Ramadan, Einstein, and a memory

by Azly Rahman

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Yes indeed the Muslim kids in Malaysia today have it easy during the fasting month; their conversations with Time is as speedy as the speed of the ‘Internet of Things’ (the IoT). Time is compressed in this global village characterised by the rapidisation of things. Relativity is the key word here as we speak of how the mind, body, spirit, and soul respond to the demands of the worldview of Ramadan.

Technology to ease the suffering of hunger and thirst has today progressed in Einsteinian proportions, as how the advancements have been made since Einstein scribbled his grand theory of everything, of Relativity and Black Holes, Worm Holes, and quasars and pulsars and said, in his broken German-English accent to the world:

“Here it is, my proof of the existence of black holes. One day (yes, about a hundred year later in 2015) and after the release of James Cameron’s movie Interstellar, you’ll have the proper instruments and a couple of great scientists mainly from Columbia University in the NYC to build that machine to see black holes. One day you’ll see my calculations come alive.”

How fast technology has changed and our conversations with modernity and hyper-modernity in this post-post-post Age of Techno-humanism have advanced, too. For Ramadan, today’s Muslim kids can sit in an air-conditioned room the whole day and play video games and check their Internet phones every six minutes and go take a two-hour nap, and next go back to the AC room and next, it’s break fast - or Bukak Posa Time!

Time is compressed. Technology has a life of its own, ‘a technologically-deterministic being’ it has become, as Marx predicted and alluded to in his magnum opus with Friedrich Engels, ‘Das Kapital’.

I remember my childhood days of Ramadan when technology in my house in my gangsta Malay village in JB was still in its Neanderthal stage. One step backward and it was the Age of No Tech, Low Tech, and one more step behind was the Age of the Perak Man... the age of the early man who got lost trying to decide which way to go: Bota Kanan or Bota Kiri. He went bald thinking hard.

He died waiting at the junction, at the crossroad of human evolution. He gave up. Although he was said to be a determined man who lived for hundreds of years (we need to check his birth certificate though), he gave up right there near Changkat Jering, now a dangerous highway. He was a brave man - he walked from Africa alone and didn’t know where he was going and ended up in Perak. Hence the name Perak Man.

But that is another story of why he walked out of Africa. I saw him once in the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur, a few years back. He was lying in an enclosed glass bed, tired from the long walk to freedom. He was all bones. He was bald.

Twelve hours felt like twelve months

I remember my childhood Ramadan of the sixties. It was pure torture. It was a Buddhist experience of samsara. Of a life of suffering. Of denouncing water, food, and other childhood Earthly pleasures. Although the suffering was about twelve hours, it felt like twelve months of dying, of the experience of the Perak man’s marathon solo-walking. Herein lies Einstein’s Relativity.

I had no iPhone nor iPad to play with, no PlayStation Seventeen to play games that have me shoot people. no blasting high-fi air-conditioning machine to ease the cells in my body and to freeze them pleasurably so that they would not wilt like raisins in the sun, as how Langston Hughes said about the self in his poem ‘Dreams’.

And I didn’t have 700 channels of junk on TV to help me escape the reality of suffering and to bring me to this Hollywood or Bollywood nirvana.

None of these I had. Nor was I as a kid fasting the full swing of 30-day delight as strong as our man, the Perak man. Every day of the journey, I felt my body slowly getting weak and turning into that Malay pancake called ‘lempeng’; a sorry state of beingness with the feel that by the Time the bilal hit the ‘kentong’ (sounding ‘tong... tong... tong...) or that bamboo ‘break fast announcement instrument from the kampong masjid yonder’ and next, by the time I heard the imam clearing his throat at the microphone like Matt Monroe or Louis Armstrong, ready to azan or ‘bang’ (not banging people’s head, mind you... but ‘bang’ means calling for the maghrib prayer - signifying the end of suffering,) and lastly... by the time she announced, “Lekas, boleh berbuka kita... orang dah bang tu...” (Let us now break our fast as the imam has called for prayer - by the Time all these happened, I thought I had already died, ready to be reincarnated the next day for another round of the hunger game.

So - it seems like - in Ramadan death cometh daily. The madman Mansur Al-Hallaj said that, too, running around the street yelling, “Ana al Haq... Ana al Haq... I am the Truth... I am the Truth”.

And then I would be alive again. Time. Time. Time. Relative is Time.

As the Quranic verses go: “Time. Verily, Man is in a state of Loss and Utter Despair. Except those who do Good and Keeps the faith and remind others to do Good.” In other words: To promote peace and to keep peace and to build peace, after making peace with the self.

