The Isma chief’s liberalism deception

In Malaysian Islamic discourse, there are a few key words which can earn you tremendous brownie points if you press those buttons among the conservative masses.

Choose a traditional platform like the Friday prayers and launch your attack from there and you will have their keen attention.

Obviously you would have to be in a position of authority to be able to occupy the Friday pulpit and so the conservative masses would consider your every word highly credible.

They would be easily convinced that the parties whom you have framed as the enemies of Islam are indeed so.

That is really how easy it is, and one of the biggest weapons in their arsenal is the word “liberalism”.

To these people, the very notion of freedom is anathematic to their ideals. They fear that if Muslims were empowered to think freely, their own institutions would be made redundant, or worse, be fingered as the root cause of Islamic decline.

With this in mind, conservative scholars of Islam use sophisticated linguistic tricks in order to demonise liberalism. These linguistic tricks are not easily detectable if one is not familiar with the subject matter.

Abdullah Zaik, the president of Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Isma) is a master of such word play. Of course it is also possible that he uses such language without realising their implications but to me, that is highly improbable.

Abdullah has to engage with liberal and progressive scholars in his activism and they must have pointed out the weaknesses in his thought system. Nevertheless, he continues to push this “Liberalism vs Islam” agenda without any compunction.

His latest diatribe against liberalism sees him claiming that "liberalism can only co-exist with Islam if it is willing to submit to an Islamic system, as the ideology is a malleable man-made system compared to a religion that is bestowed by God".

This statement is an audacious attempt at supremacism based on nothing less than a bald faced lie.

Abdullah sees “co-existence” as an imbalanced power dynamic. Liberalism can only “co-exist” with Islam if the former is under the latter’s jurisdiction.

Given the kind of Islam that Abdullah adheres to, that would not be a co-existence at all, rather, a demonisation.

Abdullah subscribes to the oppressive strand within the Islamic tradition, Islamofascism.

In the Islamofascist system, all ideologies which are counter to “Islam” (as per their understanding thereof) cannot be allowed to operate.

This is the same reason Sisters in Islam and generically liberal Islam itself were given fatwas before, decreeing them to be forbidden.

The prevailing Islamofascist system brooks no kind of co-existence. It is a marvel of social engineering designed to keep the numbers up through birth or by marriage.

It should be noted at this point that despite Abdullah’s hegemon-client dynamic above, the Quran itself does not have any such problem with liberalism.

The greatest proof of this is that the Quran does not demand anyone to be Muslim! It unambiguously states that there is no compulsion in the religion (2:256).

Not only that, it goes so far as to chastise Prophet Muhammad for even thinking that he can compel anyone to believe (10:99). He is told not to a compeller or tyrant over the people but rather remind them with the Quran itself (50:45).

This brings us to the issue of reason. Reason is the lynchpin of liberalism. Without the freedom to think, we could not arrive at the philosophical truths which would take us to higher stages of existence.

The Quran, if it indeed was against liberalism, should be strongly against any kind of thinking. It should, as the ulama tell us, leave the thinking to the “experts”.

The truth is quite contrary.

The Quran connects acquiring faith with the process of reasoning (10:99-100). It postulates that guidance will stand out clearly from error (2:256) and that truth will cause the passing of falsehood (17:81).

This fearlessness in argumentation shows that the Quran encourages the process of thinking which entails a liberal mindset.

I believe we can safely say that Abdullah Zaik and the Quran preach two different paths. One wonders from where Abdullah acquired his thinking but it certainly is not from the Quran.

Finally, Abdullah considers liberalism a “malleable man-made system” compared to Islam which is “bestowed by God”.

This oversimplification was designed to hoodwink the masses into thinking that Islam as we know it is a divine product.

A criteria which the Quran offers about verifying the divinity of a text is consistency (4:82) and traditional Islam as we know it is a mass of contradictions. Even the sources regarding Islamic law vary within the Sunni schools of law themselves.

Not only that, the utilisation of the Quran within Islamic law also cannot be determined since the “sciences” of the Quran vary from scholar to scholar.

Is this not the very same malleability for which Abdullah criticised liberalism? Why make fish of one and fowl of the other?

We need to be acutely aware of the language used by the Islamofascists in their quest to sell their discourse as “the divine truth”.

This deception only serves their purpose to dupe the masses into becoming unthinking sheep. – September 30, 2015.

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