The Legacy of Titus Burckhardt
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Having written about Martin Lings, I felt it is appropriate to write about his contemporary, Titus Burckhardt, as a matter of thematic continuity. Burckhardt, a swiss, was only a year older than Lings but he died in 1984. Lings wrote the introduction to Burckhardt’s Letters of a sufi master the Shaykh Ad Darqawi and Fez, city of Islam. Apart from his translations of classic Sufi texts by Ibn Al Arabi and Abd Al Karim Jili, making the metaphysics of the former known to the western world as well as his own writings on the subject, Burckhardt was also a distinguished art historian. With the intimate understanding of an ‘insider’, his authoritative work on Islamic art is unsurpassed. Thirdly, his role as an expert engaged by UNESCO in the conservation efforts of the city of Fez is another area where he has made a major contribution in the domains of Islamic intellectual, spiritual and artistic traditions. It is Burckhardt’s work in these 3 related areas that before returning to Malaysia in 1990, I took 2 months off and drove from England to Morocco, stopping for a couple of weeks in Andalusia, whose culture and civilization Burckhardt also wrote about (Ibn Arabi was from Murcia in Southern Spain). I was also drawn to Fez for the reason that Ibn Khaldun, credited for the birth of critical historiography and sociology, lived and taught in the Qarawiyyin mosque university in the heart of the medieval city for a period during the 14th century.

I first stumbled on Titus Burkhdardt some 25 years ago through his translation of Letters of a Sufi Master The Shaykh ad-Darqawi (simply known in Darqawi circles as Rasa’il or letters), first published in 1969. This was republished by Fons Vitae in 1998. The book consists of excerpts of letters of Mulay al Arabi ad-Darqawi (died 1823), founder of the Darqawi branch of the Shadhiliya Tariqa (Sufi order) to his disciples, instructing them on the spiritual path. The letters were collected and later published in a lithographed edition in Fez in early 19th century. They are a gem of Sufi literature, offering a fascinating insight into how a Sufi shyakh guides his disciples in the rigorous path of Islamic spirituality.

As these are letters of instruction, the emphasis was more on practical methods and operative aspects of Sufism rather than doctrine. In his counsel to his disciples Shaykh Darqawi referred heavily to aphorisms from Ibn Ataillah’s Al-Hikam (a widely used Sufi text even today all over the Islamic world), other masters of the Shadhiliya order including his own teacher, as well as the Quran and the prophetic tradition. Burckhardt’s translation has enriched Sufi literature and made available a document of extraordinary power and beauty that belonged to a recent past.

Here are some examples of these epistolary gems, “The Fuqara’ (pl. of faqir, novice of the spiritual path) of ancient times sought only for what could kill their souls and bring life to their hearts, whereas we do just the opposite… . They strove only to become free of their passions and dethrone their egos; but as for us, what we long for is the satisfaction of our sensual desires and the glorification of our egos, and thus we have turned our backs to the door and our faces to wall”. Subduing one’s ego forms one of the major themes of Rasa’il, and in another letter, “The first lesson that my master gave me was as follows : he ordered me to carry two baskets full of fresh fruit through the town. I carried them in my hands and did not wish, as the others told me, to put them on my shoulders, for that was unwelcome to me, and constricted my soul, so that it became agitated and fearful and grieved beyond measure, till I almost began to weep. Never before had my soul had to suffer such a thing, so I was not conscious of its pride and cowardice (Shaykh Darqawi, of noble lineage, was a young scholar then). While I was in this state, my master who perceived my pride and my inner distress, came up to me, took the two baskets from my hands and placed them on my shoulders with the words: ‘Distinguish thus between good and evil’. Thereby he opened the door for me and led me the right way, for I learned to discriminate between the proud and the humble, the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the orthodox and the heretical, between those who know and translate their knowledge into deeds, and those who do not. From that moment no orthodox person ever overpowered me with his orthodoxy, no heretic with his heresy, no scholar with his knowledge, no pious man with his piety, and no fasting man with his ascetism. For my master, may God have mercy on him, had taught me to distinguish truth from vanity, and wheat from chaff”.

Burckhardt also brought us an unlikely story that could only have come from classic Sufi literature, the account of Shaykh Darqawi’s first meeting with his master: “That night I asked God to confirm my intention (of becoming a disciple of the Master Ali al-Jamal), and I spent the whole night picturing him to myself, wondering what he was like and how my meeting with him would be, unable to sleep. When morning came, I went to find him at his Zawiyah in the Rumaylah quarter, located between the two cities (“old” and “new” Fez), on the river bank, in the direction of the Qiblah, on the very spot where his tomb lies today. I knocked on the gate and there he was before me, sweeping out the Zawiyah – as was his custom, for he never gave up sweeping it everyday with his own blessed hand, in spite of his great age and high spiritual function. “What do you want”, he said. “O my Lord”, I replied, “I want you to take me by the hand to God”. Then he began to reprove me furiously, hiding his true state from my eyes, with words such as these, “And who told you that I take anyone at all by the hand and why ever should I do so for you?”. And he drove my away – all to test my sincerity. So I went away. But when night came I questioned God once more (by means of the Holy Book). Then after performing the morning prayer, I went back again to the Zawiyah. I found the master again sweeping as before and knocked at the gate. He opened it and let me in and I said: “Take me by the hand, for God’s sake!”. Then he took me by the hand and said: “Welcome!”. He led me into his dwelling place in the inner part of the Zawiyah and manifested great joy. “O my Lord”, I said to him, “I have been looking for a master for so long!”. “And I”, he replied, “was looking for a sincere disciple”.

Burckhardt’s translation of selections from Rasa’il opens up a fascinating dimension of Islamic tradition whose vestiges was still present in late twentieth century to the western world. A more complete translation of Rasa’il was later produced by the English Sufi Aisha Abd ar Rahman at-Tarjumana titled The Darqawi way. What surprised me most was, not long after reading Burckhardt’s translation, I came across a jawi-malay translation by the Terengganu scholar Tok Pulau Manis in the early 1900’s (The Darqawi Tariqa is largely North African but many scholars of Tassawwuf from all over the muslim world lived and taught in Mecca before the collapse of Caliphate and the imposition of strict wahhabism).

How did Burckhardt came to write that translation? In his book, Fez, city of Islam, he gave an account of his visit to Morocco in 1933 – 34 as a young man of 25, “Seeking a spiritual master, I settled in Fez, where I divided my time between this search and the study of Arabic. After six months, however, I had reached a dead end …”. Then follows his account of his meeting with the sage Hajj Muhammad Bu Sha’ara, with whom he stayed and later recommended him to one of the foremost ulama of Fez, Mulay Ali ben Tayyib Darqawi, the grandson of the Shaykh Darqawi. It was Mulay Ali who completed Titus Burckhardt’s education – in Arabic, theology and Sufism, making him read and learn by heart many chapters of the Koran, as well as the essentials of Islamic doctrine and rituals by Ibn ‘Ashir, and also making him attend the courses in traditional science, which he himself and other scholars gave at Qarawiyyin University, then situated in the mosque of the same name (traditional Islamic universities were based in great mosques). He wrote, “On the day that Mulay Ali gave his lectures at the great mosque, a saddled and caparisoned mule was waiting for him at the door of the sanctuary to take him back home before midday. As soon as he was in the saddle, he told me to grasp the tail of the animal which trotted up the steep lanes of the Medina … . His garments were always in an impeccable condition and bore witness to his rank as a scholar. I sometimes saw him, however, in the garb of the Sufis, wearing a patched cloak”. Nevertheless, his presence in Fez raised the concern of the French Protectorate authorities. To them it was unimaginable that someone, especially a foreigner, could so diligently attend the courses at the traditional university, for other than political motives. In those interwar years, a swiss intellectual and artist officially converted to Islam could only be a cause of trouble and in the pay of a foreign power hostile to France. He was made to leave Moroccan territory. Once back in Switzerland, Burckhardt was only able to return to Morocco after she regained independence in 1956.

The book Fez, city of Islam was first published in 1960 in german but the English translation by The Islamic Texts Society of Cambridge only appeared in 1992 (It was part of a series which he edited – Homesteads of the Spirit to which he also contributed two other volumes, Siena, city of the virgin and Chartres and the birth of the Cathedral).

Fez, city of Islam conveys a profound understanding of the sacred roots that nourish Islamic culture and civilization, drawing from his own experience and the people he knew when he was young student of Islam, as well as references drawn from classical texts by scholars who had lived in the Maghreb in past centuries. For bonus the book is beautifully illustrated with photographs of many of the city’s rich architectural heritage as well as his black and white prints of 1930’s.

As Fez has been the intellectual, cultural, spiritual heart of North Africa, he dedicated whole chapters to traditional science, Islamic orthodoxy and Sufism. There is also a chapter on the houses of Fez, “The true unveiled face of Fez remains hidden to whoever knows Fez only from the street, and has seen only the shopping alley-ways and the grey outer walls of the houses …”, but once inside its exterior drabness gives way to a beautiful courtyard, some with a small garden and fountain, with arches leading to the surrounding rooms. As Martin Lings wrote in the introduction, Titus Burckhardt is an authority whose works are a constant source of inspiration … the publication of this book in English is like the unearthing of a great treasure”. It was in recognition of Burckhardt’s unrivalled knowledge and authority on Fez that he was appointed special advisor to UNESCO with particular references to the preservation of the unique architectural and cultural heritage of Fez.

Related to the architectural, cultural and intellectual heritage of Fez, Burckhardt is also an authority in yet another domain, Islamic (and religious) art. He is an accomplished art historian, following in the footsteps of a great-uncle, and his father was a sculptor. His last major work was Art of Islam. Unfortunately I am in possession only of its French version, L’Art de l’Islam. He was persuaded to write the book side by side with his activities as adviser to the Arts Council of Great Britain during its preparation for the exhibition of Islamic art during the World of Islam Festival in London in 1976. Unlike the many books of Islamic art, Burckhardt wrote from the position of an authoritative figure who also had an intimate familiarity and profound understanding of Islamic civilization and its intellectual and spiritual traditions.

Burckhardt gives his penetrating insight into the intellectual principles, contemplative nature and spiritual role of the Islamic art forms – architecture, calligraphy, the decorative arts, those related to worship and the mosque, the folk crafts – as well as thoughtful thesis on the influence of other cultures that greatly enriched it as the religion rapidly spread beyond the Arabian peninsula.

In a world stifled by the crushing weight of a secular materialism and uniformizing consumerism, Titus Burckhardt has left a precious legacy. In Fez, city of Islam, he expressed his concern over dehumanizing ravages of secular modernity on traditional muslim society, “Whereas previously men were differentiated only by their culture, the community is all of a sudden split into economically determined classes, and with the cheap products of the factory, a poverty without beauty invades the homes, ugly, senseless and comfortless poverty is the most widespread of all modern achievements”. Writing then in 1960, he could have been easily rebuffed as a western romantic irrationally smitten by the hollow charm of the Islamic orient, who wanted it remain stagnant for his own selfish romanticism. It is also true that sclerotic traditions that have no mechanism for self rejuvenation within themselves and the accretion of negative external influences have led to the stagnation and decay of Islamic civilization, hence the fixation for secular modernism for some and a reformist spirit driven with the puritanical zeal for others have formed our main responses to modernity. But today, the unintelligent embrace of modernity and the careless jettisoning of traditional wisdom has caused, the muslim world to sink deeper in crises of all forms imaginable – political despotism, poverty and ignorance of the common folks whereas the rich wallow in consumerist materialism, religious fanaticism on the one hand and the loss of values in the embrace of the latest post modern fashions on the other. As for his Fez, une ville humaine (badly translates as a human city, the title of one of his lectures), Burckhardt may have succeeded in preserving the many beautiful buildings and monuments, but the march of secular modernity and materialism is too overwhelming despite his noble efforts at rehabilitating its Islamic culture and tradition. Taking a look at today’s metropolises and urban environment of the muslim world reminds one of Burckhardt’s horror of “poverty without beauty”. Today, after all those costly false starts, what we need is to intelligently seek a balance between conforming to modernity and remaining faithful to our traditional wisdom and values. There is perhaps something to be learned in the romanticism of men like Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Martin Lings in memory
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

His most widely read book sits very conspicuously on the shelves of many a muslim home – its bright blue jacket against which are the white lettering of its title Muhammad : His life based on the Earliest Sources. When news of his passing circulated in cyberspace recently, I learnt that Martin Lings’ biography of the Prophet of Islam has touched the lives of quite a number of friends, whose frank admissions rode on the eulogy by a muslim from North America grateful that his life has been equally transformed.

