms and men’s hostel of Ehya, and divided the padifields from  the rubber smallholdings of Kampong Gunung Semanggol to its south and right up the lower slopes of Gunung Semanggol itself.  Gunung Semanggol is no more than a bukit (hill) really, rising as a backdrop to the village and Pekan Semanggol (town and village by convention is collectively referred to as Gunung Semanggol, or simply Semanggol) to no more than four hundred meters.  This “gunung” was to attain a higher significance than its physical height, for Gunung Semanggol stands, literally and figuratively at the crossing of national history. 

On this particularly bright afternoon, both sides of this village track were lined with teachers and students of the madrasah, mingling in great excitement with the villagers, women and children in front of the respective hostels. From where I stood, even with the extra elevation above the road provided by the fallen coconut trunk, I could not see beyond the women’s classrooms extending roughly a hundred metres up and away to my left, facing in the direction of the pekan. But I could hear the cheering, rising louder and louder as the great man made his way from the pekan between the lines of honour taken up by the waiting crowd as they greeted with such joy the return of the prodigal son, and local hero.

Kamal Salih my story episode chapter semanggol abu bakar al-baqir taiping bagan serai

Abu Bakar Al-Baqir

It was 1952, and the British Military Administration that took back control of Malaya after the defeat of the Japanese in the last Great War in the Pacific had just handed over in the previous year the country’s administration to civilian rule, albeit as a British colony as Malaya was before the War.  Ustaz Abu Bakar Al-Baqir was imprisoned the previous four years by the British for the crime of slapping an officer of the British Administration as the British returned after the Japanese surrender.  He was the founder of the Madrasah Ehya As-Sharif since before the war, an Arabic religious school with links to Al-Azhar, charging miniscule tuition fees, and drawing students not just from the rest of Malaya then but also from neighboring countries especially Brunei and Indonesia.  The religious school was funded by contributions from the local community and from far-flung alumni and wellwishers, organized as members of the Ehya Association.  As the reputation of the school grew, so did the level of pride and reverence the people of Semanggol and beyond held for Ustaz Abu Bakar, the mudir or principal of Ehya As-Sharif.

I don’t know whether that was the moment, the triumphant return of a favorite son upon his release from prison, amidst the roaring adulation of his villagers, tempered at the end by a prayer of thanksgiving in front of his mother’s house, the richest landowner in the village, that planted the seeds of a political consciousness yet unformed and unrecognizable but to reappear later in this child’s life.  It however did leave a huge impression on him, enough to begin a life story from the moment of this joyous event.

I was born in Gunung Semanggol on July 29th, 1946 just after the Japanese surrender and the return of the British administration, and two and a half months after another significant political event in the country’s history – the birth of UMNO in Johor Bharu in May of that year.  Of course, I was not to know of this event then.  That was pure coincidence and totally unrelated, like saying I successfully swam across the Semanggol canal on the day Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo!  Personally significant though that particular canal crossing event is as I will refer to later.  It turned out that it was in this village in the hallowed classrooms of the Ehya’-as-Sharif that a faction led by Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmi, had broken away from UMNO, to form PAS, the Islamic party a few years after. These two political parties were destined to do battle in the political arena in Malaysia throughout the length of my life, serving as the backdrop to my own engagement with politics in my adult career later.

The religious Islamic strand in my upbringing, and in the life of Semanggol had revolved around the activities of Ehya as-Sharif.  But it must also have been in our family bloodline.  My grandfather Haji Salam had grown up in Kudus near Solo on the island of Java, home of the second youngest sunan, Sunan Kudus of the famous Wali Songo, the nine mystics who had brought Islam to the Indonesian island from the fifteenth century on.  When he was a teenager Haji Salam had worked on the Arab merchant ships that had plied among the Archipelago, and brought those early Islamic teachers to the islands.  One year on one of these trips, the story goes, my grandfather landed in Mekah and stayed to study there for a few years.  He returned after that not back to Java, but stopped in Penang, and settled down in the Malay Peninsula at the turn of the century.  He married an Indian Muslim woman and raised his family in the southern part of Kedah, across the Krian River from Parit Buntar.   They had five children, four boys, my father Salleh being the second youngest.  Haji Salam settled down and became a religious teacher, and built a mosque in Sungei Kepar, just six kilometers south of Bagan Serai on the old trunk road to Ipoh.  He also built a reputation as a dakwah advocate throughout the district. The generational tree linking my family to the Kudus bloodline was evidenced, as pointed out some years ago by a friend who had a similar sign (thus making him a relative) from another branch of the family group, by the genetic kink between the first and second phalange of the left little finger that is common to the males of the Kudus line.  Allahu ‘alam (only God knows).

After marrying my mother, my father moved to Gunung Semanggol to start a family of his own. My father built the family house, located just opposite the corner of the women’s hostel and classrooms, on land generously “leased” to him by Tok Minah, the mother of Ustaz Abu Bakar himself.  On it was a prolific mangosteen tree on the front yard, and a rambai tree at the back near the well.  During the high mangosteen fruiting season, I remember, my mother would make jam from the abundant fruit, besides providing me endless joy climbing it.  I don’t remember her selling the mangosteen jams she made, but they were popular with my sisters’ student friends visiting the house.

Ustaz Abu Bakar was a progressive religious leader.  Having built up Ehya into an Arabic school with  a national and region-wide reputation, he caused quite a controversy when he decided to finance a new women’s wing of Ehya with contribution from the national social welfare lottery.  Ignoring the religious travesty of utilizing such a haram source of funds, he proceeded to build in concrete the new blocks to replace the wooden barracks of old.  His own reputation subsequently was much enhanced by that decision.

Opposite from the fallen tree trunk that I had stood on, on that famous day of Ustaz Bakar’s triumphant return, was the Ehya’ surau (little mosque), which was to serve as the focal point of the encounter between the school and the village, the setting for the storied life of the school, and the whispered playing out of a blessed village life that was a significant marker of my own unfolding.  Sixty years later I returned to the spot I had stood that day, to see that much have changed.  And not much changed.
Kamal Salih my story episode chapter semanggol abu bakar al-baqir taiping bagan serai

Kamal Salih My Story: Chapter 1 Episode 2: The Book House