COMMENT Right now, for Anwar Ibrahim a bunker in Benghazi under siege from a crumbling dictator would be a safer place than any redoubt he might chance to have, either in in Segambut Dalam, where he has his house, or even Cherok Tok Kun, his village back in Permatang Pauh.

NONEBarely had he emerged from what turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory - the refusal of the court, reversed subsequently, to allow personal effects from his brief incarceration in Sodomy II as items for DNA procurement - than he found himself bushwhacked by a sex video purportedly capturing him in flagrante delicto with a sex worker.

As if that were not enough bother for one phase of a preternaturally tumultuous life, Anwar is now under investigation for promoting religious pluralism.

A speech he delivered at the London School of Economics in March 2010 is under investigation, so said the de facto religious affairs minister, Jamil Khir Baharom, for possible religious deviancy.

If you thought that the ongoing and interminable Sodomy II, combined with his six-month suspension from Parliament over Apco, would strike his besiegers as enough to keep their quarry nicely enmeshed; apparently, this is not reckoned to be sufficient.

A sex tape and probable religious aberrancy have now been added to the bill of sundry indictments against Anwar.

His adversaries' obsession with him has bordered on the pathological just when Anwar has come through a phase when errors in his judgment with respect to PKR affairs such as its divisive internal elections and its detrimental aftereffects, leadership issues in its Sabah chapter, and to a lesser extent also in its Sarawak division – have combined to detract from his standing as a potential prime minister.

Feet of clay

The smart money would have been on him continuing to expose his feet of clay and allowing that impression to ripple across the political terrain.

But no, his adversaries are not content to wait for that. They are bent on pulling him by the pants down.

That much won't appease them either. They are now trying to divest him of his skullcap.

One will have to search hard for a precedent in modern history for this kind of treatment, except in despotisms of the right and left. We have to use a metaphor, of despotic provenance, to describe it: Stalinist.

Not since Joseph Stalin pursued his rival Leon Trotsky, whose skull was split by an assassin's axe in 1941, has there been a feud as malignant as that between a rabid Umno and Anwar Ibrahim.

It must be said that the vendetta is pursued mainly from one side, with Anwar the target more than reciprocal antagonist.

It's a hugely distorting antagonism that has deepened the blight to institutions - the judiciary, police force and mainstream media - that were already sliding into the decay which has given Anwar's career its raison de'tre since 1998 when he was sacked from Umno and the government.

The hectoring of Anwar

But even if Anwar had not joined Umno and the BN government in 1982, his career would be incandescent because it is linked to what has become a world-historical issue: whether Islam is compatible with democracy.    

This issue has been hogging the world's attention the way the Japan earthquake and its collateral issue - nuclear energy - have done the past month, but unlike the latter, is not likely to recede to the margins over time.

It is what is called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, a question that is set to be determined in this age and times.

This makes the decision of the government to investigate Anwar for purveying Islamic pluralism over a speech, ‘Religion and Pluralism in a Divided World,' he delivered at a colloquium in London a year ago an attempt to trap a bird that has irrevocably flown its cage.

Nothing gives the lie to the 1Malaysia concept of national concord espoused by Prime Minister Najib Razak as the hectoring of Anwar for, essentially, propounding the view that Islam is compatible with democracy, the line he has been purveying throughout his career.

If anything, that view would help give heft and weight to the 1Malaysia concept of the PM, if that concept ever had anything more substantive than its merely pleasant phonetics going for it.

That Najib's surrogates in party and government don't know this marks the gulf in substance that separates them from the target of their lunatic obsession.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.