It is indeed a testament to the sorry state of political discourse in Malaysia that clear arguments are replied with misrepresentations under the pretense of “nasihat”.
My short statement on Seksualiti Merdeka, published some two weeks ago, argued that the event should be allowed to proceed on the basis of free expression.
The LGBTQ community in Malaysia is a vulnerable minority and they must be allowed to narrate and explain the difficulties they have experienced as a result.
Muslims too lose nothing with considering discourses in other disciplines on the issue since sexual orientation and rights are already topics that are being discussed in Malaysian society.
Muhammad Husni Mohd Amin and Wan Mohd Aimran Wan Mohd Kamil from Hakim (Himpunan Keilmuan Muslim) responded with a 12 page retort replete with accusatory claims implying that I somehow rendered Seksualiti Merdeka as permissible in Islam.
My position
To be clear, I have already stated in my previous article that “as it stands, it is overwhelmingly clear that same-sex relations, indeed anything beyond the known standards of hetero-normativity, are not acceptable in Islam. The question now remains as to what kind of relations Muslims are to have with members of the LGBTQ community.”
My concern is a practical one. It was a plea for calm and rational discourse at the face of a rising frenzy against a minority community. I believe that as citizens with rights in Malaysia, the LGBTQ community should not be ostracised or alienated by other Malaysians of which Muslims comprise the majority.
At the most you will find a defence of the right of a minority community to live in privacy. At no point did I forward any argument to render homosexuality permissible in Islam. That is neither in my interest or capacity.
Thus there was no further need to make claims, as my two critics did, without any proof, that I somehow “uncritically accept Western values”.
Simplified generalisations
One of the more conspicuous features of the authors’ response was their repeated slew of gross generalisations about very complicated subjects.
1. Consider this: “Human rights as espoused by the West is a product of their collective guilt over past mistreatment.” The authors provide no reason, never mind citation, to support this claim.
It is interesting that “guilt” in the sense that the authors mean is nowhere mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In writing this article the authors too are already beneficiaries of the freedom of expression, which is a right accorded to all rational human beings due to their recognition of the need to live freely as an important aspect of their existence.
I am no apologist for human rights. There are indeed serious problems with how rights, in the modern sense that we know it today, were conceived - namely in their liberal-individualistic philosophical anthropology and the overt racism of their earliest ideologues. But their supposedly guilt ridden design is the least convincing argument against it.
Human rights nevertheless still matter because despite whatever philosophical problems they pose they remain the best methods against tyranny. Given the democratic framework we are working with in Malaysia, and the long way we have to go in living up to its promises, human rights remains the most viable moral justification with which we can protect ourselves as citizens.
2. Consider another bizarre claim from the authors: “The secular Western conception of freedom has failed to address the indignation of man which later results in him being delegated as mere animal thus enabling, to use Freud’s term, ‘rationalisation’ of any moral breakdown.”
First of all, they should be clearer on what they meant by “the secular Western conception of freedom”. There are at least three very loaded terms in that phrase alone. It is as complex and elastic a phrase as “the Islamic concept of good governance”. If we do not ground it to a definition, then it can mean anything to anyone.
Now on Western secularism: Kant had a rather secular conception of freedom and morality but he was definitely not among those who would rationalise any form of moral breakdown.
Existentialists, like Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre come closest to offering philosophical legitimacy for the kind of hedonistic notion of freedom that I think my critics were referring to, but Sartre and Nietzsche by no means were geared towards rationalising any moral breakdown.
They were moralists in their own distinct styles, but they were basically doing what philosophers – including my critics – tend to do, which is to argue for different vision of morality, albeit distinctly defined of course.
All this is to say that if we are serious about furthering intellectual debate about a certain issue we must be clear and careful with our terms.
At any rate, the crucial point remains that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which seems to be what people mean when they refer to “the secular Western conception of freedom” are doing precisely what the authors are trying to do, which is to prevent tyranny and the justification of all and any forms of moral breakdown.
The Declaration will of course have a different way of defining ‘morals’ and a different standard of what would constitute their ‘breakdown’ but it is not a justification for anarchy or the collapse of society.
