Anwar Hassan

Brief Bio:

Anwar Hassan was born in Malaya when the country was still a British colony and under threat of a Communist insurgency. As he put it, he was born into a Muslim family and didn’t have an option with religion. Having an extroverted personality, both people and nature intrigued him. Observing bacteria under a microscope triggered an interest in research which eventually led to service in the veterinary sciences, multinational engagement and community service.

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If science starts off with curiosity, I certainly started with that trait. I was curious enough to want to know anything about everything that I saw. Sitting here at the Old Boys’ Club and looking out at the surroundings of the Anderson school which I attended for 13 years, I remember the spiders that we used to catch and keep in match boxes. During our class breaks, we schoolboys would set up spider competitions, and I used to wonder, “Why do these creatures fight when they’re put together?” I was in primary school, about 10 years old, and many things like that about nature were intriguing.

I was born in Malaya in 1943 during the British colonial period many years before the country gained independence in 1957. I grew up as a Muslim. In fact, I was born into the religion, there was no option. Growing up, I was told that all other religions were bad. As a young boy, you went to school in the morning, and in the afternoon, you went to the Madrasah religious school and that’s where I learned about Islam.

I was dismissed from my first Madrasah for asking too many “stupid” questions.  For example, we were told that we had to pray five times a day, and I would ask, “Why five?” The Ustaz told me that to have good faith, you do not question the teachings. I was a non-conformist and didn’t accept coercion even in those days. In a sense I had an inkling towards the sciences and when you tell me something, I want to know and understand the reasons. I was sacked from that Madrasah also because I was bored. Given half a chance, I would skip class and go for a swim in the nearby Kinta river.

I was then placed in a second Madrasah and soon got dismissed for supposedly stealing fruits in the compound of the mosque. I argued that the fruits belonged to the community and that was not stealing. From that point on, I thought, “This is a peculiar religion.” I began to lose my faith.

My village in Kampong Paloh was part of the city of Ipoh. My family rented a room in a house that was close to the mosque. The house was also beside a Chinese temple in a big wooden building, all of it ornately carved and painted. I remember the scent of the really big joss sticks that would be burning all day, and noticed that people would come to pray and bow and burn their own smaller sticks of incense. I saw gentle-looking Buddhist monks in saffron robes. That Seng Wong Temple which is now over 140 years old, was named after the God that protects the City.

Adjoining the temple, there was a Chinese opera house or Wayang China as we called it. With the loud-speaker broadcasts, I got used to listening to their opera which my mother also began to enjoy. At the time, I didn’t know any better and thought that the opera was part of the temple. What was more interesting to me was the backstage compared to the front stage of the theatre. The male actors, and there were only males back then, were made up to play the role of females. An absolute rascal who looked like a thug to me, could be transformed and act, walk, and be like a lady, swiveling this way and that way, after they had put on all the makeup and costumes for the performance. 

It seemed also that Chinese worship seemed to embrace many spirits as such. I remember for example how they would celebrate the Ghost Festival or the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. At the theatre, the first row of two or three tables were always left vacant no matter how big the crowd was. As I was told much later, they believed that the spirits would always come to watch the opera and those seats were reserved for them.

I was curious about their religion as the underlying theme seemed to be peaceful. The appearance of those monks always seemed calm as opposed to the Imam or Ustaz teacher who held a cane and invariably said, “You must not do this, you must not do that.”

I was also intrigued by the Hindu festival of Thaipusam. I remember going to watch their ceremonies at an Indian temple near Gunung Cheroh, part of the range of limestone hills that surrounded our Kinta Valley. I was fascinated by the devotees going into trance, being pierced with steel hooks and rods but with no apparent evidence of pain or bleeding.

I was exposed to these different religions and I didn’t see anything wrong in each. However, being told very early on that other religions were wrong, I somewhat accepted what I was told but also couldn’t dismiss the comparison back then. I do believe in free will. I half-jokingly tell my friends these days, “The problem with God is that he has no quality control. Some people are good, some people are bad so there’s no QC. If something is wrong with the product, then the Creator is at fault.”

