1. The Malaysian Insider (http://www.themalaysianinsider.com)
‘A more religious brand of secularism’, 27 November 2009
Religion is a problem for PKR. The recent bouts of infighting over Kulim MP Zulkifli Noordin's claims that Malaysia is an Islamic state seem to indicate a party uncertain of its stand on religious affairs.
By deciding not to explicitly censure Zulkifli, PKR has risked alienating the urban, liberal set who are one of its crucial entrenched bases. Most of these people accept as gospel the idea that secular government is necessary and religious government necessarily evil, and have responded to Zulkifli by singing the praises of a secular, liberal, democratic Malaysia.
Their arguments are generally founded on two assumptions: one, that a society with minimal oppression and a strong distinction between public and private spheres is, all things considered, the best kind of society, and two, that such a society is best achieved through liberal democracy. These aren’t indisputable, but they’re strong enough that for the purposes of this article I will proceed as though they should be accepted as sensible.
Most liberal democratic thinkers fiercely interdict any links between political power and religious canon; they argue that religion seeks to regulate people's personal lives to an excessive degree, and brooks no compromise — the final rationale always being that divine law is above mortal question.
Most of these secularists don't seek to restrict religion altogether; being liberals, they realise that this would be a hideous violation of the rights of religious people. History provides ample accounts of attempts to banish religion — Stalinist Russia, post-Revolutionary France, etc — and the outcomes have never been picturesque. Most contemporary secularists seek only to declaw religion, as it were, and prevent religious edicts from influencing the formation of coercive laws. If you can discourage people from seeking legislation on the basis of religious belief, then their religion can be freely practised without presenting a threat to the liberal and tolerant character of society.
The pithiest summation of this idea is the Doctrine of Religious Restraint, or DRR, which dictates that when a citizen supports a coercive law, she must ensure that she has a strong secular reason for doing so, regardless of whether or not she has a religious reason.
Hence, if a devoutly religious citizen is inspired by his faith to support a law banning cremations, he will need to provide a good secular reason for this, because his religious reasons aren’t enough on their own. If, on the other hand, he is not religious and has only secular reasons for supporting the ban — perhaps he is a medical researcher who has discovered that cremation releases harmful carcinogens — then he has all the justification he needs.
The underlying assumption of the DRR is that not all reasons are born equal, and that for political purposes secular reasons are inherently superior to religious ones. To me this smells suspiciously like a kind of blanket discrimination. It's far from Maoist China, and there certainly isn't any active persecution involved, but is the absence of active persecution really the same as a lack of oppression? Is there not a possibility that the religious are oppressed by the DRR, since it dismisses the political validity of their beliefs, and restricts their freedom of conscience?
Secularist thinkers have a tough time proving that this isn't the case — so tough, in fact, that they still resort to variations on the wheezy old “false consciousness” riff, essentially arguing that secularism is not discriminatory because any rational person would accept it. This is ludicrous, and is entirely comparable to the logic of a religious fundamentalist — “if you were in your right mind you would believe what I believe”.
For those who prioritise political equality, it's tough to explain why the concerns of every non-religious interest group in the world — the environmentalists, technologists, market capitalists, sports enthusiasts, etc, etc — should be given political legitimacy when the religious are denied it.
The secularist may bring up religion’s lamentable track record of derailing tolerance and freedom, and suggest that this alerts us to the risks involved and justifies the suppression of religious arguments in politics. To my mind, no proper liberal will accept this. It's a damning reminder of how easily even the most well-intentioned liberal ideology can slip towards self-defeating paternalism.
Considering that even today there exist strains of bigotry that not only thrive within secular political systems, but are actually justified using secularism — think of the headless histrionics that flare up in France over the sartorial preferences of Muslims — it’s difficult to accept that secularism is as clear-cut and unadulterated a virtue as it’s made out to be. Perhaps in the interest of liberty we need to temper our secularism and accept religious arguments in the political sphere.
This does not necessitate an anything-goes society; it simply means that we should evaluate political arguments not on the basis of their religiousness or secularity, but on the basis of how well they contribute to the overall project of a society free of oppression.
Some may cry foul over this, and suggest that it seeks the impossible, because tolerance and individual liberty are anathema to religion. This is a curious view, because it overlooks the religious origins of many of the values integral to liberal society.
