Haris Ibrahim - Taking Small Steps For Giant Changes

How To Change The World

By Malik Imtiaz Sarwar

I had heard of Haris Ibrahim even before I met him. Some acquaintances had told me of a lawyer who was seemingly singlehandedly taking on the world in his defence of principle. At the time he was involved in the case of the Besut Four, four individuals who had been convicted by a syariah court and sentenced to three years jail even though they had renounced Islam. His was the titanic struggle that pointing to an unpopular and inconvenient truth always is.Reading of the case in the newspapers, it had struck me how frustrating it must have been for Haris to have to contend with a system that seemed more concerned with finding excuses than solutions. I wondered what it was that made him do what he did.

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I came to see the sense of his choices when I met him for the first time at a Bar Council human rights training session a short while later. I saw a man who embraced the world and whose heart had enough space in it for everyone.

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Over the years, we have collaborated on various initiatives, driven by a common belief in Malaysia’s need for an open and inclusive society in which all its children, irrespective of race, religion or culture, can have the freedom to pursue their dreams. It is this common belief that saw us developing a proposal for a commission that would be empowered to enquire into matters of religious harmony. It led us to engaging in a public awareness campaign aimed at creating awareness about worrying constitutional trends. It also prompted us to team up in a number cases that we believed had great bearing on the way things would be and which have ultimately left their marks on this nation.

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Haris has become one of the most important civil society voices of this era. His highly influential blog, The People’s Parliament, and the range of civil society initiatives he gave life to over the last two years are breathtaking for their depth of reflection and breadth of reach. He was a prime mover of The Peoples’ Declaration, the Barisan Raykat and a host of other initiatives all of which were aimed at making the rest of us see that we had the power to effect change in our hands.

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Before we began to believe in ourselves, Haris already did. March 8th proved his faith not to be misplaced. As much as this was about the soundness of his vision of what could be, it was equally about the correctness of his method. I have had the privilege of seeing some of his ideas come to life and I can say with conviction that nothing happened overnight. They developed one step at a time, from conceptualizing to planning to implementation, everything had its time and place.The lesson I took from this is that to change the world, you must want it to and then take it one small step at a time.

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Any effort aimed at improving our community, no matter how small, is a worthwhile one. Change is the by-product of an accumulation of worthwhile endeavours that may have as individual efforts escaped notice. We might think that one person’s choice not to engage in corrupt practices anymore would not bring endemic corruption to an end. If however there were sufficient numbers of such individuals, a tipping point could be reached and we might see a day when those who bribe stood out as the exception rather than the norm.

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Understanding that our every action has a consequence is therefore the key that unlocks the door to change. Revolutions always start small. Consider the signals we send to people around us - family, friends or colleagues - and how those signals will be received. If you are a father and you bribe a police officer in front of your child, what you are in effect saying is that corruption is acceptable no matter how you might try to justify your behaviour. In the same way, if you are racist then those who you influence, even indirectly, will be influenced. It is the less obvious dimensions of what we do on a daily basis that trap us into vicious cycles of destructive conduct.

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The change we effected last year was only skin deep. For us to transform ourselves we must confront the question of whether we really want change. We cannot run away from the fact that though the politicians are to blame for a good number of things, the ills that ravage our society stem from a value system that we have allowed to warp over time for our own convenience.The question for us is what we propose to do about it.

Malik Imtiaz Sarwar is a leading Malaysian human rights lawyer and activist and the current president of the National Human Rights Society (HAKAM). Through HAKAM and a coalition of NGOs callled Article 11 (after the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion) of which HAKAM is a member, he has been actively involved in efforts to promote the rule of law and constitutionalism, particularly in the face of worrying trends of Islamization and race politics in government and wider society. He further actively promotes a civil rights discourse both in and outside court. In August 2006, a poster declaring him to be a traitor to Islam and calling for his death began circulating in Malaysia.