But we also faced the Hulu Selangor by-election with a pathetic and weak campaign machinery. It was badly coordinated and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Plus there was a host of other weaknesses that I do not wish to highlight here.
NO HOLDS BARRED
Raja Petra Kamarudin
What does one write about the Monday after a defeat? Yesterday, in the aftermath of the Hulu Selangor by-election, and with hardly any energy left in my body due to many days of lost sleep, my mood was most foul indeed. I could have listed down twenty reasons why Pakatan Rakyat lost the by-election. And I could have whacked Barisan Nasional as well as Pakatan Rakyat and blame them both for what happened in Hulu Selangor yesterday.
I had a good sleep last night and have just about recovered from my loss of sleep. So my head is clearer than it was yesterday. Maybe holding my breath and counting to ten, so to speak, was the best therapy. I would recommend it to some of you, as I can see that your comments are laced with anger, frustration, bitterness and maybe desperation as well.
Many talk about religion, especially Muslims. I have many Christian friends who preach to me about God’s love and divine will and all that. But I find they seldom have the ability to translate what the Muslims would call akidah into what they call adeen or way of life.
The non-religionists would pooh-pooh all this and call it hogwash. Man, and not God, is in control of his/her destiny, they would argue. Maybe. I would not want to start an argument about intelligent design, natural selection, the will of the Creator, the process of evolution, and such matters that may be beyond the average readership of Malaysia Today.
I am not asking you to believe what I believe. This is the penchant of most Muslims who believe that their mission in life, as destined by God, is to convince you to believe what they believe and get you converted to their belief. To each his own, I always say. After all, is not one man’s meat another man’s poison? What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa.
Which is harder, to handle success or to handle failure? I really don’t know because there are times when I find one more difficult and other times when I find the other more difficult. Nevertheless, to avoid an argument here, let us just agree that both are almost equally difficult to handle.
Talking is easy. Walking the talk, not that easy. Religionists have the ability to talk. Most do. It is walking the talk that they fall short. And religionists focus more on trappings and symbols and less on what lies deep down inside our hearts.
Muslims would be the first to whack me for what they claim to be my absence of akidah. Yes, that ‘magic’ word, akidah. What is akidah? How would I translate that one word into English? More importantly, how do I translate it into action?
Sometimes, Arabic, just like Latin, is not easily translatable into English, at least not with just one word. Locus standi, mala fide, bona fide, and so on, still require the use of Latin because those two words can never be translated into English with just two words. The same sometimes applies to Arabic as well where one word like akidah can never be translated into English with just one word.
Akidah could probably be loosely translated as faith although it involves more than just faith but would include contentment, acceptance, gratitude, and so on, as well.
A Muslim is not a Muslim in the absence of akidah. It is not prayers or fasting or believing in the One God, or believing in Muhammad as the last Prophet of God that makes a Muslim. It is the akidah that lies buried deep in his/her heart that makes a Muslim.
But what is akidah? How do we relate akidah to our daily lives? Even Christians and Jews believe in akidah although they use a different language for it. And how many Jews, Christians and Muslims practice akidah? No Jew, Christian or Muslim would dare deny that the strength of their akidah would determine whether they do or do not believe in God’s will, divine intervention, destiny, and whatnot.
The absence of akidah would mean the absence of religious belief.
Akidah is much talked about but the thing that we practice the least. Most Muslims would argue otherwise, though. They will insist that their akidah is strong. After all, do they not believe in the One God and in the Prophet of God and in the Afterlife and so on? This means they do have akidah.
Yes, that is also akidah. But that is the rudiment of akidah. That is what we learn in chapter one of the kitab or religious book. That is what we are taught in standard one in primary school. Thereafter we need to move beyond the basics of akidah and connect with God on a higher plane.
With a very troubled mind I once went to meet my Tok Guru in his home. It was cheaper than going for psychotherapy. I was facing a failure in my life and needed to understand how to handle this failure. I was contemplating some very drastic measures and needed guidance on where I take my life from that point on.
