Silence in Islamic capture is required behavior. It is the insistence of subjugation,a clean surrender to the power vested by religious belief inside a primitive appetite of the mighty religious jurists in a state that is conceived as legally co-extensive with the whole of human life.
Islamic law rules even what you eat, the manner you eat, how you transact and where you turn in prayer.
When officers of the Selangor religious department raided the Methodist Church in Damansara Utama in the night of Wednesday August 3 where a charity thanksgiving dinner was being held, the primitivism was recalled making the raid an act to protect the religion and to stop Christians from proselytizing the Muslims.
Twelve was the number of Muslims attending the dinner. Probably all were members or associates of the NGO, Harapan Komuniti, which, we are told, had organized the dinner to collect funds to help AIDS victims.
The Harapan Kommuniti is a partner of the Malaysian AIDS Council.
In the distresses that followed the nocturnal action of the religious authority the people were once again dismayed while Muslims, even leaders of the Islamic party, Pas, were divided once more, a patent reaction that has repeated itself over and over again like in a pavlovian experiment.
Islam is holistic according to this line of thought and the Islamic State, said the great Pakistani scholar and founder of the Jemaat-i- Islami, Mawlana Maududi, is coextensive with all of life.
Hence, the rulers of Islam must, as of a necessity, become authoritarian and therefore, making it difficult for the people to draw the line between good and bad laws.
Had Maududi lived he would have to explain the social breakdown in his country which is torn to shreds by sectarian conflicts between Muslims.
The Muslims, in the evolution of the Islamic State for which Pakistan was born, are crapped by the diversification of the monotheistic religion as it evolved into becoming a mass of conflicting sects to make cohesion, coherence and comprehensibility nearly an empirical impossibility.
The Islamic State is ‘the very antithesis of secular western democracy’, someone remarked.
The State is assigned to administer the Divine Law and therefore no Non-Muslim can be parked into policy-making, nor can Non-Muslims proselytize, and as Dhimmis they must pay the capitation tax (Jizya) and be confined to a class of non-citizen residents who have no vote.
Decolonization
It could have been worth something as a decolonization strategy like in the ideological conceptions of Jean Paul Sartre and Franz Fannon when Western colonization was receding after World War II.
But the great minds of the Existentialists had obviously failed to address the emotions involved in religion the fact Fannon was a psychiatrist notwithstanding.
The Islamic resurgence that had begun in the 60s went several ways but as we have witnessed, the most successful had come from the city of Qom, the seat of fundamental Shi’ah Islam which provided us with the foundational approaches of Imam Khomenie upon whose understanding of Islam Iran now stands.
In the early days of the religion there was Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law and the last republican caliph.
His attempt to steer Islam into a universal humanistic religion and to regard all his subjects as ‘brothers in faith and brothers in kind’ was overtaken by the Umayyad dynasty which imposed discrimination including over non-Arab Muslim subjects (here).
The ideal religion had been overrun by the Arabs themselves.
Islamic history took a turn that led into a bewildering mix of glorious conquests, of stupendous civilizations which flowed along tracks of copious literary and scientific achievements, but with legal and judicial confusions.
Now Muslims react to American, European and Zionist hegemony with suicidal terror to stand a chance in the asymmetrical wars. The Americans hardly accept Obama's reforms, which are good, like the healthcare insurance. Obama promised an independent Palestinian state and that too would be disagreeable to them.
Panic seemed to have been struck in the government of Malaysia to cause it to pass a series of constitutional amendments pertaining to Islam in both, the federal and state constitutions. This began in 1988.
These laws gave wide and sinister powers to the Muslim authorities.
They denied the rights of citizens to apply to the civil courts in prayers for civil and constitutional justice.
The bunch of enactments passed in 1988, I had been told, were suggested by the “dangerous” passages former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, had installed in his political networks which involved several NGOs in Indonesia, America and Europe.
It included the think-tank of the German Christian Democratic Union - the Konrad Adenaeur Stiftung (KAS).
Anwar’s think-tank, Institut Kajian Dasar (Institute for Policy Research) was funded by KAS, which was the same body to later fund the Malaysian Inter-Faith Network (MIN) which became quickly viewed as anti-Islam.
The bases for the blanket security options had been sown from before the 1987 leadership crisis Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir, had had to face.
In 1988 the tussle in Umno had brought the backbone of the ruling coalition to fall dead on the bench of Justice Harun Hashim.
Mahathir won in 1987 by the wisp of his whiskers he failed to shave. He won by 43 votes. The challenger was Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.
Following the fateful contest 10 of Razaleigh’s sympathizers filed complaints in court to declare the contest null and void.
The reason was about some illegal party branches.
That caused the judge to conclude some of the delegates who voted were illegal while at the same time some of the party divisions had also been illegal.