The biography by Lings combines light scholarship and factual accuracy with what muslims traditionally expect of a narration of the Prophet’s life – a degree of respect and reverence for his person. He does away with extensive bibliography and footnotes despite what the title suggests (based on his earliest sources), not for want of scholarship, for Martin Lings is more than capable of that, given his mastery of Arabic and for many years he was keeper of Arabic manuscripts in the British Museum and later the British Library. Instead he retells the familiar events of the Prophet’s life in a narrative that is refreshingly simple but in such a beautiful language that the his humanity shone through. Many readers must have had teary-eyed moments when reading some of the passages that recounted the hardship and tribulations of his early Mecca years. Lings has filled a void for those western-educated muslims wishing to have a fresh start at understanding Muhammad, God’s last messenger but who was also a loving husband and father, a loyal companion, a leader of his community, respected adversary and many more. Otherwise one would have to wade through Guillaume’s translation of Ibn Ishaq’s voluminous Life of Muhammad convoluted text and style.

When his biography of Prophet first appeared, I had not expected it to be a straightforward, traditional narration of his life, having read his earlier books A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century – Shaikh Ahmad Al-Alawi, his spiritual heritage and legacy (1961) and the 2 smaller books, What is Sufism (1975) and Ancient beliefs and Modern Superstitions (1965), and also his introduction to Titus Burckhardt’s Letters of a Sufi Master the Shaykh ad-Darqawi (1969). Rather, given Lings’ leaning towards Sufism, I thought it would be in a similar vein to Anne Marie Shimmel’s And Muhammad is His Messenger – the veneration of the Prophet in Islamic piety (1985), weaving mystical symbolisms and interpretations into the biographical narration.

The story of Bahira the Christian Monk who thought that the young Muhammad bore the marks of the coming messenger, when as a 12 year old he (Muhammad) accompanying his uncle Abu Talib on a trade caravan to Syria, they stopped near the monk’s cell, and the story of Isra’ and Mi’raj, the Prophet’s night journey to Jerusalem and his ascension to Heaven – both were narrated devoid of any references to mystical symbolisms.

Martin Lings, Titus Burckharft and Fritjof Schuon are notable figures who had gone beyond academic orientalism to steep themselves in the esoteric Islamic tradition of Sufism (Tasawwuf) – mastering the language, learning the texts and studying from the masters, to write eloquently as exponents of universal religious wisdom (religio perennis, a term coined later by Schuon) to guide the modern man in finding back his balance in this secular milieu of spiritual poverty. All of them lived long productive lives, especially Schuon and Lings. The latter was 95 when he recently died. All 3 of them had association with the Darqawi branch of the Shadzili Tariqa of North Africa and reformulated the metaphysics of the Spanish mystic Ibn Arabi in the modern idiom in their writings for the western educated audience.

Martin Lings and Firtjof Schuon were deeply influenced by René Guénon, the French mathematician and gnostic who was disillusioned with the west’s loss of the spiritual dimension. He moved to Cairo in 1930 to steep himself in the muslim tradition. Guénon took the name of Abdul Wahid Yahya and lived as an orthodox muslim, was initiated into the Shadzili Tariqa and later wrote his influential books on the recovery of tradition as salvation for the modern man.

Lings first read Guénon’s books in the early 30’s and translated one of his earlier ones into English. He recommended his closest friend at Oxford, who was then lecturing at Cairo University to meet the very reclusive Guénon, and later became his assistant. As fate had it, taking a break from his lectureship in Lithuania, Lings went to visit his friend in Cairo in 1939 but unable to return because of the war. A year later his friend died in a riding accident and Lings had no option but to take his place as Guénon’s assistant, and that was the start of his privileged relationship with him (meanwhile he also lectured at Cairo University on Shakespeare).

Guénon died in 1951 and Lings returned to England a year later where he took up a degree in Arabic at London University. Lings had been in special charge of Quran and other oriental manuscripts at the British Museum and British Library. Presumably it is from this background that he wrote A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century – Shaikh Ahmad Al-Alawi, his spiritual heritage and legacy, his other more readily available book. A Sufi Saint is largely adapted from his PhD thesis for the University of London, and therefore unlike his biography of the Prophet, it is written in a distinctly academic style with extensive footnotes and references to classical Islamic texts, prophetic traditions (hadith) and the Quran. It provides readers an interesting insight into one institution of traditional muslim society – the practice and influence of Sufism, its formal structure and hierarchal order of masters and disciples, its teachings and methods of spiritual self-realization. This is a useful book to gain a reasonable depth of understanding of Sufism and its various aspects through the examination of the life and works of a traditional master, who is perhaps among the last. I would like to dwell on this book in some detail as I feel it is more interesting than his other general work on Sufism and spirituality. With the title A Sufi Saint of the twentieth century, perhaps Lings would like to convey that such a tradition, though documented in our time, is something of an anachronism of the modern age, that it would soon be weakened or diluted by the encroaching modernity. Martin Lings gave an account of his subject, Shaikh Al-Alawi (Aliwah) who lived in Mostaganem, Western Algeria in the early part of the twentieth century when much of the muslim world was on the threshold of a rapid change from its encounter with the west through colonialism. This was also the period when the muslim world was supposed to be its darkest depth of ignorance, degeneration and decay. The French colonial power had the policy of separating the settler communities from the native algerians, minimizing contacts between the two and thus largely preserving the traditional muslim society and its institutions. He also provides a back drop of the social situation in the muslim world during that era – the rise of modernist muslims who uncritically wished to imitate the west, the puritanical muslim reformers who attacked Sufism as a corruption of the faith, and the agitation of the young Turks against the Caliphate which the Shaikh witnessed during his visit to Istanbul.

The first half of the book consists of a biographical account of Shaikh Al-Alawi’s life drawn from a number of sources – a french doctor who befriended the Shaikh, his own dictation to his scribe, testimonies of his disciple and the work of a French writer Berque – who wrote about Shaikh Al-Alawi Un mystique Moderniste in the journal Revue Africaine in 1936 (the title is a strange one, Lings notes, Berque’s quotations show that the Shaikh was essentially very conservative. His so-called ‘modernism’ appears to have been nothing other than the great breadth of his spiritual interests). Part 2 of the book deals with general aspects of Sufi metaphysics and mystical symbolisms with references from the Shaikh’s works. It is interesting that Lings dedicated 2 chapters on the Shaikh’s commentary on the ritual purification (wudhu) and the ritual prayer. This was taken from his book Al Minali Al Quddusiyyah, which was a commentary on Ibn Ashir’s guide to the essentials of religious knowledge, a book which all novices had to learn by heart to ensure that they have basic grounding in the outward, obligatory rituals before embarking on the spiritual path. His commentary and explanation of the mystical symbolisms of these 2 basic everyday rituals are astounding, given that the Shaikh did not have a formal education in a religious seminary and that he started life as a cobbler. Even more so are his mystical poems and aphorisms translated by Lings which make up part 3 of the book.

If parts II and III are informative about Sufism’s intellectual dimension and methods, Part I is highly interesting to the curious modern reader for it provides an account of an extraordinary life which perhaps could only have been possible in a traditional muslim environment. This is based first on the account of Dr. Marcel Carett, a French doctor who had an intimate friendship with the Shaikh from 1920 until his death in 1934. Dr. Carrett, unlike his compatriots, was curious to understand and interact with the arabs. He set up a clinic in the arab quarter of Mostaganem and charged minimal fees. Within a few months of his arrival from France he was requested to examine the Shaikh who was having a bout influenza, and thereafter began his friendship with him. At least once a week he would visit the Shaikh and the two would engage a in conversation over a wide range of things usually in the garden of his Zawiya (religious centre where the Sufis gathered). From Dr. Carrett’s notes Lings gives us an account of the Shaikh’s personality, habits, his disciples and the people around him and their rituals of dhikr (exercises in the remembrance of God). Of note is his first impression of Shaikh Al-Alawi’s appearance whereby he was struck by his likeness to the usual representations of Christ, “including the fine lawn head-cloth which framed his face, his whole attitude – everything conspired to reinforce the likeness. It occurred to me that such must have been the appearance of Christ when he received his disciples … that Christ like face, that gentle voice, so full of peace, those courteous manners … his taste for solitude and self-effacement … . I was surprised by his broadmindedness and tolerance, I had always heard that every Moslem is a fanatic and could never have anything but the greatest contempt for non-Moslem foreigners”. Frequently they engaged in frank, probing conversations about faith and salvation as Dr. Carrett was an atheist steeped in the scientific rationalism of his day.

The other source materials that Lings drew to construct a biographical outline of Shaikh Al-Alawi is the account of his life that he had himself dictated to his scribe a few years before his death. This formed the second chapter of the book. His beginnings were humble and ordinary. He never went to school/seminary and his only early education was the evening Quran lessons from his father. As a young man he became a cobbler to support his poor family. His initiation into the Sufi path, his relationship with his teacher Shaikh Al Buzidi and his spiritual development makes for interesting reading for a twentieth century audience. This is straight out of classic Sufi literature, which I feel merits to be reproduced here. He tells us of his inclination towards Sufism from an early age, first initiated into the Isawi Tariqa (Sufi order), from which he quickly distanced himself because of what he perceived as unislamic practices. The only thing he kept was the art of snake charming which brought him into contact with his future teacher, Shaikh Al Buzidi, who had regularly come to visit his business partner in their shop. ‘One day, when he was in our shop, the Shaikh said to me: “I have heard that you can charm snakes and that you are not afraid of being bitten”. I admitted this. Then he said: “Can you bring me one now and charm it here in front of us?”. I said that I could and going outside the town, I searched for half a day, but found only a small one… . This I brought back with me and putting it in front of him, I began to handle it according to my custom… . “Could you charm a bigger snake than this?” he asked. I replied that the size made no difference to me. Then he said, “I will show you one that is bigger than this and for more venomous, and if you can take hold of it you are a real sage”. I asked him to show me where it was, and he said : “I mean your soul which is between the two sides of your body. Its poison is more deadly than a snake’s … . Then he said : “Go and do with that little snake whatever you usually do with them, and never go back to such practices again”, and I went out, wondering about the soul and how its poison could be more deadly than a snake’s’.

Thus began his spiritual journey under the guidance of Shaikh Al Buzidi. He was a very gifted disciple who became the natural heir to his Syaikh when the latter died, and under his leadership the Darqawi Tariqah enjoyed phenomenal growth in Algeria and Morocco as well as other parts of the Islamic world where he travelled during his pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1926 he was invited to preach the first sermon and lead the first prayer of the Paris mosque.

Apart from his mystical poems and the more profound and abstruse works, he also wrote a couple of simple expositions of the elements of Islam, for it was his principle that the first thing to be done with a novice was to teach him his ordinary religious obligations according to his capacity.

