Address terrorism, not flimsy sedition
Azly Rahman
‘Dewan ulama delegate pays tribute to slain militant, saying he was a martyr’ – The Malaysian Insider
That was what I read yesterday – a most dangerous symbolic act Malaysia is seeing from an influential political party- the romanticising of diabolism, and if a political party can do this, imagine what we will be facing in these immediate years to come – home grown ISIS!
We ought to be afraid and to be very afraid – when the modus operandi of ISIS is to strike global fear through the broadcasting of beheadings, rape, mayhem, murder. My question to the government is, what are you going to do about this celebration of martyrdom and diabolism?
What is martyrdom or “shahidism in jihadism…”? I am still grappling with these words.
It might be the most misunderstood concept in the Socratic maxim of the life examined. My questions are:
* Who or what would you die for and why? is the question…
* Who decides whether one has died for god and paradise awaits…? and
* Which god is worth dying for in all its validity?
I don’t know.
I am more interested not in the question of what to die for but what kind of life have you lived to the fullest with the wonderful gift of life giveth – because my question is – must religion have enemies if ‘religio’ (from the Latin) means ‘connectedness to a universal higher force of life that will not require warring factions’?
Then there is this story of ISIS handing out its new curriculum in Mosul, Iraq – removing the arts, humanities, and liberal ideas to the schools to impose a theocratic paradigm of teaching and learning, echoing the vision of society in what the Boko Haram of Nigeria and the Talibans of Pakistan hold.
Critical to Malaysian education is the equal emphasis given to music, the arts, humanities, cross-cultural studies and philosophy to be structured into the curriculum, across all subject matters, across the lifespan of the mind, and the monitoring of all formal and non-formal religious schools .
Taken seriously by the Malaysian Education Ministry, this might even be the most important advice for preparing bastion against religious militancy in schools and a peaceful and sustainable weapon against the country’s takeover by ISIS-inspired groups. We must remember what Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Afghanistan were like before what they are now, (and not all hell that broke loose is the fault of the Americans, mind you…)
In the late 1980s in Malaysia I have been in schools that mirror what is being promoted by the curriculum of the Islamic state – girls and boys separated in class, even in group discussions requiring intermingling, English Language arts and drama activities sabotaged by religious groups, music lesson discouraged, students given the free hand delivering all kinds of khutbahs/sermons and talks inspired and fuelled by religious and politically-motivated teachers – all those that ISIS is promoting. I don’t know how things are these days.