So - with no AC, how did I ease the suffering? Here is what I did daily. The tempayan was my friend, I’d go to the bathroom and climb into the huge earthen-ware pot, turn on the tap, water would flow through the mouldy green hose, the tempayan/pot would fill up to the brim, and I’d be sitting in there as cool as the Perak Man in the Pahang River. Cooling myself with water coming to the level of my neck.

“Liiikkk kau buat apa lama lama dalam bilik air tu, nak... Dah dekat sejam.”

My mother would call out after an hour of wondering if I had drowned in the gigantic pot and died and perhaps transported to Africa and walked with the Perak man and get confused like him at the junction of Bota Kanan or Bota Kiri.

“Lik mandi mak... sekejap lagi habis. Nak sabun badan ni. (I am bathing, mother. Now is the soap-ing part...)”

Ultimate goal is the finishing line

I was happy for that Einsteinian hour in that day on the month of extreme test of spiritual endurance. For about twelve hours daily, I was both the Perak man and Siddharta Gautama or the ‘Buddha Matrieya’, wandering like Moses in an exodus for 40 years in the desert of my hyper-consciousness, in this Hunger Game called fasting - a game whose ultimate goal is the finishing line... to still be alive to hear the ‘tong... tong... tong...” sound of the masjid’s kentong. Mind-body-spirit game.

I suppose Einstein would agree. Life is not about finding happiness. It is about evading pain. Not about suffering. But to find victory in the battle within. The jihad within - and only within. And that jihad is Love and nothing else. In memory of the greatest Love - my mother.

Today, sixteen hours of my journey of the Perak man, in the blazing saddle heat of the New York Indian Summer Ramadan... I have felt nothing. I only eat one simple meal a day. A dead simple minimalist meal.

Thank you to the memory of the Perak man. And of course the tempayan, the huge pot in the bathroom. And the sound of the tong tong tong... I could still hear - from more than a thousand miles away!

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DR AZLY RAHMAN grew up in a village in Johor Baru, Malaysia and holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He is pursuing his fifth Masters in Fine Arts, specialising in Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Writing. He has taught more than 50 courses in six different departments and has written more than 350 analyses/essays on Malaysia. His 25 years of teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He has edited and authored six books; Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present, Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012), The Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013), Dark Spring: Essays on the Ideological Roots of Malaysia's General Elections-13 (2013), a first Malay publication Kalimah Allah Milik Siapa?: Renungan dan Nukilan Tentang Malaysia di Era Pancaroba (2014), and Controlled Chaos: Essays on Mahathirism, Multimedia Super Corridor and Malaysia’s ‘New Politics’ (2014). He currently resides in the United States where he teaches courses in Education, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Political Science, and American Studies. His forthcoming book, One Malaysia, under God, Bipolar, a joint project between Gerakbudaya and World Wise Books of New Jersey, USA, is his seventh compilation of essays on Malaysian Cultural, Creative, and Critical Studies. He is currently working on his eighth book, on Gifted and Talented Education in Malaysia, honouring a prominent educator. Twitter, blog

The Orlando Shooting and Malay-Muslim Gays, Part 1

by azly rahman 

The Orlando shooting that took the lives of 49 innocent people and injured more than 50 in a bar brought a sense of deep sunken-ness in my heart; I was grieving inside. Disagreement over one’s lifestyle choice should not lead one to take the lives of others. Only a bad religion would urge such a diabolical jihad. Grief brought me to my childhood memories and into my teen years at a high school I fondly call Bauxite High in Kuantan, Pahang in Malaysia.

My thought was: how could one commit mass murder - just like that? As if I have not understood well the complexity of psychosis and mental illness emblematic of this society called America - a society, as I have always spoken about in my lectures on Globalisation and Human Consequences, always a work in progress and in experimentation mode as a republic that chose, wisely, to keep Religion and the State separate.

A society that continues to struggle with definitions such as of equality, democracy, and justice.

God and King were buried with the installation of General Washington as the first president of the republic called America. Yes, America was named after the mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci who prepared explorers in the 15th century court of King Ferdinand of Spain to seek for newer worlds and to colonise them and subjugate the less powerful human beings.

With ships such as Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the Italian explorer Cristoforo Colombo or Christopher Columbus was sent to search for ‘India’.

