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HIV/AIDS - No Room for Zealotry(s)
Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" reminds us that even first-hand accounts can be
unreliable. People tend to embellish their versions of an event and hide
inconvenient facts to make themselves look good and to persuade listeners
onto their side as to who the heroes and villains are. In that 1951 classic
film, a simple woodcutter returning from a trial for rape and murder in
feudal Japan to which he was witness took shelter from the pouring rain
under the ruins of the Rashomon gate. He despondently recounted to the
other travellers how the people involved were less than honest in their
testimonies- the thief accused of the crime, the raped woman and the spirit
of the murdered husband who spoke through a temple medium. But in the end,
even the simple woodcutter whom the audience initially felt to be a truthful
witness left important holes in his recounting of the event.
The second International Muslim Leaders' Consultation on HIV/AIDS (IMLC II)
conference on HIV/AIDS ended more than 2 weeks ago but the controversial
paper by Dr. Amina Wadud and the verbal fracas that it provoked still
animated the English press ("Clouded by obscurantism" by Rose Ismail and
Aniza Damis, NST 25 May, and "Drawing Muslim leaders into fight against
AIDS" by Aniza Damis, NST June 1 and "Urgent request for more charity among
muslims" by Askiah Adam, the Star 25 May).
Divergence of positions between the "progressive" muslims and those of
mainstream traditional persuasion is often thrown into sharp relief on
issues that touch on gender and sexuality. The debate not infrequently
becomes emotive and the atmosphere highly charged, that the objective of the
conference becomes lost in the confrontation. In the various feature
analyses that appeared in the English press, those who sought to broaden the
fight against the AIDS/HIV pandemic beyond condoms-campaign to include
religious moral values have been vilified as "obscurantists", "opposers",
"resisters", "retrogressives" etc by those who appropriated for themselves
the term "progressive" and "liberal" muslims. The "progressive" muslims
quickly claimed the moral high horse by demonizing their opponents as
consistently failing to show understanding and humanity towards AIDS
sufferers and instead condemn and pass moral judgements on them. They are
obdurate and belligerent in their medieval views of women and sexuality. In
truth, there is a lot that muslim religious leaders in Malaysia need to
learn about the nature of the AIDS pandemic, and how to treat AIDS sufferers
with kindness and humanity, and be non judgemental of what people do in
their private lives. This failing on their part has been repetitiously
highlighted and rather unfairly amplified in the various newspaper features.
But then, this was perhaps the first time that they had such an exposure in
the examining of complex social problems beyond the simple black and white
of religious moral sanctions. If the objective was to bring the mainstream
ulama into a consultation to fight HIV/AIDS, then they should perhaps be
treated with more respect and understanding.
The progressive muslims appeared to have gained a lot of sympathy from the
English reading public as victims of the retrogressives' moralizing and
obscurantist attitude to sexuality and gender. But does the press tell the
whole truth? Well, like the characters in "Rashomon", every body tells the
story the way they want people to hear it, and we all understand how the
media works in this country. While the Malay press may sometimes be overly
critical of progressives like Sisters in Islam (SIS), in the English media
it is the other way around. They are the media darlings and their opponents
are cast in the worst possible light, with no recourse for rebuttal or
defense.
As expected, the President of Islamic Medical Association (IMA) Malaysia's
reply to Rose Ismail's "Clouded by Obscurantism" which mercilessly demonized
the mainstream "retrogressive" was never published, even though some of the
specifically religious references could have been modified to suit a mixed,
general readership. Although I was not physically present at the
conference, I kept in touch very closely with what went on as these events
were recounted by colleagues blow by blow and updated daily on a net
discussion group, and I have had the privilege going through all the papers
that were presented (including the Dr. Wadud's) and the newspaper clippings.
Given the media's unbalanced accommodation towards the progressive muslims
in their demonization of their nemesis, I think another perspective on the
controversial event that took place during the conference is in order.
