Assalamualaikum dan salam sejahtera.
Saudara-Saudari,
It is with great pride mixed with some sorrow that I accept the Malaysian Bar Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of my father.
I know we would all have wished him to be here to receive this recognition of his lifetime’s achievements during his lifetime. I am acutely aware of offering a poor substitute for the address he himself would have given. Nonetheless I have done my best to think about what my father would want you to hear, and what he might want me to say on his behalf, and for this I crave your indulgence.
Let me start by saying thank you to the Malaysian Bar and to the Bar Council; to those who proposed him for this award, advocated for him, those who selected him, and those who organised this event. I do not know all of you, but I am deeply moved by your efforts.
I thank Dato’ Ambiga for her comprehensive and kind citation. You spoke at my mother’s memorial service too, in 2021. I thank you for your decades of friendship to both Mum and Dad, and for your personal kindness and bravery in delivering these professional and personal eulogies. It cannot have been easy.
I thank the distinguished members of the Bench and Bar here today, in person and online, for bearing witness to his achievements and to those of Puan Hendon, of whom my father always spoke with warmth and admiration. She was one of the very few people who did not irritate him in some way, which if you knew my father well, was almost unheard of. I offer her and her family my salaams and my congratulations.
Here with me today are my wife Claire Wong, who was a devoted daughter-in-law, and in turn, much loved by both Mum and Dad; my cousins Lavanya Iyer and Soumya Iyer, who showed my parents great love and kindness their entire lives, and were a huge source of support particularly in the last decade; and Siti Noor Abdullah, my father’s assistant and caregiver in the last 6 years, who organised his diary, ran the household, and managed his healthcare. I am grateful for their presence.
For providing some of the photographs that I was able to pass to the Bar Council to be displayed today, I thank Vatsala Ratnasabapathy and her colleagues at Zain and Co, as well as Siti Noor Abdullah.
Some of you in this room today, or watching online, were his students at university, his pupils, or those whose call to the Bar he moved. Please know that he was always very proud of your achievements. Thank you for holding him in your hearts and your memories. Please continue to uphold the standards of excellence that he demanded of you.
Some of you were his colleagues, his juniors, contemporaries, or seniors. Whether you found yourselves on the same side, or as opposing counsel, I am grateful for the engagement, the professional courtesies you exchanged, for the complexities and cut and thrust of cases and litigation that kept his mind sharp until the very end, even as his bodily health declined. Please think of him the next time you are in court.
Some of you were friends too, and kept that friendship going over years and decades. Thank you for visiting my parents, for bringing them chapati and dhal, or durian, or assam pedas for Mum, or for stoically enduring a frankly mediocre meal at the Lake Club Buttery for the sake of keeping them company. If Malaysians are willing to tolerate not very good food in order to hang out with you, they must love you very much, and that is how I know my father was much loved.
His life was largely made possible by my mother’s support, advice, and encouragement. She brought order to the more chaotic aspects of his life. She was his intellectual equal, and in certain matters frankly his superior, and in turn he was smart enough to realise where she should take the lead. I am proud of the fact that he always supported her efforts as an academic, a consultant, and a Human Rights Commissioner.
Much is known about those aspects of his professional life that were played out in public, whether in open court, or in Bar AGMs and EGMs. But I have come to realise over the last few years that many of my father’s professional achievements were private, in negotiations and settlements, in delicate compromises and tactful accommodations. Inasmuch as he was respected as a public speaker and litigator, one of the lessons I learned from observing his life is that it is sometimes better to avoid open conflict, to build consensus behind the scenes.
Over the last few years his former clients and colleagues have made me realise that he did this in matters ranging from the most intimate — negotiating the amicable dissolution of a client’s marriage so as to preserve the dignity of both husband and wife — to those of the highest public interest, with grave constitutional issues at stake.
