Malaysian Babel

Today the favourite political subject in Malaysia is not so much GST though it's important, perhaps far more important than any other issue, perhaps even the water problem for Selangoreans. But instead, Hudud has claimed everyone's attention.

Constitutional lawyers, professors, NGOs, self proclaimed experts, politicians, senior 'states persons' and of course bloggers have all provided their two sens worth of opinions, advices, pleas and threats, wakakaka, depending on who each has been delivering his or her message to.

I don't know who, but given the disparity of opinions, someone out there is lying through his or her teeth, wakakaka.

But it's a great issue for testing whether PAS or UMNO will blink first, and whether MCA or DAP will lose grounds on their alleged support for their respective political ally's aspiration for hudud, ...

... while PKR stands astride two sampans ... perhaps waiting for the light to black out before its leaders dare commit themselves, wakakaka.

It's also great as a subject for every party to blame one another, wakakaka.

Aeons ago, when men become arrogant in attempting to reach heaven by building the Tower of Babel, God punished them by making them speak in different languages so that they would fight against each other instead of combining together in an blasphemic attempt to become divine by walking up the Tower to heaven.

Today God is again punishing arrogant Malaysians by making us speak in different 'languages' on the subject of not only the 'Allah' word but also of hudud, for never will we be able to speak a common 'language' on both issues and understand each other, thus divided we will remain.

Hudud is either a great political advantage for Muslim parties like PAS and UMNO and also the predominantly Muslim party PKR (and KIMMA can get f**ked) or instead, a hot potato that will burn their hands and political prospects.

This is because Malaysian Muslims claim hudud is divine law though in RPK's Malaysia-Today there is a post titled Does hudud really exist? which tells us:

Most Muslims believe that Hudud, in particular the law on stoning adulteress women to death, was a law that was introduced by Prophet Muhammad. Actually it was not. This law was introduced by Umar ibn Al-Khattāb, the Second Caliph who took over after the death of Abu Bakar As-Ṣiddīq. Hence it was Umar and not Prophet Muhammad who made this into law.

Umar was actually a very strict disciplinarian and was most feared for his temper and harsh treatment of women and ‘deviants’. He even punished those he caught writing what today we refer to as Hadith or sayings of the Prophet. Hence during Umar’s time no Hadith were allowed unless you want to get whipped and kicked. It is therefore no wonder that the Hadith were written more than 150-250 years after the time of Umar.

Before the time of Umar, women could pray side-by-side with the men and even joined the men to go to war. Islamic history reports that Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khatijah, was a successful and prosperous businesswoman. And it was she who proposed marriage to Prophet Muhammad and not the other way around. Hence women were more liberated in that society more than 1,000 years before western women understood the meaning of women’s liberation.

Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattāb sounded like a misogynist and no doubt must be misogynistic PAS' poster boy.

The Chinese on the other hand don't want to know about hudud at all, but try to engage them in their children's education, especially vernacular education, and they'll turn verbally diarrhoeic, adding new meaning to the word 'babel', wakakaka.

Indeed the people of the Far East, these being the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese, those steeped in Confucian doctrines, take their children’s education seriously.

It's taken so seriously that, for example, a TV documentary informed us that in Korea, during high school or college examination days, government and commercial offices reschedule and stagger their business hours so that morning traffic would be decently light in order not to delay the aspiring scholars when they travel in their cars or taxis to the examination halls.

Meanwhile in China, the authority has taken the precautions one step further, by considering the feng shui aspects of the very important examination days.

During the day prior to school and college examination days, taxi companies in Shanghai would recall all taxis with the number ‘4’ on their licence plates so that the budding scholars won’t be hexed with the ‘shi’ (or in Cantonese ‘sei’) word. That's because the word sounds like ‘death’ in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Japanese, and ‘loser’ in the Shanghai language.

Nothing must be left to chance to affect the examinees’ prospects, not even a word pun which could invoke bad feng shui.

We Malaysians don't worry about such silly stuff because tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of our school students could easily attain 17 A's in their final school examinations (I'm ashamed to say I attempted only 9 subjects). We (excluding kaytee) are smart lah!

So here in Malaysia, we have the Muslim Malays placing great store on religious issue (not unlike the load of the world on the shoulders of the Titanic Atlas) as in the implementation of hudud into our legal system or use of the 'Allah' word by the Christian churches, while the Chinese would become skittish on education issues for their children, even paying heed to aspects of feng shui.

I wonder what the Indians major sensitive issue is?