By Terence Netto
COMMENT KUALA LUMPUR: The February 19-21 weekend edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal carried an editorial on Malaysia under the heading ‘Faith and Punishment in Malaysia’.
It decried the trend towards syariah punishments after Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein’s announcement that three women and four men were caned for premarital sex on Feb 9.
This may seem tendentious but two claims made in the column reflect the misperceptions that beset western takes on Islam in this part of the world.
One was that religious tensions in Malaysia have risen because of disputes over Malaysian Christians’ use of the term ‘Allah’ for God, leading to incidents of church burnings and mosque desecrations.
Evidence suggests there has been no decrease in church attendance as a result of the arson against Christian places of worship, following a court decision in late December to allow the Catholic weekly, Herald, to use the term in their Malay language edition. Likewise mosque attendance after the desecrations.
Also, there has been no visible lessening in interaction – albeit there is not very much – that takes place between Muslims and Christians in their daily lives. People unconcernedly went about their lives.
Two months after these potentially inflammatory incidents began, a not always healthy debate on the issue continues in newspaper columns and on the internet, but there is no evidence – of a tendency even – to violence among disputants.
Religious tensions haven’t risen in Malaysia. If anything the episode reinforces the view that ordinary Malaysians are aware of the designs of fringe elements with malevolent intent, and are declining to play along. This must be a source of great frustration to some.
Consider a parallel situation in the not too distant past. In October 1990, in the immediate prelude to the 8th General Election, a surge for the opposition stalled on the strength of the ruling Umno-led coalition’s exploitation of the ‘headgear’ issue.
This concerned the welcoming ceremonial headgear foisted on the putative leader of the opposition coalition by a Sabah power broker whose party had bolted the Barisan Nasional at the 11th hour, leaving the ruling coalition in peril of losing its two-thirds parliamentary majority.
The Umno-controlled mainstream media, in the days when the internet was just a rumour, cynically exploited a cross-seeming symbol on the headgear as proof of the opposition leader’s acquiescence in a Christian plan to dominate Sabah.
Actually, the symbol had more to do with agriculture than with religion.
The ruling coalition retained its two-thirds majority. Needless to say, a repeat of this sort of cynicism in an internet-savvy age is certain not to succeed.
However, there is no guarantee that in an information-sped era, unnuanced perceptions of reality will not flourish.
A contortion too far
Over the last two days, some of us were fortunate to enjoy the erudite company of M J Akbar, a well known journalist and author from India, who was in Kuala Lumpur at Anwar Ibrahim’s invitation.
In a talk he gave to media practitioners, he recalled the fifth anniversary of 9/11 when he was asked by CNN to comment on George Bush’s use of the term ‘Islamofascism’ in a speech the American President gave to mark the occasion.
Akbar, an observant Muslim and author of an acclaimed biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, shed much needed perspective for the network’s viewers by explaining that lslam was a 1,400-year-old faith whereas the ideology that went by the name of ‘fascism’ was a 1920s’ invention of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Even if you were to take the view that while the nomenclature was relatively new fangled, the tendency of conservative groups to save their way of life, privileges, and class values from destruction by industrialisation, urbanisation, and socialist or liberal social policies, has existed from, at least, the time Caesar made a play for more power, Akbar’s point is well taken.
To lump a religion with emphasis on equality and justice with an ideology of race/class supremacy, with leanings to eugenics, is a contortion too far.
Which brings us to the second point about the ASWJ editorial that is redolent of flawed perception. It lamented that leading Malaysian politicians, presumably Muslim ones, are unwilling to speak out against strict interpretations of Islam.
Because Muslims believe that the Quran is the inerrant word of God, adherents hewing to strictness in interpretation have the inner track, as it were, in the struggle to understand what the holy book says.
That does not necessarily mean that those of elastic interpretive bent are cowering in the shadows; only that the effort of interpretation and disputation is undertaken with the delicacy, timing and poise of a trapeze artist performing with no net underneath.
Because ishtihad is a famed practice of seeking consensus and the doors to it can never be regarded as closed, textual inerrancy and interpretive variety can coexist in Islamic tradition, in the way it may not be said that the religion can coexist or be fused with fascism.
All of which brings us to the sobering advice that Francis Bacon, no real friend of religion, urged upon the truth-questing: “May we not be wise above measure or sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity.”
That line should be nailed to the mast above any discussion on religion.
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