Lings quoted a number of examples of how Shaikh Al-Alawi’s reliance on inspiration of the moment, such as the decision to write his ideas down into books – which is one of the characteristics of mystics, but he also gave examples of his practicality and pragmatism, however much they might go against his natural inclinations. He started a religious weekly newspaper, Al Balagh al Jazair in Algiers as a means of disseminating his teaching, seeking to safeguard Islam’s dimension of breadth, and above all to restore what it had lost of its dimension of depth. He stressed the importance of knowledge of classical Arabic and pointed to the dangers of westernization. He also used the medium to defend Sufism as a wholly integral part of the Islamic tradition from attacks by puritanical reformers.

Shaikh Al-Alawi was also conscious of his role as he declares in one of his poems,

Then when the Giver vouchsafed that I might proclaim it, He fitted me – and how I know it – to purify souls, And girded upon me the sword of steadfastness, And truth and piety, and a wine He gave me … … thus came I to pour it, nay, it is I that press it, Doth any other pour it in this age?

Lings concluded the summary account of the Shaikh’s life by a quotation by Fritjof Schuon, taken from his eulogy “RahimahulLah” published in Cahiers du Sud in 1935, “So much the greater good fortune is it to come into contact with a true spiritual representative of one of those forms (worlds which the modern west fails to understand) to come into contact with someone who represents in himself … the idea which for hundreds of years has been the very life-blood of that civilization … To meet such a one is like coming face to face, in mid twentieth century, with a medieval saint or a semitic patriarch, and this was the impression made on me by the Shaikh Al-Hajj Ahmad bin Aliwah, one of the greatest masters of Sufism, who died a few months ago at Mostaganem”.

From his account of Shaikh Al-Alawi’s life and his spiritual legacy, Martin Lings has captured for the twentieth century audience the vestige of that universe of traditional Islam where spirituality, of which Sufism is its formal expression, is the third pillar in that triumvirate of iman (faith), Islam (outward observance) and ihsan (goodness). Martin Lings belonged to that select handful of scholars who had privileged access to that traditional universe and conveyed what he had absorbed of that to the reading public with great insight and eloquence. It cannot be denied that some aspects of Sufi practices and teachings as exhibited by a number of its modern day exponents are questionable, and later developments of Schuon’s own Tariqah as available in the public domain are a sad testimony of this. But, it is also more evident today that western exponents of Sufism are bringing it fully into the fold of orthodox Islam, its natural home. This owes in no small part to the likes of Martin Lings, who undertook a serious study of Sufism – mastering its language, delving into its texts and chronicling its masters, rather than removing it from its Islamic moorings and distorting it into a form of exotic pseudospirituality as was the fashionable thing to do until recently in a secular world which has lost its capacity and awe for the Transcendent. Alfatihah.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Use and abuse of the human rights discourse
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

If a columnist of a mainstream paper can be said to represent the general mood of the malaysian middle class, it is gratifying to note that we have suddenly woken up to the realization that we must defend our civil liberties as enshrined in articles 5 and 10 of our constitutions. It is uplifting to see that we can put aside our usual worries of how to make the most money in the shortest possible time and that life’s greatest dilemma is deciding which shopping mall to go to this Sunday. Is this for real? This has not been seen before in our sycophantic mainstream media with its fawning herd of columnists and commentators. They used to be very sensitive and touchy over the subject of fundamental civil liberties, always amplifying the stance of the authorities to the point of refusal to even look at the human rights discourse objectively, for it is not without deficiencies. I guess our aversion has much to do with the fact that we don’t like what we see in the mirror as far our human rights practices and record are concerned. We had a good argument at that time. We are asians, we are successful beyond our wildest dreams, and we have our “asian values”. With a sneer, we said that the human rights discourse is a western concept and its claims of universality is just a cover for the west’s hegemonic designs. They are just “jealous of our success”.

As a simple primer, the idea that human rights are universal and that human dignity is inviolable crystallized after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), an ambitious combination of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights adopted by the General Assembly of the nascent United Nations on 10th December 1948. Stretching back into history, such notions had their beginnings in the Habeas Corpus act and Bill of Rights of 17th century England, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

But the cold war politics that followed not long after stifled the human rights discourse and stalled its evolution into an effective international mechanism that protects the dignity of man as both power blocs vied for the support of dictatorship that comprehensively violated them in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East. Although the twin Covenants on Civil and Political Rights signed during the cold war decades were supposed to have carried contractual weight, this became mere pious declaration with no real intention of abiding by them. Proxies of both blocs understood that their continued human rights abuses were expediently condoned if not encouraged by their respective masters.

With the collapse of communism, as millions of eastern europeans basked in the euphoria of their newfound liberty, there was a genuine determination to make human rights work, give or take the “end-of-history” triumphalism of the US. For a few years in the early 90’s the human rights discourse seemed free of ideological constraints and there was real optimism that the world could be on its way towards that vision of the Universal Declaration at its adoption in 1948. Nobody would dispute that the dignity man, the basic freedoms of thought, conscience and expression, and the right to life and liberty should be enshrined as “universal”. Also, as the euphoria was beginning to fade in the 1990’s and as the spectre of another ethnic cleansing was fast taking shape in europe’s backyard in the aftermath of communism’s demise, the determination to make the concept of universal human rights truly work took on a sense of seriousness and urgency – only for us to throw the spanner of “asian values” into the works. Universal human rights is a concept that the west is imposing on us in their quest for global domination, went our standard line (that is of course not an entirely hollow accusation as western governments are not averse to hypocritically use the human rights discourse as leverage whenever the occasion suits them).

Why not, we were at that time riding high as the tiger economies with near double digit growth for years in succession. I suppose hard work, loyalty and unquestioning obedience, though not exclusively asian traits, they are something that we east asians exhibit more that other third world peoples. But our runaway success was not because of that alone. It was a combination of those traits with hot money, unsavoury corporate practices, and also a political stability bought at the expense of some degree of suppression of civil liberties, thanks to novel new uses of draconian laws bequeathed by our former western colonial masters. We would not allow these embarrassing human rights issues to spoil our party. Our leadership and that of Singapore, China and Indonesia cleverly devised that “Asian values” argument to discredit human rights discourse as the liberal west’s agenda. Before the UN World Conference in Vienna in 1993, asian countries caucused and went to the conference with our declaration that universal human rights must evolve to accommodate the significance of national and regional peculiarities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds. The conference’s final declaration at the insistence of the asian bloc made no reference at all to the Civil Covenant or to individual rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly (Crimes against humanity – the struggle for global justice” by Geoffrey Robertson, Penguin Books 2000). For the good part of the 1990’s and more so after the upheavals of 1998 our media commentators and columnists have been very creative at propagandizing this line – we have do away with some of these fundamental freedoms for the sake of development. We are Asians anyway, we have our own religions and cultural traditions, and those freedoms that we clamour for will only lead us to the path of western moral decadence.

After a posture of disdain and contempt towards the human rights discourse today some of our pundits have, out of the blue, become its staunch defenders – for the simple reason that it is a very useful and effective tool to undermine the place of the Sharia in muslim society. The Sharia enactments trample on our civil liberties, they violate articles 5 and 10 of our Constitution, wrote one columnist recently. But those who have never had any genuine concern for human rights and civil liberties are bound to reveal their ignorance or perhaps dishonesty when they misuse the discourse for a dubious end. Let us be reminded that article 5 is about the rule of law, the unlawfulness of detention without trial and the right to a legal counsel, whereas article 10 protects the freedom of speech, assembly and association. These are the fundamental civil liberties which the Islamic religious authorities actually have no jurisdiction through the Sharia enactments. Malaysia is unique in that it has 2 legal systems with the Sharia having a very limited jurisdiction and applying only to muslims, covering family law and specific areas of public morality. Therefore the accusation that the Sharia infringes on civil liberties guaranteed by articles 5 and 10 is laughable. It is precisely in these 2 areas of human rights that we as a nation have habitually been the target of criticisms which we cleverly deflected with the “asian values” rhetoric.

The strong men of asia, all of whom have now retreated from the seats of power, may have used “asian values” to silence critique and curb civil liberties in the name of development. The concept of universal human rights has evolved sufficiently such that no one today would disagree that freedom of thought and expression, the right to a fair tribunal, the unlawfulness of arbitrary arrests and torture are non-negotiable (except in extenuating circumstances, which even then safeguards against abuse of executive power must be in place). That our leaders could appeal to our values and traditions for a wholly different end and we all bought it was ingenuous. But is there absolutely no place for cultural relativism in this discourse?

There are some of us who treat the human rights discourse as contained in the Universal Declaration as a sacred religious dogma. But we must differentiate between fundamental civil liberties that allow no room for cultural relativism, which at any rate are compatible with the moral teachings of all authentic spiritual traditions, and those parts of the Universal Declaration (UDHR) which constitute no more than ideals or aspirations, and therefore allow for consideration of nuances of customs, traditions and level of economic development. For a traditional agrarian society, article 24 makes no sense, “everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”. Homosexuals would take unkindly to section (3) of article 16 which says “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and state”.

For muslims, beyond the scope fundamental civil liberties as per articles 19 and 20 (the basis of our articles 5 and 10), which are in concordance with Islamic principles, are we not entitled to be governed by laws some of which are derived from the religion’s teachings – the Sharia, if we were interpret article 18 correctly, “…freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance?” (the part about the freedom to change his religion may not sit well with some muslims but that is another matter)

It is interesting that the campaign to repeal the Sharia and deny muslims their right of this public aspect of their religion as guaranteed by the constitution in the context of Malaysia’s multi-religious society is initiated and spearheaded by muslims. Perhaps knowing that they are unlikely to get much support from mainstream muslims, they turn to non-muslim NGOs and social activists who may be well-intentioned in the cause of advancing civil liberties and democracy. The use, or more accurately abuse of the human rights rhetoric is very persuasive to the unsuspecting. In this highly mediatized age, the simple minded – no matter how well-meaning, are quick to label people, in this context, muslims, as either “liberal progressive” or “conservative”, “morally uptight” or “enlightened”, “modernist” or “obscurantist”. But in real life things are much more nuanced than that. Wether the Sharia should be repealed or not is actually an internal muslim issue as its jurisdiction is limited to muslims. This should be resolved internally by honest discussion and dialogue between those having opposing views. Of course there will be entanglements between muslim and non-muslim parties at individual level which may complicate the Sharia administration, but this is something that is not impossible to resolve amicably. To drum up support from non muslims using the human rights bait is mischievous.

In truth, we are a people with no genuine commitment to values, and that is how we have excelled at double-speaking. When people accuse us of undermining fundamental civil liberties, we say the human rights discourse has no universality, a purely western agenda that seeks to corrupt our society with decadent western culture. We sought refuge in cultural relativism and appealed to our “asian values”. But we also want to be feted as “progressive and liberal muslims” by our friends and the Sharia which happens to encompass some of those “asian values” is such a sore and embarrassing anachronism that we don’t want to be associated with. That human rights thing has its uses after all.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

The wellspring of law and morality
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

“The long arm of the law” is no longer such a proverbial phrase today. Ask those British and German men whose idea if a holiday in a tropical paradise is paying for sex with young girls and boys in exotic Thailand or Cambodia. They face prosecution at home for a crime committed thousand of miles away and the prospect of spending a good part of their lives in prison. “f*?%* their daughters and pay them in dollars”, says one character in that silly DiCaprio movie The Beach. This has to be the worst form of humiliation and contempt for the “other”. It is no wonder that these westerners who act out their sexual fantasies on innocent young children of the third world are despised even by their own society, that the only other instance where such prosecutorial resolve is applied is to those who commit crimes against humanity. In one respect, perhaps paedophilia when linked to racist contempt is almost as much a crime against humanity.