Firstly, the public may have been led into thinking that all those who
protested against Dr. Wadud's paper are the typically conservative,
patriarchal and chauvinistic ustaz and ulama who will not tolerate open
discussions on gender and sexuality, who think of AIDS as God's punishment
on sexual permissiveness, and people who lack compassion and understanding
towards AIDS sufferers. Yes, certainly there were such people in
attendance, and the culture shock was probably too much to handle for
first-timers. But is everybody who disagrees with the progressives
necessarily an obscurantist zealot? What has been largely hidden from the
public by the progressives is that the most effective challenge to their
agenda was mounted by articulate, muslim medical professionals. They led a
walkout when requests to debate the controversial paper was turned down, and
they quickly organized press conferences and issued media statements, as
anyone who wished to be heard but were unfairly silenced would have done.
NST's Rose Ismail commented that the dissenters were highly organized and
able to come up with typed statements in a short time. That is hardly
surprising as the protest was, among others, led by Dr. Musa Mohd Nordin,
President of Islamic Medical Association (IMA) of Malaysia. The highly
respected British trained paediatrician and neonatologist is indeed a very
articulate person who, at the same time has a deep understanding of Islam.
Some of us might recall his appearance on TV2's "Point of View" some time
ago, brilliantly fielding questions from the live audience on cloning and
reproductive technology. He is also a formidable debater at Malaysian
Paediatric Association annual congresses. Dr. Musa's secretary is a British
trained specialist in respiratory medicine. The other dissenter is Dr. Ali
Misyal, President of the Federation of Islamic Medical Association, a very
warm, deeply religious, soft spoken and fatherly man whom I have the
privilege of friendship for more than a decade. For many years he was
endocrinologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of
Illinois, Chicago. He later went back to Jordan and founded the successful
and highly regarded Islamic Hospital in Amman. He has been to Malaysia
several times at the invitation of IMA of Malaysia and the Ministry of
Health to address various issues related to medical ethics and Islam. The
IMA Pakistan president is an eye surgeon well known for his medical charity
work among the poor. Then there were representatives of IMAs of United
Kingdom, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Uganda and South Africa (well, AIDS is, for
all its social and economic ramifications, a medical problem). So there is
hardly any parallel with the "Persatuan Ulama Malaysia (PUM) vs. Farish
Noor" affair. It is also not true that all the dissenters are chauvinistic
obscurantists who completely lack compassion, understanding and humanity
towards AIDS sufferers. The IMA of Malaysia founded and runs "Rumah
Solehah" in Cheras, a charitable half-way house that provides shelter,
counseling, living skills and more importantly friendship and understanding
to female AIDS sufferers in a society that is still deeply ignorant and
prejudiced towards people like them. Rumah Solehah today has expanded to
embrace children with AIDS and has recently opened its business premises
managed by the inmates themselves to sustain some measure of financial
independence.
The conference's advisory council and the various national IMAs have long
recognized the pioneering effort of IMA of Uganda in AIDS education at
community level though Imams working from their mosques. The IMA Uganda in
1992 established the project "Family AIDS Education and Prevention through
Imams", which provided training to 850 imams and 6800 assistants, who then
reached 100,000 families.
The progressives seemed to have deliberately potrayed the dissenters as
uncaring religious moralists with a very distorted, narrow perception of the
AIDS pandemic. The muslim professionals well recognize that despite Islam's
moral strictures, in today's modern multi-cultural society like Malaysia
where sexual behaviour has become more liberal in contrast to homogeneous
traditional muslim societies, AIDS transmission though extramarital sex or
homosexuality and its spreads to family members is a real problem, and no
one would argue that condoms and safe sex are effective measures in
controlling the spread of the disease in high risk groups.
