40 years of trust and patience

The columnist draws parallels between almost half a century of walking alongside another and the unity government with its ‘marriage’ of just two years.

MY wife Norhayati Yusof and I tied the knot – or in Islam, pronounced the akad nikah – on July 15, 1984. Yes, yesterday was our 40th anniversary, I am happy to say.

In this week’s column, I would like to reflect on that 40-year journey to show how, despite being two different personalities, we managed to navigate our way through many differences and remain together still. Perhaps there is a lesson here for our unity government that is made up of parties with different ideologies.

I read in a book that was based on an expatriate’s PhD work that Malaysia’s Constitution had used the basis of the Alliance Agreement between Umno, MCA and MIC. The marriage of the Alliance and Pakatan Harapan is not much different, I believe, from the matrimonial ties between a man and a woman of different families and ways of life.

Norhayati and I met when we were part of a group of 11 students in the Public Service Department (JPA) scholarship programme for MCE high achievers; all were Malays, of course.

Our group had a six-year scholarship for undergraduate and masters degrees in architecture in the American education system.

The very first flight in my life took me halfway around the world in 30 hours. We landed in Green Bay in the state of Wisconsin, where we studied for two years, when I also got to know Norhayati.

As part of the scholarship, we were given flight tickets to go home for the summer after two years. And when we went back home, I asked my parents for permission to be engaged to Norhayati. By the time we flew back to America at the end of summer, we were bethrothed.

In 1984, we returned home for the marriage ceremony in Kajang, Selangor, where her family lived, and then returned back to our studies overseas.

Our eldest child was born in 1986, six months before our scholarship ended. Luckily, Yati’s mum flew all the way from the kampung in Kajang to care for her daughter’s first baby. We were most grateful to her!

We returned home in the middle of 1986 at the height of the economic depression in Malaysia. Luckily, I landed a job at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia after a year of doing odd jobs to survive. The rest, as they say, is history.

Raising children and money are two things constantly on the minds of parents. Among many arguments and discussions between Yati and me were those we had over the children’s schooling.

We placed our two older children initially in public schools for the first two years after returning from a three-year stint for my PhD in Edinburgh (1992-1995).

After that, we transferred them to an Islamic school run by the Jamaah Islah Malaysia NGO. We were both influenced by the Islamic Reformist movement initiated by the likes of Anwar Ibrahim, Hadi Awang, Hassan Ali and Shaari Sungib.

After two years at the Islamic school, however, I decided to pull the two girls out and send them to complete their education in public schools.

My wife was unhappy with that decision because she wanted the two girls to grow up to be “proper” Muslim women, with prayers and the tudung. I disagreed as I wanted our children not to be around only their own race. I wanted them to grow up mixing well with different races for the sake of their Malaysian-ness and Islamic-ness of multiculturalism.

I knew my wife never really agreed with that decision but she did not defy my decision as the head of a Muslim family.

When our five children – two boys and three girls – grew up into young adults, my wife and I had another disagreement. She felt that I was too lenient in disciplining them about being proper Muslims.

The thing is, I did not want to be a traditional Muslim father, and I wanted the children to decide for themselves whether they wanted to follow the Muslim lifestyle, and to what extent. That decision really did not sit well with my wife, but again she kept her peace.

I said that if the girls chose not to wear the tudung, I would not think any less of them because I had seen Muslim women wearing the tudung saying the most insulting words and acting in the most undignified manner towards those of other races and faiths.

There was also my argument to Yati about the choice of faith, that they must find it on their own because, as Lao Tse said, “The way that can be told is not the eternal way”. I will explain Islam to the children when they ask me, I said. I have enough knowledge and will always be there to answer them.

The third serious thing my wife and I differed over was my political writing. We were supporters of Anwar and the Reformasi movement of the 1990s, and alongside that my reading of Islam led to my writing leaning towards criticising Umno and the Malays. Unfortunately, my wife’s family are mostly all Umno-Malays and in the teaching profession in the government, just like us. My wife had to endure terrible text messages from her relatives and friends, and that took a terrible toll on her health and mental well-being.

She did ask me to stop writing but I told her that I would stop only if there was another Malay who would defend the injustices hurled at non-Malays by Umno.

I told my wife that as a Muslim who had read the direct teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, I did not want to be questioned in the hereafter for not explaining conflicting issues in a more academic and balanced manner compared with the racial-religious supremacist narratives of the day.

Again, she held her peace, but I also compromised and stopped writing for a year. I did not want to stop but I could feel the pain she was experiencing.

For me, I lost friends, and relatives no longer invited us to marriage events. Now with Umno on the side of Pakatan, her relatives are back on good terms with me. But some of my friends have stayed away because they support Perikatan Nasional for the sake of Malay-Islam supremacy.

When I see columns or comments thrashing the Prime Minister and his ministers now, I always wonder whether the authors are married. In marriage, you need to be patient and have trust. My wife did not like some of my decisions but she now accepts them after she herself experienced many life lessons of her own.

The unity government has only been “married” for two years. It took me and my wife 40 years to accept many things in our marriage and to learn the value of trust and patience. My sadness presently is that our people have no trust in our leaders and this to me is their fault – they are impatient and don’t have respect for each other.

Building a nation is not too difficult, really. If one can stay the course with another for 40 years and tread the path of patience and trust, who knows, providence will make another 40-year journey a meaningful one also.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.