Akira Kurosawa's 'Rashomon' reminds us that even first-hand accounts can be unreliable. People tend to embellish their versions of an event and hide inconvenient facts to make themselves look good and to persuade listeners onto their side as to who the heroes and villains are.

In that 1951 classic film, a simple woodcutter returning from a trial for rape and murder in feudal Japan to which he was witness, takes shelter from the pouring rain under the ruins of the Rashomon gate.

He despondently recounts to the other travellers how the people involved were less than honest in giving testimony - the thief accused of the crime, the raped woman and the spirit of the murdered husband who spoke through a temple medium.

But in the end, even the simple woodcutter - whom the audience initially felt to be a truthful witness - leaves major holes in his recounting of the event.

The second International Muslim Leaders' Consultation on HIV/Aids (IMLC II) conference ended more than two weeks ago.

However, the controversial paper by Dr Amina Wadud and the verbal fracas that it provoked still animates the English press ('Clouded by obscurantism' by Rose Ismail and Aniza Damis, NST and 'Urgent request for more charity among Muslims' by Askiah Adam, The Star, both May 25; 'Drawing Muslim leaders into fight against Aids' by Aniza Damis, NST , June 1).

Belligerent views

Divergence of positions between 'progressive' Muslims and those of mainstream traditional persuasion is often thrown into sharp relief on issues that touch on gender and sexuality.

The debate not infrequently becomes emotive and the atmosphere highly charged, that the objective of the conference becomes lost in the confrontation.

In the English press analyses, those who sought to broaden the fight against the HIV/Aids pandemic beyond condom campaigns to include religious moral values were vilified as "obscurantists", "opposers", "resisters" or "retrogressives" by those who appropriated for themselves the term "progressive" and "liberal" Muslims.

The "progressive" Muslims quickly claimed the moral high ground by demonising their opponents as consistently failing to show understanding and humanity towards Aids sufferers and instead, condemning and passing moral judgement on them. They are obdurate and belligerent in their medieval views of women and sexuality.

In truth, there is a lot that Muslim religious leaders in Malaysia need to learn about the nature of the Aids pandemic, how to treat sufferers with kindness and humanity, and to be non-judgemental about what people do in their private lives.

This failing has been repeatedly highlighted and rather unfairly amplified in various feature reports. But then, this was perhaps the first time that there was exposure of the examining of complex social problems beyond the simple black and white of religious moral sanctions.

If the objective was to bring the mainstream ulama into a consultation to fight HIV/Aids, then they should perhaps be treated with more respect and understanding.

Media darlings

The progressive Muslims appeared to have gained a lot of sympathy from the English-language reading public as victims of the retrogressives' moralising and obscurantist attitude to sexuality and gender. But does the press tell the whole truth?

Well, like the characters in 'Rashomon' ( photo ), everyone tells the story the way they want people to hear it, and we all understand how the media works in Malaysia.

While the Malay press may sometimes be overly critical of progressives like Sisters in Islam (SIS), it is ithe other way around in the English media. The 'progressives' are media darlings and their opponents are cast in the worst possible light, with no recourse for rebuttal or defence.

As expected, the reply from Islamic Medical Association Malaysia (IMA) to the Rose Ismail report - which mercilessly demonised the mainstream "retrogressives" - was never published, even though some of the specifically religious references could have been modified to suit a mixed, general readership.

Although I was not present at the conference, I kept in touch very closely with what went on as these events were recounted by colleagues and updated daily on a net discussion group.

I have also had the privilege going through all the conference papers that were presented (including Wadud's) and the newspaper articles on the event.

Reason for walkout

Given the media's unbalanced accommodation of progressive Muslims in their demonisation of their nemesis, I think another perspective on the controversy is in order.

Firstly, the public may have been led into thinking that all those who protested against Wadud's paper are the typically conservative, patriarchal and chauvinistic ustaz and ulama who will not tolerate open discussions on gender and sexuality, who think of Aids as God's punishment for sexual permissiveness, and people who lack compassion and understanding towards Aids sufferers.

Yes, certainly there were such people in attendance, and the culture shock was probably too much to handle for first-timers to handle. But is everybody who disagrees with the progressives necessarily an obscurantist zealot?

What has been largely hidden from the public by the progressives is that the most effective challenge to their agenda was mounted by articulate Muslim medical professionals.