In today’s highly secularized world as God is banished from the public domain and before long, expunged from modern man’s consciousness, religion, along with morality has come to a stage where it is hopelessly old fashioned, deserving only of scorn and ridicule. Especially so in the case of Islam such that no one who prides him or herself in having acquired the sophistication of modernity wants to have anything to do with it, unless one wants to be feted as the “moderate” and “progressive” sub-species of the genus. This has become evidently clear in recent orchestrated campaigns to roll back religion as the basis of legislation on aspects that concern morality and decency. Why, we have finally completed the trajectory of man’s positivist evolution – no longer do we need the moral crutches that religion used to afford previous generations. Morality, as it relates to sexuality and fulfillment of man’s sexual needs, is an entirely private matter that the state must not interfere.

I suppose from the point of view of lay persons like us, our modern conception of what constitutes a punishable offence is premised on the existence of a victim consequent to an act (or potential victim as in under the influence). We can therefore understand why there is no disagreement that murder, robbery and fraud are criminal offences deserving severe punishments. To secular sensibilities however, adulterous sexual relations is perfectly alright because it is pleasurable and does no harm to anybody. In fact it is often celebrated in fiction as the ultimate expression of genuine love that has conquered all obstacles thrown its way, which quite often is depicted as sclerotic traditions and restrictive conventions linked to religion that society is still unable to shake off. Modern individualism and often a particular conception of liberty always try to reassure us that we should feel at ease with our bodies and desires, and free ourselves from the shackles of tradition, such that “recreational sex” has come into the vocabulary of today’s lifestyle. It is fun and creates no victims, the law should stay out of it (it is not always “victimless” though, as children suffer when marriages break up and it eats into our social welfare budget, not to mention crimes of passion from well known cases that have whet our media appetites).

If adulterous sex is victimless fun, it is blindingly obvious that sex tourists with a penchant for young boys and girls are a scourge. They exploit the most vulnerable of all sexual preys – poorly educated third world children for whom some nice cloths, sweets and a bit of money are a welcome respite from the only thing they know – poverty. Everyone agrees that paedophile sex tourists deserve the shame and long prison sentences upon conviction. In fact, we can proudly claim that this is a triumph of secular ethics. So who needs religion if we can have morality without its intrusiveness? Isn’t it time that we retire this moral crutch now that history has ended?

But between the extremes of harmless adulterous liaisons by consenting adults and paedophile sex-tourism is a veritable moral slippery slope. This is where modern man’s overweening moral self-sufficiency shows some cracks, exposing an underlying confusion. Beneath this façade of self-sufficient secular ethics, we seem unsure whether we should cut ourselves completely off our religious moorings. Take for example the case of director Roman Polanski who had to jump bail and exile himself in Paris after a conviction for statutory rape for having sex with an underaged girl.

Many people are sympathetic to Polanski because he’s such a brilliant director who gave us Rosemary’s baby, Chinatown and the Pianist. As a jewish boy growing up in the Krakow ghetto, his pregnant mother was taken away by the Nazis to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. As if that was not enough share of tragedy, his actress wife and friends were brutally murdered by the Manson gang. What his sympathizers are not saying though is what’s the big deal about having sex with an underaged girl in today’s world when many teenaged girls are already sexually active from the age of 13 – 14. They’re biologically mature, and most of them know exactly what they’re doing and doing it the safe way. Was it not uncommon that 1 or 2 generations ago girls were married at 15 or 16? Is it not absurdly hypocritical that on the one hand we encourage teenage girls to be comfortable with their bodies and sexual urges, and safe-sex is all they need, but on the other people like Mr. Polanski face rape charges for partaking mutual pleasure with them?

More often than not, in cases like Mr. Polanski’s, the “victims” are sexually experienced and mature that to secular logic such a law seems absurdly unjust. This penal code statute that having sexual relations with a girl below 18 is rape and therefore carries a heavy punishment is obviously a baggage that we have carried over from the age of faith, when religion had coloured much of our conception of morality, of what is right and what is wrong.

Yes, okay, we do encourage teenage girls to be comfortable with sex, but surely there is something exploitative about older man having sexual relations with teenage girls. How can she not be a “victim”, never mind how experienced she is – says our irrational inner voice defying our liberal logic. But increasingly we read in the papers of female school teachers going to prison for having sex with their teenage (boys) students. Here the slope becomes even more slippery. If our conception of a crime is that an act must have a victim, there is none in this sort of relationship (corrupting the morals of youth is such an ambiguous charge). Are we being just to these women teachers in search of some solace or adventure? Is this a baggage from the age of faith that we should all jettison today?

That these statutes criminalizing sexual relations between older men and teenage girls or the other way around in the modern era of safe sex and early sexuality still exist in our law looks betrays our moral confusion and hypocrisy. At another level, it is perhaps testimony that beneath that surface of modernity and our scorn towards religion, religious ethics still informs much of our law-making today. Only that we refuse to acknowledge that debt. Why this refusal to break free from the influence of religion? No matter how illogical these statutes are to the secular mind and how unjust they may seem to Mr. Polanski and the school teacher who seduced her students, perhaps deep down we acknowledge that without them human civilization as we know it cannot be sustained for very long.

If secular ethics is confused in this grey moral zone and needs to fall back on sensibilities carried over from the age of faith, it also owes a debt to religion in the more clear-cut matters of the penal code. In today’s language, murder and robbery are major crimes because of what the victims suffer, and “sin” has nothing to do with it. But the way the public reacted to the outcome of the OJ Simpson trial suggested that it is more than just about justice for the victims. Either we have not sufficiently evolved such that we still carry that primitive religious idea of “sin” or such an idea of moral right and wrong is a quintessential part of our constitution, or “human nature”.

It is not only in the area of law-making that provides citizens personal security, recourse to justice and maintain public order that we owe a great debt to religion. Extending the discussion on the conception of ethics and justice, let us look at the modern discourse on human rights which is premised on the idea of the inviolability of the dignity of man. Secular humanism might claim that it had thought out such a concept de novo, but it would be easier to admit that a good deal of it is borrowed or appropriated from religion. The “dignity of man” is a difficult concept to chew if we exclude God from the discussion. As secular humanism is the fruit european enlightenment, the religion here in question is of course Christianity, but it can be safely said that all authentic spiritual traditions share a common clear conception of what constitutes moral rights and wrongs, and enjoin the same praise-worthy values of kindness, compassion, generosity and forgiveness. The west’s (and the rest of the world that has modernized ourselves in its image) conception of virtue is a Christian ghost. Modern man in the manner of Heidegger may choose to exclude Christian (or religious) paradigms but internalize them implicitly to provide meaning and direction for our existence. But Jurgen Habermas, a later proponent of the Frankfurt School is more honest in recognizing modernity’s debt to religion. He attributes to christianity as the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, and we continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post modern chatter.

What we mean to say in all this is that despite our modernity and sense of moral self sufficiency, religion in its most generic sense is never far beneath the surface. True, religion as played out in history by men has its dark and shameful episodes, and it may be convenient to shift blame for all that is wrong with humanity onto it, but it remains the inspiration for much of our laws and civic conventions. It is the weak glue that is just barely holding modern civilization together. And beyond law and ethics, religion informs much of what we take for granted in our civilized existence – architecture, philosophy and learning, the university system, the welfare system etc.

In our relentless march to secularity, many of us may not want to recognize that debt we owe to religion but a significant section of humanity actually still does, however strange and unfashionable that may be. The most recalcitrant are, not surprisingly, the muslims whose religion spells out the moral issues, for good or bad, in more clear terms i.e. the shariah. Being the youngest of the Abrahamic monotheisms, it still has its sources fairly intact. Is it too much to ask that the muslims’ desire to recognize this debt and live their lives according to it be respected?

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Senior Minister Contemptuous of Muslim Sensitivity
by Puan Elya Lim Abdullah

The Muslim Professionals Forum (MPF) regrets Datuk Seri Dr. Lim Keng Yaik’s recommendation that religious matters be kept out of national schools if this means abolishing religious instruction to Muslim students.

The assertion that the teaching of Islam in national schools deters non-Muslims from enrolling their children into national schools may have its substance, however we think much of that has to do with ingrained prejudice and problems inherent within the national schools system.

Some degree of religious instruction has always been an element of our educational system, whether they are schools established by Christian missions or national ones. It fulfils the holistic educational needs of our children as we parents perceive them. Children of other faiths receive instruction in moral education when Muslim students have their religious classes. .The recent initiative to introduce the teaching of Mandarin and Tamil in national schools is indicative of the Ministry’s concern for further improving national integration.

While it is true that the family plays an important role in imparting religious values to impressionable children, instruction in the basic fundamentals of Islam, rituals of worship, study of the sacred texts, religious morality and Islamic history has to be done by qualified teachers.

The national schools have admirably fulfilled this need without altering their character into religious schools. Muslim parents accept this compromise and send their children for extra religious lessons outside the normal school hours. It is utterly insensitive to demand that religious instruction for Muslims be scrapped from national schools if that is the intent of Dr. Lim’s recommendations.

By virtue of demography and history, Islam has been very much part of the nation’s social and cultural fabric. Our colourful history bears testimony to the religious tolerance, harmony and mutual respect which has stood the test of time and which Malaysians have continued to guard jealously.

It is somewhat baffling that Islam is suddenly demonized as an obstacle to national integration. The call to keep religion out of the national schools is contemptuous of Muslim sensitvity and flies in the face of our tradition of respect and understanding among the religions.

it is an idea unmistakably borrowed from a particular brand of secularism that has its roots in a conflict between religion and the state which has a very specific historical context. It is by no means the universal experience of all modern states, least of all Malaysia.

Instead of purportedly promoting national integration, such brazen insensitivity is potentially disruptive of our hardwon religious harmony. That such a proposal had come from a senior member of the cabinet is all the more regrettable.

There are probably more valid reasons why non-Malay parents are reluctant to send their children to national schools especially those outside the affluent middle-class areas. And this has more to do with the school’s academic performance, class size, facilities, quality of the teaching faculty, morale of teachers and standards of discipline rather than religious studies.

These are equally the concerns of many Muslim parents, some of whom are willing to pay for private education or send their children to Chinese schools. While we urge that the government take immediate measures to remedy these pressing problems, various aspects of religious instruction for Muslims need to be tailored to mould young Muslims with Islamic spirituality (iman), examplary behaviour (soleh wa musleh) and intellectual strength (ilm) to prepare them as citizens of a modern, pluralistic Malaysia.

Puan Elya Lim Abdullah
Founding Member
Muslim Professionals Forum
Suite 1810, 18th Floor, Plaza Permata (IGB Plaza)
Jalan Kampar, off Jalan Tun Razak
50400 Kuala Lumpur
Tel : 03-40426102
Website : http://mpf.org.my

Islam & Human Rights
by Dr. Azzam Tamimi

The concept of human rights in Islam is rooted in the concept of divinity. Muslims believe that man was created by a transcendental God who favours no human over another except in terms of piety and good conduct. In a bid to defend Islam or to promote it, several contemporary Islamic scholars and thinkers have sought to show that Islam has from the outset laid the foundations for human rights by asserting the supremacy of the value of justice and of the principle of human dignity. Some of the effort made in this regard has been aimed at developing an Islamic, as compared to secular, discourse on human rights.

Both in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the value of justice is considered the highest of all values, for it derives from one of God’s main attributes, The Just. Hence is the emphasis on ‘equity’ rather than equality in Islamic thought. This is one of the areas where the Islamic conception of human rights differs from the secular conception. The principle of human dignity derives from the belief that al-insan (the human being) is the vicegerent of Allah on earth. Al-insan, who is honoured and preferred to all other creatures, is expected to lead a life guided by Allah’s law, or the Shari’ah. This is another area where disagreement exists. The word al-insan, in the Islamic terminology, refers to the human being irrespective of gender, colour or race.

