I am thankful to the organizers for giving me the privilege to address colleagues and friends of S.M. Mohamed Idris at this meeting called to commemorate his passing.

Memorial functions should be occasions for celebration, for poetry, for stories, and for drums, song and dance. Also, it helps if in this case one makes the effort to imagine that the person being remembered is himself sitting in the audience, so that one is reminded that he did not appreciate memorials, ego-blandishing and ego-embellishment or the usual flurry and storm of good words. At the end of it, we can all picture him standing up and demanding of the speakers, well, all that is enough, what now, where do we go from here? This is not the end of the world.

The world’s best loved poet, Maulana Rumi, dictated the following poem on the sudden disappearance of Shams of Tabriz:

When the prayers begin after my death

Don’t think I’m sad to leave the world

You mustn’t cry for me or mourn my going

Don’t fall prey to the devil, that would hurt

Never say at the funeral, “He is leaving”

For this is when I shall be reunited

Do not say “goodbye” when you lay me down

The grave is but the lid to the meeting in heaven

When you see me lowered, think of rising high

Can the sun or the moon ever be lost?

What you think of as the sunset is the sunrise

The grave is not a prison, it frees the soul

Haven’t you seen the tree sprout from a seed?

I’m a human seed too, don’t you see?

When you close my mouth on this side

It opens at that moment on the other

I first visited Penang at the invitation of Uncle Idris in 1984. 35 years later, in May 2019, I was given the grace to spend a whole priceless week with him, just before his systems began to collapse. We had joked about his passing on several occasions earlier and he would laugh heartily when reminded that heaven, from all accounts, and from all revealed scriptures, had no environment or wildlife problems, no substandard products and no complaining consumers, no devils like Blair, Bush, or Bolsonaro, so what would they do with him there anyway! But when it came, the news of his passing still left a Black Hole, an emptiness. The Kaabah for environmental and human rights activists from across the world has been taken away. We are without an anchor.

We have come to celebrate Uncle Idris today because deep down inside we all feel this is the way a person should live among his community, but we are too terrified or too timid to do so ourselves. We still cower before white people, we are ashamed of our parents and the clothes they wear, we do not think we have produced anything of consequence in the last 500 years, we defend the West and its empty culture more passionately than westerners themselves, we have opted en masse to encourage our own children to become willing serfs in the global slave labour camp. All of us wish to migrate to the most indebted country of the world. And we can find explanations and reasons for all this, but they do not really explain anything.

Ashis Nandy, winner of the Fukuoka Prize and an Idris follower from India, once asked which class of individuals should we admire more: those who decided to discourse with the West because they found it of significance and accepted the doctrine of its inherent superiority simply because they went to English medium schools, — or those who refused to discourse in the words, terms, language  and categories offered by the West because they had the wisdom to realize that this would mean they would be forever entrapped in playing the games of the West, leaving our own assets and concerns by the wayside.

This is the choice facing all people born outside the West, as Indians or Malays or Chinese or Filipino. When I first met Uncle Idris at RECSAM in 1984, he was even then dressed in his trade mark white sarong and kurta (including the songkok). When he died, he died in those clothes. There are those who remain faithful to the costumes and categories of their cultures (and Idris firmly chose to be part of this class), and there are those who opt fully for imported categories, and lifestyles, only to find in their dying days, that they gained nothing, yet lost everything because they had become caricatures of their ancestors as well as of those they sought to imitate.

It is in his 70s – when most people have already decided to retire from life a full decade earlier – that Uncle Idris started his work on “decolonizing the mind”. With Anwar Fazal, he set up, Multiversity, and let loose a canon of denunciation of Western academic knowledge and schooling which challenged and upset the most fervent devotees of the formal education system. He found strong and unshakeable allies in Vinay Lal and C.K. Raju. He was impressed by Maulana Maududi’s speech before a university convocation in India in the 1940s, when Maududi had referred to universities as being places for the mass slaughter of human beings.

But even before he set up Multiversity, Uncle Idris had already recognized that all formal institutions of the modern world were committed to the imposition (and continuance) of knowledge created by the West – and useful for the economies (not necessarily the people) of the West. We had to look critically at every one of these he insisted, and resist, because they were killing us with these catchy songs.

So Uncle Idris organized the first international law conference to call attention to the fact that international law was the law of the jungle, set up and enforced by Western countries for their convenience. He organized international conferences on media, modern science, development, transport, health. He was unstoppable. Even as we sat and chatted in May, he was persuading me to organize two meetings in India, one on the media and the other, on education.

Similarly, he started his critique of chemical agriculture – co-called modern agriculture in which countries like Malaysia and India had immersed themselves without much awareness of its consequences – and went on to invite organic farmers from India to help CAP start an organic farming movement in Malaysia. He went to India in his late 70s to study pranayama and did it till he was able, almost to the final days of his life.

For 50 years of his life, Mohamed Idris existed only to talk and scream about the problems of others, to denounce oppression of any kind, in any form, including the slaughter of animals in India, the killing of Palestinians, the killing of the Libyans, Iraqis and Syrians. There has indeed been no social activist of this caliber ever. At least none who survived like this, daring to continue his activism, till the age of 93, till his deathbed!

How does one place this astonishing life?

For that, I can only revert to the Iroquois tale of the wolves.

In the native American story, a tribe sets out to find a new place which would have better water, soil, temperature, environment for their survival. Their scouts locate a suitable new area. They place the proposal before the Council of Elders. They discuss the new site and all opt for it. They move there. But they are unaware that the area is also the niche carved out by a family of wolves and their young ones. They come to notice this in a few days. The kills which they make (and hang out to dry) disappear by the morning. Obviously, someone else is eating up their efforts. They are informed by one of their scouts that there is a family of wolves in the area with their young ones and their decision to adopt the new land was defective because it had not considered the voice of the wolves.

Since the wolf is also a brother, the tribe decided on one new principle for selecting any future habitat: at the Council, one place would always be left empty to remind them that they must always hear the voice of the wolf.

Uncle Idris was BROTHER WOLF (in large letters). He spoke for everyone who needed a voice. He had a strong voice, so he used it to good effect. He used it every week at weekly press conferences. At every international conference, dressed in his simple attire, he berated the highly educated and the powerful that they were letting down the people of the world. At the age of 92, he was still on the street protesting a mega project in Penang. Today’s world economy does not recognize the voices of farmers, tribals, ordinary folk, uneducated people, children, wives, women, Palestinians, animals, cows and thousands of other disenfranchised creatures. So Uncle insisted on standing in for the voice of the wolf. While many of us think we represent these unprivileged classes better than they can do so themselves, Idris did so because he was convinced they were not being heard though they had a right to be heard, and till they were heard, he would find it difficult to rest.

Now that he has decided to rest, we who loved him, revered him, listened to him, and were driven by him, we who have concerns that reverberate with his, have little choice but to train to be a better kind of wolf than we are today. If he is sitting in the audience there with you, as I am convinced he is, he will smile at that prospect and be happy for ever.

(On the occasion of the memorial event celebrating social activism of S.M. Mohamed Idris held in Penang on August 3, 2019)