Born towards the end of the Japanese occupation of Malaya in the Perak border town of Tanjung Malim, Rustam grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Abdullah Sani, who was better known as Ahmad Boestaman.
He deepened his preoccupation with the challenges of Malaysian nationhood at the university, an enduring theme in his writings since the 1970s, and the subject of one of his two latest books, which was launched posthumously by his old friend from the 1960s, Anwar Ibrahim.
Back at UKM, he switched to the Politics Department as his old Canterbury friend, then Abim secretary-general Kamaruddin, had left to join Anwar in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and the Government.
With Syed Husin at the helm of the Malaysian Social Science Association (PSSM), Rustam started a bilingual quarterly journal, Ilmu Masyarakat, to try to open new Malaysian debates under the dispensation of the then new Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to which the former UKM academic as well as PNB and Guthrie chief executive Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim (later Selangor Mentri Besar) was an early and insightful contributor.
There, he helped to craft Mahathir's historic February 1991 speech promising a “Bangsa Malaysia” as part of his Vision 2020 (thankfully translated by Rustam as Wawasan 2020, instead of the earlier Visi 2020), changing the terms of national discourse in one fell swoop.