Hudud passion and its discontents

Politics is always passionate. What this means is that it must always be understood in terms of the imagination. It's about the very human propensity to envision alternatives, the desire for a better state of affairs beyond the present.

It becomes slightly complicated for the Malaysian context as Muslims are demanded to be loyal to a past they did not experience. This appears strange to onlookers, though the strangeness is the point. What is the religious experience if it does not long for another world altogether, for wisdom that endures through changes of context and time, for an ethical system that can solve all problems, and one that should be emulated by everyone? It is valuable because it offers relief and empowerment.

This is relevant as a reminder to look beyond the legal frame. To understand Islamic politics, as merely a legal battle is to obscure its visceral drives. Of course, Islamisation over the past thirty years has been about instituting certain laws, but it has also been particularly colourful: there are modes of architecture, dress, "entertainment" and education that have manifested in the process.

Islam is a set of principles but politicised, in the era of the post-colonial nation state, it becomes animated, and creatively too, by a desperate and emboldened aesthetic sense.

In other words, it does not just want to win the state, it must also announce itself to the world. The changes have fast become palpable over recent years, but given the way things are it won't take long until it is finally clear what this country is about. The Jakim stamp, the halal spaces – they demarcate borders of outlooks and attitudes, slowly carving out an ideal into reality.

So the hudud controversy is rooted to something more than questions of scriptural affinity, or practical methods of criminal deterrence. The narrative has lasted for so long because it is tied to the larger issue of what Malay Muslims need to feel at home here. This is the practical question: "what are the actual demands of Islamisation on us, as in ALL Malaysians". It is neither "what does the Quran say about stoning?" nor "is the Malaysian constitution secular or Islamic?" 

What the constitution says, what the laws ought to be, how the Quran should be read: such discussions assume that the problem is so rational that it can be pointed out in texts.

That stoning and cutting hands could be desired as forms of punishment to begin with, is the problem. What greater expression of remaking the world is there than the power to dictate the terms of punishment? Think too about what it transgresses. Hudud overrides any notion of bodily integrity, that most cherished entity of liberal politics.

But that is not the only problem. For this country is not short of draconian punishments. How much worse is cutting off hands from suffocating at the gallows. Where is the urban liberal’s indignation at the fact that hundreds of poor and hungry undocumented migrants are routinely whipped, condemned for the rest of their lives by injuries that will never leave their backs? Is something a problem only when it scares us? Anti-hudud indignation is so crudely selective and no amount of human rights rhetoric will hide that.

The problem now, as it has been for other issues in Malaysia's narrative of identity, is that our coming of age is coloured by the convergences of contradictory traumas. Everyone's crying but no one is listening.

Muslims are more culpable but the difference ends there. For all sides – liberals, conservatives, Islamists and secularists, Muslims and non-Muslims – share the same hope in laws because they can think of nothing other than to contain each other. We have failed to look beyond the protector state not for a lack of morals, but for a lack of imagination. – May 10, 2014.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.