A complex story of America emerged ever since - a story of globalisation in ancient times - globalisation of 500 years ago. In the story of America lies episodes of happiness, victory, madness, sickness, death, and mental derangement leading to a hundred over wars from the arrival of Columbus to the last few months to the departure of America’s first black president well-versed in the principles of democracy as well as demagoguery.

More stories are emerging of the shooter, including a report that Omar Matten was a ‘closet gay’ and could not come to terms with the complexity of the difficult evolutionary stages of his life. His life was as complex as the story of America.

As with anything I see, hear, and think, my mind would been in this globalisation-analytical-critical-complexity mode allowing it to feel what the issue was all about and to let me come to its natural conclusion as how my heart would feel as it dictates my mind to compute.

In contemplating the Orlando mayhem, memories of growing up encountering ‘gay-ness’ visited me. In my village I saw what ‘gayness’ looked like although I did not have a name for it. It was a story of my response to it as well as a brush with it and how the episode shaped my view of what this ‘thing’ is about. My narratives will consist of some observations - and confessions.

Encountering gayness

“Kita tarok Colgate kat mulut lah... he he he...” we giggled.

Before we go to sleep, we must put Colgate toothpaste on our lips, everybody in my team advised. I could not make sense of the advice until years later. As a young boy of ten or eleven, my soccer team would have ‘sleepovers’ to celebrate our victories or even losses in our kampong and inter-kampong matches.

Though one of the youngest, I was the captain of my team Garuda, a name I gave and a captainship I ‘appointed myself’, I prepared the team’s jerseys and using the shoe polish Kiwi-brand and a cut-out of the symbol of the Javanese mythical bird Garuda (I created) I ‘printed’ the logo on all the white T-shirts my team would wear at every game - home or away.

Home would mean the field right in front of my house - a balding field. Away would mean in some village outside of my ’hood Majidee. We’d walk for miles at times to go for our away games.

But for the ‘Colgate-on-the-lips-for-personal-safety-and-chastity’ advice, I was not the captain, I listened attentively to the older members of my team. It was a giggly advice but I did not realise how serious it actually was, coming from those who knew what has happened before and what would happen that night.

“Pretty boy like you will need the thickest Colgate,” I was told. They giggled at me in their batik sarong, in their Burmese-national-costume-looking Malay pajamas. We would be taking turns telling ghost stories. At the back of our minds, going to sleep became an anxiety bigger than waiting for another story of pontianak to be told.

On the field he was a towering figure. I supposed he was more than six feet tall and he has a look of Rock Hudson, a Javanese actor, and what looked like a model from a tribe in Papua New Guinea, nicely combined. He was a dark-skinned Muhammad Ali-complexioned soccer player. I did not remember how he came to volunteer to coach Garuda, my team.

He would show us all the new moves in football and make us feel as if we were the Under-12 Youth of the Brazilian team.

Soccer or football was my life. A huge part of my life as a child. You take away soccer and you take away my legs. I live, breathe, dream, and think soccer. I’d even kick an imaginary ball everywhere in my house - in the living room on the wooden floor, in the wooden kitchen when grandma was cooking her gangsta chicken curry, and even in the bathroom when I was bathing naked with the huge earthenware pot (tempayan) in front of me.

I’d kick an imaginary ball and imagine myself the captain of Brazil - naked! Eleven-year-old naked captain. My mind was totally soccerised.

That beautiful sports of the underclass, like that of the Brazilians, was my other religion, And Pele was my prophet. Yet, Mr Edson Arantes do Nascimento was a prophet - of soccer. As a kampong boy I met many prophets and angels. And ghosts, too. And madmen as well. Orang gila-ism. Mat Gian as well. Drug addicts - definitely. Stoned and smoking hot kampong I grew up in. Gangsta ganja high many of the young people were.

But soccer made me a full human being, made me a real boy.

He would always be there in his light-coloured sports-shirt and his short pants. He'd be there as early as an hour before evening practice starts and would run around the field tagging along some of us who were there early.

We would be like two sets of seven dwarfs and he'd be like a Malay ‘Andre the Giant’. We’d be huffing and puffing and he’d be smiling while running two laps. His voice was commanding yet gentle. He was well-respected by his peers in the field although I once heard a villager refer to him as “Abraham the (Female Private Part)”, “Yem P...” in Malay.

Yes, I heard that and was trying to figure out what that meant and what kind of person he was. It was not a nice word I knew, especially when translated and used as a man’s family name - “Yem P...” in Malay. Not honourable at all. That designation of a man our team respected was a subject of my curiosity and my deep contemplation, leading to the incident of smearing our lips with thick, white Colgate-brand toothpaste.

