©The Star
(Used by permission)
Brave New World by Azmi Sharom
You can’t control what another believes because no fellow human being can truly
tell what is going on in the mind of another.
I DON’T like yoga. With all due respect to yoga practitioners out there, I
always found it a little wimpy. I mean, yeah, it’s a great party trick to be
able to bend over backwards and look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist but,
really, is that going to help me lug two suitcases up four flights of steps? I
don’t think so.
Be that as it may, I do practise a bit of yoga. In between sets for my abdominal
workout, I do a yoga thing.
I am not sure what it is called in yoga terms, but if I had to name it, I would
call it “small hummingbird reaching for the moon”, and it’s great because it
stretches out my ageing back.
I’ve been doing it for years and I must say that in all that time, not once did
I get an urge to build a shrine to Vishnu in my dining room.
I’ve also lit an incense stick and stuck it in a pile of sand in front of a
stone Buddha. And I’ve sung hymns in an abbey for two years’ worth of
Wednesdays.
Neither activity made me want to be a Buddhist or join the Church of England.
They were after all merely physical acts. What goes on in my mind and in my
heart are completely different things.
And no one can tell me what my faith is or is not.
This brings me to the National Fatwa Council and its declaration that yoga is
forbidden because it has Hindu elements in it which can cause poor simple
Muslims to lose their fragile faith while sitting in the lotus position.
A lot has been said about this issue already and I don’t wish to add to the
numerous points made on the legal effects of the declaration or its theological
basis.
Instead I wish to point out that it is actually quite ludicrous to try to
control that most private and intangible human trait: faith.
You can’t control what another believes because no fellow human being can truly
tell what is going on in the mind of another.
And yet there are some who insist on trying. And so, because you can’t tell what
goes on in a person spiritually, you try to control the surface issue, the
physical manifestation of what you deem to be reflective of faith.
This obsession with form is not only shallow; it is also counter–productive. It
breeds a mentality of “if I do the ‘right actions’, then I’m doing the right
thing”.
It’s the kind of thinking that creates some horrible everyday blasphemies like
people muttering “halal, ya?” after they accept a bribe.
As though the physical utterance of the right word is enough to blank out the
intangible wrongness of the act.
It does not take much for a person to go to temple or church or mosque and carry
out all the rituals. But such acts without the prerequisite emotional content of
the rituals do not make you pious.
Just as performing things with roots in religions different from your own – the
bersanding ceremony for example – without the corresponding emotional and
spiritual content does not mean you are deviating from your faith.
This being the case, why bother trying to control a person’s actions? Perhaps it
is the only way to try to assert authority, to force your perceived relevance
onto others. If this is so, then it is a most futile effort.
I am not suggesting that there is no space for the fatwa councils of this
country. There will always be people who want to get guidance from figures they
believe are better qualified than themselves. Even in personal matters like
faith. This is fine, but such bodies ought not to have the power to control how
people choose to live their lives.
It is one thing for an authority figure to give advice; it is quite another for
that same body to have the power to make rulings that have the effect of
legislation, especially when it is not elected.
There is a sub–text to this episode and it concerns the recent calls by the ex–
and current chief justices for the merging of Islamic law and civil law or the
merging of the syariah courts and the civil courts. I do not think this is a
good idea.
I have argued elsewhere that the emotive nature of any theologically based law
and the exclusivity of such systems are not appropriate for a fundamentally
democratic society.
Time and time again, I have heard the repeated argument that only those who are
“qualified” can speak about Islamic law.
In a country where all its people should have a right to speak about matters
that affect their lives, regardless of their education, this to me is an
unacceptable approach to law–making.
However, my point here is that this recent declaration on yoga, which to my eyes
reflects a terribly narrow world–view and a superficial understanding of this
matter of faith, is made not by some obscure group. It was made by the National
Fatwa Council.
This council is a part of officialdom and in the event that our Constitution is
fundamentally changed to allow our civil and Islamic legal systems to be merged,
the council’s voice will be a most prominent one in the hybrid system that is
formed.
That is all the more reason then that this proposed merger is not allowed to
happen.