Dr Asri's Kerbau on Khat

From Malaysiakini:

Does writing ABC make us Christians, mufti weighs in on khat debate

M Fakhrull Halim  |  Published: Today 3:39 pm  |  Modified: Today 5:02 pm

Perlis mufti Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin said learning khat (Jawi calligraphy) is not an attempt at Islamisation, because Jawi is related to Bahasa Malaysia and not the religion.

If the logic of those who argue against khat on the basis of Islamisation is applied, he said Romanised writing would make everyone Christians instead.

“If we write in the Romanised form, we become Christians... Hebrew was once the language of the holy books. Greek was once the main language for the Bible.

“In Arab countries, the Bible (is written in Arabic). Rock singers sing in Arabic... All those songs and books which oppose Islam among the Arabs, what language are they written in? Arabic,” he added.

Asri was responding to a question raised during a lecture in Kangar last night.

The mufti believes that the polemic surrounding the introduction of khat in the Bahasa Malaysia syllabus for Standard 4 pupils is related to non-Muslims' phobia towards Islam.

He said the issue arose due to the misunderstanding that khat is an attempt at Islamisation.

“It is like the songkok. In India, (non-Muslims) wear (something similar). The prophet (Muhammad) never wore a songkok.

“The baju Melayu does not represent religion, it is a Malay attire. Jawi writing is the writing of the Malays, but some of them (non-Muslims) think it is an Islamisation attempt. This is wrong.

“I feel there is some form of hatred towards anything that is seen to be related to Islam...” he added.

*********

Kaytee notes:

Firstly, to recall the advise/teachings of Dr Azly Rahman (and many other Malay teachers), khat and Jawi are different though both use the Arabic script.

Khat is Islamic/religious calligraphy, whilst Jawi is Bahasa alphabet in Arabic (not Islamic) script - in the same way Farsi, far older and totally different from the Arabic language, uses Arabic script; likewise with Urdu, which is a Hindustani language and mutually intelligible with Hindi, but uses written Arabic as its written script.

Farsi 

Urdu 

Thus the Arabic script is used by many languages in the same way as the Latin alphabet is used by many languages too, eg. English, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Spanish etc. 

Dr Rahman was very emphatic that khat is NOT part of Malay culture.

Thus Dr Asri saying, “If we write in the Romanised form, we become Christians ... Hebrew was once the language of the holy books. Greek was once the main language for the Bible" etc, needs examining.

In one heap, Dr Asri has a melange of issues which need disentangling, as follows:

(a) Hebrew was the language though not the sole one in the (originally written) Bible - some parts of the Bible was written in Aramaic which happened during the 1st Diaspora when the Israelites were taken as slaves to Babylonian - the use of the Hebrew language gave way to Aramaic and thus two books in the Old Testament, that of Daniel and Ezra, were written in Aramaic.

Suffice to say Hebrew or Aramaic were different as they were not Roman but rather Semitic languages with completely different script. T'was the language of the Israelites which ceased to exist around 300 CE. The modern Israelis revived it and thus making Hebrew the only 'dead' language resurrected.

Hebrew scripts above 

Aramaic scripts above  

(b) Actually Greek script hails from its Phoenician origin - it modified parts of the Phoenician alphabet to use as its written script. Historians say today's Greek alphabet was the Ionian version (Ionic being part of the ancient Greek world on today's Turkey or Anatolia - see dull blue colour). T'was conceived around 770 to 750 BCE.

OK, so ignore Dr Asri's Greek language Bible Kerbau.

(c) now we come to Dr Asri's "If we write in the Romanised form, we become Christians".

That's Kerbau because the Latin script was conceived as far back as 6th BCE, way way before Christianity came into being.

During that time Romans were worshipping Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Mars (Ares), Minerva (Athena) and their Emperor Augustus Caesar.

Minerva or Athena

my fave goddess 

Maybe that's why we didn't became Christians even after learning how to write in the Latin script, wakakaka.

But Dr Asri might have a point in his remark “I feel there is some form of hatred towards anything that is seen to be related to Islam...”. 

If he still is unaware of how non-Muslims in this country feel towards Islam, he should read up on the various inter-religious issues such as:

(i) the sad story of M Indira Gandhi,
(ii) the missing Pastor Koh,
(iii) the disrespect shown to Hindus vis-a-vis public slaughter of cattle (especially at places where there were Hindu school students),
(iv) his own disdain for coconut votive offerings at Thaipusam,
(v) the recent sneaky attempt by the Selangor MB (Amirudin Shari) to propose a bill to revert the religious conversion of non-Muslim minors into Muslims into requiring only a single parent consent a la the sad situation which led to the sufferings of M Indira Gandhi
(vi) various aggressive Islamic-centric politics of the federal and state governments, eg. only Muslims may be PM, MB etc
(vii) Pahang Mufti's 'kafir harbi'

(viii) 2 state muftis disagreeing with the recent call by Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) to stop using the word “kafir” (infidel or disbelievers) when referring to non-Muslims
(ix) the idiotic "better to believe in a corrupt Muslim leader than a non-corrupt non-Muslim leader"
(x) etc etc etc


Thus it is NOT Islam that non-Muslims Malaysians have an issue with - it's some Muslims, in particular its clerics and politicians who have grossly misused the good name of Islam.