3. You find the same kind of reductionism in their statement about the social and natural sciences.
The authors claim that the sciences are supposedly laden with “the values, hopes and purpose of the dominant civilisation that produces, practices and propagates it i.e. the values, hopes and purpose of the Western civilization.”
The authors also added that these values are supposedly obscured by the assumption that those sciences are by and large taken for granted as “‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’, eternally-unchanging and unaffected by the course of history.”
The problem here of course is that the authors seem to neglect that Western science itself is not as monolithic as they claim.
There is a great deal in the discourse of even Western philosophies of science that does not regard Western science as neutral, value free, eternal or unchanging (my critics might want to consider the arguments of Foucault, Feyerabend and Kuhn on these matters).
The point here is that terms like “the West”, “Western science” and “secularism” are not monolithic, all or nothing terms. Our use of them must be careful and informed, sensitive to the context and purpose (or purposes) we have in mind.
For example, what is the ‘West’? Is it an idea, or a geographical location, or both? If it is a geographical location, where does it begin and end, exactly? If it is an idea, or way of looking at the world, at which point did it start? Plato? Descartes? The French Revolution? On what basis is Islam to be placed in a binary and diametric opposition to this “West”?
These are the questions that those who are most dependent on the term “the West” should be reflecting on.
Hakim’s contradiction
In what was to me the most hopeful part of the response, the authors stated the following: “Prying into other people’s privacy is not prescribed under the Shari’ah, nor was there any government or religious body set up in order to investigate what are inside their thoughts.”
But then they claimed: “Islam does not recognise – as does Western Christianity – the separation between private and public spheres” while advocating intervention and healing programs for homosexuals.
On the Madinah Charter
My two page article began with a short quotation of what I thought was clause 43 of the Madinah charter. The quote says, “Anyone who is wronged must be helped”, which the authors claim is false. I take their point that I should have at least cited my source or explained it in detail.
But the authors then proceeded to argue that that clause 43 actually states something else, for which they proceeded to accuse me of “linguistic deception” and “twisting the facts.”
Now to accuse someone of deception is a serious claim. In effect the authors are saying that the statement “anyone who is wronged must be helped” is not present in the Madinah charter.
I couldn’t remember exactly where I found my quotation, seeing that two weeks had passed since I wrote the article. So I proceeded to turn to the book the authors themselves cited, which I also happen to own, which is an anthology called ‘Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook’ edited by Charles Kurzman.
I turned to the Ali Bulac chapter at page 172 which the authors pointed to and searched for the Madinah Charter there. I looked for clause 43 and sure enough it doesn’t say “Anyone who is wronged must be helped” as I had initially thought.
But then I paused to wonder why, such a simple common sense statement that urges us to help anyone who is wronged would not be there, especially given that the charter is essentially about the terms and conditions with which Muslims were to co-exist peacefully with their (non-Muslim) neighbors in constructing a polity. I trusted my instincts and memory enough to continue searching.
I proceeded to read the rest of the document and, lo and behold, I found it, albeit at clause 37. The sentence is translated in even more forthright terms: “No one may commit a crime against his ally; surely the oppressed shall receive help.”
Now, clearly the essence between the two versions of the sentences is the same. The statement commands us to help those in need. To disagree on the congruence between “Anyone who is wronged must be helped” and “Surely the oppressed shall receive help” would be nitpicking.
Curious, I read along more, and learned that there are in fact varying translations and annotations to the Madinah Charter itself, which makes perfect sense to anyone who researches in humanities for a living, since it is a very historic document that has undergone centuries of studies. This explains why I first found it as clause 43, and then found it at clause 37 in another document.
The point here is the basic common sense virtue to help those who need help is in clearly the Madinah Charter but my critics claim that it’s not, and then proceeded to say that I was the one twisting facts and engaging in linguistic deception. At best, they never really cared to look at the document closely. At worst, they did but were carried away by their eagerness to smear me. Wallahua’lam.
But as one reads further along their article, one realises that this is not even the issue. The authors don’t even think that Malaysia’s LGBTQ community is “wronged” in the first place.
