Imagine yourself in 2020. GE14 has been and gone. Najib Abdul Razak has finally stepped down and done a deal with Hadi Awang, the leader of PAS. The deal has allowed Najib to live in exile. Naturally, in luxury.

The irony is that after years of turning a blind eye to the extremists, they finally ousted Najib and established hudud law, not just in Kelantan, but in all of peninsular Malaysia. Hadi’s wish for hudud came true.

The smile had hardly left Hadi's lips when his rule as PM was terminated. He was not religious enough, and was deposed by the Perak mufti, Harussani Zakaria. Harussani then made the one they call ‘the chameleon’, Haji Jho Low, his deputy.

The fall of secular Malaysia to an Islamic state and its steep descent into a conservative religious nation was swift. Now, people are afraid, and are forced to wear their religion on their sleeve. They do this not because they have become more pious, but to keep out of trouble.

Many of the Malays regret not heeding  the lessons from other hudud-ruled nations when they were ‘free’.

The Malaysians who in 2016 were naïve and believed Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, the then-deputy PM, who said hudud would only affect Malays, were numb when one morning after GE14, the headlines in Utusan proclaimed hudud for all, including non-Muslims.

The Sarawak bureau was swamped with requests to become Sarawakian citizens and unmarried Sarawak men and women were inundated with marriage requests. With hudud law, Sarawak threatened to secede.

This morning, I am being driven around KL. In the new Talibanised Malaysia, a woman cannot drive. The men who lived by hudud decided that women had to be chaperoned.

Many Malay men resent having to babysit a woman, and many of them dream of the life before when they could lepak in peace, and were not forced to accompany female family members wherever they went.

A vicious cycle

Far from a drop in crime, the statistics show an increase in all crimes, because people are starving, and steal to feed their families. When men and women have their limbs cut off, they cannot work and more people end up either begging or stealing food. It is a vicious circle.

Foreign maids are afraid of working in Malaysia because they fear being raped by their masters. Women who are raped know that they risk being accused of illicit sex and adultery.

The rise in backstreet abortions, because of unwanted pregnancies from rape, is high. Many women die, because they know that giving birth, even after being raped, is used as an excuse to charge them with illicit sex, for which the punishment is to be stoned to death. Women suffer the most, with hudud law.

The elite have cars, whilst the rest use camels for transportation. I peer through the mesh on my burka. The ruling mullahs have also decided that women should wear the full-blown burka. The rakyat is truly ‘1Malaysia’ because no one can tell if the wearer is Chinese, Indian or Malay.

The queues of women who are afflicted with fungal diseases and rashes in this hot and humid tropics are long outside the clinics. Being covered, has caused a rash of skin diseases.

The traffic jams are particularly bad when the people flock to the stadiums. Sport is less popular now. Men have to wear full Arab robes on the football field, and sports-women are a distant memory. It is widely circulated that even the Saudi Arabians are fearful of ‘Malaysian Islam’.

Stadiums are packed to capacity only during executions. People are bored and go for the entertainment, watching punishments and executions. Cinemas have closed down, because too much censorship has taken a toll on film makers.

Even the grounds around Dataran Merdeka have been ripped-up and drainage pipes installed. Drains are needed to channel blood from public executions.

The bridge between the Petronas Twin Towers has a new use. Lesbians, gays, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) people are thrown off it. Occasionally, it is also used to hang people, and display the bodies.

The cranes that were once used to build skyscrapers have a new life; they are used to display the bodies of the hundreds of criminals who are convicted by our glorious muftis.

At traffic junctions, heads of so-called criminals are placed above the lights, as a deterrent.
There is no more democracy. The order of the day is ‘mobocracy’. The mobs with the most guns are in control.

Meanwhile, the super elite live behind high walls in the township re-named Putrahududa. The rest of us are ruled by hudud. The ones in Putrahududa, are exempt from this barbarism.

MARIAM MOKHTAR is a defender of the truth, the admiral-general of the Green Bean Army and president of the Perak Liberation Organisation (PLO). Blog, Twitter.