As usual, anything the Kelantan government does for the well-being of their women and Muslim ummah is never good enough for Dato' Shahrizat Abu Jalil and all those in similar paradigm zone. She is worried about the RM60,000 spent on the roadshow alleging that the money can be used to help many who are in need.

If this is the kind of reasoning and logic a minister uses, then why do we spend so much money on launching the Nur programme which is under her ministry, beautifying our cities, sending Malaysian teams to scale the Everest, dropping a Proton Saga in the North Pole, have competitions on the longest, biggest, largest this and that, spend more than RM1.5 million per month just to maintain the landscape of Putrajaya, and the lists go on and on.

Aren't all these also "superficial and ludicrous" and sometimes outright embarrassing and stupid? Why don't we use all these money to build houses for the poor, build child-care centres for lowly paid working mothers, provide scholarships for students instead of them taking the PTPTN loan, etc.

If we are to add all the excesses and wastage of the current BN government, RM60,000 for educating Muslim women to dress acceptably according to Islamic standards is a pittance. Oh yes, please do pass on the names of the single mothers in Kelantan who cannot feed their children and we will take the state government to task.

The roadshow will help explain to Muslim women and men in Kelantan the religious obligation of covering the aurat, the Quranic and Hadith injunctions underlying the obligation, and what is really meant by covering the aurat and safeguarding modesty. Agreeably, already a majority of Malay women in Malaysia wear the baju kurung and the scarf. However, this is more of a habit, done not with the intention of abiding Allah SWT. The result of doing anything without understanding and internalising the true intention is the current contradicting phenomenon we see now in our society amongst Muslim men and women.

The scarf is like the chocolate chips advertisement, "now you see it, then you don't". When you go to work you don't have it on but when you go to the funeral or visit the terminally ill, you drape it around your shoulders or over your head. And we also see the Muslim girls wearing "tudung" and baju kurung to school and when you see them at the pasar malam they are in tight jeans, navel showing top and hair coloured in the hues of the rainbow (we now know why they opt to wear the "tudung" to school!).

We hear reports, too commonly now, the Muslim girls wearing "tudung" are the ones behaving immorally. We see couples, the wives covering the aurat perfectly and the husbands in shorts! Of course, there are those who cover "up" there but oops, bare their legs. All these manifestations only show the contradictions and confusions our Muslim community is facing.

Part of the confusion (partly thanks to some liberal Muslim women NGOs) stems from the fact that there are some loud-mouthed influential figures seemed to think that in Islam what matters is the heart or the faith. Their argument is that only God knows your inner faith.

True. However in Islam, followers either forget or are ignorant that faith is made up of three components - the acceptance of faith in the heart, the admission of the faith (with your words) and submission by action (your deeds). Our faith is not complete if one is missing. It comes in a package. We will have to take it or leave it.

If one can do all of them, praise be to Allah SWT for giving the guidance and the strength. If one can't, then pray for guidance and forgiveness and hopefully one day one can. Do not try to justify our own weaknesses and our disagreement with theologic argument and then drag the others with us. Is it because we are feeling a little bit lonely, because people around us have changed and we have decided to remain the same or do we feel that we are part of a diminishing specie and therefore must take measures to prevent this from happening?

So is RM60,000 too much to educate the public? This is not about patronising women but about liberating women. Muslim women should not do anything to please anyone else but for yourself and your Creator. If Muslim women cover up, how do the men gain? How do men dominate women when women cover up? If the patronisation of women is proportionate to the amount of clothes we wear, then does it mean the lesser clothes we have on, are we more liberated?

If we are worried about patronisation and exploitation of women, there is much more Dato' Shahrizat's ministry can do for the unfortunate women. What about the women who have to bare their bodies to sell cars and other products? To be pretty and sexy to "serve drinks" or to be "guest relations officers". Dato', you are barking up the wrong tree.

Put simply, I think some government bodies/ministers are going to spend much more than RM60,000 on the Ramadan feasting and the open houses this coming Hari Raya, feeding the already overweight Malaysians. Why don't all those allocations be put together to support single mothers so that they do not have to work but spend their time looking after their children?