Time for some secular aggression
By Sim Kwang Yang
The canning of former model Kartika Sari Dewi Sukarno has been postponed till the Ramadan moth is over. She has been sent back home for another month of emotional anguish.
The news has since become the fifth most popular story on both the CNN and BBC websites. There was even a Facebook account listed as “Help Kartika Sari Dewi Sukarno”.
I feel boiling mad with her sentence, because the canning punishment is barbaric and out-dated for any crime. It should have been outlawed long ago. It does not serve as a deterrent, and neither should it serve as punitive punishment. It belongs to the Dark Ages.
I was thinking of writing about religious overzealousness, at the risk of offending some religious sensitivities, when I came across the article entitled “Time for secular aggression” by Wole Soyinka.
Wole Soyinka (born 1934) is a Nigerian writer, playwright, and poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honoured. For him, both Christianity and Islam have their camels.
I realise that sometimes our blog is well placed to introduce farawy ideas from strangers from faraway lands. The NY Times piece on one Malaysia attracted about 2000 hits. So here goes below:
WOLE SOYINKA, POET AND PLAYWRIGHT
Time for some secular aggression!
From my primary school reader, comes the following morality tale.
A Bedouin on a journey through the desert camped down for the night, his camel tethered to a peg outside the tent. A while later, the camel pleaded, “Master, the desert air is cold. Can I put my nose inside the tent just to warm it a little?”
The kindly Bedouin decided to gratify the camel’s wish. Next the camel, meek as ever, proposed that his neck follow suit. The rest of the story is soon guessed.
After the incursion of legs, chest, hump and rump, the camel grumbled that there was not enough room for both.
Still vivid in my mind is the accompanying illustration – the astonished Bedouin sailing through the air from a powerful kick from the camel’s hind legs.
Anyone who seeks a graphic actualisation of this fable should visit Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, whose solitary dual carriage motorway into the interior is ritually clogged up by revivalist sessions of rival Christian campsites which litter the borders of that sole motorway into the interior.
The backup traffic runs for miles imprisoning travelers sometimes all day and night.
Efforts to move them to other sites have failed, and the average citizen finds himself or herself the dispossessed Bedouin of our fable.
If only the acquisition of such territory remained purely physical!