They led a walkout when requests to debate the controversial paper were turned down, and they quickly organised press conferences and issued media statements, as anyone who wants to be heard but is unfairly silenced would have done.

Rose Ismail commented that the dissenters were highly organised and able to come up with typed statements in a short time. That is hardly surprising as the protest was, among others, led by IMA Malaysia president Dr Musa Mohd Nordin.

The highly respected British-trained paediatrician and neonatologist is indeed a very articulate person who, at the same time, has a deep understanding of Islam.

Some of us might recall his appearance on a TV2 talk show some time ago, brilliantly fielding questions from the audience on cloning and reproductive technology. He is also a formidable debater at Malaysian Paediatric Association annual congresses.

Musa's secretary is a British-trained specialist in respiratory medicine. The other dissenter is Dr Ali Misyal, President of the Federation of Islamic Medical Association, a very warm, deeply religious, soft spoken and fatherly man whom I have the privilege of friendship for more than a decade.

For many years he was endocrinologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He later went back to Jordan and founded the successful and highly regarded Islamic Hospital in Amman.

He has been to Malaysia several times at the invitation of IMA Malaysia and the Health Ministry to address various issues related to medical ethics and Islam.

The IMA Pakistan president is an eye surgeon well known for his medical charity work among the poor. Then there were representatives of IMAs of United Kingdom, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Uganda and South Africa (well, Aids is, for all its social and economic ramifications, a medical problem).

Respected track record

So the controversy hardly has any parallel with the 'Persatuan Ulama Malaysia vs. Farish Noor' affair. It is also not true that all the dissenters are chauvinistic obscurantists who completely lack compassion, understanding and humanity towards Aids sufferers.

IMA Malaysia founded and runs Rumah Solehah in Cheras (Kuala Lumpur), a charitable halfway house that provides shelter, counseling, living skills and more importantly friendship and understanding to female Aids sufferers in a society that is still deeply ignorant and prejudiced towards people like them.

Rumah Solehah today has expanded to embrace children with Aids and has recently opened business premises managed by the inmates themselves to sustain some measure of financial independence.

The conference's advisory council and the various national IMAs have long recognised the pioneering effort of IMA Uganda in Aids education at community level though imams working from their mosques.

IMA Uganda in 1992 established the project 'Family Aids Education and Prevention through Imams', which provided training to 850 imams and 6,800 assistants, who then reached 100,000 families.

The progressives seemed to have deliberately portrayed the dissenters as uncaring religious moralists with a very distorted, narrow perception of the Aids pandemic.

The Muslim professionals well recognise that despite Islam's moral strictures, in today's modern multi-cultural society like Malaysia where sexual behaviour has become more liberal in contrast to homogeneous traditional Muslim societies, Aids transmission though extramarital sex or homosexuality and its spread to family members is a real problem.

No one would argue that condoms and safe sex are effective measures in controlling the spread of the disease among high-risk groups.

Arguments wrong

The dissenters' protest over Wadud's paper had less to do about HIV/Aids than with the fact that she had used the conference as platform to expound her revisionist feminist theology to denigrate mainstream Muslim beliefs and ethics in a language that many consider vulgar outside the circle of university militant feminists.

The gist of her paper, 'Vulnerabilities, HIV and Aids', can be summed up as: "...that Islam and Muslims exacerbate the spread of Aids and that a traditional Islamic theological response can never cure Aids" (page 3).

Well, she is right about the last part because the Quran has never been intended as a textbook of medicine or epidemiology, for as she said: "It will be impossible to refer to a specific Quranic verse or prophetic hadith that can stand as the foundation of the technical skills, medical know-how or research methods that could actually prove to bring about the solution". (page 14)

But she is irresponsibly wrong to say that "Islam and Muslims exacerbate the spread of Aids". This is the exact opposite to World Health Organisation statistics on the disease.

In the sub-Saharan nations of Africa, where as many as one in five people carry the virus, one can imagine the spectre of the humanitarian catastrophe that is slowly unfolding. However, Muslim nations north of the Sahara have among the lowest prevalence of HIV/Aids.

Similarly, Muslim minority groups in the worst hit African nations have much lower rates of infection. Experts have attributed one of the major contributing factors to the strict Islamic moral code.

The vulnerability of two innocent sub-groups - monogamous heterosexual women and their children - to infection through husbands and fathers was the whole edifice on which Wadud's attack on Islam and the Syariah was founded.