Take human rights, for example, which many see as having been first systematically formulated in the American Declaration of Independence. In making their assertions of individual human dignity, the American founders were influenced by the work of British philosopher John Locke, whose ideas are rooted in Protestant theology. Locke's philosophy builds from the assumption that all things belong to the divine, including humans (which is why we shouldn’t kill or hurt one another). This, and not secular thinking, is the basis of America's famous (and inconsistently observed) tenets of human rights.
A similar effect can be seen with the Islamic philosophy of tolerance; there are pieces of Muslim scripture that clearly advocate a tolerant and understanding outlook towards outsiders; these find their basis in a belief that creation is as the creator has willed it. If divine will has brought about a global diversity of races and religions and views, it is not the place of mortals to question or alter this.
History gives us no indication that secular government will be necessarily free of the kind of fundamentalist zealotry that seeks to question and alter diversities of community and opinion. As American political thinker Hugh Heclo put it: “If traditional religion is absent from the public arena, secular religions are likely to satisfy man's quest for meaning. ... It was an atheistic faith in man as creator of his own grandeur that lay at the heart of Communism, fascism and all the horrors they unleashed for the twentieth century.”
Furthermore, while there have been many attempts to formulate foundations for human rights through reason and logic, even the most well-established and cogent of these — such as Kantianism or Utilitarianism — have been as controversial as religion, and ultimately always rely on some kind of foundational value-set which cannot be derived through hard reason alone. This value-set is precisely what religion provides for much of the world’s population.
In 2004 Pope Benedict XVI — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — took on Europe's foremost liberal thinker, Jürgen Habermas, in a debate. Back then the European Constitutional Treaty was being deliberated and Habermas, like many of the leading European intelligentsia, had been pushing to exclude any reference to Christianity as a fount of European liberal and egalitarian values, preferring instead the concept of “neutrality between worldviews”. Ratzinger argued that such neutrality cannot bear the weight of the values it is meant to support. Denying religious contributions to the development of human rights would be amnesic and fraudulent, he contended, and would hinder religious and secular folk from moving forward in pursuit of the goals many of them share, such as peace and freedom from oppression.
In order to maintain human rights, Ratzinger claimed, a staunch worldview of common values is required, and this should not be considered a matter of compromise. Such a set of values should have a “thick” foundation in history, tradition and — if one happens to be religious — spirituality, in order to overcome arguments in favour of oppression.
Habermas was so struck by Ratzinger's points that he conceded the debate, and went on to revise his ideas, saying that “Universalistic egalitarianism … is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle post-modern talk.”
Liberals ought to take note of Habermas' change of heart; an acceptance of religion as a stakeholder in the founding of human rights will serve to include the religious in the continual battle to uphold these values, in a way that staunchly secular politics simply fails to do.
Rather than claiming that we only need secular foundations for our values, we should, as British philosopher John Gray suggests, accept that “our criteria for judging religions shouldn't be truth or falsehood, it should be like judging poetry or art. We should adopt ones which are the most beautiful.” Inconsistencies notwithstanding, we should acknowledge that religion has made beautiful and important contributions to ethics.
Once we accept this, it becomes hard to deny that a free political system should encourage religious arguments just as much as secular ones, because no idea can be judged as harmful or beneficial until it is tested against a society’s overarching values. Liberal democracy provides a suitable, if very messy, arena in which we can conduct this testing. It seems a ridiculous waste to adopt a system of government that fosters and balances so many worldviews, and then impair it by ostracising such a rich source of ethical acumen.
The problem with the arguments of any given Zulkifli Noordin is not that they are religious, but that they are intolerant and shallow. But we cannot let secularism run rampant, any more than we can let any one religion run rampant, because secularist thought is capable of equal feats of intolerance. We should instead encourage ulamaks and swamis and priests to speak out on politics. Provided equal footing is given to all religions, and that the religious adhere to anti-incitement laws (of the kind so often disregarded by Umno leaders), there is no reason not to give them a share in the big political dialogue. We should build a society where even people like Zulkifli Noordin can have their say; both religious and secular folk should be brave enough to accept that the fact of their inevitable disagreements doesn’t at all provide enough reason for one side to muzzle the other. At its core our society must be cognizant of the fact that whether or not we believe in a god, our decision to live ethically and be tolerant of others will always be a kind of spiritual leap.
