It’s tough being a Malay Muslim in Malaysia

Sometimes, we get too obsessed with rituals that we forget to practice the actual religion.

Zan Azlee, Astro Awani

My three year old daughter Athena Azlee has a very active imagination (as most kids do, I assume). She has imaginary friends that she talks to on the phone and she likes to dance to an imaginary audience at times too.

Sometimes, she thinks she’s Spiderman and pretends to climb the walls at home. Other times, she would think that she is Lola from the cartoon Charlie and Lola. Most times, she’s a dinosaur that likes to eat our noses.

I like the fact that she has an active imagination. I used to be like that too when I was little. In fact, I still like to believe that I have a wild imagination even at 36 years of age. It’s the only way to have fun in life.

But recently, that overactive imagination of Athena’s turned into a nightmare for me and my wife. We were on a short weekend holiday to Singapore when Athena pretended to be something she had never pretended to be before.

She pretended to be a puppy!

My wife and I were horrified when she put her two hands in front of her face like a puppy begging for attention. Not only that. She also stuck her tongue out and started panting and yelping.

“Athena! What are you doing?” I asked her out of shock.

“I’m a puppy pops!” she replied smiling away.

Then she ran up to me and started licking me on the face. I screamed in fright. Then she leaped on my wife and started licking her face too. We were both just so shocked that we didn’t know what to do.

“What do we do? Should we samak?” I asked my wife.

“I don’t know. Where are we going to find soil to use?” she replied.

In case you didn’t know, we were referring to the cleansing ritual practiced by Malay Muslims when they come into contact with dogs. It’s six times of washing with water mixed with soil and once with just clean water… or the other way round, I think.

This reminded us of the time when we were on holiday in Australia and had brought Athena to the zoo, There was a pig pen with several sows lying around in a mud bath. She went right up to the side of the enclosure to see the pigs.

She was too fast for us to stop her. The pigs started grunting away. Athena got excited and started laughing. Then she started imitating the pigs. She scrunched up her nose and begin snorting and grunting loudly.

“Pops! Pigs don’t go oink. Old Macdonald is a liar!” she screamed.

My wife wanted to pick Athena up but I stopped her. She would have picked her up with her bare hands and that would mean contamination! So we just slowly coaxed her back into her baby stroller and pushed her away from the pigs.

Once the pigs were out of her sight, she stopped pretending that she was a pig and her scrunched up nose returned to being the almond shaped nose that she got from my genes and we pretended like the incident never happened.

Now back to Singapore where Athena still thinks she is a cute little puppy. After a couple of hours, she turned back into normal Athena. We were relieved. But in the back of our minds, we were still feeling icky after her licking.

At the end of the day, my wife and I never did samak after both of these occasions. Athena is our daughter, and if she was pretending, we hoped that God would realise this and not punish us for not cleansing ourselves.

It’s kind of like using different languages to pray as well. Chinese Muslims may pray in Cantonese, Indian Muslims may pray in Tamil and Malay Muslims may pray in Malay. I’m sure God would understand the prayers no matter what language it is in.

Man, it’s hard being a Malay Muslim in Malaysia. There are just too many religious rituals to be obsessed about to ensure that we are actual Muslims to even have time to practice the actual religion.