COMMENT It’s paradoxical but true - Anwar Ibrahim and the coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, he leads will be stronger if he winds up in jail than if he is freed by the Federal Court on the sodomy appeal today.

Estimable lawyers say this second sodomy case against him is so weak you would have to upend the juridical maxim that the benefit of the doubt is always given to the accused to convict Anwar.

However, the lessons of Malaysian history - which Anwar had contributed to in 16 complicit years in government - hold that politics can trump all other imperatives.

It is one of the enduring - some would say exasperating - fascinations of his political odyssey that it sheds light on French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s definition of greatness: “A man does not prove his greatness by standing at an extremity but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies in between.”

Anwar has been at one time or the another and, sometimes, simultaneously - an Islamist and a democrat, a fighter for justice and a mute witness of its defeat, a silent bystander at Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s assault on judicial independence (Salleh Abbas impeachment) and sometime agent of its resuscitation (Lingam videotape) - that his career defies neat categorisation.

Just now the opposition coalition he leads is straining at the seams, with its Islamist component pulling it one way and its populist other parts tugging it in the opposite direction, such that the enormity of Anwar’s jailing for sodomy is certain to have a becalming effect on its fissiparous tendencies.

Last Sunday the coalition’s top leaders met after a long and distressing spell of feuding over policy and direction and decided nothing so much as to agree to disagree.

If that counts for something, it is because Anwar’s presence in the coalition like a good stage actor’s in a mediocre production - it creates the illusion that the play is better than it actually is.   

Sceptics contend Anwar’s imprisonment will send the coalition into a tailspin from which it won’t recover; however, his freedom will compel him to make a choice he has thus far sidestepped - is he more Islamist than democrat or the other way round, or both simultaneously?

That the latter question is a world-historical issue invests Anwar’s career with a resonance that transcends the verdict the Federal Court will deliver this morning.

Long-running saga

This saga of the sodomy charges against Anwar has been running for so long its protraction resembles the popular serials of TV entertainment: the episodes are designed not to resolve the show’s core question but to string out the answers to it; that way the producers hope the interest is sustained.

But the Anwar sodomy saga has been elongated to the point of ennui.

Running in two installments since its inception in 1998, punctuated by a six-year jail term that culminated in an acquittal, and resuming like a bad dream in 2008 with a finale of sorts set for today, the saga and its cloying details have become an adequate substitute for chloroform.

When one considers that the act of sodomy is not by any stretch a constitutive part of human character and motivation, one could be appalled by the amount of time and resources the entire saga has consumed.

In the catalogue of aberrant human conduct, sins of the flesh are not as invidious as the sins of pride and greed for power and wealth.

So how has the saga been able to run for this long?

There is only one reason for the melodrama’s longevity - it has been driven by a sensibility that regards sodomy with a hideous repugnance.

No prizes for guessing whose career in the last 44 years since the formation of a youth movement has played the main part in ingraining this sensibility among the people.

One cannot say that the country, in its morality and justness of its governance, has been the better for it.

In fact, some would argue that the country was better off before this sensibility became so deeply entrenched.   

The undercurrent that has driven Anwar’s sodomy drama for so long is that sensibility which revolves obsessively around a voyeuristic question - did he do it? Is he bisexual?

Other sensibilities, honed by the civilities of the rule of law and due process, would have discounted the issue a long time ago as inherently implausible or not worth the bother.

But not the sensibility that regards sodomy as abysmally gross which is why in Anwar’s present predicament there are the lineaments of truth to Mark Twain’s intuition that though history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.