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‘Zakir Naik needs to defend Islam in India’

I think Zakir Naik needs to defend Islam in India, more than tell us Malaysians what Islam should look like in a multicultural country. He needs to answer the charges presented to him.

Just when Malaysians are about to realise the need to have more transcultural, inter-faith dialogue, and to understand each religion and each ethnic group as unique worldviews we can learn from, in order to forge a nation of progressive and tolerant and collaborative peoples - as how Tunku Abdul Rahman envisioned - we have these types of preachers to mess things up.

The discourse of the ongoing devastating Muslim-Hindu conflict in India - of a conflict that has taken so many lives, since even before the India-Pakistan separation, is now going to be brought to Malaysia through TV evangelicalism.

Already statements antagonising the non-Muslims are being made by this fugitive preacher, by this man brought over for the Umno-PAS alliance, as perhaps a main attraction for the speeches for the coming elections.

Just when we are about to realise how much the non-Malays and non-Muslims are to be brought back as equal and equitable partners in this multicultural entity and polity called ‘Malaysia’, we have this type of speaker brought in, harboured, protected, well-fed, promised an island, and given Islamic-Malay type of awards - to speak on “troot... troot... troot” (truth, as pronounced in Mumbai English) till Islam is now seen as a defensive and for-no-reason-jihading religion in a political climate of “attack... attack... attack” as if we are all a society of reptiles with sub-standard reptilian brains holding to the art of war of ‘fight or flight’.

That's what the climate is now. Implosive. Explosive. Impulsive. Divisive. Chaotic. Corruptive, Corrosive Cataclysmic. You add to this list.

Nauseating it has been to go through the videos on how Islam is presented by this Indian preacher.

He debunks Darwin in a single saliva-spitting breath, he called Westerners pigs and said that they love to swap wives after wild parties, he argues about theories and facts and confuses the two in his attempt to promote his ideas, he talks about Islam as if it is a simple mathematical calculation of 2+2=4 and therefore the only truth, and a range of other deranged misrepresentation of the religion as a buffoonish, simplistic, one-argument- fits all cultural philosophy, and he uses half-baked perspectives of alternative views to spice his spittances and spurtations of what Islam is.

I am sure many of us have sat down and listened to his speeches on YouTube and perhaps many Muslims outside of India and Pakistan and his ‘PeaceTV’ radar have cringed and crawled in search of intellectual/philosophical solace after consuming the views...

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