We cannot achieve perfection by compulsion
U-En NgPublished: Aug 16, 2010 10:05 AM | Updated: Aug 16, 2010 10:07 AM
I write in support of Hazrul Nizam Bukhari's letter The blood on our hands. I applaud his courage both in asking why, as a society, do we gravitate towards punishment as the panacea for all social ills, as well as his broad appeal for better education and greater responsibility on the part of religious authorities in attending to what are obviously the facts of our daily existence – in this case pre-marital sex, as opposed to the fantasies of an imagined moral utopia.
These are not popular opinions. Pre-marital sex constitutes zina, a grave wrong in Islam and equally as grave (as fornication) in all traditionalist branches of Christianity and Judaism, while the other prevailing religions in our country such as Hinduism and Buddhism attach to it terrible shame and immorality.
Pre-marital sex (let alone pregnancies) has become so entrenched as a sin in our moral and religious desire for identity – or vengeance – that we frequently feel ourselves compelled to recommend punitive measures as an attestation to little more than our own declarations of faith, religious or otherwise.
We have allowed matters to get to the point that one should die for nothing greater than fear of a religious department's punishment. We have allowed the chief minister of Melaka to go on a frolic of his own with regard to child-marriage, to the extent of mooting RM500 in financial help to do so.
We religiously take action against ‘immoral’ activities in nightclubs, bars and private hotel rooms. We, self-proclaimed ‘democrats’ and ‘liberals’, frequently oppose the rule of law and the tenets of liberty by demanding capital or other corporal punishments for ‘perverts’, ‘deviants’, rapists and murderers.
‘Imagine if it is your daughter who is raped and killed. Don't you want to eviscerate the perpetrator with your bare hands?’ How civilised. And to what end? Have we established the Kingdom of God or Righteousness or Whatever on this earth with our skodeng, religious raids and the utter conviction of our own moral superiority?
Isn't it better, both for one's faith and one's democratic duty to the state, to approach adult pre-marital sex from the perspective of individual legal and political responsibility? An adult's private actions, so far as they do not infringe on the rights of others, must surely remain his or her own private business, absolutely inviolable and protected to the full extent of the law.
We cannot maintain otherwise without insulting humanity as a whole – and while we certainly have terrible problems as a species, any attempt to regulate private morality today will not only fail, it will turn most of us who subscribe to such things into bigoted hypocrites whose courage and conviction stem not so much from faith as from the insuperable power of the mob.
Religious authorities should have no right to barge into our homes demanding proof of legal relations with our friends: these actions degrade not the subjects of such rules but their enforcers; and they serve no law but that of men – I mean both mortal as opposed to Divine and the fact that women still have far too small a voice in the religious laws of our country – and their actions pose the question few want to ask: in what place do our constitutional rights stand in so far as they protect us as Malaysians regardless of our faith?
And yet this is what the authorities do. How can we hope then that they might exercise a hitherto absent humanity in counselling young single mothers without resorting to moral violence?
I will not abide by the persecution of my Muslim friends in whatever way – whether they are unjustly victimised because they have children out of wedlock or whether they choose to act on their own decisions in private, and I do this for the simple reason that I believe that we built our country on the basis of the protection of fundamental freedoms that we hold collectively and which we are therefore bound collectively to defend (these are contained in articles three through thirteen of the federal constitution, in case you were wondering).
By the same token, I think it is utterly disgraceful that some of us still rely on arguments seeking to vilify Islam (or any religion for that matter) or to portray it as the principal cause of our problems, just as there are many who justify shooting 14-year-old Aminulrashid Hamzah on the basis of ‘what if he rammed the car into you?’ or, from a comment to Hazrul Nizam's letter, ‘rapists should have their organs cut off!’ Inhumane to do castration? Tell that to those victims of rape. Yes let your daughters be raped!’
How dare you demand good governance when you clearly have no idea what it is? How dare you demand religious freedom when you so gleefully paint any woman in an jubah or abaya as a devotee of Osama bin Laden? How dare you demand anything when you lack the courage of people like Hazrul Nizam and others to stand by your convictions in public, under your real names, as real Malaysians seeking at least to debate rather than cudgel for the sake of some selfish, narrow-minded and ultimately bigoted personal ideology?
