What’s up with touching a dog?

By admin-s On Oct 21, 2014

Make sure you have done your homework to be able to make that choice instead of just relying on hand me down knowledge.

Zarif Ismail, TMI

When I first saw the “I Want to Touch a Dog” event I was quite disheartened.

Disheartened due to the fact that we in Malaysia, especially the Malay Muslims, have come to an extent where we have to create an event like this just to plant the value of compassion towards dogs.

Did not our parents/teachers teach us to be kind to all God’s creatures since we were little? Which part of our childhood did we miss that has brought us to this stage?

The issue of dogs in Malaysia (especially among Malay Muslims) has always been about the culture of ignorance relying on hand me down knowledge.

Equipped with such attitude, the probability of thinking about the issue critically from different dimensions such as religion, culture, and science is highly unlikely to happen.

As much as I hate to say this, the problem is tightly bound by the way we were taught to perceive dogs at a young age. We were told that that dogs are forbidden to touch because they are impure or “haram”.

They are associated within one of the “najis berat” categories. If that is so, why are we surprised when dogs are being ill-treated in our society? Is it not logical that if something is dirty to the point where it is associated with excrement, one would automatically get rid of it?

In addition to that, what appalled me last night was a Facebook post including various hadiths in relations to Islam and dogs.

In one of the hadiths that was referred to, it says that the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) allowed dogs to be killed except for the ones used for hunting and herding cattle.

The major flaw that I found from the post, however, was that almost all of the hadiths were not directly stated by the Prophet himself. And on an amusing or even ironic note, the post finishes off with “dogs are God’s creation, thus it should be loved”. Nice sign off.