I was hoping Azly Rahman would actually take up the task of critiquing 'anti-hadis' or 'Quran-only' ideas for that would have been an interesting and meaningful piece.

Instead, what Azly has chosen to do is to conveniently lump artists, feminists and musicians into one group and then proceeded to accuse this group of a plethora of ills. According to him, not only is this group guilty of being zealous, ignorant and lazy but their disparate ideas also promote apostasy.

Moreover, he derives the substance of his claims from bizarre and cryptic ramblings contained in anonymous emails. Thus after stripping away flowery tongue twisters such as 'syntagmatic' and 'eschatological' it would appear that his piece is merely baseless ad hominem leveled at a diverse group of people with varied interests and agendas which he has chosen to simplistically dub 'anti-hadis cults'.

As a reader interested in religion and related subjects, I thought it was disingenuous of Azly to adopt the crude approach that he did. In order for meaningful discussions on contentious issues to be had, we need to move beyond shallow labeling and generalisations.

The truth, I believe, is far more complex.