Rustam Sani
Rustam Abdullah Sani (12 August 1944
Born towards the end of the
Rustam served as an associate professor at
Education
Rustam attended the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur.[3] He later enrolled at the University of Malaya for a bachelor's degree before heading to the University of Kent for a master's degree, where he wrote a thesis entitled Social Roots of the Malay Left which traced the origin of the Malay political left to the 1920s.[4] At Kent, he mentored a variety of undergraduates including PAS secretary-general Kamaruddin Jaffar, economist Ghazali Atan and publisher Lim Siang Jin.
Early career
Rustam joined the
Later he embarked for Yale University, but after passing the tough comprehensive exams there, he lost interest, preferring instead to write a statistics textbook. Back at UKM, he switched to the Politics Department as his old Canterbury friend, then Abim secretary-general Kamaruddin, had left to join Anwar in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and the Government.
With Syed Husin at the helm of the Malaysian Social Science Association (PSSM), Rustam started a bilingual quarterly journal, Ilmu Masyarakat, to try to open new Malaysian debates under the dispensation of the then new Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to which the former UKM academic as well as PNB and Guthrie chief executive Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim (later Selangor Mentri Besar) was an early and insightful contributor.
At the end of the 1980s, Rustam accepted Nordin Sopiee’s invitation to join ISIS. There, he helped to craft Mahathir’s historic February 1991 speech promising a “Bangsa Malaysia” as part of his Vision 2020 (thankfully translated by Rustam as Wawasan 2020, instead of the earlier Visi 2020), changing the terms of national discourse in one fell swoop.
Frustrated by its lack of serious commitment, he left ISIS in the mid-1990s to become a writer, translator and reluctant businessman.
Soon after, he agreed to become deputy president of PSSM, later inaugurating the biennial series of international Malaysian Studies Conferences in which we tried to reposition Malaysian studies as a national – and nationalist – discourse, rather than as post-colonial studies.
Political involvement
However, the events of 1997-99 with the sacking of the then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim disrupted Rustam's plans and he rose to the popular national call for Reformasi following Anwar’s incarceration and persecution, becoming its most thoughtful “participant observer”.
As deputy president of the
Death
Rustam died at his home in
His body was sent to a mosque near his house at Bukit Lela and he was later buried at the Taman Danau Kota Muslim cemetery after Zohor prayers.References
- Farewell to a true Malaysian, The Star, 26 April 2008.
Notes
- ^ "So Long, Comrade Rustam Sani (1944 - 2008)". Bobjots. Archived from the original on 25 April 2008. Retrieved 30 April 2008.
- ^ "Rustam Sani dies, aged 64". The Star. Archived from the original on 3 May 2008. Retrieved 26 April 2008.
- ISBN 978-0595533664.
- ISBN 978-9833782444.
- ^ "Rustam Sani dies, aged 64". The Star. Archived from the original on 3 May 2008. Retrieved 26 April 2008.