My childhood memories also included something quite traumatic.

My mother always said, “You must never steal. Ask, if you want something.” One day, she was making Bubur Kachang, green bean porridge with coconut milk and sugar. She had boiled and drained the beans to have them ready to make the porridge. I asked for some beans but she chased me out of the kitchen. I didn’t give up and thought to myself, “I asked. You didn’t give. So, I have to steal.”

I was just about table height at the time at five years of age. Without hesitation, I went on tippy toes and reached over to get to some of the beans that were behind the pot of hot water that she had just strained out. It was the eve of Hari Raya, the end of the Muslim month of Ramadhan fasting. I heard someone coming into the kitchen and quickly pulled my hand back. My elbow hit and toppled the pot of hot water. “Awww!” I yelled from the heat and searing pain. Someone pulled off my shirt and I remember seeing strips of pink that was my peeled-off skin on the inside of the thin rayon shirt.

I was rushed to the General Hospital and admitted to the children’s ward for several weeks. My mother didn’t scold me about what happened but it was a lesson learned. I remember thinking that it was good to help and treat people well, as the nurses had done for me. I believe it is one of the experiences that set the stage for later doing welfare work.

Those days at the hospital also awakened another interest. While I was admitted to the children’s ward with other children, half the ward was actually occupied by soldiers. During 1948 and 1949, Malaya was going through post-World War II conflicts with Communist insurgents. It was the first time I was seeing men with all kinds of injuries. The soldiers got priority in hospital care. I knew something horrible was happening in the country outside. All I saw were the consequences. Being bed-ridden and recovering in the hospital gave me time to think. I developed an interest in what was going on in general affairs. “Why were people fighting, why was it necessary to fight, be injured and to suffer?”

My parents had not gone to formal school. In those days, Malay boys usually went to Malay language schools for a few years, and then to what was called “Remove Class” before they entered the English language schools in Standard 5 or 6 at age 11 or so. I however started right off at the all boys’ Anderson School in 1950. My English was very bad. I probably knew 10 words and at that, I thought they were Malay words, not English words, like “radio, football, referee, penalty, goal” and such.

It was sometimes difficult to understand the English spoken by our teachers. Mr. Brian Toft, my geography teacher, was Scottish. There were the English-English teachers like Mr. Ogle and Dr. Etherton, while Mr. G.E.D. Lewis, our School principal, was Welsh. Curiously, all three of them sounded so different but we soon got used to their accents.

For most of my school days, my idea was to have fun. I mingled with everybody. Most of my classmates especially in Primary 1 to 4 were Chinese and Indian anyway, and I had no choice but to mix. I learned from them while playing marbles and getting into spider fighting contests.

It was mostly in Form 6, the last two years of High school, that I became more focused about my future.

In the context of what’s happening in the U.S. today, I remember something that was taught by Dr. Etherton during our English class. He walked in and wrote two words on the Board – “Little Rock.” Then he said, “I’m not asking you to write an essay, just come up to the front and say something about “Little Rock.”

At this time, we had already visited the Geological Survey Department as part of our career guidance excursions. We each went up and said something innocuous about rocks, how they were formed or about different types of rocks. But those two words were really Dr. Etherton’s way of seeing if we paid attention to world affairs and if we were reading the newspapers or listening to world news. Those two words were about the incident in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the U.S., where nine African American Negro students were prevented from entering a school by the Governor of the state. None of us read the paper or knew anything about this. We got a good scolding. It made an impression on me when I heard what he said, and that’s when I became more interested in international affairs and issues of racial differences and riots between Blacks and Whites all those years ago. I feel these issues are all coming back again with the police brutality and death of the African-American, George Floyd, in Minnesota this May 2020.

How then did I choose veterinary science and medicine?

As I mentioned earlier, our teachers took us to visit various institutions in town such as the Geological Survey Department; the General Hospital; the Veterinary Research Institute (VRI) and such to introduce us to professional possibilities. Something happened there at the VRI that caught my attention.

