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Spending/Donating taxpayers' money is no generosity, PMX Anwar and Prof Dr Rasdi reminded
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 6, 2025: Columnist and socio-political commentator Prof Dr Tajudin Rasdi has been rapped for allegedly failing to understand generosity.
one wonders how a man of supposed learning could miss it. “Spend your own money and it is generosity. Spend public money without consent, and it is not generosity at all - it is indulgence cloaked in virtue,” a teacher wrote.
And, this was a response posted on Facebook with regards to Tajudin’s alleged ignorance:
Sharifuddin Abdul Latiff
Najib Razak had a piggy bank of taxpayers’ funds to do as he pleases. He ended up in jail.
And Anwar Ibrahim thinks he can emulate Najib?
Excerpt: But Redzuan did not stop there. He turned to the heart of the matter - the issue of public money.
Here, Tajuddin Rasdi’s essay collapsed completely. The professor was free to spend his own salary however he wished. If he wanted to pour it into his children, his sisters, or even “monkeys in the forest,” as Redzuan quipped, that was his right.
But public funds are different. They are not the professor’s allowance. They are not the prime minister’s personal wallet. They belong to the people.
This distinction is so clear, so obvious, that one wonders how a man of supposed learning could miss it. Spend your own money and it is generosity. Spend public money without consent, and it is not generosity at all - it is indulgence cloaked in virtue.
One does not need a PhD to see this; one only needs common sense.
A High and Mighty Professor is Schooled by an Ordinary reader with common sense
Opinion
3 Sep 2025 • 5:00 PM MYT
TheRealNehruism
Writer. Seeker. Teacher
Image credit: Sinar Harian
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who quietly shoulder their duties without fanfare, and those who trumpet their every sacrifice as though the world were their audience. Recently, Prof. Tajuddin Rasdi — a scholar of Islamic architecture and a veteran commentator on education, politics, Islam, and nation-building — chose the latter path. He decided not only to defend the prime minister’s decision to allocate RM100 million to Gaza, but to do so by putting his own life, his children, and his relatives on public display as a case study in “responsibility.”
His argument, at first glance, sounded weighty. He claimed that just as he spends thousands of ringgit each month supporting his children, helping his sisters, and providing zakat and fidyah, Malaysia too has a “duty” to help the Palestinians. What he wanted to establish was a moral equivalence: that private responsibility and public spending share the same foundation of obligation.
But this lofty essay soon sank under its own weight. Instead of elevating the discussion, it read like a catalogue of personal sacrifices — a long list of how much he pays, whom he supports, and how generously he fulfills religious obligations. Noble deeds in themselves, yes. But when displayed in this manner, they became less about duty and more about performance. Tajuddin Rasdi turned himself into both subject and hero, his family reduced to supporting characters in the drama of his own virtue.
And therein lay the problem. To prove his moral point, he stripped his children and siblings of dignity. Their struggles — retrenchment, financial dependence, frailty — were laid bare before the nation, not as a cry for help, but as props to prop up a philosophical argument. Any parent with an ounce of humility would know better. A father shields his children’s weaknesses, he does not parade them. A brother protects his sisters’ vulnerabilities, he does not wave them around in print.
It was this violation of dignity that prompted an ordinary reader, Redzuan, to respond with more clarity and moral sharpness than all of Tajuddin Rasdi’s lofty paragraphs combined. Quoting the French proverb il faut laver son linge sale en famille — dirty laundry should be washed at home — Redzuan reminded the professor of a truth so basic it borders on instinct: true generosity does not require an audience. The most meaningful sacrifices are the ones done quietly, with no need for applause.
But Redzuan did not stop there. He turned to the heart of the matter — the issue of public money. Here, Tajuddin Rasdi’s essay collapsed completely. The professor was free to spend his own salary however he wished. If he wanted to pour it into his children, his sisters, or even “monkeys in the forest,” as Redzuan quipped, that was his right. But public funds are different. They are not the professor’s allowance. They are not the prime minister’s personal wallet. They belong to the people.
This distinction is so clear, so obvious, that one wonders how a man of supposed learning could miss it. Spend your own money and it is generosity. Spend public money without consent, and it is not generosity at all — it is indulgence cloaked in virtue. One does not need a PhD to see this; one only needs common sense.
And so, in a few paragraphs, an ordinary layman dismantled Tajuddin Rasdi’s carefully constructed essay. The professor, with all his degrees, his podium, and his sense of authority, was schooled by someone with no academic title, only clarity of thought.
This should have been a moment of humiliation for Tajuddin Rasdi, but it is also an instructive lesson for the rest of us. Too often, those with academic credentials mistake verbosity for wisdom. They believe that listing sacrifices is the same as embodying virtue, that invoking religion automatically confers moral authority, and that writing in public elevates their words above the judgment of ordinary people. But the truth is harsher: the more a man trumpets his sacrifices, the less authentic they appear. The louder he speaks of virtue, the more we suspect vanity is at work.
As Redzuan’s reply makes clear, wisdom is not found in degrees, but in clarity and humility. The ordinary man, with no pretensions, understood instinctively what Tajuddin Rasdi failed to grasp: dignity is found in silence, virtue is rooted in restraint, and public money is not the playground of personal philosophy.
This is where the contrast becomes truly biting. Tajuddin Rasdi thought he was teaching a moral lesson, but in reality, he was being taught one. He believed his article would strengthen the case for Anwar’s RM100 million allocation; instead, it weakened it by exposing the arrogance that creeps in when scholars try to moralise from an ivory tower. He wanted to show that responsibility extends beyond one’s own home; instead, he ended up showing how little responsibility he took for the dignity of his own family.
And perhaps that is the cruel irony. A professor who cannot see his own pride is no different from a preacher who forgets his own sins. A degree on the wall is not proof of wisdom, only proof of attendance. Knowledge without humility is just noise; knowledge with humility is light.
The lesson here is simple: just because you teach does not mean you are learned. True learning begins with knowing oneself. Before offering advice to others, a truly educated person first examines his own life. If he finds that his words are outpaced by his vanity, then silence would serve better than speech.
Because advice given without self-knowledge is not only wasted, it is irritating. To hear Tajuddin Rasdi lecture about responsibility while exposing his family, or to watch him justify the spending of taxpayers’ money while ignoring their consent, is to feel not enlightened but provoked. A learned man should know himself. A wise man should know when to remain silent.
In the end, this episode teaches us something larger than Gaza or RM100 million. It teaches us that wisdom does not live in titles, nor does it reside in the length of one’s essays. It is not found in the parade of personal sacrifice, nor in the loud proclamation of virtue. Wisdom lives in humility. It lives in restraint. And it is sometimes revealed most clearly not by the “high and mighty,” but by the ordinary man who dares to call them out.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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