When you consider my father’s legacy, I ask also that you think about ways in which you can avoid conflict and maintain harmony by working with discretion, away from the public gaze, to ensure the best outcomes for all parties. It will often mean that nobody knows what you did, but that was a price Dad was willing to pay.
As a consequence of his professionalism, one of my enduring sorrows is that I will never know the full extent of the achievements of his lifetime. A typical experience: I would be visiting him, his phone would ring, he would say, “Yes, Dato’, how can I help you?” and he would listen for a few minutes, and say, “No, Dato’, I would advise Tuanku not to pursue that course of action.” And after a few pleasantries, that would be the end of the conversation.
“Er … which Tuanku was that, Dad?” I would say.
“Oh, one of them, lah,” he would say, going back to watching Roger Federer.
“But what were they asking you?”
“Don’t ask me, Huzir, because you know very well I can’t tell you.”
So there is much I didn’t ask about, and much he couldn’t tell me. I know you all suffer from the same heavy burden of secrecy despite the important work you do.
And yet in matters that did not impinge on client confidentiality, he was generous in his sharing, and his mentorship. It was from him that I learned that it is necessary to know a little bit about everything in life, so as to be able to talk to anyone and engage with any subject, something useful to lawyer and playwright alike. He had a deep and broad understanding of different points of view, and always wanted to bring people together.
He did so even in death. On the day of his funeral, in the beautiful Jalan Templer mosque, I saw Malaysians of all communities and backgrounds come to pay their respects and say a prayer in their own way. It would have made him very happy.
He loved the legal profession, and he cared very deeply about the Malaysian Bar. A few weeks ago, on 7th May, at the Reference organised by the Selangor Bar, he was described as “the moral compass of the Bar”, a phrase that moved me greatly. He might not have described himself in exactly those terms, but I do know that, from the time I was in my mid-teens, over the last 35 years, I saw him intellectually and emotionally invested in the legal profession as a calling, a culture of service, a pillar of building Malaysia into a nation of fairness and justice.
This level of belief and idealism was taxing. It took a toll. I only ever saw him cry twice: once after my mother’s death, and once many years previous, when he disagreed with an action of the Bar Council and had been voted down.
I say this as a layperson, and as his son: he saw the Malaysian Bar as being composed of highly educated, highly intelligent, and highly principled people who were nonetheless prone to occasional moments of being foolish, short-sighted, petty, or selfish; and who had to be reminded to stay the course, to see sense, to focus on the long term to better serve the country.
I cannot possibly know if he was reasonable or correct in his assessment across all of the issues over all those decades; I’m sure he was sometimes wrong. But I do know that whatever he did or said came from a place of humility and out of a sense of duty, of wanting to see the legal profession be the best version of itself.
He was certainly not perfect. The irony is that the more he respected you, the higher his expectations of you, the harsher he might be in his words. So if ever my father offended you, disappointed you, or let you down as a colleague or a friend, please accept my formal apologies today on his behalf, as I seek your forgiveness.
It has been pointed out that he died in office, as an active member of the Bar Council. If indeed he served as the moral compass of the Bar, I know you will commit to finding your own true north yourselves, in the years and decades ahead, now that Haji Sulaiman isn’t here to orient you with his interventions and orations, sometimes kindly, sometimes caustic, always heartfelt. He may have had certain exceptional gifts, but his sense of responsibility and duty of care towards the profession and towards the country are within everyone’s grasp.
As much as the Malaysian political class were a constant source of disappointment to him, he found endless hope in the journalists, academics, civil society activists, and you: lawyers, prosecutors, and judges who were striving to do the right thing for the rakyat. I know you will take up his baton and run with it.
I thank you all for bestowing this honour on him today.
Please click on the following links to view the:
(2) Web Report of the award ceremony held on 31 May 2024;
(3) Video on Sulaiman Abdullah;
(4) Video on Hendon Mohamed; and
(5) Malaysian Bar Lifetime Achievement Award 2023/24 Commemorative Booklet.