UNITEN INAUGURAL INTEGRITY LECTURE SERIES -chpt1

UNITEN INAUGURAL INTEGRITY LECTURE SERIES (mohon izin Uniten)
3rd. February 2012
INTEGRITY: YOU KNOW IT BUT DO YOU HAVE IT?
By
Tun Abdul Hamid Bin Haji Mohamad
(Former Chief Justice of Malaysia)


I thank UNITEN and the Institut Integriti Malaysia for giving me the honor of delivering the first lecture of this series. I am more honored by the fact that this lecture is on integrity which makes me
believe that I must have some integrity, at least sufficient to deliver this lecture, provided that the invitation is not a mistake !

As I am not an academician, I have decided to speak about what I have seen, heard and experienced throughout my life, vis-a-vis integrity. So, if you were to ask me how long I took to prepare this lecture, my answer is “Sixty nine years and ten months!”

I hope you will bear with me for a while, while I narrate the story of this man whom I am taking as an example.

At the close of the nineteenth century, a baby was born in Permatang Tinggi Bakar Bata, Kepala Batas, Province Wellesley. He grew up in the village, attended a pondok school in Kedah, then in Kelantan and later spent a few years in Makkah where he attended classes at Masjid al-Haram.

He returned home, married a girl from the same village, worked as a rice planter. He taught the Qu'ran on a voluntary basis twice a day to the children in the village, besides being the Imam of the mosque in the area.

In 1950’s there was no school in Bumbung Lima. He and the people in the area decided to build a school. They collected money after every harvesting season which was entrusted to him for safekeeping. They went into the nearby forest to cut down trees and bamboo and, in the gotong royong tradition, built a three-classroom school made of attap roof and woven bamboo walls and windows. The Government provided the teachers and the children in the nearby villages went to school.

The  mosque with woven bamboo walls, was old and rotting. He initiated a fund to rebuild it, collecting RM15 (if I am not mistaken) from each family after every harvesting season. He kept the money in safe custody, bundled in an old piece of cloth and known to the wife and children as duit Masjid and no one would touch it. During that period, he bought an old Austin 8, the first car in the village. Fearing that people might think that he had misused the duit Masjid to buy the car, on the following Friday, he carried the bundle of money to the mosque. Before the prayer started, he placed the bundle on the floor of the verandah of the mosque (called balai lintang because it lies horizontal to the main building) and announced to those present. ”Those of you who think that I bought the car with the  “mosque money”, come and count it.” There was a complete silence. The mosque was built and completed, wholly from the money collected from the villagers and their sweat.