She drew from western feminism in equating Islam with "the tyranny of patriarchal domination through heterosexuality, that for the most part, marriage in Syariah is marriage of the women's domination" (page 6), and "the Quran itself as well as the Syariah is founded upon male sexual experience". (page 8)

In the context of Aids, she says a Muslim wife is "... defined in terms of her benign unconditionally sexually available to her husband...properly fulfilling this role of wife is fatal to some women...". (page 4)

It is regrettable that in some traditional Muslim societies, oppression of women is a known phenomenon and they may not be treated with dignity and respect. But Wadud's attribution of this directly to Islam's holy book and prophetic traditions rather than to interpretational aberrations was what formed the crux of the delegates' protest.

As part controversies have informed us, because of the way a religious text like the Quran is organised, it is easy to pick and choose certain verses while leaving out problematic ones and render them out of context to suit one's ideas - whether it is liberation theology, neoliberal economic theory or as in this case, feminist revisionism.

At any rate, the Syariah with regard to family law is not such a closed entity. Many jurists would argue that in a deadly transmissible disease like Aids, women have the right to refuse conjugal relationships without safety precautions or even ask for divorce if they know that their husbands carry the HIV virus.

Articulate opponents

But things would not have snowballed into a protracted confrontation between the "progressives" and obscurantists" had the organisers allowed her paper to be debated, given its very controversial content

But little did the progressives-dominated committee realise that they were facing a very articulate, literate and highly organised opponent. After much bargaining and arguments, the organisers relented to the dissenters' request and an hour-long rebuttal forum was held the next day.

Among others, Ali Mishal of Jordan gave a point-by-point rebuttal of Wadud's paper while Nazlin Omar, a veteran Aids campaigner from Kenya, defended mainstream Islam from a feminine perspective against Wadud's feminist revisionism.

According to colleagues, while the session's atmosphere was not exactly congenial, it was not one where delegates stripped and skewered Wadud as some quarters have claimed (this dispute can be settled by recourse to the session's transcripts).

That brings us to the question as to the role that Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (Jakim) played, being co-organiser of IMCL II with the Malaysian Aids Council.

Have their representatives been sleeping-walking through the committee meetings or completely sidelined in its planning stage, given that Wadud's 1999 book, 'Quran and Women: Rereading the sacred text from a woman's perspective' was declared haram by Jakim in 2001 and its circulation banned by the Home Ministry?

One cannot help but feel suspicious that Jakim with its suit-wearing ustaz - and given its resources and clout as a government religious body - has been taken for a ride.

Provocative views

It is also odd that for such a conference, a significant number of the invited speakers are known for their controversial and provocative views. They include Riffat Hassan and South Africans Ebrahim Moosa and Farid Esack, apart from Wadud herself.

Esack's book 'Quran, Liberation and Pluralism' (Oneworld, Oxford, 1997) borrowed heavily from liberation theology and proposed an iconoclastic revolution in Islamic methodology that attempts to make Quranic ethics conform to post-modern, late 20 th century western ideals.

He demands the abolition of gender-related dimensions of Quranic legislation which conflict with modern liberal values, and advocates female imams in mosques.

In the early 1990s, former South African president Nelson Mandela ( photo ) had promised Muslim organisations that Muslim personal law would be introduced following the abolition of apartheid. Esack, however, led a determined protest which resulted in the authorities changing their mind.

But views like Esack's and Wadud's can only thrive in authoritarian societies where mainstream traditional discourse in the media is hounded, caricatured or demonised, and where anti-tradition zealotry masquerades as liberalism.

In South Africa, Esack's constituency for his hyper-liberalism has shrunk rapidly since Mandela's victory and his Call to Islam Society no longer even exists.

Similarly in Malaysia, the community would be more intellectually robust and confident had the media been more balanced allowed open discussion and debates on Wadud's book.

Despite the bitter and fractious confrontations that lasted almost throughout the conference, at least the whole episode serves as a sobering starting point for a more civilised discourse between progressive and mainstream Muslims.

Aids prevention involves much more than condoms and safe sex, especially in Malaysia where disease transmission through sex accounts for only 12.9% of cases (and homosexual sex, 0.9%). The rest is through contaminated needles in IV drug users.

The Aids pandemic is too great a problem for any one group to appropriate the cause and claim to have all the solutions.

Calling oneself progressive and others with differing views as obscurantists is hardly a good beginning for consultation. It is just the other face of zealotry.