TUN Mohamad Suffian’s name is not well known outside legal circles. Born in an ordinary kampong in Perak in 1917, he continually excelled in his studies at school in Lenggong before going to the Clifford School in Kuala Kangsar. He became the first Malay to receive a Queen’s Scholarship and went on to read law at Cambridge and then the Inns of Court, being called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1941. En route back to Malaya he was stranded in Colombo due to the war and became a newscaster, finding his way back to England to work at the BBC. After the war came an offer to work in the Malayan Civil Service, which he accepted after more courses at Cambridge, the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Transferred to the legal service in 1949, his rise was so meteoric that by 1956 the Conference of Rulers requested his advice in drawing up the Constitution of the Federation of Malaya (the Sultan of Brunei did the same three years later). At the age of 42 he became Solicitor-General and two years later was elevated to the Bench. Accepting the post of Pro-Chancellor of the University of Malaya in 1964, he also helped draft the constitutions of Universiti Sains Pulau Pinang and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia – but he is probably most famous for his Introduction to the Constitution of Malaysia, recently revised. In 1973 he was made Chief Justice of Malaya and soon after, he became the fourth Lord President of the Supreme Court (preceding his future monarch, Sultan Azlan Shah). In 1975 he was made a ‘Tun’ and was awarded a Magsaysay Award (one of 11 Malaysians to have been awarded one), but he also received a bevy of honorary doctorates. When he passed away in 2000, he was laid to rest in the royal mausoleum in Kuala Kangsar.
All that information is in the public domain, and I am grateful to Tunku Dato’ Dr Sofiah Jewa, Dato’ Dr Yaacob Merican, Tan Sri Siti Norma Yaakob and Thavamani Subramaniam for inviting me (separately!) to the second Tun Suffian Foundation Fundraising Charity Dinner last weekend, where the above story was brought to life through a remarkable slideshow presentation and personal recollections of those who knew him. The Foundation was set up by Tunku Sofiah Jewa together with a board of trustees that included Dato’ KC Vohrah, Dato’ Seri Utama Dr Rais Yatim and Dato’ Zaid Ibrahim. The scholarships awarded by the Foundation will hopefully impress upon its recipients the immense stature and remarkable life of the late Tun Suffian.
In the slideshow were images of so many other remarkable Malaysians whose legacies are ignorant to my generation. It is hardly surprising, given that the histories of our very own Prime Ministers have not been accorded proper prominence, and even then subject to censorship. But the thing about those old photographs was that they do not merely portray Malaysians who were to steer their country, but also a country different in feel and ambition to the one we have today; I wonder how different the hopes and ambitions of a young Tun Suffian in the 1930s are to those of a Malaysian teenager today. It’s not just the slanted songkok, mengkuang mats and rattan chairs, but an obvious sense of confidence and of freedom. You get the same emotional response watching Mansor Puteh’s recent documentary on Tunku Abdul Rahman which depicts him doing the ronggeng, or old footage of our first election: people entering polling stations with smiles on their faces even as communists lurked in the jungle. Does that same sense of confidence exist when we go to the ballot boxes today? I think not.
It simply is not in the interests of the contemporary political environment to educate young Malaysians of such an era, and it is why something as innocuous as a filmmaker talking to students at Universiti Teknologi MARA was banned by the authorities this week, and it is why it was only when Tun Omar Ong Yoke Lin passed away last month that many Malaysians of my generation learnt about him: his trip to London with the Tunku prior to Merdeka, his status as a member of the Tunku’s first Cabinet and his instrumental role in formulating the original Alliance that was later replaced by the Barisan Nasional.
As we have entered the holy month of Ramadan, within which Merdeka Day will fall and after which Malaysia Day will be celebrated properly for the first time, we should also remember the fact that so many of our early national heroes suffered hardships unimaginable to us today, and none ever had such access to the smorgasbord of buka puasa buffets that seem to be booked up weeks in advance.
Selamat Berpuasa!