Three Qur’anic verses, which are crucial to determining a Muslim’s identity, summarise the concept of human dignity:

1. Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: “I will create a vicegerent on earth.” (2: 30)
2. We have honoured the children of Adam; provided them with transport on land and sea; given them for sustenance things good and pure; and conferred on them special favours, above a great part of Our Creation. (17:70)
3. O mankind! We created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know each other. Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. (49:13)

In spite of Islam’s assertion of the value and dignity of humanity, violations of basic human rights in the Muslim countries are very common. Although repression and persecution go back to the colonial era, more subtle methods have been devised by post-independence regimes in the modern territorial states that inherited power from the colonial authorities.

The Muslim world is one of very few remaining regions in the world where local culture is being systematically eroded through the persistent violation of fundamental human rights. Mosques have been placed under direct government control, freedom of the press is non-existent, opponents are silenced or liquidated, women are punished for choosing to be modest, men are persecuted for choosing to follow the sunnah (way of the Prophet), and prisons host more prisoners of conscience than criminals.

In the absence of the rule of law, and in the courts of military ‘justice’, thousands have lost their lives without being able to defend themselves or appeal against their convictions. Even in countries where some form of democracy was experimented with, when it became apparent that democratisation did not serve the interests of minority ruling elites, the process was immediately interrupted or even reversed. Though not the only one, the Algerian case may be the best example.

Such a miserable situation has prompted many NGO’s to dedicate part of their resources to defending human rights in the Muslim world. Most of these NGO’s are foreign. Although local human rights groups are not tolerated, some have managed to establish themselves, but regrettably not without stringent conditions, either in response to pressure from local authorities or from funding institutions. As a result, some of the values promoted, defended and universalised by the Western-led international human rights movement have gained local platforms. Since these values clash with some of the basic principles of Islam, the human rights movement does not enjoy a good reputation among the Muslim masses.

The secularist discourse on Human Rights undermines Islam by negating, in the name of universalism, the right of Muslims to cultural specificity. To prove their respect for human rights, Muslims are told they must board the boat of modernity. The price they are expected to pay for this ride is to re-think their religious convictions or re-interpret their sacred texts so as to conform to international standards and universal values.

It is not surprising, thus, that some Muslims regard the human rights movement a post-colonial tool of cultural imperialism. Regrettably, such a radical view amounts to a denial of the role played by numerous organisations around the globe in defending human rights and in exposing the violations and the violators. The contribution of the international human rights movement is indispensable and should be greatly appreciated.

What is also greatly appreciated, and should in all fairness be recognised, is that the Western human rights tradition, whose roots are founded in the European Enlightenment, has enhanced both the dignity of the human being and the value of human civilisation. Four major contributions are accredited to this tradition. Firstly, it has endowed the individual with certain basic rights such as the right of free speech, the right of association, the right to a fair trial and so on. Secondly, it has strengthened the position of ordinary citizens against the arbitrariness of power. Thirdly, it has expanded the space and scope of individual participation in public decision-making. And fourthly, it has forced the State and authority in general to be accountable to the public.[1]

However, in spite of the positive contributions, there are serious misgivings. Some of these misgivings relate to the attitude of the West, both past and present, toward the issue of human rights. Historically, the ‘human’ the Europeans referred to when they spoke of human rights was none but their own citizen; the French human, the English human or the Western human in general.[2]

This probably explains why Europe, which – as a fruit of the renaissance – engaged in the process of building the edifice of the individual within its own borders, destroyed the human person without.

While human rights expanded among ‘whites’, European empires inflicted horrendous human wrongs upon the coloured inhabitants of the planet. Native populations in the Americas and Australia were eliminated and Millions of Africans were enslaved. Millions of humans throughout the world were suppressed. Western colonialism in Asia, Australia, Africa and Latin America represented the most massive systematic violation of human rights ever known in history.[3] Much of this violation involved undermining other people’s cultural and religious identities.

Though formal colonial rule has ended, Western domination and control continues to impact upon the human rights of the vast majority of the people of the non-Western world in ways which are more subtle and sophisticated but no less destructive and devastating.[4] On the one hand, the colonial ruling elite has been replaced, in many cases, by Westernised local elites, very often authoritarian and corrupt, who serve their Western masters and help to perpetuate this unequal and unjust relationship.[5] On the other hand the dominant West controls global politics through the United Nations Security Council. If the Western powers so desire, they can get the Security Council to starve a million people to death to force them to submit to their will. The dominant West controls global economics through the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the G7 or the G8. The dominant West also controls global news and information and it has the powerful means to dictate to the rest of the world styles of life through music, cinema, fashions etc.

Some misgivings concern the way human rights organisations conduct their business. The overwhelming majority of human rights organisations have a radical secularist vision of man and the world. For the secularists, human rights are based on the idea of natural rights. This means that God is left little or no place in man’s life. While this supposes that nothing sacred remains, in reality the divine sacred is replaced by a secular sacred.

Inevitably, some of what Muslims may hold to be unquestionable, or immutable, may be considered a violation of human rights. Questions such as the roles of men and women in family life, the Islamic law of inheritance, the Islamic code of penalties and the Islamic code of moral conduct are some of the issues constantly targeted by the secularist human rights movement.

I have, over the past few years, participated in debates over these issues with representatives of international as well as regional human rights organisations. Insisting on the universality of their vision, the secularist human rights defenders refuse to entertain the mere suggestion that a common ground can be reached not by re-interpreting Muslim sacred texts, but rather by revising, re-examining, rethinking or re-writing the Universal Declaration of human rights. After all, this declaration, whose articles I would say are acceptable save for few exceptions, was born out of the global conditions that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War. I would like to share with you some of the experiences I had. For I believe they illustrate the magnitude of the problem.

One of these experiences was in the form of a live TV debate between me and the assistant to the secretary general of Amnesty International. The Amnesty official insisted that the Universal Declaration was binding upon all and that it was Islam which needed to be re-interpreted in a manner conducive to reconciling it with the declaration. It could clearly be seen throughout the debate that the spokesman for Amnesty found it more outrageous to cast doubt on the universality of the Universal Declaration than to cast doubt on the validity of divine revelation.

The second experience took place in two symposia organised by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights over two successive years to discuss Islam and Human Rights. During both meetings (held in 1996 and 1997) the Muslim participants, who insisted that it was beyond anyone’s power to alter or omit a categorical Qur’anic text, were accused by some secularist participants of fundamentalism and inflexibility.

Fahmi Huwaidi, who attended the second of these symposia, was confronted by a non-Muslim participant who told him that she was told that this group of Islamists was among the enlightened and moderate. She was at a loss because she could not understand how a person could be enlightened and moderate and at the same time oppose the amendment of a text from the Qur’an.[6]

Among the Qur’anic verses that the secularists thought should be modified or re-interpreted were those dealing with family relations especially with regard to marriage and divorce, as well as those dealing with inheritance and corporal punishment.

It was not convincing enough for the secularists to be told that while no one who believed in Allah and His Book could change or tamper with certain absolute areas, Muslims were encouraged to exercise ijtihad to provide safeguards that might prevent abuse of the legal order. This ijtihad, it was stressed, would have to come from within the House of Islam and in response to real needs and not in acquiescence to pressure from outside or in order to appease the power to be.

Several Muslim participants expressed concern that the whole purpose of the project was not to initiate dialogue with the aim of reaching a common ground, but rather to impose the Western perspective of human rights and the secularist view of the world on the Muslims.

The third experience occurred last May when I was invited to participate in a symposium organised in Helsinki by yet another American foundation called “Search for Common Ground”. On the eve of the first session, which was supposed to be exclusively for the Arab participants to discuss the promotion of human rights in the Arab region, delegates were invited to have dinner in a nearby Chinese restaurant. As part of the informal discussion over dinner, a Palestinian secularist colleague of Christian origins expressed the opinion that only secularisation could bring about an improvement to the standard of human rights in the Arab region.

Together with an Islamist colleague from Lebanon, I argued against the secularist thesis and sought to prove that, contrary to the claim made, secularisation has been accompanied by a marked deterioration in the respect for human rights in the Arab region. The discussion shifted to an analysis of international standards and the universal declaration of human rights and as to whether cultural specificity should be taken into consideration.

The following morning and as I headed for breakfast, the organiser’s secretary whispered into my ear that the organiser wished to speak to me. I waited for her and we had breakfast together. She said that she was told I had a very interesting discussion the previous night. I thought she was impressed. I briefed her on the main points raised in the discussion and reiterated that if common ground is indeed what we are searching for we needed to assert the right to cultural specificity and to question the assumption that the universal declaration of human rights was universal.

She turned to me and said: “Azzam, I don’t know how to say this to you, but I would like you not to speak at today’s session.” She explained to me that my ideas would disrupt the harmony of the series of meetings her institution had held so far. In other words, it was not recommended at this stage to question what had already become an absolute.

I understood from her, and later on from other key persons involved in the organisation of the function, and who were put in charge of steering the discussions, that this forum had a well-defined, previously agreed on, agenda and that it would not be acceptable to throw in new proposals. This experience confirmed my suspicion that the whole project was designed to bolster the peace process in the Middle East through the enforcement of secular notions of human rights.

One of the ways of doing this is to assert universality and deny specificity; to come up with ideas as to how to change the perceptions of people in the Middle East to make Israel more acceptable to them. The assumption was that the values that make Israel unacceptable are those derived from Islam, and for this reason Islam had to be re-questioned.

One of the main objectives of this project was to suggest plans aimed at effecting changes in school curricula. It was suggested for instance that values that are not conducive to respecting the human rights of the Israelis or to the establishment of peace in the region should be removed from teaching curricula. The Islamic value of jihad was a prime target.

Muslim intellectuals have been critical of the position adopted by the Western human rights movement in support of Salman Rushdie and later on in support of Taslima Nisreen. It is not support for Salman against the fatwa, which concerns me. In my assessment, the fatwa was issued for purely political reasons and had benefited the author of Satanic Verses – whom it brought fame and prosperity – more than it benefited Islam and the Muslims.

What is of concern is the support for Salman’s, and later on Taslima’s, alleged right to free expression without any consideration for the fact that their writings insulted the entire Muslim community that constitutes no less than one fifth of the world’s population. While secular human rights activists talk about freedom of expression as a very important civil liberty, they forget that there is also a right to honour and to dignity for whole communities.

It has been suggested that the Western civilisation, by virtue of the way it has developed, seems unable to empathise with the notion of the sacred, which is very important in other societies. What about the rights of the people who consider the sacred and the transcendent important values? Should they not be entitled to be respected? Should not their right to honour be observed.[7] It has also been suggested, as Richard Webster once remarked, that the unconditional Western support for writers Rushdie and Nisreen is not a support for the freedom of thought, but for the European secular tradition of blasphemy.[8]

It is worth noting that although Islamic values show a high regard for human dignity and great respect for the fundamental rights of man, the secularist discourse within the human rights movement seeks to show the exact opposite. It is not surprising that the human rights movement in the West gives credence to certain individuals of Muslim origin whose main concern has been to cast doubt on the validity of Islamic sacred text.

In Western human rights circles, the followers of Mahmud Taha, such as Abdullahi An-Na’im, are regarded an authority on Islam although in the eyes of most Muslims they would just be regarded apostates. The reason such people are favoured by the Western human rights movement is that they call for repealing more than half of the Qur’anic text for allegedly contravening universally accepted values, including those related to human rights. An-Na’im is highly regarded within these circles for his role in propagating the idea of his mentor that Medinite revelation, which deals primarily with laws and codes intended to guide individuals and communities in all affairs, is a hindrance to Muslim progress. Ask any Muslim what he or she thinks will remain of Islam once Medinite Qur’an is omitted and you will hear one answer: nothing remains.

