The Beautiful Malay [A participant's comment]
As published in The People’s Parliament
Assalamu’alaikum Encik Haris and readers.
i contemplated writing this comment in Malay but i want to be understood properly by your readers so i’ve decided to write this in English.
firstly, thank you Encik Haris for documenting the visit which was initiated and attended by private citizens of Malaysia. and might i add, with the exception of my beloved mother and a number of gentlemen, the group was made up of young people.
reading some of the comments here, it sounds as though until this post was published there were no decent “Malays” left in this country. so much so that our visit to the temple comes as such a pleasant surprise to many of your readers here – to the point of tears. imagine if you didn’t publish this post. we would all be left in our bigoted belief that the vast majority of Malays/Muslims in our country are arrogant and intolerant.
one of your commentors even said that it is “so rare that Malays come out of their way to lend a hand to non Malays”. perhaps such people should socialise a bit more and not depend on newspapers and blogs for generalised “truths” on how members of other races behave.
we would like to think of ourselves as intellectual and [correction: sophisticated] for our ability to carefully identify all the political culprits who are responsible for the sorry state of our perpaduan today. but we, the Rakyat, are ourselves too self-righteous to even admit that WE are the most responsible party in this mess. we let this happen.
bless the internet for today we have an avenue to share information and discuss more openly. but at the same time, cyberspace has become a place for thousands of Malaysians to become yea and nay sayers without doing much else.
if you really like what you see here, get your own little group together and visit your neighbourhood’s places of worship and offer a hand shake. and yes, that should include your neighbourhood mosque or surau. if you want to bring a buah tangan to these places of worship but you’re not sure what’s appropriate, bring something safe. we brought flowers. and jelly.
we don’t always have to move in big groups to make our point. and we certainly cannot afford to wait for another incident to happen before we make our move.
Wassalam.
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* The beautiful Malay on The People’s Parliament.
Young women must claim their space
As published in The Sun
UNIVERSITY students are still waiting for the University and University Colleges Act to be abolished, or at least amended to suit the 21st century.
The Act has been used to curb student activities, particularly to prevent student involvement in party politics. However, over the years the Act has acquired new jurisdictions to include student participation in organisations and movements with broader interests. The result is a generation of removed and apathetic young Malaysians.
Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Egyptian girl finds herself in the thick of action in Malaysia. Hadil El-Khouly is in town to lend a hand at the Musawah meeting in Kuala Lumpur this weekend.
Musawah is a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. The meeting will see some 200 Muslim scholars and activists from 49 countries come together to launch the movement and discuss ideas on how to reform Muslim family law.
Hadil arrived from Cairo in December to assist the organisers with Arabic translations for their meeting materials as well as to strategise on integrating young women into the movement.
“It’s important for young women to have experience in activism, in this case, in the Islamic context. Our experiences and challenges may differ from the older generation, for example on issues relating to identity and acceptance within the Muslim community. A body like Musawah can also promote multi-generational dialogue,” she said.
As a student at Cairo University from which she graduated in law, Hadil was active in student organisations promoting equality and justice for women. At 18, she threw herself into the “real world” working with the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance.
“Starting work young forced me to manage my time between school and work. But the experience was liberating,” she said.
She said the women’s movement in Egypt is, as a whole, a visible and strong one. The student organisation she was involved in promoted equality and justice for women, but was conscious not to exclude men.
Their activities would ride on the general human rights platform (where women’s rights are an integral part) which included male students.
Women in the Arab world are reluctant to identify with the English term “feminist” even though they have an active women’s rights movement.
As writer Tala Al-Ramahi said in the UAE-based publication The National, even progressive Arab women “would be weary of the word, most probably because it carries with it Westernised connotations of what a woman is expected to be.” They would prefer to identify with the kind of activism that is more relevant to their own cultural context. Moreover, another major criticism of “feminist” groups is that they tend to hold dialogues only among themselves.
Hadil said that for the cause to succeed, women’s groups cannot afford to isolate men. After all, when it comes to legislation men would have to vote for women’s rights too.
That is precisely what Musawah is trying to achieve: reform in legislation. Muslim family law in many countries has not changed from the classical legal framework. This framework does not take into consideration the daily realities of Muslim women today. Malaysia, for example, is a good case study.
While Malaysia remains one of the more progressive Muslim countries, its position as a leading nation in providing just Muslim family laws has been surpassed by countries like Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia. We can claim back our position in the Muslim world by supporting Musawah’s international law reform movement to end discrimination against Muslim women across the globe.
Hadil sees immense potential for our country to play a major role in the movement. Malaysia’s strength, she said, is in the diversity of her people.
She said young Malaysians must have the desire to be part of the decision-making process and young women especially, must integrate and dare to take risks. Most importantly, they must claim their space because no one will give it to them freely.
if you can’t kill them, join them … or the other way round
when i grow up i want to be a Latitudinarian. it doesn’t matter what kind as long as i get to tell people i’m a Latitudinarian. it’s too late for me to be a 17th century Anglican one, or a vegan one for that matter.
speaking of vegans … damn them. especially the political types. story goes something like, there were (at least) two vegans on campus back then who went around wearing fake beaver tails on the back of their jeans. what the bloody hell for, you ask? i don’t know … maybe they were half beaver? shit, which means they could’ve been the first two half-beavers to go to college! damn, that’s cool. the guy at African American Studies said they did it to challenge the norm. you know, do a Rosa Parks on everyone. they figured someone’s got to start wearing beaver tails before everyone else gets to. f*cking Yanks.
come to think of it, they could have been vegetarians. big difference the two ~ vegans and vegetarians. it’s like Sunnis and Shi’ites. most people tend not to differentiate between the two and would want to kill both. the beavers could have been lacto-ovo vegetarians. you know, vegetarians who eat eggs and dairy products. or just lacto vegetarians, where they eat dairy but not eggs. then again … maybe they’re ovos, taking eggs instead and not dairy stuff. those damn vegetarians are spoilt for choice! vegans don’t compromise these things. flora Nazis.
anyway, when i grow up i want to be a Latitudinarian. well you know, someone who departs in opinion from the strict principles of orthodoxy. sounds cool enough, so who gives a shit what that means. can you imagine being a librarian too?! how cool is that, to be a Latitudinarian librarian?! or a Latitudinarian veterinarian! goddamn …
Latitudinarian … a person who is broad-minded and tolerant, especially in standards of religious belief and conduct. ah, f*ck it. too much hassle.
chicken or egg?
a rabbi once said: “part of the process we call modernity – most obviously associated with the European Enlightenment – was to call into question the salience of almost everything associated with the word ‘religion’.”
as a proponent of religion, and one who is a self-appointed culprit hunter, one wonders if the ultimate death of religion in Europe (oh, get over it. religion is dead in Europe. adulterers are fornicating in churches) should be blamed on the Enlightenmenists or ~ the Church. a tough one. a chicken-and-egg.
did the Church go mad with corruption and hierarchy to the extent that it drove people up-the-wall outraged? ~ subsequently, creating the right environment for the Enlightenment movement to emerge? or did a bunch of pagan gypsies who had fantastic propaganda skills come up with the Enlightenment campaign? ~ subsequently, deconstructing religion as a social institution?
a chicken-and-egg, indeed. surely it’s got to be either one. someone has to be blamed for the collapse of religion in Europe. and it sure ain’t Bono. or technology. so who’re we going to kill?!
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