Firstly, the officers took the time to welcome our student group and explain what they were doing. I remember that they showed us different things including looking at something through a microscope. It was a magnified image with dark field illumination of a twirling creature. They told us that it was a bacteria called Leptospira and that it caused a serious disease in people and animals. For some reason, those spiral, Cinderella-like dance movements just captured my imagination. I think that’s when I decided that I wanted to do this kind of work in a laboratory and be a veterinarian.

Coming from a poor background, coming from nothing, I knew I couldn’t afford to go to University on my own and would have to get a scholarship. I asked my teacher what training I needed to work in the laboratory at the VRI. My guidance teacher said, “It’s not a popular option to choose veterinary sciences and maybe the competition won’t be high to get the scholarship that you need. Go for it.” So, I stuck with that plan.

I succeeded in getting a Colombo Plan scholarship to study in Canada. I qualified for the scholarship interview by listing my first choice as the veterinary field. At the interview, I was asked, “You want to go for Veterinary Science and you have a choice of several countries. Why Canada?”

Even now, many still ask, “Why Canada?” In those post-colonial days, most people went to the U.K. or Australia. I told the interviewer my simple reason. Keith Norris, my classmate in Form 2, was from Canada. He was the first white boy I ever saw in my life. He was a fun person and I also remember that his father was attached to the Education Department. I enjoyed geography and history classes and learning about other places in the world.

Studying in Canada opened up whole new experiences and new friendships. Even on my very first trip to Guelph, I remember meeting this guy at the station who said he was from Iran. I later learned that André had run away from Iran because he was a Christian and was worried about persecution. He first migrated to Germany on the pretext of being a talented carpet weaver and got immigration clearance for this specialized skill. From Germany, he made his way to Canada hoping to get work at a carpet factory.

At University, the first year was easy. I found most of it to be a repeat of the subjects I had previously done for the high school exams. I was ranked almost at the top of the class. I thought the rest of the course would all be a breeze.

I joined a lot of Clubs at the University including the New Democratic Party. And I watched a lot of television. When I left Malaysia, there was maybe one family I knew of with a small black-and-white TV; I binged, especially on the news. Those were the days of Martin Luther King, race riots and the Ku Klux Klan. The Cuban crisis made me admire John Kennedy. I watched the landing on the Moon and later watched footage of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in the Fall of ‘63.

I was also doing nightclub runs. I would go to the Concordia and Schwaben Clubs and the Hotel Waterloo, they were nice places, and Los Corrales on Albert Street, a nice Latin place. My attitude about university was to enjoy myself since I decided, wrongly, that studies were not going to be too challenging.

The stipend I received through the scholarship wasn’t enough since I liked smoking and occasionally having a drink so I needed more money. I had to get a part time job.

The first year I refurbished the boards that were used for exhibitions and poster presentations. The second year I got a better paying job at a fiber glass factory – that was illegal actually because I was an international student. At the factory, I told them I was from Malaysia and nobody knew where that was so I said “Near Vietnam” and they said, “Must be very hot there!” Because of that, they gave me the task of working at the furnace!

Many of the factory workers were from Italy and related to each other. I became friends with Lorenzo. During lunch break, he and the other Italians would have their lunch boxes. Within each box, there’d be a small table cloth and a little bit of this and that and a small cravat of wine. With a Canadian quarter, I could get 4 peanut packs and a coffee from the vending machine and that would be my meal. But they would take pity on me and soon I had more food than I could eat.

One day just before Christmas, there was a big commotion in the lunch room. Were the workers going on strike? I couldn’t afford to get caught in that as I would lose my University position and scholarship. I asked Lorenzo what was going on. He was all excited and started going on in Italian. It took a while before I understood that they had made a request to City Hall and had gotten back a rejection letter. “What did you ask for?” Lorenzo again went off in a torrent of angry Italian. I looked at the Mayor’s letter and it was just one sentence, “Your application was reviewed and has been rejected.” Lorenzo then showed me their petition. It said something like, “On Christmas Eve, we the Italians in the city of Guelph would like to do what we always do for this celebration. We want to do it all night.”