2. The Star Online (http://thestar.com.my)
Building bridges of respect, 29 November 2009
by SHAILA KOSHY
In multi-religious Malaysia, people of different beliefs are reaching out to each other to foster better understanding and friendship.
ON Malaysia Day, the Open Hearts and Mind Study Institute and the Inter¬national Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) co-organised a closed-door dialogue between Muslims and Christians.
At that session, Islamic Information & Services Foundation (IIS) chief dakwah officer Shah Kirit Kakulal Govindji shared something odd.
Some members of 50 youths from the Islamic Information & Services Foundation (IIS) who attended a church service and dialogue at the St Thomas Mar Thoma Church in Jalan St Thomas, Kuala Lumpur, on Nov 22, with Rev Mothy Varkey, the vicar of the church, and (in jacket) IIS chief dakwah officer Shah Kirit Kakulal Govindji.
Odd, that is, in light of the continuing controversy over whether Muslims can wish their friends on the occasion of their religious celebrations, visit them or even invite them to a mosque.
The IIS takes Muslims on visits to churches and temples; they attend the service, dialogue, and share a meal with their Christian, Hindu or Buddhist hosts.
During the buka puasa after the dialogue on Sept 16, this writer asked Shah Kirit whether he had taken his group to an Eastern church service. When he said no, I suggested they visit the St Thomas Mar Thoma Church in Kuala Lumpur.
He said thanks and laughed when I said: “Come for an English service and your friends will not have to worry about seating arrangements because the women still generally sit on one side and the men on the other.”
Shah Kirit got in touch with Council of Churches Malaysia president Rev Dr Thomas Philips, the vice-president of the Mar Thoma Church (Malaysian Zone), and on Nov 22 brought a group of 50 for the Holy Qurbana (Communion) service at the church in Jalan St Thomas.
Some members of 50 youths from the Islamic Information & Services Foundation (IIS) who attended a church service at the St Thomas Mar Thoma Church in Jalan St Thomas, Kuala Lumpur, on Nov 22, at a dialogue that followed after.
The service was at 10am, but they turned up at 8.45am when Rev Mothy Varkey, the vicar of the church, said there was a Bible Study session at 9am before the service.
During the service, many of them picked up the service book and followed the liturgy, which is in English with some chants in Malayalam and Syriac, and some even opened the Bible when passages were read out.
The service, in which the congregation also sang choruses in Bahasa Malaysia, was followed by a light tea, after which the visitors gathered back in the church for a dialogue.
There wasn’t much time for questions as they were expected at the Sri Lanka Buddhist Temple in Sentul for lunch and dialogue. But those who did ask showed they had been pay¬ing attention during the service and sermon.
One woman prefaced her question on the Holy Trinity with this: “I always thought that Christians worshipped three Gods. But from your service I realise that’s not true.”
One of the men told Rev Mothy that he found his sermon inspirational.
Later, a young adult member of the church said she hadn’t been sure what to expect when she heard there were going to be Muslim visitors.
“I certainly didn’t expect to see tudung-clad women coming for a communion service.
“I was a little confused as to what to say and do because I didn’t want to offend anyone but it was good they came,” she said.
A 16-year-old boy, who had acted as usher, said the visitors were friendly. “They went up to people and talked to them. They said they were not made to feel like strangers; it was nice to have them.”
Similarities and differences
In an interview a few days later with Shah Kirit and Rev Mothy, Shah Kirit said the group was amazed by the hospitality shown to them at the church.
“They got a better understanding of Christianity,” he said. “They discovered not all of their assumptions were correct. They had more questions but there wasn’t enough time.”
The IIS, which has been around since 2002, was registered as a foundation a few years ago. Its efforts at building bridges are certainly meeting a need for inter-religious dialogue in Malaysia where religious sensitivities are taut at best.
Shah Kirit said the IIS strives to give a proper understanding of Islam, correct misinformation and disinformation in a just manner, promote unity among Muslims and bridge the gap between Muslims and those of other faiths and work together with the good people of the world of all faiths.
