Which of the following statements are true?
> Azmi Mohamed was the former Lord President of the Federal Court.
> Azmi Mohamed played football for Malaysia in the 1990s.
> Mohd Azmi was a Malaysian judge on the Supreme Court in the 1980s.
If you answered “All three statements are true”, you would be correct.
The judge Azmi Mohamed is not the same person as the footballer Azmi Mohamed. They just happen to have the same name. But Azmi Mohamed is also not the same person as Mohd Azmi, even though they are both judges.
Until last week, Wikipedia would have linked Mohd Azmi’s name to Azmi Mohamed’s Wikipedia entry, not realising that Mohd Azmi Kamaruddin was a high court judge when Azmi Mohamed was Lord President.
It would have also said that the former Lord President’s name was not Azmi Mohamed, but rather Mohamed Azmi Mohamed.
The thing is, the name Mohamed Azmi Mohamed has been used to describe the third Lord President of the Malaysian Federal Court since at least 2008. If you use Google to look into other nooks and crannies on the Internet, you’ll find that double Mohamed version used in sources as varied as newspaper articles, a pamphlet published by a secondary school, and perhaps most surprisingly, a booklet produced by the Malaysian judiciary itself and hosted on the Kehakiman website.
These documents have been around for decades. Surely people would have checked before putting anything in print? But the truth is that it’s quite hard to fact-check something thoroughly.
Wikipedia, in fact, emerged from an earlier project called Nupedia. Nupedia was intended to be a free encyclopedia in the sense that readers would not have to pay for access. Articles were written by experts and subjected to a lengthy review process. After a year of operation, however, the project had produced only 21 articles.
Fact-checking is slow, painstaking work.
That was certainly my experience while working on documentaries for the History Channel and National Geographic.
Every claim that appeared on screen had to be supported by multiple independent sources. This was relatively straightforward when dealing with objective facts such as dates, locations, or the names of key figures. However, with personal anecdotes, things could be more challenging. Telling producers, “He’s literally the man’s grandson!” doesn’t carry as much weight as you might think.
An even trickier problem is shared sourcing. Imagine an interviewee states a fact and it appears to be corroborated by a book. What nobody realises is that the interviewee learned the fact from that same book in the first place. The problem becomes even worse years later. Suppose someone challenges the author’s claim. The author then discovers a documentary clip featuring the interviewee repeating the information and triumphantly presents it as independent confirmation of the original assertion.
This phenomenon of circular referencing, sometimes called “citogenesis”, is one of the banes of Wikipedia.
One famous example involved the actor Sacha Baron Cohen. At one point, somebody inserted a false claim into Wikipedia stating that he had worked for famous financial institution Goldman Sachs. The statement was subsequently repeated by so many newspapers and magazines that when editors later attempted to remove it from Wikipedia, others objected, citing those very print articles as evidence that the claim must be true.
Something similar may be happening with the name of Malaysia’s former Lord President. If someone attempts to correct the record and state that his name was simply “Azmi Mohamed”, they may well be confronted with apparently authoritative sources that insist otherwise, such as the Malaysian Judiciary Yearbook 2015, which refers to “The Rt Hon Tun Dato’ Mohamed Azmi Mohamed” as Malaysia’s third Lord President.
So there is indeed some work to do. This is what I could find: A Straits Times article from May 1966 reporting on his appointment as Chief Justice refers to him as “Dato Azmi bin Haji Mohamed”. Another article published in the now-defunct Eastern Sun in September 1968 calls him “Tan Sri Azmi bin Haji Moha-med”.
Was the “Haji” always there, or was it sometimes omitted? Further evidence appears in the authorised biography of Tun Zaki, who is Tun Azmi’s son. Both “Azmi Haji Mohamed” and “Azmi Mohamed” are used in the text. Meanwhile, a Straits Times article from May 1956 refers to an assistant state secretary of Kedah named “Inche Azmi bin Mohamed”.
I am fully aware that reading all that might have tired your brain out. But if you’re willing to do the hard work and follow the links, I believe the evidence stands up.
Of course, the case could always be strengthened. A birth certificate or identity card would settle the matter beyond any reasonable doubt. For the purposes of this exercise, however, I have limited myself to publicly available information. Even so, I would argue that the evidence presented here goes considerably beyond the “trust me, bro” standard of proof.
The point is that facts should still matter, even in this post-truth era. Yes, it takes a long time to gather and present sources (there were hours of research for this article alone), and even then we can still argue about the accuracy of what we’ve unearthed.
At this point, you may be wondering why any of this matters. Why spend so much effort untangling the identities of three people with remarkably similar names who are, truth be told, receding into history?
If we ask that question, we might as well ask why the study of history matters at all.
Because at the very least, getting history right prevents us from confusing one judge for another. Or even for a footballer.