Next week: Orlando shooting and Malay-Muslim gays, Part II

Read more: https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/345634#ixzz4BroqdOcp

Ramadhan myth of the Shackled Devil

by Azly Rahman

When I was very young, learning how to fast in the month of Ramadan, given all the lessons on how to be a good human being and go to Heaven, taught how to calculate and compute the good deeds I do, including walking a mile to the village masjid counting the steps I take, eliminating evil thoughts, praising my parents, my villagers and God in every breathe doing and all those a good ol’ Johorean religious education accorded me, I was always told that in the holy month, the Iblis/Mr Shaitan/Monsieur Diablo/The Fallen Angel/The Jebat-Malaikat reincarnate or whatever one calls as the Evil Guy who challenged The God to a game of finding followers (like the US presidential campaign for votes) - I was told that he would be imprisoned.

Ramadan - month of Imprisonment. I walked and talked - I’d count my steps and said my mantra “O’ God O’ God’ at every breathe, in hope that the Devil with Bling-Bling of the Seventies would not jump into my inner space.

Only on the first day of Hari Raya, the end of the fasting month and the day of the Great Victory, Mr Satan, probably wearing baju Melayu Telok Blangah Johor with a Gangsta Punk Rocker-Death Metal-Satanic Grunge Rock-Donald Trump-tattoo-inspired embalmed on his forehead would be released and allowed to have his ball of a-golfing and pole-dancing Prime-Ministerial Colombian Cartel-ish Hellish private-jet-setting time possessing me and my friends and those who are Muslims.

In three-piece suits and red tie and the Malay songkok, he’d be free to do his job creating chaos again. Hooray - free at last! Free at last! like Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s battle cry, Mr Iblis would sing his solo-a capella aloud, with a Muhammad Ali gusto. That gusto seen in Ali’s 1965 historic victory over Sonny Liston.

He’d be going into human hearts and whisper into our hearts to lure us into doing evil - stealing bicycles, playing ‘Tikam Tikam’ (Johor Chinese lotto and scratch-scratch gambling game,), and even drink shandy (low-dose alcoholic beer sold widely in JB), and continue to steal rambutans from neighbours.

I struggled thinking about how the Prince of Darkness looked like. But I know during Ramadan he would be incarcerated for at least 29 days - much longer than the British paedophile if you multiply every second on Earth equals to 1,000 years in Hell, making it many years of imprisonment - if you do the Maths.

I was happy the Havana Cigar-smoking Mr Devil-wearing Prada carrying a US$10,000 Birkin bag walking like a Ziggy-Stardust looking transgender from Jalan Bukit Timbalan, Johor would not be running around annoying humans of JB.

Then as I grow older I began to have serious doubts if indeed he was put away. I figure that if Hang Tuah was said to be put to death and was put away instead and did not die, I began to panic knowing that aspect of my belief would be shattered. A Kuhnian paradigm shift of a devilish magnitude was about to happen.

The great bard Shakespeare once said “Hell is empty and all the Devils are here (on Earth).” Wow - I began to get more scared. Maybe the ustazes who told me that were just parroting others before them who did not know much about the phenomenology and the politics of the Iblis or Devil-dom. Maybe, like many of my History teachers, they lied, too.

My History teacher told me that the Malacca sultans originated from Alexander the Great but when I read the Sejarah Melayu/Malay Annals, those folks did not even come out of human wombs but from foams and bubbles or foamy bubbles (buih buih) from some mystical Sanskrit-sounding ocean somewhere in a Hindustani Lala-land.

That was one big lie they told. I discovered more - stories juicier that just the foaming origins of the Malay sultans - creation myths crafted by some mentally and intellectually-slithering scribe named Tun Sri Lanang who perhaps was paid a truckload of durians by the Malacca sultan then. So, if Frank Zappa was the Father of Inventions, Mr Lanang was the Granddaddy of Lies.

A time for self-reflection

So - is Mr Satan Esquire shackled or not?

Ramadan, for the Muslims is supposed to be a time for reflection, self-reconstruction, and inner-revolution. It is supposed to cleanse the Muslim self-yearly of physical, emotional, as well as spiritual toxins. It is supposed to be the month of fasting practised as an extremely private act and that life has to go on as usual.

In Malaysia, after almost 60 years of Independence, we are supposed to see the fruits of inner sensibility, ethics, and humility of those fasting, displayed in public life.

