Reckoning the peace/violence ambiguity in the apostasy debate
by Joshua Woo, New Mandala
Whether a religion is of peace or not depends very much on the believers’ definition of ‘peace’ itself. One’s ‘peace’ can be violence to another.
Such notion is simply too familiar to human experience. This peace/violence ambiguity is observable in recent history. For instance during the first half of the 20th century, the Japanese propagated the ideology of ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, which presented them as the messenger of peace and the liberator of Asia from western oppressors. The caption of one of the Japanese poster reads: “With Japanese, Chinese, and Manchu working together, a great peace can be brought to the world.” We can always ask those who lived through the war to find out what kind of “great peace” the Japanese brought. In China, such peace is remembered as the Nanking massacre. In the Malaya peninsular, the Sook Ching massacre.
The point here is not to identify any religion to the aforementioned horrendous acts, but to establish the crude reality of one’s ‘peace’ can be violence to another. If we learned anything from history, it is the way to reckon the peace/violence ambiguity by evaluating the relationship between the advertised peace and the actual act of the regime.
Zulkifli Hasan’s article ‘Refining the misconception of apostasy in Islam’ attempts to demonstrate that the ‘peace’ of Islam as he understands it does not contradict the “sanction on the matter of apostasy.” He asserts that Islam recognizes the liberty for non-Muslims to join any religion, yet it is a different matter for Muslims to convert out of Islam. In showing how such ‘peace’ is conceptualized, he wrote:
“The freedom of religion should not be abused and any elements of irresponsible religious anarchy that may lead to religious disharmony should not be allowed. This is because Islam considers religious freedom as a matter faith and not as legal or political issues.” […]
“It is found that this issue has been heavily politicized as an ideological weapon to get the support of the public particularly by secular humanists including many Western-oriented Muslim intellectual. If the element of politics can be put aside, the apostasy in Islam will not be an issue either in the aspect of human rights or fundamental freedom of an individual.” […]
“The debate and arguments on the law of apostasy in Islam is often superficial, marked by political intentions as well as religious prejudices.”
There are several matters in this quotation for us to look at. Firstly, this gives the impression that western-orientation is somewhat political in a way that problematize the issue on apostasy in Islam.
This means, to Zulkifli, that the root cause of the current debate on apostasy lies in the difference between the ‘West’ and Islam: The former is political, while the latter is not. Therefore, the solution to the problem is to loosen the root, to “put aside” such western-orientation.
I find that this point is too presumptuous in a way that does not do justice to the ‘West’. To illustrate what I mean, let us first consider another article written by Zulklifi, titled ‘The Challenges of Globalization to Muslim Youths’.
