A candle for RPK, Teresa & all ISA detainees

This is written by Dr Azly Rahman. It is a touching and heartfelt open letter to RPK that should resonate with all right-thinking and fair-minded Malaysians:

Set Raja Petra free – this true defender of Islam and the rights of many

The rakyat awaits your homecoming, a candlelight vigil will adorn the street in front of the prison-industrial complex built by those who designed architecture of structural-violence, unseen by the naked eyes of the rakyat. Like the candles that await Sita Devi and like the candle-lights that bathes Jelaluddin Rumi, the light from the rakyat soothes and calms your bruised spirit in their patient wait for your freedom.
Azly Rahman

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?

To die: to sleep;No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd.

--- from William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Saudara RPK,

I hope they are treating you well, in this holy month of Ramadhan that is turning our nation into our Ramallah.

I write in a state of being free while you languish in sadness incarcerated by those in their dying days breathing painfully. They say that you are anti-Islam and anti-government. The are wrong on both counts. You are a great defender not only of Islam but of other faiths. You are a great defender of a sane government yet to be installed and one that will gladly set you free.

They are fearing not you nor the voices of conscience no longer in the wilderness; they are fearing themselves – their Inner Self – that they are answering to in their scramble to satisfy their greed for material wealth and lust for power.

They have not made you a bankrupt, RPK. They themselves are drowned in riches that will bury them.

Sdr. RPK. I hope your incarceration will be the brief. So too will be of the others.The rakyat feels that the present government will not be the one freeing you. A new one will.

Below I reproduce a tribute to you I wrote sometime ago. Read more here.