COMMENT A syllogism is an argument in logic which is formed by lead-up statements - usually two of them - and a conclusion which must be true if the preceding statements are true.
 
On a number of occasions in recent years the Malaysian public has been in tizzy over syllogisms that declined to pan out.  
 
A famous instance was at the royal commission of inquiry (RCI) into the judge-fixing scandal in January 2008.
 
At the inquiry, lawyer VK Lingam (left) said in respect of a video that showed him speaking on his mobile to someone assumed to be a judge, “It looks like me and the voice sounds like me.”
 
But Lingam stopped short of formulating the syllogism that the man who looked like him and sounded like him was indeed him.
 
No matter. The RCI, in its findings announced weeks later, concluded the man captured by the video was indeed Lingam.
 
But until the RCI came out with its findings, Lingam’s lead-up admissions but short-stopped conclusion was as hilarious and ubiquitous a conversational topic as the sauce that goes by his name is at dining tables.
 
A couple of years down the road from that incident, the Malaysian public were similarly titillated by another spat in which the use of syllogisms somewhat helped settle the altercation that arose.
 
The then de facto law minister Mohd Nazri Aziz, who was something of loose cannon (he still is) in an otherwise stolid ministerial line-up of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government, found himself in a flare-up with the redoubtable Dr Mahathir Mohamed, about the only person in Malaysian public affairs who can decline syllogistic conclusions and still sustain public belief in his powers of reasoning.
 
As a result of a difference of opinion about the contents of the training module used by the National Civics Bureau in inculcating patriotism in civil servants – Nazri felt the module should be changed while Mahathir held otherwise – the minister called the former prime minister a racist.
 
Not known to be slow on the uptake particularly when riled, Dr Mahatahir resorted to syllogism in deflating Nazri.
 
Mahathir's riposte was that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He said Nazri was the actual racist because the latter was a member of Umno and because the party confined its membership to the Malay race, Nazri being Malay could not escape classification as a racist.
 
Analogous method

An analogous method of reasoning appears to be at work in the home ministry’s current exercise in branding PAS deputy president Mohamed Sabu, popularly known as Mat Sabu, as a Shiite Muslim.
 
According to the ministry’s religious adviser Dr Zamihan Mat Zain al Ghari, Mat Sabu is a Shite because:
 
“We have solid evidence that Mat Sabu attended Shiite classes with Shiite religious teachers, met with Shiite leaders, visited Shiite countries, praised Shiite leaders and Shiite countries.”
 
If you apply this type of associational deductive logic, you may well conclude that a leader like the late Nelson Mandela was a communist.
 
Mandela (left) was the founder of the military wing of the African National Congress (AFC), Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation), better known as MK.
 
MK was founded to prosecute a terrorist war against the white apartheid regime in South Africa. This wing of the ANC was trained by the Soviets. Also, the South African Communist Party was a member of the AFC. 
 
Not only was MK communist-inspired, it had an anthem that was racist. Some lines from the anthem read, “Go safely Umkhonto/ Umkhonto we Sizwe/ We the members of Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them – kill the whites.”
 
Overall, history would more readily confirm Mandela as an exponent of social democracy than of communism; in race relations, the same history would depict him a multi-racialist than as black racist.
 
But if elements in his entire biography are not airbrushed, there are grounds to categorise him as communist and racist.
 
Suffice, in a long career associations may not constitute essences, flirtations may be only that and nothing more, and shades fall away when a career is seen to stand for a few estimated and cherished things – like Mandela’s – and not for a swarm of possibilities.

The possibility of Mat Sabu being other than what he has avowed – an ASWJ (Ahli Sunnah wal Jamaah) – albeit, one with a dollop of admiration for some Shiite leaders is slim, judging from the evidence tendered thus far.
 
But ours is power set-up that can appropriate the term ‘Allah’ as exclusive to Peninsular Muslims and declare Shiite Islam as a deviant sect and it is recognised as branch of Islam.
 
It’s a Humpty Dumpty (“A word is anything I say it is”) mind-set about which little of a fundamentally altering nature can be done save to accumulate the votes to cashier them.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.