I asked him for more details and he said they each were sent wine from their villages, made from grapes that had been passed from family to family over generations. In 1963 in Canada, you couldn’t drink alcohol on the side walk which is what they wanted to do– to be together and to drink their wine from home. I asked him, “Why didn’t you just say that in your letter to the Mayor?” I told him to appeal. I ended up writing their letter, making it very technical explaining that their tradition was important to them and in addition to companionships, it meant good fortune for the new year. Well, the appeal got approved. The Italians were overjoyed and to thank me, they made me a non-paying member of the Guelph Steelworkers Guild. I could go into this place and have a drink whenever I wanted.

And during the 2^nd year of University, I would go to the Guild quite often which meant that I often missed morning classes. We were assigned seats in alphabetical order of our names and my absence was noticed. I would catch up with notes but I’d be half asleep through the rest of classes. That year I misbehaved and didn’t spend much time on studies.

I failed my second year.

The first thing I did was go to town and get a bottle of Bacardi Rum. My landlord was Hungarian and he gave me wine; I just drowned my sorrows.

Fortunately, Guelph allowed you to repeat if you failed the 2^nd year but not the 1^st year. That was a wake-up call. I was ashamed and I started to pay attention to my studies. I stopped working at the factory and frequenting the Guild.

I completed my degree in veterinary medicine at Guelph in 1969. After that, I did a diploma course in pathology. There’s a simple explanation for why I chose pathology. During vet school lectures, I heard about basic research in pulmonary reaction to injury. The lecturer kept referring to this work as something foundational and ground-breaking. He also told us that this work had been done by Omar Abdul Rahman while he was at Cambridge University. Omar was a fellow Malaysian and that made me so proud; that’s really what inspired me to further my training in pathology.

After completing the diploma course and because my return ticket was covered by my scholarship, I spent a few weeks traveling to see other parts of the world, like Berlin, Amsterdam, Beirut and Bangkok.

All that said, I feel that you only know a country if you live and work there for quite a while.

Returning to Malaysia, I got my first job at the VRI in Ipoh, and indeed fulfilled my dream to work there. To top that, my Head was that same Malaysian, Dr. Omar, whose research had inspired me to focus on pathology.

I later became Director of the VRI and finally retired as the Deputy Director General for Veterinary Services for Malaysia. Some of my work involved collaborations with German organizations and also consultancies with world organizations such as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). After Government service, I worked for a bit in the private sector and have since devoted my time after retirement to non-governmental work and community service.

The German partnership from 1971-1984 was interesting; it included setting up veterinary diagnostic laboratories, training lab technicians and further developing the cattle/goat industry in Malaysia. There was a lot of very detailed planning and correcting things to optimize each step. The Germans even sent a psychologist to join the team; he was very “Ungerman”, very calm, very diplomatic and it felt like he would slowly but surely indoctrinate you!  I picked up a lot of German ethics, focusing on outcome and evidence-based results. Precision is the word that I would use when I think German.

With the FAO agreement which was also in the ‘80s, Malaysia was selected to provide technical expertise to regional countries; the mandate was to set up standard guidelines and procedures for controlling FMD, the Foot and Mouth Disease virus that affects food animals. There were also other issues to be resolved with staffing and cross-border smuggling of animals. With that project, I visited several countries.

I was intrigued by Thailand, a country that was never colonized. I was once in a coffee shop in the province of Yala, and on the wall was what looked like a poem with a few English words. I took a photograph and asked the owner what it was all about. And he said the poetry had something to do with animals and diseases. I was intrigued and he said, “Go to the Suanmokh Buddhist monastery to learn more.” Though it was a distance away and located in dense jungle with thick creepers, I made my way there and remember the place as a carpet of green. Each Monk was given a small hut with a ladle and little else. They slept on the floor, grew their food, and lived off the earth. The chief Abbot turned out to be a white American, very serene looking in saffron robes. He told me, “It’s a poem that cannot be translated into English without losing its meaning. It’s actually in Sanskrit, not in Thai.”