But after 60 years, why have leaders we elect - especially Muslim leaders observing Ramadan - becoming allegedly more corrupt, arrogant, and abusive when power to rule others (and make lives more bearable) are given to them temporarily on the Earth?

If indeed the sixty Ramadans were supposed to make our country better, if we assume that sixty times a year leaders and the led have become more spiritual, why are we seeing the country turning devilish and those in power engaged in corrupt acts to the max diabolical? Why are we seeing the nation destroyed after three generations?

Why the massive loss of money, those political murders unsolved, those installation of newer acts that guarantees the crushing of good dissenting voices, and finally as of yesterday the gazetting of an act that ensures national security meaning the implementation of Draconian measures in full-force ready to crush, like the production of ayam penyet (beaten-to-a-pulp flattened-Indonesian originating-spicy chicken), anyone and even any leader or ruler trying to bring their state of Malaysia.

And to add to the list of diabolical signs and symbols of the times of the unshackling of the fallen Angel of Ramadan, we have religious-political leaders insisting that corruption, however massive and murderous at the most extensive of all scales, and however much the rakyat have suffered and will continue to do so for generations - corruption is not punishable by the hudud? Why? Why, why, why, Delilah?

Why - because the Devil was never shackled. Because it is a myth of Ramadan. Because he never was and never have been and never will. Because he has reincarnated - not as protons and neutrons - but as leaders in our midst.

Maybe those leaders in their old age still destroying the nations need to be, like the Fallen Angel, imprisoned. Or, the angels, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, should be clipped of their wings and be sent back to where they belong, if not turned into ayam penyet; that flattened chicken.

Read more: https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/344753#ixzz4B8ebHYwZ

METALLICA PARANOIA MALAYSIANA GANGSTA ROCK GENRE? ..

METALLICA PARANOIA MALAYSIANA GANGSTA ROCK GENRE? ..

METALLICA PARANOIA MALAYSIANA GANGSTA ROCK GENRE? ..

alright fine young religionistas ..
what's this paranoia over Metallica

to protest against rock kapak's finest gangsta
why not protest against the saudis and the egyptian massacre

leave those metallica folks to show their yellow culture
kids these days are becoming rockers and gangsta

in protest against the religionistas
a sure sign of a failure to teach them ethics and good behavia'

all because religionistas too are a tribal group of a postmodern culture'
supporting this or that regime whose politics they don't have quite a clear idea

whose fault is it, folks lend me your left ear ...
nobody' fault it's all paranoia

alright-- let us not fight over this group metallica
if you don't like them it's simple and clear --

stay home and listen to dangdut or dikir barat kampong guar cendana
you don't buy the ticket to metallica, you don't get to see them and enjoy
rock kapak' s glorious metal gangsta

have no fear
i too don't fancy metallica

i stay home and play the gambus of the ghazal and sing like the hindustani lata mangeshkar
but don't you ban led zeppelin either, you good religionistas

i will ban your acapella sung with turkish sitar
that is my paranoia

fear of old school rock kapak banned out of religious paranoia
okay-- fans of metallica

enjoy the show but don't do things gangsta
music is music
genre is genre
metallica is rock's finest gangsta

hush now religionistas
come one
come all
come to stadium merdeka 

-- azly rahman

Anything better to discuss, than the Hudud and Hudud and Hudud, Malaysians?

by azly rahman

Stoning to death. More lashes to the Friday caning. Syaria Law eventually for non-Muslims. Leave Malaysia if you don’t like how things are run. That puzzling and trumpeting Bangsa Johor rhetoric - as if nobody can explain what the concept of ‘nation/natio’ is. Sabah and Sarawak wish to leave the federation.

Criticise the county and you’re not allowed to go for your overseas holidays. Who owns Gold Star and why the deep secret? Syaria-compliant this and that. A possible boxing match with Dr Mahathir Mohamad, in Kuala Kangsar. Humans eating ‘dedak’ or chicken feed. Is Hang Tuah a real person? Is the Taming Sari we have now a fake dagger?

These are some of the topics dominating the discourse of our nation. Can we do better than this? Don’t we care about the intellectual future of our children? Don’t we want them to emulate good ethics from us and the adults they see in power? Don’t we have such moral and critical thinking obligation to them, leaving behind good lessons in their national lives?

That much we owe them, so that they could carry on rejuvenating society without emulating the political and psychological ills of today’s leaders.

I feel that Malaysia’s youth of the next generation is missing out on good and productive discourse plaguing the national debate on things. Malaysians have becoming more global, progressive, intelligent, innovative, and articulate - at least from my analysis of the stories of successes I have been reading.