Discrimination faced by Malaysia’s LGBTQ
The problem runs deeper than their hostile and accusatory style of thinking. Consider this odd claim from the authors, which I think should be quoted in full:
“We are not told how LGBTQs, simply because of their sexual orientations and gender identities, are discriminated and persecuted against. The organisers of Seksualiti Merdeka or even the writer from the so-called Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF) have not offered us any data or factual evidence to support claims of discrimination or persecution.”
My immediate thought upon reading this was: “Well, why didn’t you check?” You could’ve emailed to ask us, or pose it in the form of a question in this response. By the way, in the age of Google and YouTube, why would anyone have to WAIT to know anything?
Any researcher, of good scholarly conscience, knows that when a claim is presented to him or her, that the immediate task would be to verify that claim by looking into sources that would most likely be able to do that.
The LGBTQ community in Malaysia is one of the most vulnerable communities in the country. They are routinely discriminated against at the workplace and in public. They face discrimination from formal institutions, the various communities they come from, law enforcement and employment.
The very thought of their existence might repulse you, but it is not your lives that are facing the daily, and now increased, threat of death and violence. They are victims. This is a global fact.
Malaysian LGBTQs ‘treatable’?
What accounts for the authors’ cavalier attitude to the struggles of a minority community with barely any social or political representation? We can surmise from their description of homosexuality as a “treatable psychological state” and a “deviant sexual” practice.
To imply that homosexuality is something “treatable” is to imply that it is a disease. To imply that something is a disease is to imply that it is an effect of a biological dysfunction. This is a scientific, not merely a descriptive, statement.
There is an immense wealth of medical, sociological and psychological researches out there that disproves or complicates your simplification, which we should consider in these debates.
At any rate, according to ICD-10 (the tenth International Classification of Diseases), the standard guidebook for medical practitioners throughout the world, homosexuality is no longer classified as a psychiatric illness.
What do we mean by 'rights'?
I will end with the authors’ central bone of contention, which was my appeal to human rights. What do the authors mean by rights?
In the spirit of fairness, I will quote their definition in full:
“What constitutes a right? As a language belonging to the family of Islamic languages, the Malay term for ‘right’, hak, is adopted from the Arabic haqq, which stands for both reality and truth. Its opposite is batil, which means non-reality or falsity [1].
“Therefore, what is good is not simply a property of statements or propositions, but has ontological significance in that it refers to that which has real and true existence, whilst that which is bad is considered illusory, ephemeral and unreal. Indeed, Al-Haqq (The Truth) is one of the 99 Beautiful Names of God as the one who is the antithesis of falsehood, as things may become evident by their opposites.”
What constitutes a right? It depends on which rights you mean. Rights are said in many ways. The problem is that the authors are equivocating: I used the word “right” to refer to the range of freedoms that should be made available to citizens of any democratic state.
My point was simple: as human beings of various faiths and cultures, the Malaysian LGBTQ community deserves to be granted the right to express their opinions and live a life without intimidation, fear and slander.
I use it as a legal and political category to denote the extent of entitlements that are to be allowed and enforced (or not) by the state.
The authors are using ‘rights’ as an ethical category based on Islam, as the opposite of wrong.
Both our uses of the word converge at times, but not always. Not all things that are legally permissible and tolerable are necessarily right (like smoking and drinking). And not all things that are deemed wrong have to be explicitly lettered and addressed in law (like being rude or purposely being late for a meeting).
This is due to the simple reason that no state is completely monolithic or uniform in cultures or even opinions. At some point, the law cannot compel everyone to agree to a single ethical code. Thus space must be accorded to allow for different ways of living and being.
I am just stating a basic point in political philosophy 101 that there are two different, although interrelated, scopes of ‘rights’ - one within the jurisdiction of institutional law enforcement (real), and the other, within the scope of ontology (ideal). My explanation has been limited to the former.
Now should they be isomorphic? The union of both scopes of rights, that is rights as defined by the authors (as an ontological philosophical status) and rights as I was using them (that is, as particular extents of state power) would effectively lead to something of an Islamic State.
