Anwar symposium - a kaleidoscope whose patterns depend on who shakes it

COMMENT | It's just as well that a symposium on the thoughts of Anwar Ibrahim at the Penang Institute yesterday began with a present poet's intimation of what the man is, and could only end with a past bard's encapsulation of how to deal with self-contradiction.

Poet Muhammad Haji Salleh, after running through the gamut of his experiences over four decades with Anwar concluded, a trifle wearily, that he did not know if “Anwar is a Muslim democrat”, but the one-time national literary laureate was certain Anwar “is a special kind of democrat.”

You would not be able to appreciate Muhammad's quest for the essence of the man if thereafter you hadn't heard one panellist aver that at one time in his career when Anwar was regarded as a Muslim fundamentalist, he was also holding interfaith dialogues with Christians.

Or this, from another speaker that Anwar, as a Muslim democrat, perhaps would have the solution to the nation's long unresolved puzzle: could Malaysians be plural in ethnicity and equal in citizenship?...