COMMENT Media agenda is such a tricky thing that some issues not of paramount importance, always have a chance to become incredibly popular in the public discourse.
 
These distortions indeed have narrowed down the reality to very limited issues - like hudud - whether we were discussing about the Arab spring, liberal democracy or maqasid al-shariah (higher intention of the syariah).
 
Foreign guests were getting puzzled due to the persistent interrogation on how Malaysia could resolve its hudud fever, whilst the collective consciousness is drifting away from important issues, to chocolate bars.
 
It’s as if Malaysia has forgotten the fact that it bears the proud name of ‘Asian tiger’ and to be an example of a successful Muslim country in the whole world - because it is the way Malaysia is observed from abroad.
 
And it’s as if it has also forgot that talk at any spot on the planet spreads like wildfire due to information and technology age we are in right now.
 
Was it the fear that has brought Malaysians to this loop of such discussions, and find themselves locked in the endless space of Kafka’s ‘Castle’?
 
The ideology of the besieged fortress made everyone there a prisoner wandering about it in an attempt to find a key to the system. The latter meanwhile runs away to a safe distance and replaces itself with a surrealistic chocolate bar.
 
The agenda must be rewritten.
 
“People start constructing fences, when they feel most vulnerable”, argued Dr Anas Altikriti, Director of The Cordoba Foundation and the guest at the roundtable discussion on “Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy” held by the Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF) in collaboration with the Penang Institute and Global Movement of Moderates Foundation (GMMF) on May 18 at the GMMF Conference Room.
 
Instead, in Malaysia, so much of time is spent on sorting out who is a real Muslim and who is not, who is pious enough and who is not. “People of different backgrounds and aspirations can yet all advance the society and make it thrive”, stressed Altikriti.
 
“We honored the sons of Adam” (17: 70), said Allah through the Revelation - to those who read it properly though.  Yet there is a bizarre earthly fray to decide who is worthy of Allah’s honour.
 
Bewildered at discussion

Another guest of recent days, Dr Jasser Auda, a professor of the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies in Doha and a member of the executive board of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, seemed bewildered at the discussion on Maqasid al-Shariah at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) on May 31, being asked a hundred times on what Malaysia should do regarding hudud, and how to handle apostates.
 
He meant to say that when it is time to provide safe drinking water, or education, or decent medical services, it is clearly against any reasonable goals of syariah to bring Quran to the needy people and teach them how to read Arabic scripts.
 
“There is no division for me between an Islamic state or a secular state - there can be only division between a good state and a bad state”, he said.
 
A sound steward does not try to bring in a new painting labeled ‘halal’ when his house is in the middle of the earthquake.

The question is not whether we have a ‘halal’ government but whether it performs its duties efficiently for the sake of people’s wellbeing.
 
Why the emphasis on hudud?

Meanwhile at the discussion that took place at GMMF, Dr Anas Altikriti commented that hudud was revealed only during the last one and a half years of the Prophet’s da’wah.

So the question is:  from the entire body of divine revelations, why does hudud take priority and must be pursued first?
 
So much talk about justice in Islam became faint when the issue of criminal law, so unprofessionally branded, shoots itself in the foot in an attempt to prove that it is going to provide that very justice that is badly needed.
 
Meantime, the same IRF’s roundtable discussion was meant to cover an interrelation between Islam and liberal democracy in the new political climate.
 
Director of PAS Research Centre, Dzulkefly Ahmad (left) and the other participants confidently asserted that compatibility between Islam and democracy is somehow indisputable. 
 
It would be good if this magic world of academic discussions blends with reality, in which human rights are considered sacrosanct.
 
As a matter of fact, erecting fences between different categories of population prove to serve more effectively the divide and rule strategy than to multiplying the treasures  of  a multi-ethnic state nation.
 
Liberal democracy is yet a question for the part of traditionally oriented preachers of divisions and clash of civilisations.
 
I agree that this is not the issue to be discussed – while we should keep in mind that for some people it still is – and sense the time when the bubblegum of media bestsellers can be replaced by worthwhile agenda. But it seems better when this constructive effort takes place sooner than later.
 
For my favorite mysterious writer who passed away before he finished his gloomy ‘Castle’, I guess it is better for those who are still captivated to the idea that divides society along different lines, to find a way out of their own surreal and not really pretty prisons of the mind; before it gets too late in their lifetime.
 

MAHSA AMIRI reads Malaysiakini.