We might be shamed in the cyberspace and international media with the massive and complex money-laundering scandal implicating our leaders and members of their families, but we are also reading stories of ‘global Malaysians’ - in the arts, business, and sociopreneurship - doing well inside and outside of Malaysia. They are proud calling themselves Malaysians.

But I feel that the discourse dominating the country is one plagued with the filth of retrogressive-ness our youth need not be subjected to.

From the Islamists wishing to push the completeness of the Islamic penal code, the hudud, to the ongoing fights between the members of the opposition and ruling coalitions, to the increasing paranoia over race and religion produced by the political leaders, the daily news of cases of corruption, robbery in broad daylight, the ongoing public arguments between the Johor Royal household with select Umno politicians - showing who can be more arrogant that the other - the malaise in our education system, and a host of other issues plaguing us, I feel that we are not moving in the right direction and taking advantage of the richness and talented-ness of our diverse population.

In other words, we are constantly at war with ourselves and that the goal of each political party is to destroy one another and for each leader to aim for the jugular - to rule the country.

As citizens we are not allowed speak up against evil-doings, such as the massive losses arising from the 1MDB fiasco although it is the right of each citizen to know what can happen to their life savings such as those in the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), the Haj Fund, and the fund allocated for the servicemen and women (Lembaga Tabung Angkatan Tentera).

Bipolar a nation we have become

We are asked to shut up or else be locked up if we dare speak of the fate of our hard-earned savings. Bipolar a nation we have become, paranoia our leaders are plagued with.

We are not allowed to do all these although as citizens - besides going out to vote - we are accorded the rights to participate in nation-building through making suggestions on how to maintain check and balances in a society supposedly progressive and democratic.

What a pathological state of democracy we are living in. What a shame for a country supposedly a ‘fully-developed industrialised society’ with first-class infrastructure and rhetoric of hypermodernity.

Today the dominant theme is (again) the hudud; of the Hadi-hudud proposal. I am sure by now Malaysians understand what the demands are and how Umno is helping to fast-track the proposal. Although items concerning the Islamic penal code are minimal, they do point to the inching of our country to the illusionary and ‘non-existent’ concept of an Islamic state.

Although punishments such as stoning to death and amputation are left out, they might be tabled again eventually when the Umno-PAS coalition on the ‘survival of the Malays’ and the ‘defence of Islam against its enemies in Malaysia’ becomes louder battle cries, especially for the Islamists wishing to turn Malaysia into a Taliban nation.

Today, the insistence is that the Syaria Law and hudud is only for Muslims, tomorrow it will be for all Malaysians, as political logic would dictate. Analysts on the scenario and the futurism of the implementation of Syaria law and the hudud have written about the complexity of the issue and how it can never be a suitable law in a country that prides itself in the superiority of man-made law as such as the Malaysian constitution.

The thought of stoning to death and amputation itself makes one wonder of the barbarism to be represented as a punishment supposedly ordained by a merciful, loving, and compassionate god -– God of the Religion of Peace. God who forgives more than one who gets angry all the time. Perhaps not many Islamic scholars in Malaysia have even inquired into the ancient cultural origins of such punishments; for example of the Pagan (Greek) and early Judaic origin of stoning which was then borrowed by Islam.

Today, stoning to death can be considered barbaric and inhumane and opposed to the United Nations convention on torture. Why subject a wrongdoer to a slow death? Would that be a philosophical question of today as the Hadi-hudud PAS-Umno proposal progresses?

These developments in Malaysia that are colouring the discourse on hypermodernity continue to take away our consciousness - especially of the youth - of more exciting things to work on: environmental issues, sustainability, newer technologies of peace, green technologies, newer jobs, newer hopes for world peace, appreciation of the arts, humanities and philosophies in school, good labour practices, respect and understanding one another cross-culturally, virtual reality, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and even new ways of crafting Malaysian politics so that the rich will not get richer and filthier and the poor taken care of well and re-humanised.

But we are not there yet. We seem to love letting the discourse on Medieval and Dark Age practices dominate us. We need to move beyond these. How do we do this?

Let us share as many ways. As a people let us not stone ourselves to death. As smart and peace-loving Malaysians, let us not amputate our intelligence; the gift of the intellect to be used for ethical and social purposes. Is not religion, from the Greek ‘religio’ about making peaceful connections and not about amputations or being spiritually empty after being stoned to death metaphorically?