“Do you see what you are now facing as a bala (tragedy)?” asked my Tok Guru.
Of course I did.
“Do you see yourself and all things in this world as the creation of God?” asked my Tok Guru.
Again, of course I did.
“So you and all things created in this world are at par in the eyes of God then?” came my Tok Guru’s third question. “You are equally (sama-sama) all creations of God.”
I could not disagree with this as well.
“So, are you looking at things from your eyes or from the eyes of your Creator? Whose perception is it that you have failed? Your perception or God’s perception?”
Mine I suppose.
“So you failed to get something or you lost something that belongs to you. Is that a tragedy for you?”
Yes.
“Why? You said everything in this world was created by God. So nothing belongs to you. Everything belongs to God. How can you lose something or consider yourself having failed if you do not get something when it does not belong to you in the first place but everything belongs to God?”
I remained silent.
“You did not fail. You did not lose anything. It is only that God did not give you what you wanted or took back what He had earlier given you, but for a good reason. God never does things for a bad reason. It is only for good reasons. And that is why we say that God is fair and kind and merciful and loving.”
I did not respond.
“God loves you. And He loves you by not giving you what you want or by taking something away from you. It all belongs to Him anyway so He has a right to decide what He does with what belongs to Him. Sometimes He entrusts (amanah) you with what belongs to Him and sometimes He takes away what He had earlier entrusted to you. That is God’s way.”
I just nodded.
“To feel depressed would mean you disagree with God’s action. That makes you defiant of God’s will. It means you think that God was wrong. Can God be wrong? Would God be so unkind as to punish you for no reason? Or is God, in His love for you, helping you by not giving you what you want or by taking back what He had earlier given you?”
I still needed a bit more clarifying.
“God gave you a chicken. You then slaughter that chicken for dinner and the whole family enjoys a good meal. Is that good or bad? You have now lost your chicken. But you and your whole family enjoyed a good meal. Is the ‘loss’ of your chicken a good or bad thing?”
I begin to see my Tok Guru’s point.
“Bad and good is a matter of perception. It is only what you perceive. It is not the way perceived by God. So what you may consider bad now may actually be good later. You may get something now that could later turn out to be bad. Or you may lose something now and that may turn out later to be a good thing after all. You don’t know, but God knows.”
I nodded.
“So don’t feel depressed. Feel shukur (grateful) and accept that God in His wisdom has decided that today you would face a loss so that later you will benefit. You will not know those details now but later you will look back and say that today was a blessing in disguise and you will thank God that you did not get what you wanted because if you had it would have later been a curse.”
Forget about the corruption. Forget about the cheating. That is how Umno has been conducting itself for 53 years so why should they change now? You mean we faced the Hulu Selangor by-election without realising we would be facing what we faced the last week or so? We knew all that. We faced the same in every general election and every by-election.
But we also faced the Hulu Selangor by-election with a pathetic and weak campaign machinery. It was badly coordinated and the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. Plus there was a host of other weaknesses that I do not wish to highlight here.
We tried telling the Pakatan Rakyat leadership about all this but our words fell on deaf ears. If PKR had won the Hulu Selangor by-election then they would have arrogantly said that we were imagining all these weaknesses. How can there be weaknesses if Pakatan Rakyat is able to win the Hulu Selangor by-election? And these weaknesses would have remained right up to the next general election. And in the next general election we would have paid dearly for these weaknesses.
So maybe this is God’s will after all. I really don’t know. And you who do not believe in God would certainly disagree that it was God’s will.
Can we win the next general election if we conduct ourselves the way we did in Hulu Selangor? Certainly not! So, is this probably God’s lesson so that we can reflect on our weaknesses? Maybe, maybe not, but if we can take this defeat in Hulu Selangor not as a loss but as a gain then we would need less psychotherapy in our lives and we will be able to look at all events as positive and move on. That is what akidah is all about.
And I am going to move on and prepare myself for D-Day, the big one yet to come.
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