The Loss

On 18 Ramadhan, The Royal Professor Tan Sri Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas has left us. I am making this post just to put this on record in my blog.

I did not have the luxury of meeting him and neither am I directly a student of the late professor. But I have read about him and have read some of his books. I will not say much about his work and let more qualified scholars to do this. I will paste the pic below as a quick info about the late professor.

Note that I have pinched the above two pics from social media postings of the Prime Minister's Office and Bernama.

When I first saw the news, I was about to rest in bed. I got up and went to pick up one of his book from my library and post the pic below on FB with the wording "Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we shall return". I chose this book in particular (I have others) because it might not be that known to the local readers.

The book is published by Mansell Publishing Limited and I bought it while I was in Cambrdge (I think). I can't remember precisely where I bought it, but I think it was from a small bookstore of Islamic Text Society, (where I have bought other books Of Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Gai Eaton) and the book costs twenty pounds.

This edition of the book compiles his earlier monograph "Islam and Secularism" (I don't have this book to compare the contents) and additional materals from his papers in Chapters 6 & 7. This edition of the book is probably hard to get nowadays and hence the decision to post this.

I can't remember precisely when I first heard about the late Prof. Al-Attas. In the mid 1980s, after my BSc studies, I undergo some form of religious awakening and I start to buy many books on Islamic topics. Naturally, before I went to Cambridge for my Part III of Mathematical Tripos, I have already accumulated plenty of Islamic books. If I'm not mistaken at that time, I have subscribed to Afkar Inquiry magazine. It is within some issues of this magazine, I get to know that the late Prof. Al-Attas was a famous scholar revered by many particularly the columnists of the magazine (they called themselves as the Ijmali school with names like Ziauddin Sardar, S. Pervez Mansoor, Merryl Wyn Davies, Gulzar Haider and many more).

And it is from this knowledge, that I bought the above book "Islam, Secularism and the Philosophy of the Future". Coming back to Malaysia, I began to buy more of his books and monographs.

With his passing, the Islamic world has lost a great scholar. May his students, both here and abroad, continue his legacy with deep sophisticated writings, respected by the international community.