In conclusion, I would like to stress that there is a need today for the establishment of an Islamic human rights movement to defend human rights without compromising Islam. One of the objectives of such a movement would be to introduce Islam’s compassionate image to the world through the defence and promotion of human rights. At the same time, the movement would be expected to search for a common ground on which all the defendants of human rights, irrespective of their ideological convictions, may stand.

The value of Human Rights is indeed a universal value and the cause of defending these rights is a universal cause.

For both the value and the cause to remain universal and in order to prevent their monopoly by one particular culture, cultural specificity has to be recognised and respected. In fact, cultural specificity is an indispensable feature of universality.

Issues related to the Concept of Human Rights in Islam

1. Vicegerency

In Islam, man is God’s vicegerent on earth. Humans have been honoured by the Creator and gifted with the faculties of the mind and will-power. Everything else in the universe has been created for the purpose of serving them and achieving their happiness. The Divine honour bestowed on them confers upon them rights that no one else has the right to deny or violate. Humans, in their capacity as vicegerents of their Creator, are expected to defend their God-given rights and struggle for preserving them.

A fundamental difference between the Islamic vision and that of the Western civilisation. It is the difference of maintaining, as opposed to severing, ties with God. The Islamic vision is based on the belief that Divine Revelation has been intended to serve the interest of humanity, and that the most pertinent interest is the administration of justice.

Ibn al-Fahim: The subject matter of Shari’ah-based policy is justice, although no provision in respect of it was revealed. This is so because God has sent His Messengers and revealed His Books in order to administer fairly the affairs of the people. This is the justice on which the heavens and earth are based and according to which if the signs of truth become apparent and its face is revealed, in whatever way possible, then it is there that God’s law and religion are to be found.

Ibn As-Salah: Shari’ah-based policy is defined as every measure that directs people nearest to rightness and furthest from corruption, even if such policy was not prescribed by the nor was a revelation made in respect of it. The way that leads to justice is the way of religion

In contrast, Western political thought is the fruit of rationalist philosophy and the principles of natural law. It is also the product of the grinding wars which took place in the West between reason and religion; between, on the one hand, the struggle for freedom, self-determination and the right to enjoy the goodness of this world on the basis of the centrality of man in the universe and the absolute ability of reason to understand and explain the universe and to organise life, and, on the other, the church and its despotic authority which it exercised for many centuries of darkness, backwardness and oppression. The battle in this conflict was won by reason and science, and as a result the people recovered their rights and rid themselves of the church’s control over man’s mind and conscience and over the organisation of life. In end, natural law replaced God’s revelation as the philosophical basis for legislation.

2. Freedom

Classical Islamic scholars deduced from the Qur’an the golden rule of ‘no responsibility without freedom and sanity’.

Freedom contributed in the past to the progress of Muslims who built a great civilisation. It had a considerable impact on the Western civilisation as well. It is believed that through direct contact with the Muslims in the Arab East during the days of the Crusaders, as well as in Spain and in southern Italy, the Europeans were fascinated by the life style of the Muslims. Compared to their own life style, the Muslims had freedom, dignity and motivation. This influence contributed to the revival of the spirit of rebellion against the theocratic shackles imposed on the mind, conscience and social conduct of Europeans, and thus was the starting point of the Renaissance.

Freedom of faith, and what it entails in terms of freedom of thought and expression, is the basis of freedoms and rights in Islam, because of the great influence belief has on all aspects of individual and collective behaviour. If man does really have the freedom of faith and if compulsion is forbidden, even unimaginable in this zone because of its importance, then compulsion in everything below that is forbidden a fortiori, such as compulsion to marry, to take up a certain profession, to join a group or a party, or to live in a particular country or to leave it. The fundamental element is that man is free and constricting his freedom is an exception which requires a just law.

God-given freedom to man is not supposed to be absolute permissiveness nor is it supposed to be a heedless and spontaneous thrust to fulfil desires. It is primarily a responsibility and a realisation. It is one’s responsibility towards one’s conscience, Creator and fellow humans. For in addition to bearing within him an aspect of the spirit of God, man has inherent within him desires and ambitions that could lead him to misery and hardship in this life and in the Hereafter if he did not subdue them by means of a Divine guidance. While Islam clearly affirms man’s status, freedom and enormous abilities, it underlines his weaknesses. For this purpose, God sent Messengers who urged humans to respond to their Lord’s call and who warned them against the repercussions of being tempted to rebel against their Creator under the pretext of asserting their independence. A free man, who is truly God’s vicegerent, is he who worships God by contemplating the wonders of His creation in the heavens and the earth and in himself, and who exploits the resources made available to him in this universe, enjoys its bounties and meets the needs of his body, soul and society in a balanced manner without excessiveness.

The legislative implications of the Islamic concept of freedom have been addressed by Islamic jurists throughout the history of jurisprudence to the effect of establishing and refining a legal framework for man’s freedom, or ‘for his duties.’

Ash-Shatibi (d. 1388) elaborated this framework in his book Al-Muwafaqat. which sets out the objective of Shari’ah (Islamic law) as being the realisation of what he called al-masalih (pl. of maslaha, exigence, requirement or interest). These are a set, or sets, of requirements whose fulfillment is the responsibility of those in charge of the affairs of the Ummah. Ash-Shatibi divided al-masalih into three main categories.

The first category is comprised of al-masalih ad-daruriyah (essential requirements), without which life becomes unbearable or even impossible. Food, shelter and security for instance are daruriyat (essential) for the maintenance of life.

Next comes the category known as al-masalih al-hajiyah (utilities) whose absence may cause privation but does not jeopardise life, these may include requirements such as education, health and social care, etc.

Next to this category in importance is al-masalih at-tahsiniyah (ameliorative) whose realisation imparts splendour and beauty to life, such as recreational facilities.

The idea is that Islam as a religion was revealed for the purpose of guaranteeing and preserving these essentials which constitute the general framework of human rights, including the right to choose a faith, the right to life, the right to education, the right to free expression, the right to have a family and the right to own property.

3. Justice

Justice in Arabic is ‘adalah from the root ‘adala, which means to be balanced, to engage in acts that are framed by an awareness, born of the pursuit of reason over passion. The opposite of ‘adalah is zulm (injustice) from the root zalama, which means to do wrong or evil, to ill-treat or oppress, to harm or commit an outrage or to daken. An Islamic political order is supposed to prohibit all forms of injustice. Not only is injustice considered a grave sin, an atrocious crime and a cause for decline and destruction, but is considered to be an aggression against God Himself. After all, Islam’s main mission is the administration of justice and the elimination of all forms of oppression. One of the main tasks of the community of believers is to deter injustice and support the wronged.

Elaboration on the freedom of belief

When the term dar-ul-Islam is used it connotes one nationality for those residing in it, Muslims and non-Muslims, and for all of whom the fundamental rights are guaranteed by the Quran, the Sunna and Islamic jurisprudence. These are: equality, which is positive and all comprehensive, regardless of race, ethnic origin, colour, social status or creed; freedom, which encompasses freedom of thought and freedom of belief including the right of non-Muslims in a Muslim state to build churches, temples, monastries, synagogues, etc.; and freedom of movement and the right to establish schools and religious centers.

Today, when the resurgence of Islam is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon, it is imperative for Muslim leaders to face the rather complex problem of the relation between Muslims and non-Muslims within the Islamic states and in the world at large. He warns that this issue is loaded with fallacies and baseless arguments which have projected Islam as a menace that denies people their basic human rights of freedom, justice and the pursuit of happiness.

Two categories of citizenship in the Islamic state; he calls the first categoriy muwatana ‘amma, unqualified citizenship, and the second muwatana khassa, qualified citizenship.

Although a person who resides in an Islamic state has, irrespective of his or her religion or race, what he calls ‘absolute rights to a decent living,’ he or she has the freedom to choose between embracing or rejecting the objectives and principles underpinning the state. When a person chooses to embrace Islam, he or she becomes a Muslim citizen not discriminated from the rest of the Muslim members of the society save for distinctions of personal talent or qualifications. When a person chooses not to embrace Islam, then he or she would have – in order to acquire the right to citizenship – to express loyalty to the state and recognise its legitimacy so that he or she does not engage in any activity that may be construed as threatening to its order.

In the latter case, citizenship is qualified, and such qualification is only lifted when the concerned person embraces Islam. While enjoying full freedom in personal matters, that is matters pertaining to faith, food, drink and marriage, a non-Muslim citizen may still be denied a right enjoyed by a Muslim citizen, that is the right to occupy senior positions in the state – such as the Presidency – that may be considered of significant bearing on the identity of the state

Scholars and thinkers, both classical and modern, continue to disagree, except with regard to the position of head of state, on which senior positions, or which functions, are denied to non-Muslim citizens in an Islamic state.

Most modern thinkers are of the opinion that dhimmis have the right to participate in elections at all levels and may be nominated for any position apart from that of the head of state, and may therefore be members of nationally or locally elected councils.

A modern Sudanese ijtihad which grants Christian-majority provinces in Sudan the right to opt for a legal system other than Shari’ah in order to organise their affairs. Nowhere in the past or the present ‘do we know of a state whose constitution is void of certain restrictions the pupose of which is to safeguard the state, or to protect the freedom of citizens or the right of the majority to impart on public life a colour of their own choice

Riddah

Any discussion of the freedom of faith in Islam must raise the question of riddah (apostasy).

The classical definition of riddah is ‘the voluntary and conscious reversion to kufr (disbelief) after having embraced Islam by denying any of its fundamentals in matters of ‘aqidah (faith), Shari’ah (law) or sha’irah (rite), such as the denial of Deity or Prophithood, or the licensing of prohibititions or the negation of obligations.’

There are two Muslim schools of jurisprudence on the matter. The first school, to which most classical jurists belonged, considers riddah a religious offence punishable by death. The second considers riddah a political offence that has nothing to do with ‘the Islamic guarantee of a person’s right to freedom of faith.’ So, riddah in this case is not apostasy but sedition, an act of mutiny or treason, that is punishable within the framework of the authority’s responsibility for preserving the community and maintaining law and order.

Elaboration on Economic and Social Rights

While the right of an individual to own property is guaranteed in Islam, this is not considered a natural right, as in international conventions or declarations, because in the end every thing belongs to God. Therefore, all that pertains to ownership, such as the methods of acquiring and disposing of property, should take place in accordance with the rules of Shari’a.

Not only is an individual’s right to ownership guaranteed, but it has an important role to play. Power is distributed among the members of society by virtue of their shared ownership of the resources. This imparts on political freedom and shura, which he discusses later in the book, a social import. So, in the Islamic model the aim is to make ownership accessible to almost every member of the community.

Islam provides broad guidelines to guarantee the equitable distribution of wealth. These include the prohibition of usury, monopoly, extravagance, etc. and the imposition of Zakat. However, the challenge facing the Muslims in modern times is to envisage how such principles can be translated into modern Islamic economics.

Social rights are taken to mean the needs of an individual in his livelihood of social and health-care. The most important social rights stipulated by modern constitutions in the West are the right to work, the right for medical-care, and the right to social security. Some contemporary Islamic thinkders have sought to root these rights in the teachings of Islam. Some have even claimed that whereas such rights have not been of interest to Western constitutions and human rights declarations until ‘recently,’ and only as a reaction to pressure from ‘socialist theories’ and trade unions and to banish the ghost of the Marxist revolution, they are well-established in the Islamic conception. Examples are usually quoted from the era of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Caliphs.