As such, the IIS reaches out to Muslim university students and young career people to expose them to the major religions in the world, especially the ones in Malaysia.
“Our programmes are geared towards exposing them to the basic beliefs of other religions – what are the similarities and the differences.
“When I first took a group to a church and temple, they were concerned that they would not be welcome, that there might be hostility.
“But after the visit, they were astonished at the welcome. It broke the barrier,” said Shah Kirit who is now trying to organise a visit to a mosque for the Mar Thoma church members.
On whether the misconceptions he’s come across among his group over the years are due to the lack of teaching or mis-teaching, he replied, “Both.”
“But we need to work carefully. Any change in a community has to be gradual. It cannot be forced.”
Establishing dialogue
And what does he tell the Muslims in his programmes if they ask whether it is all right to wish a person of another faith during their religious celebration, or visit them?
“Islamic scholars are divided on this issue.
“Our Prime Ministers (all Muslims) have always wished Malaysians of all faith, showing they are Prime Minister to people of all faiths.”
He then tells them that while there are differing opinions, they must choose what they see is right, he added.
“My personal choice is this. My mother is a Hindu and every Deepavali I visit her. I spend time with her. I will even send her to the tem¬ple but I do not participate in the worship. It is not appropriate that my mother should take a bus by herself to go to the temple.
“When you visit your neighbours during Deepavali or Christmas, it is to establish a bonding.
“I tell them also, when you visit, to ask their friends why they celebrate their festival so you get a better understanding. They may also ask you about Islam. That is how we establish dialogue.”
And is there any fear among the group that they may be “converted” by their exposure?
“No, I take mature Muslims on visits to other places of worship, those who have been coming to our programmes for a year.
“When we go on these visits, it is to understand other faiths. We embrace the similarities and agree to disagree on the differences, not fight each other.”
While this was Shah Kirit’s first visit to a Mar Thoma Church, having Muslims at his service was also a first for Rev Mothy, an Indian citizen here on a work visa.
Asked whether he has visited any mosque in Kerala, Rev Mothy said no. “In Central Travancore, where I live, the people are predominantly Hindus and Christians.
“There is no mosque in my area. I haven’t had the opportunity to have inter-religious dialogue with people from the Islamic faith. This is the first time. I’ve had fellowship with Hindu friends and visited temples but no inter-religious dialogue.”
Rev Mothy said the people in Kerala are more understanding and are into inter-religious fellowship but this equation has been disrupted since the advent of the charismatic, independent churches.
“Tolerance has gone down because they are more aggressive, less inclusive and less tolerant even towards Christian denominations,” he said.
Shah Kirit, a proponent of dialogue but not debate, which he says is about one side winning, is already making plans for future meetings.
“When you spoke that day I could see we can have a future in dialogue. You’re objective.
“When we’re more comfortable with each other, maybe we could have a more serious discussion on our respective faiths; no censorship,” he told Rev Mothy who replied, “That’s a good idea.”
Nov 22 was certainly a day for building bridges. Maybe, just maybe, we can bring down the walls of bigotry in people of all faiths and build bridges of respect and compassion instead.
© 1995-2009 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)
3. Telegraph News(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/6678686)
by Janet Daley
Home grown terrorism our values are not optional for minority groups, 28 November 2009
It would be better if we enforced Britain's cultural values on immigrant communities, rather than allowing them to dictate government policy, says Janet Daley
Maj.or Nidal Malik Hasan, the US army doctor named as a suspect in the shooting death of 13 people and the wounding of 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas Photo: Getty
How do you create a home-grown terrorist? For a while, Britain seemed to hold the copyright on the formula for this. First, you import a huge number of people from places where there are unresolved historical conflicts, with no stipulation that they learn anything about their adopted homeland (not even its language). Then you make no attempt to integrate these groups – which are large enough to constitute self-sustaining communities – into the culture and political traditions of the country that is now their home, nor do you advise the schools to inculcate any sense of pride or pleasure in the new national identity to which they are entitled. Indeed, you do precisely the opposite of this: you positively encourage not only the incomers themselves but their British-born children to maintain a separate, inward-looking ethnic community that stands apart from the mainstream life of the society and whose values may conflict with it.