We cannot achieve perfection by compulsion. Hitler tried, and then shot himself. And if we, liberal or conservative, should persist in this pursuit we must inevitably lie both to ourselves and those we intend to ‘save’.
These are not popular opinions. Pre-marital sex constitutes zina, a grave wrong in Islam and equally as grave (as fornication) in all traditionalist branches of Christianity and Judaism, while the other prevailing religions in our country such as Hinduism and Buddhism attach to it terrible shame and immorality.
Pre-marital sex (let alone pregnancies) has become so entrenched as a sin in our moral and religious desire for identity – or vengeance – that we frequently feel ourselves compelled to recommend punitive measures as an attestation to little more than our own declarations of faith, religious or otherwise.
We have allowed matters to get to the point that one should die for nothing greater than fear of a religious department's punishment. We have allowed the chief minister of Melaka to go on a frolic of his own with regard to child-marriage, to the extent of mooting RM500 in financial help to do so.
We religiously take action against ‘immoral’ activities in nightclubs, bars and private hotel rooms. We, self-proclaimed ‘democrats’ and ‘liberals’, frequently oppose the rule of law and the tenets of liberty by demanding capital or other corporal punishments for ‘perverts’, ‘deviants’, rapists and murderers.
‘Imagine if it is your daughter who is raped and killed. Don't you want to eviscerate the perpetrator with your bare hands?’ How civilised. And to what end? Have we established the Kingdom of God or Righteousness or Whatever on this earth with our skodeng, religious raids and the utter conviction of our own moral superiority?
Isn't it better, both for one's faith and one's democratic duty to the state, to approach adult pre-marital sex from the perspective of individual legal and political responsibility? An adult's private actions, so far as they do not infringe on the rights of others, must surely remain his or her own private business, absolutely inviolable and protected to the full extent of the law.
We cannot maintain otherwise without insulting humanity as a whole – and while we certainly have terrible problems as a species, any attempt to regulate private morality today will not only fail, it will turn most of us who subscribe to such things into bigoted hypocrites whose courage and conviction stem not so much from faith as from the insuperable power of the mob.
Religious authorities should have no right to barge into our homes demanding proof of legal relations with our friends: these actions degrade not the subjects of such rules but their enforcers; and they serve no law but that of men – I mean both mortal as opposed to Divine and the fact that women still have far too small a voice in the religious laws of our country – and their actions pose the question few want to ask: in what place do our constitutional rights stand in so far as they protect us as Malaysians regardless of our faith?
And yet this is what the authorities do. How can we hope then that they might exercise a hitherto absent humanity in counselling young single mothers without resorting to moral violence?
I will not abide by the persecution of my Muslim friends in whatever way – whether they are unjustly victimised because they have children out of wedlock or whether they choose to act on their own decisions in private, and I do this for the simple reason that I believe that we built our country on the basis of the protection of fundamental freedoms that we hold collectively and which we are therefore bound collectively to defend (these are contained in articles three through thirteen of the federal constitution, in case you were wondering).
By the same token, I think it is utterly disgraceful that some of us still rely on arguments seeking to vilify Islam (or any religion for that matter) or to portray it as the principal cause of our problems, just as there are many who justify shooting 14-year-old Aminulrashid Hamzah on the basis of ‘what if he rammed the car into you?’ or, from a comment to Hazrul Nizam's letter, ‘rapists should have their organs cut off!’ Inhumane to do castration? Tell that to those victims of rape. Yes let your daughters be raped!’
How dare you demand good governance when you clearly have no idea what it is? How dare you demand religious freedom when you so gleefully paint any woman in an jubah or abaya as a devotee of Osama bin Laden? How dare you demand anything when you lack the courage of people like Hazrul Nizam and others to stand by your convictions in public, under your real names, as real Malaysians seeking at least to debate rather than cudgel for the sake of some selfish, narrow-minded and ultimately bigoted personal ideology?
We cannot achieve perfection by compulsion. Hitler tried, and then shot himself. And if we, liberal or conservative, should persist in this pursuit we must inevitably lie both to ourselves and those we intend to ‘save’.
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