References :

1. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar: From Human Rights to Human Dignity, p.1,International Conference on Human Rights 6-7 December 1994, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
2. Ibid.
3. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, see ref. above.
4. Ibid
5. Hj. S. M. Hohd. Idris, International Conference on Human Rights 6-7 December 1994, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
6. Fahmi Huwaidi, Hiwar At-Turshan (Dialogue with the Deaf), Al-Ahram, Cairo 11 Nov. 1997.
7. Chandra Muzaffar, from a talk at the Islam and Equality Symposium, organised by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, London 14-16 October 1997.
8. Richard Webster, Paper entitled: Free Speech, History and the Christian Tradition of Blasphemy, The Collapse of Secularism Symposium, Centre for the Study of Democracy, London June 10, 1995

Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction and legislating morality
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

So February is the Superbowl month, something I found out as I killed time in the airport lounges of Bangkok, Riyadh and Cairo recently in a hectic schedule of back to back lecture invitations. It is one of those facets of american life that, thanks to Janet Jackson, we now have a better understanding of. The superbowl fanfare reported widely in the media brought to mind how, many of us unfamiliar with america’s mass culture, read with uncomprehending bemusement that the american public could be so scandalized by Ms. Jackson’s exposure of one of her breasts on live television at last year’s event. She blamed that on wardrobe malfunction and her male co-entertainer tried hard to sound flustered with embarrassment.

It got us wondering that America, the most modern society on earth and the beacon of democracy and freedom, where near nudity in mainstream entertainment is thought to be part of all that notion of liberty, and pornography is a legitimate billion-dollar industry, why such fuss over the exposure of one breast and an accidental one at that? Supposing that americans did not buy Ms. Jackson’s excuse, is she as ignorant as many of us to have overestimated the american public’s liberalism (read libertinism) and mature self control? And it was not America’s sudden prudish moment of moral puritanism as the media blitz on the court trial of her more famous brother demonstrates. So, us naïve ignorants now know that even in America there are still lines that should not be crossed in matters of morality and decency, even when there are no victims.

That brings me to the question of wether or not legislating morality is anti-progress and uncivilized backwardness, which formed the backdrop to the recent debate that followed the JAWI enforcement officers highhanded treatment of muslim youths detained at a discotheque on the eve of Eidul Adha. The question was all the more vexing as I was travelling from Thailand to Saudi Arabia, two different moral planets for all we care. What is clear is that the unprofessional behaviour of some JAWI officers during that raid is categorically unacceptable and they should do something about it, and we will rest the matter there. Much less clear is wether legislating morality on the basis of religious teaching is acceptable in an age when we are supposed to have outgrown the need for moral crutches that religion affords. What is equally unclear is wether it is acceptable to the general muslim sentiment, in a country where Islam has a special place in its constitution, that on the eve of the climax of one of the religion’s major worship, some of us are in a state of behavior that thumbed its nose at its moral teachings? (I have to stress that non muslims are at liberty to indulge in all the good and pleasurable things in life anytime, anywhere as long as it is within the law).

Is it acceptable, within the framework of liberal political values that once one chooses to be a muslim, one has to give up certain public non political freedoms to conform to the religion’s basic moral teachings as it might offend the sensitivities of his/her fellow muslims and insults Islam’s status that the constitution affords? Putting in another way, is the right of muslims to consume alcohol in public as fundamental as the right to a fair, open trial and access to legal counsel? Can a muslim who is denied entry to the Genting casino file a complaint that he is discriminated against and deprived of his right to pursue “happiness”? Is such a right within the grand idea of liberty that Jefferson had in mind when he drafted that immortal document?

In this post modern age, defending religious morality is the most uncool thing. In a rapidly secularizing society, as in some parts of Kuala Lumpur where some of us feel we need a passport to enter, arguing for legislating morality and decency can be a sisyphean task, especially when terms from the human rights language are “liberally” borrowed and misapplied. People who are supposedly to be modern and rational will, in knee-jerk fashion, heap abuses like “uncivilized”, “going back to the middle ages”, proponents of “talibanaysia” on proponents of religion-based morality. In other words, we can never be civil or rational beings. But that’s okay, I can tolerate name-calling.

But let us not confuse liberalism with libertinism. Liberalism, which is about fundamental freedoms, has become universal and enshrined in every constitution even though they may not be respected. Nobody would argue of its unchanging universality of time and place, that no person should be deprived of his/her liberty without a fair trial, everyone is entitled to freedom of conscience and thought, and dignity is a basic right. No less than any liberal, someone with a religious outlook desires as much a transparent, representative government that ensures the protection of minorities and distributive justice, such that hunger, poverty and ignorance would no longer be the lot of the common man. Such an outlook is not the monopoly of those with a secular liberal view. In this regard we have great disagreement with the Taliban of recent history and we would resist Talibanaysia just as vehemently.

But libertinism is a totally different creature. Its definition is time and place bound, and to a very great extent defined in context of a society’s cultural and religious norms. What is socially acceptable in Patpong and Pattaya is libertinism in Riyadh. In the Malaysian context, people who adhere to traditional values, both muslims or non muslims, would conceive this differently as from those who choose to adopt the consumerist hedonism of the post-christian, post-modern western mass culture mistaken as liberalism. It happens that in 2005, much of Malaysia is not yet Bintang Walk or Bangsar. The general muslim-malay Malaysians are still quite traditional in sentiment and outlook. We may have to wait until 2020 when Malaysia would have achieved its progressive, developed nation status. Perhaps then, only a minority of malays/muslims would be offended by our youths partying away in the hedonistic milieu of a discotheque on the eve of the Wukuf of Hajj, and no one would really complain the melding of liberalism with libertinism.

What was also confused in the unpleasant, sometimes insensitive debate was labeling these social strictures under the purview of institutions like JAWI as strictly Islamic. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, this is not quite correct as many of these laws are not directly drawn from the Islamic moral code. For instance, the personal dress code for women and men (aurat) required in Islam is something else but the lines drawn by the Sharia code in matters of public decency is much less stringent in the Malaysian situation. It is accepted that the proper practice of Islamic teachings rests on education and self realization rather than legislation. But this does not negate the necessity for some sort of legislation on morality and decency as any functioning society would.

The argument by one prominent newspaper columnist that morality should be left to parents, and everyone should be mature enough to rein in their desires and behave within the accepted parameters of public morality demonstrates a naively shallow understanding of human nature. That the majority of people can exert self control and remain within the accepted norms of civilized behaviour does not negate the need for legislating morality, wether derived from religion or secular ethics, the least of its purpose is to protect minors. There is a big grey area between fun and victimless moral “offences” and those that may ruin many young lives. Having sexual relations with a biologically mature and fully consenting Form 5 girl may seem perfectly reasonable to modern sensibilities, and no real rational reason why not, but why is it morally reprehensible as much to a secular ethicist as to a person with a deep religious outlook, that nobody disagrees that it is a major criminal offence? Many western countries even have legislations that prosecute their citizens who sexually exploit children while on holiday jaunts in Thailand and Philippines whereas we don’t. As long as man remains man, there is no running away from legislating morality.

The question is not wether we should or should not draw a line in matters of morality and decency, but where to draw and how. Secular ethics, but more often the cultural norms, tradition and religious values of each society guide and inform this process, and this is reflected in legislation. But where does secular ethics have its roots, if not in the christianity of the age of faith? In some conservative american states we were told, until very recently, sodomy and oral sex between married couples are theoretically punishable offences, something that ostensibly has its basis in christian teachings. In Saudi Arabia, Islam’s many aspects of the personal moral code e.g. in matters of dress, alcohol consumption and the mixing of sexes find their way “as is” into legislation. In contrast, the Malaysian Shariah code does not adopt “as is” Islam’s personal moral code but merely reflect its teachings on modesty and decency. Just to illustrate the point, not wearing the tudung for women is not an offence in the Sharia code. Nevertheless the scholars of Islam agree that it is an obligation but conforming to it is a personal responsibility and not the state’s. What is adopted as legislation is also bound to evolve with varying degrees secularization in societies touched by modernity. Occasionally, it may swing to more prudish moral legislation with periods popular religious revivalism.

It needs to be appreciated that this is one area of legislation where the WTO and the IMF have no interest to intervene, where a society’s laws on morality and decency can truly reflect its traditional culture and religion. Paradoxically, when we wish to exercise that last shred of sovereignty, we are derided as proponents of “Talibanaysia” and as uncivilized barbarians by the very people who condemn at every opportunity of US hegemony and the destruction of local cultures by late capitalism’s consumerist materialism.

Finally there are two aspects of being muslims in Malaysia, one is identity and the other doctrinal. Unfortunately the debate and controversy regarding the Sharia legislation on morality and decency only looked at Islam as identity. From this perspective, of course it makes perfect sense to argue that a muslim is deprived of his right to pursue happiness when he is denied entry into the Genting casino and therefore it is only right that he lodges a complaint of being discriminated against on the basis of identity. But much more than identity, the profession of the Islamic faith is a matter of personal conviction in its doctrine, chiefly accepting the oneness of God (tauhid) and the prophethood of Muhammad as the last messenger in a line of prophets that included Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Outwardly, acceptance of this doctrine, apart from the obligatory formal rituals (rukun or the pillars of Islam), entails following some personal moral code that is seen as restrictive and outmoded in today’s consumerist culture of instant gratification. Restrictive and outdated this may be to outsiders, to muslims, living a moral life in submission to God’s will is supposed to lead to inner peace and salvation, which is akin to T.S. Eliot’s beautiful christian phrasing of “Our peace in His will” or Dante’s famous saying “In His will is our peace”. The meaning of the word “Islam” in arabic is both “peace” and “submission”.

From this other perspective which is premised upon obligations and responsibility upon profession of faith, a muslim who complains of discrimination on being denied entry into the Genting a casino or to consume alcohol in public, needs to think twice before he/she cries of victimhood.

I am not sure wether the Sharia code which legislates morality and decency, which is applicable only to muslims, will make us more deeply religious. That may not even be its purpose. That relies more on personal effort at understanding the religion and honestly following its teachings, but at least the existence of the Sharia code, which is not without its humanly imperfections, serves the aspiration of muslims in seeing Islam remain in its rightful place as the religion of federation as accorded by the constitution, and the worldwide recognition that Malaysia is among the exemplary muslim nations. For this, we have to accept giving up some of those pleasurable rights that our muslim friends enjoy.

At any rate, the people who cry victimhood are actually having the last laugh. With rapid secularization and relentless adoption of the western lifestyle among urban malays, it is an uphill task trying to enforce such a legislation beyond mere tokenism, especially when the offences are largely victimless. It is much easier to enforce against illegal hawkers and peddlers of illegal VCDs, as both enforcers and offenders come from the same social class. Both are English-inarticulate and have virtually no access to the media. The same is not true for the JAWI enforcement officers who have to deal with the clients of expensive trendy discotheques in KL’s trendiest areas. The power of money and status is limitless.

Dr. Mazeni Alwi

Deal with morals of ‘wayward youth’, says MPF
by Nurul Nazirin
Feb 8, 05 3:49pm

The public outcry over the raid on a Kuala Lumpur night spot by the Federal Territory Religious Department (Jawi) has missed the bigger picture – the “moral waywardness” of youth, says the Muslim Professionals Forum Bhd (MPF).

In a statement signed by MPF chairperson Dr Mazeni Alwi, the group said it would like to see the discourse rise above the intensifying accusations against Jawi .

“We lament the moral waywardness of our youths, the social problems arising out of the loose sexual mores and their lack of (self-confidence)…,” said the statement.

“Yet the sensitivity of Muslims who make up the majority of the population has never been taken into consideration in this emotive affair.”

The Jan 20 raid earned notoriety after it was reported that Jawi officers had, among others, verbally abused the Muslim women, who were among 100 youths detained during the raid, by passing lewd remarks about their attire and taking photographs of them.

Contacted today for elaboration, MPF board member Dr Musa Mohd Nordin said “very little is being done” about the behaviour of youths, although many have criticised the religious officers for humiliating them during the operation.

Musa said the focus has been on issues of legality of the raid, human rights justifications, how future operations should be conducted, and why laws should be reviewed.