In his mind it had to roll into an avalanche that swept and buried the party as a whole – a kind of roller-coaster legal effect that should be written in the annals of Law in orange, to make it neither this nor that.
Anwar had risen from Umno Youth chief to Umno Vice-President in the 1987 party elections.
Meantime he had become close to B.J. Habibie of Indonesia and thence to Paul Wolfowitz, the American Neo-Cons leader who became one of the architects of the Iraq War.
In 1985 Wolfowitz was US ambassador to Indonesia.
Thus developed Anwar’s power-romances, which became known in Umno as “Super-Politics”, suggesting the network Anwar knitted through the Institut Kajian Dasar (IKD), his Muslim Youth Movement (ABIM), the Asia-Pacific chapter of the World Assembly of Muslim Youths (WAMY), the ABIM frontline in the Pas and ICMI, Habibie’s Muslim intellectuals outfit in Indonesia, had grown into an intercontinental giant.
Putting into focus the Christian think-tank, KAS, and adding to it the spread of Paul Wolfowitz’s connections to the already big-bodied Anwar, it would be rather easy to imagine the nervousness seizing the mighty Mahathir, the ruler of all he sat on.
Mahathir, with his sidekick from Kedah, Abdul Hamid Othman, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department presiding over JAKIM (the Islamic affairs wing of the department)swung into action with the bunch of “Islamic laws” of 1988.
These took most people by surprise and in the surprise many observers cautioned against using legislations to curtail one or another political rival.
Like the Emergency Ordinances (EO) which were passed to contain the Communist Insurrection of 1948, these laws fail to fall into disuse after the challenge had passed.
The EO was applied twice in the past months. The Islamic laws were used several more times than twice in the same measure of time.
It had even threatened the former Mufti of Perlis, Dr. Asri and his successor, Dr. Juanda. Dr. Asri was reported as a "terrorist" to the National Security Council while Dr. Juanda was called a "Wahabi". It was senseless, making Islam a mockery.
Dr. Asri had vied for the top post in Jakim. It's about a contest for resources.
There is disquiet as a result. People regard these actions as signaling a strong possibility that it is exactly what the government wants to do – i.e. apply emergency rule and the “Islamic laws” to sustain the Barisan Nasional (BN) in power against popular distastes.
Anwar
Anwar is back in the dock.
He is on a repeat performance of a sodomy charge and also a repeat performance in bed, i.e. of someone that looks like him and a Chinese doll, said to have been shown in 1999, which can make it a classic.
Will there be changes made to the relevant Islamic enactments if he were to be found guilty and removed (for the last time possibly) from posing a political challenge?
Anwar is only a political rival, not a Christian crusader in disguise or a Jew merchant from Venice.
He must have learned from his days in WAMY, which was based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that the 22 Arab countries have to consult the US and the Europeans before they can decisively act in any significant matter of statecraft or diplomacy.
Europe lies merely across the Mediterranean from these states. The distance makes for fondness. Si, si!
There lies a critical difference in the political understandings and the political outlooks between Anwar and the remaining power contestants in Umno.
Razaleigh did not approve of using the Islamic enactments to act as political constraints to contain the Anwarites and the Pas.
But Razaleigh was already out of Umno in 1988.
Nothing stood in the way of the design.
Members of the BN in the legislatures voted for the enactments, like loyal disciples. So now we have to live with them.
New legislations were added to the basic body from time to time.
The passage cleared, the way power moves when the citizens cannot effectively protect themselves from government has always been to add claws and fangs to the simian.
We must listen to Maulana Maududi again and again. He wrote to say in an Islamic State no behavior can be regarded as personal and private.
The Tanzimat (Reform)
The Ottoman, which was the largest Muslim empire and lasting until 1925, came to confront industrial Europe that stumped its westward expansion after Budapest.
Admitting it was no match to the order and the power of the new industrial civilizations, the Ottoman, from 1835 to 1873, had conceived westernization and attempted serially to change its laws and legal system, reform its judiciary and its political system, following the French and German models.
The ulama rejected it.
That movement, known as Tanzimat (Reform), caught the interest of the sultan of Johor, Tunku Ibrahim Iskandar, who considered it in 1927. It would have made Malaysia a secular federation.
But it fizzled out. And so the story refuses to end.
In its stead on Aug. 3, 2011, a thanksgiving dinner held by an NGO administering to AIDS victims was raided on the suspicion the Christians were proselytizing.
The dinner was held in a Methodist church and it involved 12 Muslims in the gathering of more than 100.
What will happen to the 12?
How do unintelligible laws become useful in honoring a modern industrial nation….? Salaam! ----a.ghani ismail, 10, Aug. 2011
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