At a glance, the Qur'an does not suggest that they should be isomorphic (10:108, 88:21), at least that’s what Fazlur Rahman and Muhammad Hashim Kamali would argue. But let’s entertain the supposition that a complete congruence between God’s vision of rights and the rights of the state as it has been defined today exists, then what would happen of pluralism?
Pluralism and inclusivity
This is one of the authors’ explanations of inclusivity: “The nature of ‘inclusiveness’ that IRF likes to trumpet is not made explicit, although based on the fact that he appears to advocate a deconsecration of values, and to exalt freedom (which is a neutral term) at the expense of justice (which in contrast, is a morally-laden term), one can safely infer that the vision of ‘inclusivity’ that it seeks to promote is founded upon the following presuppositions: the preservation of the paramount right of an individual over and above his duties and responsibilities to others e.g. other people, the state, the world, God.”
Inclusivity, understood in philosophical or political terms, will always face the risk of being too general or flexible. Inclusivity implies openness, and openness – an attitude of engaging and considering differences – always implies a certain degree of acknowledging that there is much beyond what we know at the moment. It’s an art, not a science.
Inclusivity is an on-going process. There is nothing preventing us from changing our minds, revising our positions and asking more questions in that process. The quality of our attitude to inclusiveness can only be evaluated as that process proceeds.
We measure it only to the extent that we are willing to converse and embrace different points of views peacefully. It is a more delicate path to tread, than recoiling and being closed, which implies a ‘once and for all’ event.
This is why human rights should not be discarded completely. As it stands, it remains the best measure to ensure that the process remains peaceful and secure. We do not live in a bubble. As Muslims in an increasingly globalised world we must acknowledge the presence of other perspectives other than ours.
Conclusion
There are other accusations that I feel I should respond to but quite frankly I am tired from a long day.
I am writing this after a meeting with a delegation of activists and politicians from Afghanistan who came to dialogue with IRF about the challenges of fighting for human rights in their country. It was a moving exchange, especially to see citizens of a war torn country speak so sincerely about wanting more freedoms, and to live in a polity where mutual respect and civil relations dominate.
And then I have to turn on my computer to the accolades given to these authors for what I hope to have shown are, weak anti-rights arguments based on shallow conceptual explanations and character assassinations.
At any rate, the fact that their long response has now gone public, and will be soon be translated into Malay, means that I am now presented as someone whom I am not, which is an evident smearing of my good name.
In an atmosphere as uncompromising and judgmental as the court of Malaysian Muslim public opinion, it is clearly a long way back for me to regain whatever little good standing I had to begin with.
I perhaps should have done more to quote the Qur’an and Sunnah in my arguments, but I decided to forego that option simply for the reason that this issue is not the venue for me to prove my ‘Islamic’ credentials. The supposition that such a label has to be proven or argued for is something I am personally uneasy with too.
Like it or not, Muslims in Malaysia already tolerate a great deal of un-Islamic things in their daily lives. Most of us have non-Muslim friends, acquaintances or neighbours, who consume alcohol. In fact, most of us would not mind shopping at establishments that do sell alcohol, even at seemingly innocuous shops as 7-11. Most of us have siblings or relatives or good friends that do not wear the hijab. Most of us enjoy films and sitcoms with markedly un-Islamic – in fact, haram - themes.
Much of this already happens with little threat of violence or aggressive encroachment in the lives of others. We suspend our judgment and anger because we know that there is much more to being Muslim than that. It was this same spirit of common sense tolerance that I have been appealing to. I thought this was enough, but it clearly is not.
But note the issues that we do miss when we do start thinking in those terms. Malaysia’s natural environment is being raped and pillaged everyday with little Muslim uproar or concern (is not the environment, essentially the manifestation of the miracles of God’s creation on earth – the signs of His Majesty?).
Workers are significantly losing their rights to make way for the increased liberalisation of foreign investment, a fact which many Muslims even in their most vocal moments of anti-Western, anti-imperialist sentiments do not want to even mention.
As someone who is actively in tune and contact with organisations working on those issues I always lament the utter Muslim absence and apathy therein. Accusations and misrepresentations of Muslims are what we've ended up with instead. May Allah help us all.
Ahmad Fuad Rahmat is director, chairperson and research fellow of Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF).