“If Jawi has conducted its operations badly, the officers should be disciplined. However, the misconduct of the youth will also need to be dealt with,” he said.

He noted that more should be done about the morality of youths, because this is not a one-off matter and the core issues have never been properly addressed.

Respect status

The group urged Malaysians, the government, community leaders and non-governmental organisations to be more reasoned and respectful of the sensitivity of others and the status of Islam as the official religion.

It also expressed support for a proposal by Women and Family Development Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, that future operations should involve women officials.

The MPF suggested that Jawi officials provide clarification in the face of allegations that they had mistreated those rounded up. If the allegations are proved, the errant officers should be disciplined.

In particular, the department should “protect and maintain the public image of Islam” within its powers of enforcement, ensuring that its personnel act in a more professional manner in carrying out their duties.

MPF is a local Muslim organisation that aims to promote Islamic studies and research, and to provide an Islamic response to the intellectual, educational, scientific and cultural challenges encountered.

The organisation was set up on July 23 last year by Dr Jemilah Mahmood, Farah Abdullah, Zainal Abidin Jamal, Dr Sarah Haniza Abdul Ghani, Mazeni and Musa.

Revisiting Highway 61
by Dr. Mazeni Alwi

The Hajj season came and went. In today’s fast-paced life with its glittering infotainment and distractions, it passed with the slightest of notice for many. In an age where organized religion has to constantly adapt and make concessions to modernity, some secular observers may find it is a fascinating spectacle, that such a religious rite has managed to survive the uniformizing banality of consumerist materialism. To others, it is simply the most visible anachronism of the modern age – God commanded his prophet to sacrifice his son, what could be more absurd than that? At this time of the year, newspapers and television seldom fail to show pictures of muslims slaughtering sacrificial animals and working away at their carcasses in commemoration of that sacrifice, too bloody and uncivilized for our sanitized view of things that animal lovers like Brigitte Bardot could hardly conceal their disgust.

This year, Hajj, the other “Hari Raya” that is finding itself increasingly relegated to insignificance came not long after a natural disaster that have left many shocked by the scale of its death and destruction as much as by its unexpectedness, and on top of that, the extraordinarily wide extent of its geographical impact. It also happened that the vast majority of those who perished were muslims. We have of course heard of the various positions held – a purely geological phenomenon that has nothing to do with God whatever one’s idea of Him might be, whereas at the other end of the argument, it is explained purely as divine retribution on a wayward humanity to beat us back into a life of virtuous religiousity. But whatever position one takes, of all the major tragedies, either natural disasters or those that result from human folly, we have never seen such a universal outpouring of concern and generosity for those who have suffered and lost.

For the first time perhaps, amid the distractions and a secure sense of hubris we accept that life is indeed fragile – almost in a flash, vast widespread destruction can be wreaked by something which is very much part of our environment, a source of livelihood and a place of leisure that has suddenly turned into awesome walls of crashing waters, destroying everything in its path. Was it is just a freak accident of nature or was it a foretaste of the infinite power of God, or wether that has altered our world-view at all, it must have been in the thought of many in our quieter, private moments.

In this secular age where organized religion, at least its ritualistic forms, is merely a cultural heritage and an identity thing that one readily jettisons as something nonsensical as one becomes a thinking mature person, the sense of life’s fragility may have jolted some of us back into accepting God into our consciousness and world view.

For the muslim believer Hajj does evoke that similar sense of human fragility and smallness in the face of God’s awesome presence – in the way that one feels vulnerable, dependent, and utterly alone when in actual fact one is among a sea of people all dressed in white on the plains of Arafat.

The central theme of Hajj is the commemoration of the drama in the encounter between man and God, as muslim pilgrims retrace the steps and re-live the saga of prophet Abraham and his family. The objective of reliving the drama is to re-affirm Abraham’s message of uncompromising monotheism (tauhid) and wholehearted submission to the one God (needless to say the muslims’ belief in this drama is purely rooted in faith in the scripture and prophetic tradition as this was all before recorded history).

In this post modern age whose temper is one of skepticism and cynicism towards sacred traditions, re-inforced by a sensibility that has seen too much images of death and violence, and in an age where we consume filet mignon and foie gras without having to make the connection with the slaughter of animals, the drama that Hajj re-lives each year may seem absurd- that God could have commanded his prophet to sacrifice a beloved son.

Today, with the hold of religion in the west is greatly weakened and the rest of the world rapidly secularizing, such anachronism may be peculiar to muslims. But generations ago, when the presence of God still loomed large in man’s consciousness, such notions of sacrifice was also current in the Christian world although the details may differ. Rembrandt immortalized the drama in his 1636 painting “Abraham’s Sacrifice” based on the story as narrated in the Book of Genesis. At the most crucial moment, as the son’s lithe youthful body lay stretched on the alter and his head covered in cloth, an angel pins Abraham’s arm, and the knife drops from his hand. In the Christian narrative, the son that God had commanded to be sacrificed was Isaac, “Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an alter there and placed the wood in order, and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the alter, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am”. And He said “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me”. Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horn. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. In the muslim tradition, the son in question was not Isaac but Ishmael, the son of his younger wife, Hagar. In the Quranic narrative the anguished and agonizing Abraham disclosed his predicament to his son, whom, to his surprise, readily submitted, “My son, I see in a dream that I shall sacrifice thee”. “My father, dost as thou art bidden, thou shalt find me among the steadfast”. As in other narrations of earlier prophets, the muslim scripture and tradition is silent on the details, but it parallels the Christian version in that Ishmael was saved by Abraham’s sincere devotion and obedience to God. In the end it was a sheep that was sacrificed and Ishmael went on to become a great prophet like his father. That was the basis for the sacrifice of animals during Eidul Adha.

In both the muslim and christian narratives, the moral of Abraham’s sacrifice is really about testing the limits faith and submission to God, for, it would be unthinkable that God would ask for a human sacrifice from his loyal servant. But still, such a notion must be profoundly unsettling if not illogical to the cultivated cynicism of the modern age such that it is fair game for someone like Dylan to write in his 1965 song, “Highway 61 revisited”, “God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”, Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on” …. “well, where do you want this killin’ done?” “Out on highway 61”.

Even if Dylan later in his life were to embrace Catholicism and then convert to Judaism, the irreverent lines from the song pretty much sums up post-modernism’s posture towards the sacred. For Christianity, the lesson from Abraham’s sacrifice perhaps does not occupy a central place in its theology, hence it is spared much questioning, Dylan’s song not withstanding. But for Islam, the story of Abraham has become its principal message, the uncompromising belief and submission to one God (tauhid), such that it Islamized the rites of Hajj from pre-Islamic Arabia, incorporates it into one of the five pillars of Islamic worship, and it is celebrated as a major festival by muslims the world over. Everyday, muslims pay salutations to Abraham, the father of monotheism in their five daily prayers.

In today’s information age, Hajj is perhaps the most visible of Islam’s ritualistic devotions. The swirling sea of men and women clad in white around the Kaaba, the gathering on Arafat, etc may fascinate some observers. But I guess to many others, it is probably seen more in a negative light. We have long become familiar with criticisms from animal lovers like Ms Bardot, but it is the recurring tragedy like the scores of pilgrims crushed to death every now and then in stampedes while performing these rites that are most unsettling, and one may be forgiven for making the connection with the notion of Abraham’s sacrifice. Is the use of human sacrifice on September 11 in New York and subsequent terror acts in other parts of the world also part this notion?

Given that the muslim world is a world of poverty, disease, corruption, lack of civilized norms and behaviour, violence and bloodshed, dysfunctional societies and institutions – is Hajj the ultimate proof that violence and irrationality are in Islam’s DNA? May be it is time for some very serious introspection – has the edifying lessons of Hajj been lost on us because we are unable to penetrate into the heart of its symbolic rites?

The recent tragedy from the Tsunami disaster has thrown up some unpleasant things, apart from the enormous death toll. The most embarrassing for us was to learn that the oil-rich muslim states were the most miserly in terms of extending financial aid to the victims of the tragedy. This may not accurately represent the muslim character as individuals but the fact that it is widely reported in the international media leaves us something to chew on.

Hajj is really about the individual and one of the lessons from Abraham’s sacrifice is the taming of our ego, our pretentiousness and unbridled ambitions, our unchecked desires for wealth and power. These are our “Ishmaels”, those things we hold dear that we have to learn to “sacrifice” or purity. While Islam does not advocate excessive ascetism and the negation of the material world, one nevertheless should not be a slave to wealth and power. The pursuit of our ambitions and wealth must be within the parameters of ethics and not trample on the rights of others. With modern air travel and growing prosperity among some of us, might we risk turning Hajj or Umra (minor pilgrimage) into the most ironical symbol of conspicuous consumption when it is meant to be a once in a life time obligation? To cater for the demands of the well-heeled among us who bring along our appetites for KFC and Burger King to the Holy Land, already luxury, hotels and shopping malls are mushrooming around the Masjidil Haram, displacing convenient lodgings for the poorer pilgrims and what used to be waqf accommodations for students from around the world who came to study at the Grand Mosque.

If Hajj is about reaffirming the Oneness of God (tauhid) and mortal man’s relation to his Creator, its parallel message is how man should relate to his fellow beings, of treating others with respect and dignity. This message is imparted in the way all distinctions of race, skin colour and social class are abolished as the pilgrims gather at Arafat (wukuf) and circumambulate the Kaaba (tawaf). That great lesson of Hajj had a profound and transforming effect on the charismatic Black Muslim, Malcolm X. During his pilgrimage, he saw the true brotherhood of Islam and repudiated the reverse-racism of the Nation of Islam of America’s black muslims. The great humbling experience of Hajj is laying everything bare except for the 2 pieces of unsewn cloth, and being dissolved in a sea of people of all nationalities, and of seeing poor pilgrims from Africa or the subcontinent absorbed in their devotion despite their bare financial means and spartan existence.

Another of Rembrandt’s work from the same period that was inspired by the biblical narrative was “Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael”, showing Hajar being sent forth into the wilderness at the behest of Sarah, Abraham’s older and infertile wife. Ishmael was the little boy at her side, while Sarah was observing their departure from her window.

In the muslim traditions, Abraham was commanded by God to take Hagar to go and settle in the barren and uninhabited valley of Bakka (Makkah). This was the beginning of a series of what may seem as illogical commandments that culminated in the “sacrifice” of Ishmael. After Ishmael was born, Abraham was commanded to leave the mother and infant in that barren valley. With Ishmael crying of thirst, Hagar ran back and forth between the hillocks of Safa and Marwa in search of water. When she returned despairingly to her infant, she found gushing water in the sand where Ishmael had dug his heels as he was crying- this became the well of Zam-zam, the eternal spring that drew traders and settlers to the valley of Bakka, to worship at the house of God that Abraham and Ishmael later constructed. One of the obligatory rites of Hajj is Sa’ie, briskly walking between Safa and Marwa, the re-enactment of Hagar’s search for water for her thirsty infant. An insightful explanation as to its significance was given by the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati, all the more relevant given the stagnation and decay of the muslim world today. To him it symbolizes the need for man to utilize his intellectual faculty and physical ability, to strive to the utmost in meeting the demands of the worldly existence, while one’s faith in God is a source of hope and strength, as opposed to a fatalism that later crept into muslim culture.

These are the important lessons of Hajj that perhaps in our earnestness in fulfilling the physical rites, we may have overlooked the spiritual message behind its symbolism. Some introspection is perhaps in order. That muslim society today is characterized by poverty and decay, corruption, oppression of our own people, being dependent on others for knowledge and progress cannot be wholly blamed on history. It is as much a reflection of our failure to internalize the central message of Islam, of which Hajj has a lot to teach, especially on the relation between man and his Creator, on how we should behave among fellow man, and the dignified place of human effort alongside faith in God.