So eager are you to show that you accept other cultures whose attitudes and assumptions (on, for example, the treatment of women) are opposed to the official values of your society, that you benevolently overlook what is being taught in their schools even when those schools are being supported by government funding. When your Government is caught in the act of having provided such funding, as happened last week with schools in Slough and Haringey, both of which had a history of links with the Muslim extremist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, the ensuing row is on purely technical points: which school officials held, or were connected to people who held, actual positions in the organisation on what dates? The question of whether schools with an explicitly separatist ethos should qualify as providing acceptable basic education is not even addressed.
So there it is: an instant recipe for estrangement and alienation that can turn (or be turned), in susceptible personalities under the right circumstances, into terrorist fodder. Until recently, as I say, we led the world in this particular specialism: the United States in particular was inclined to believe that the phenomenon of the native (as opposed to foreign) terrorist was a peculiarly British problem, which is why it introduced additional security measures to apply to visa waiver UK passport holders.
But the US, having been confident that it was a country that knew what was required for the successful absorption of immigrant groups, has now produced a home-grown terrorist of its own, and the controversy that this event has inspired is not irrelevant to our debate (to the extent that we are permitted to have one) in Britain.
When the Muslim American Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, he did not just murder his military colleagues: he killed the American illusion that "it couldn't happen here". And he unleashed an argument not just on practical topics such as racial profiling but on the much wider question of how much America's foreign policy decisions – how it should conduct itself in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example – should be influenced by the feelings of minority groups within the US itself.
This dispute revolves around the personality of Major Hasan: was he just an unbalanced individual for whom Islamic fundamentalism was nothing more than a delusional pretext for a psychotic break? This account has gained favour in Left wing American circles for fairly obvious reasons: it allows Islamic fundamentalism to become simply an unwitting accomplice to the act, rather than its actual cause, and the act itself to be seen as a random, unreasoning crime rather than a terrorist attack. No big national problem here: just a nutter whose instability should have been spotted sooner but whose religious-cum-political "motives" can be ignored.
According to commentators on the Right, such as Charles Krauthammer, this thesis is a pernicious attempt to "medicalise" Major Hasan's crime in the interests of avoiding any implication that there was a meaningful connection between his Islamic religious beliefs and his act. By defining the act as literally meaningless (insane), defenders of the liberal orthodoxy are not taxed by the problem of how to deal with a possibly murderous minority within their own country.
The Left-liberal camp is now in the rather uncomfortable position of holding two contradictory interpretations of Major Hasan's actions. There is the one that Mr Krauthammer describes: this incident is a one-off act of lunacy, so the fact that Hasan was a Muslim is of no importance (even if he thinks it was – after all, he is insane).
But the other argument made by the Left puts Hasan's religion at the centre of his action: Muslims, even ones born and bred in the US, are being driven to violence by American foreign policy. It is the perceived American assault on Islamic peoples and countries that is responsible for pushing borderline personalities – who have been made susceptible by their cultural introversion – into extreme associations. So the conclusion is roughly this: the only possible way to avoid radicalising any more vulnerable, borderline psychotics who happen to be Muslims is to change our foreign policy so as not to inflame their hyperactive sensitivities.
Quite apart from the question of whether any ethnic group should be allowed to dictate government policy under the threat of violence, isn't there a bizarre precedent here? Suppose an element within the animal rights lobby were to engage in a programme of major urban terrorism and threaten to persist until the consumption of meat was banned. Would we seriously entertain the idea that to continue to sell meat was an inexcusable provocation to a dangerous, unstable minority? And can there be any certainty about the causes of such provocation among Muslims? The grievances of Palestinians are the most frequently cited source of global Islamic anger, but most of the Pakistani recruits to Islamic fundamentalism in Britain have closer links with the Kashmiri cause than to any problems in Gaza. Add to this that a good few of those convicted of terrorist acts have been converts (such as Richard Reid, the shoe bomber) who had no inherited ties to any Muslim country.
What a miasma of moral confusion we are succumbing to – all for the sake of avoiding a question that must be asked: how does a liberal society cope with a minority in whose name acts of violence are carried out in its midst? Surely the answer must involve a much more muscular liberalism: a robust belief in the values that permit people of different beliefs to live together peaceably and an unapologetic determination to enforce those values in every quarter of the country.
(End)
