Ministers' wives lectured on the wrongs of Shiism

There was a girl, whose family consisted of Shiite Muslims, who complained to the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) of having to wait for half an hour or more every evening before breaking fast during Ramadan. This is because Shiite Muslims can only eat when the sun sets and stars appear.

This story, related by Jakim’s assistant director of Akidah Mohd Aizam Mas’od, had the wives of ministers in stitches.

About 30 members of the Wives' Charities and Welfare Body (Bakti), including prime minister’s wife Rosmah Mansor, were today lectured about the Shiite sect, and how it clashes with the Sunni brand of Islam, as practised in Malaysia.

The ladies took down notes as Mohd Aizam held a power-point presentation.

The presentation illustrated the millennium-old history of the second largest denomination of Islam - its leaders, practices, teachings and geographic spread and why it was wrong.

Two million Shiite followers in South-East Asia

Practitioners of Shiism, widely found in Iran but considered heretics in Malaysia, look to Ali, Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, as the divinely-appointed successor to Muhammad, and the first Imam.

"It is the oldest and most classic heresy in the history of Islam," said Mohd Aizam. "Shiism is the main enemy of Islam after the Jews and the Christians (in the historical context)."

Although Sunnis and Shiites had shared roots in the Quran, Mohd Aizam said that the advent of the Shiite sect had been warned about by Prophet Muhammad himself.

The sect was gazetted as ‘haram’ (prohibited in Islam) by the Malaysian National Fatwa Council for Islamic Affairs, Muzakarah Special Committee on May 5, 1996, as its teachings were feared to create factions among Muslims.

Mohd Aizam said in South-East Asia, there were two million followers of Shiism or about 1 percent of the Muslims in Indonesia, 21,000 in Thailand, 5,000 in Singapore and only 1,500 in Malaysia.

Mohd Aizam’s figure was in contradiction with a recent Home Ministry estimate of 250,000 Shiite followers identified nationwide consisting of 10 active groups.

But the Jakim official clarified that his figure referred only to Shiite followers who were  Malaysians, not foreigners.

There also many splinter groups within the Shiite religion, Mohd Aizam warned.

Amongst the most widespread in Malaysia, he said, were the believers in the "Twelver Shiites" who believe in twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, with a last Imam to be revealed when Al-Mahdi returns.

The talk lasted nearly two hours before it went into a closed-door question-and-answer session.