On religious authorities

By admin-s On Nov 18, 2014

It seems that whenever we question anything, either the government or those linked to it does, it is seen as a bad thing. And this comes during a period of a prime minister whose initial speech said “the era of government knows best is over”.

Hafidz Baharom, TMI

So, why is questioning a fatwa a big issue? It is truly not.

Even if we look at the most conservative nations practising Islam, there are landmark changes globally. Iran allows sex reassignment surgeries for their transgender community. However warped their mindset may be, it is clearly different than Malaysians who recently heckled the courts for upholding the constitution.

In Saudi Arabia, the authorities are now mulling over giving women the right to drive cars, a fatwa which is decades’ old and has only been vocally challenged in the last five years.

We have seen Muslim-majority countries that are moving forward in issuing religious edicts or limiting the viability of such rules and regulations to allow moving ahead together as a nation.

And yet in Malaysia, we continue to limit the general public and civil stakeholders from venturing an opinion without being heckled, or in the case of Sisters in Islam, having a fatwa quietly gazetted banning them.

It is truly nonsensical that in this day and age when other nations are talking about matters which are truly important such as poverty eradication, the lack of knowledgeable human resource, and pushing for better public transport – we are stuck discussing, and even going so far as to file police reports, a tourist attraction dedicated to a Hindu deity placed on a bottle of water next to a “Halal” logo.

Even worse: we have Malaysian Muslims who think cross-dressers are a threat to society by promoting a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT, if you still don’t know what that is) lifestyle.

Permit me to point out that a guy in a dress has nothing to do with their sexual orientation, especially when Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden chose to wear a burqa to escape their hunters.

Would you accuse them of being sodomites, too?

Fatwas should be up for question because while the religion stays true, its followers evolve. There was once a limited source of knowledge specific to Islam from muftis and imams, and perhaps PAS for the more politically inclined.

However, with the advent of the Internet, anything and everything about Islam and other religions can be found online. Intellectual debates can be seen on YouTube as raging, trolling debates rage on news portals and social media aplenty.

Malaysian Muslims can not only listen to the lectures of Azhar Idrus, but can also go as far the BBC to see debates of Islam versus Science.

The internet sparked a revolution of information being streamed, “torrented” and read online without control, allowing Malaysian Muslims to seek counsel outside the boundaries, and this is what has made our religious authorities very nervous to the point of stupidity.

What was once a monopoly of information by the religious authorities is now apparently threatened by Malay-language Bibles and Irshad Manji books. Not Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ann Coulter, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, whose books are widely available and for everyone to read and buy either online or at a local bookshop.