COMMENT “Islam means peace,” intoned George Walker Bush, the 43rd president of the United States in the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks.

Actually, Islam means submission, not peace; the peace that Islam promises comes after one has submitted to belief in Islam.

This proposition is entirely different to saying that Islam means peace although the ubiquitous greeting - “Peace be with you” - that Islamic believers readily exchange with each other would lead non-Muslims to think that the religion has a lot to do with peace.  

Indeed it has, but the ‘peace’ of which it is true to say every human being desires is not an a priori assumption in Islam; it is more of an a fortiori conclusion.

DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng was prompted to respond to an opinion expressed by PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang that anger on the part of Muslims against the DAP was permitted by God by dint of the party’s opposing the implementation of hudud.

In the manner in which he responded to Hadi, Guan Eng struck notes reminiscent of Bush’s ( photo ) initial bewilderment about Islam and the al-Qaeda version of it.  

As far as the news reports quoting Hadi to this effect were concerned, none gave the basis for Hadi’s opinion.

Widely regarded as an Islamic scholar, Hadi cannot be said to be a good expositor of Islam, not if your read him from the English language news reports of what he says about Islam or even of politics.

If your read him in his columns in the Malay language in the PAS organ, Harakah , he is indeed better at exposition than he is from English language news reports of what he says - most often, he speaks in Malay - to the local press.

It is reasonable to assume that what Hadi meant when he held forth on divinely permissible anger against opponents of hudud was that since hudud is an integral part of Shariah, which in Arabic means ‘pathway to the headwaters’, opponents of Shariah/hudud would be thwarting the spiritual fulfilment of Muslims.

This opposition would provoke the anger of Muslims. Anger, generally a negative emotion, would in this instance be permitted by God.

If this indeed was Hadi’s reasoning, it is all of a piece and holds together.

That makes it disingenuous of Guan Eng to query Hadi about where in the Muslim holy book it is said that believers should always be angry with non-believers and with those who disagree with them.

Apart from Hadi not having made such claims, this line of argument by Guan Eng, where non-sequiturs are liberally sprayed around, is akin to a dog looking for its tail - you go round in circles and wind up nowhere.

Unfortunately, Guan Eng is not any better than his late and elder DAP compatriot Karpal Singh at the tack of vigorous but respectful disagreement with Islamists on the world-historical issue of whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

This is the underlying issue in the entire debate about whether to implement hudud.

Not even the most fervent Islamist would want to be painted into a corner where it can be shown that he is not in favour of democracy; he might mutter about it but he can’t set his face against it - that has become the power of the democratic idea in human affairs.

Mohamed Morsi ( photo ) of the Muslim Brotherhood got into trouble in Egypt as soon as he placed himself above the judiciary (a flagrantly undemocratic act) in that country’s brief flirtation with the democratic experiment as a result of the Arab Spring, and Tayip Recep Erdogan of Turkey invites trouble whenever he acts like the autocrat he (hitherto hidden) is by instinct, as we now know.

The better arguments against the implementation of the Islamic penal code should be based on philosophic reason, the ideological matrix for the stock of beliefs that underpin a document such as the federal constitution, the one that existed before its disfigurement by successive Umno-BN governments’ numerous amendments.

Though the argument is germane there is not much point in telling the Islamists that one’s opposition to hudud is not because one is against Islam but because hudud is unconstitutional.

Against this the Islamists would trot out the argument that the constitution is a colonial construct - colonialists being inherently anti-Islam, period.

A more deflating approach would be to ask them what the Islamist position on statutory rape is.

The common law position is that sexual relations with a girl below 16 constitutes statutory rape and would make the man criminally liable.

This position is based on philosophic reason, a part of the raft of assumptions that a girl below 16 lacks the psychological maturity for sexual relations and therefore should not be taken advantage off.

Because this is a sensitive issue - it would make paedophiles of some of those who enjoy an exalted status in the religion - it’s best to refrain from saying what the Islamist position would be on this matter.

What Nik Aziz said on employing more women

A less volatile and more constructive stream of inquiry would be to critically scrutinise what the revered former menteri besar of Kelantan, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, said in response to the issue of whether his state administration would employ more women.

On the surface this issue would have little to do with the question of hudud but in a larger perspective it has a lot to do with justice.

Nik Aziz ( photo ) said that indeed his government was employing more women, but mostly those who were not good looking.

He said the pretty ones would likely be married off to rich husbands and so would not need employment.

So the women intake into his government would be biased in favour of the not-so-well-endowed.

Nik Aziz, without batting an eyelid, pronounced this as “justice” with the confidence that it’s of the transcendent kind.

From the standpoint of philosophic reason, this “justice” is pretty defective.

Women should be given equal opportunities when it comes to employment because that is their right as equal members with men of civil society.

The primary determinant of their employment should be capability, not looks or, more precisely, their lack of it. The latter position is sexist and patronising and won’t do women any good.

What are we to deduce from this?

That even on the matter having to do with ‘justice’, on which Islam places a high value, like more employment opportunities for women in the work force, the Islamist position can differ from the one based on philosophic reason.

Suffice to say, there are subtle grounds on which to joust with Hadi-like Islamists, without going into such tendentious matters as to whether Islam is about peace or otherwise.

It is more nearly about the securing of peace in this world and salvation in the hereafter.

Grave problems arise when the way to go about that is seen as achievable through a clear distinction between good and evil when such clarity is not often available in a world where an ambiguous grey, not monochromes of black and white, is the colour of reality.

Dealing with this reality from the revisable standpoints furnished by philosophic reason is a safer bet than declaiming on them from the certitudes of faith.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.