“When water flows and it comes across a rock, it doesn’t try to break the rock, it flows around.”

“Finally, the rock gets denuded and crumbles into small pieces and the water flows over it. So, when you’re confronted with a problem, you don’t go straight at it, you go around it. If you apply Buddhist philosophy to animal disease control, you don’t punish people for smuggling animals and tell them what not to do. You find solutions around it.”

On one visit to Pakistan, I was at Murree, a resort town at the foothills of Kashmir. I remember seeing a Catholic Cathedral, a huge building that apparently was maintained by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; that was surprising. In the cathedral’s gift shop, I found a small plaque engraved with the words, “God isn’t blind to our faults. He loves us in spite of them.” Those words somehow gave me a sense of ease. I thought, “I will never be perfect, I do a lot of things wrong. In Islam, if you do something wrong, you go to hell.” Here I was in a Catholic church in Pakistan and I decided at that moment to believe in what I saw in those words.

Also in Pakistan, I visited Taxila, a town just outside the Afghan border where they excavated a lot of marble. I saw huge statues with Roman features and wondered why the Pashtuns or Muslims there would have put up idols since Islam doesn’t allow idols. I asked around. “Why do you have all these statues and why do they look like Roman or Greek statues?” I was told that Alexander the Great conquered the area and they were impressed with that history and the philosophy of his troops. He couldn’t be a human, he must have been a god, so they perceived God as someone that looked like him, like a Roman who comes from elsewhere. “These statues are just perceptions; we haven’t given up on Islam.” I was surprised at their open mindsets and that their interpretation of religion was not just about doctrines. That said, I also saw in another area that all the heads of the statues were gone. The Taliban had come and done this.

What teaches us good from bad, what makes for a good life?

Religions are all the same in that way, they do teach us good from bad. When you’re in trouble, you have to resort to something. Or when something nice happens to you, you have to be grateful to something larger and so I do believe people need God and religion.

I did not give up on Islam. I completed my pilgrimage to Mecca in 2006. I’ve had certain experiences in religion that established my faith but not in the coercive, rigid way in which I was taught in my younger days. I recently did a quick Google search about Einstein and his beliefs. I was curious about his take on religion and found that he made a comment as espoused by the writings of Spinoza. Spinoza had a doctrine that was liberal, a simple philosophy. No belief in heaven or hell. And, so, I think, if I’m bad, it’s only because of my upbringing and circumstances, these are accidents in life. If that’s the case, “Why would one go to hell if you’re not in control of your circumstances?”

In my travels, I have visited synagogues, orthodox churches in Russia and Greece, Pentecostal churches and other establishments. I also have been particular to attend Friday prayers at a mosque when I’m traveling. I have especially enjoyed sermons in other countries where they are community based, about problems they are facing, and the social implications and openness to human failings.

I remember that Cape Town in South Africa had the most interesting mosque I’d ever been to. The periphery of the mosque was lined with coffee stalls, so, you could conduct your prayers and then socialize. In the adjoining hall, they allowed things like the international checkers competition. There was also gambling going on, but it didn’t matter to the Imam, people could do whatever they liked in the community area. The mosque also had a drug rehabilitation center and used religion as a path to help addicts and teach good values.

To sum it all up, I would say that my faith has come about through experiences and self-education and what you learn and incorporate into your beliefs and actions. I have probably become more philosophically supportive of interfaith beliefs.

As I reflect on my life, I wonder what the younger generation would learn from my experiences? I can only say that I wish I had had more balance between work, family and leisure time. In my youth, one of my favorite High school teachers, Mr. Tate, would tell me that even though I was a night owl, it was important to sleep and get rest. Later in life, I got the same tip from one of my bosses who saw me working late. In life, he said, “You must divide your day into three blocks of 8+8+8. You must sleep for 8; work only for 8, no more; and use the other 8 for family, hobbies and other things.”

~August 2020~