The dissenters' protest over the Dr. Wadud's paper had less to do about
HIV-AIDS but that she had used the conference as platform to expound her
revisionist feminist theology to denigrate mainstream muslim beliefs and
ethics in a language that many consider vulgar outside the circles of
university militant feminists. The gist of Dr. Wadud's paper
"Vulnerabilities, HIV and AIDS" can be summed up as "that Islam and muslims
exacerbate the spread of AIDS and that a traditional Islamic theological
response can never cure AIDS" (page 3). Well she is right about the last
part because the Quran is never intended as a textbook of medicine or
epidemiology, as she said "it will be impossible to refer to a specific
Quranic verse or prophetic ahadith that can stand as the foundation of the
technical skills, medical know how or research methods that could actually
prove to bring about the solution" (page 14). But she is irresponsibly
wrong to say that "Islam and muslim exacerbates the spread of AIDS". This
is the exact opposite to WHO statistics on the disease. In the sub-Saharan
nations, where as high as 1 in 5 people carry the virus, one can imagine the
spectre of humanitarian catastrophe that is slowly unfolding, but muslim
nations north of the Sahara on the same continent have among the lowest
prevalence of HIV/AIDS. Similarly, muslim minorities in the worst hit
African nations have much lower rates of infection and experts have
attributed this to the strict Islamic moral code as one of the major
factors. The vulnerability of 2 innocent subgroups, monogamous heterosexual
women and their children become infected through their husbands and fathers
was the whole edifice on which her attack on Islam and the Sharia was
founded, drawing from western feminism on equating Islam with "the tyranny
of patriarchal domination through heterosexuality, that for the most part,
marriage in Shariah is marriage of the women's domination" (page 6), and
"the Quran itself as well as the Shariah is founded upon male sexual
experience" (page 8). In the context of AIDS, where a muslim wife is "...
defined in terms of her benign unconditionally sexually available to her
husband. Properly fulfilling this role of wife is fatal to some women..."
(page 4). While it is regrettable that in some traditional muslim societies
oppression of women is a known phenomenon and that they may not be treated
with dignity and respect, to attribute this directly to Islam's holy book
and prophetic traditions rather than to interpretational aberrations formed
the crux of the delegates' protest. As part controversies have informed us,
because of the way a religious text like the Quran is organized, it is easy
to pick and choose certain verses while leaving out problematic ones and
render them out of context to suit one's ideas, wether it is liberation
theology, neoliberal economic theory or in this case, feminist revisionism.
At any rate, the Sharia with regards to family law is not such a closed
entity. Many jurists would argue that in a deadly transmissible disease
like AIDS, women have the right to refuse conjugal relationships without
safety precautions or even ask for divorce if they know that their husbands
carry the HIV virus. But things would not have snowballed into a protracted
confrontation between the "progressives" and obscurantists" had the
organizers allowed her paper to be debated, given its very controversial
content. But little did the progressives- dominated committee realize that
they were facing a very articulate, literate and highly organized opponent.
After much bargaining and arguments, the organizers relented to the
dissenters' request and an hour-long rebuttal forum was held the next day.
Among others, Dr. Ali Mishal of Jordan gave a point by point rebuttal of Dr.
Wadud's paper while Ms. Nazlin Omar, a veteran AIDS campaigner from Kenya
defended mainstream Islam from a feminine perspective against the feminist
revisionism of Dr. Wadud. According to colleagues, while the session's
atmosphere was not exactly congenial, it was not one where delegates
stripped and skewered Dr. Wadud as some quarters claimed (this dispute can
be settled by recourse to the session's transcripts).
That brings us to the question as to the role that Jabatan Kemajuan Islam
Malaysia (JAKIM) played, being co-organizer of IMCL II with Malaysia AIDS
Council. Have their representatives been sleeping-walking through the
committee meetings or completely sidelined in its planning stage, given that
Dr. Wadud's 1999 book, "Quran and Women: Rereading the sacred text from a
woman's perspective" was declared as Haram by JAKIM in 2001 and its
circulation banned by the Home Affairs Ministry? One could not help feeling
suspicious that the JAKIM with its suit-wearing ustaz, given its resources
and clout as a government religious body has been taken for a ride.
It is also odd that for such a conference, a significant number of its
invited speakers are known for their controversial and provocative views,
such as Riffat Hassan and South Africans Ebrahim Moosa and Farid Esack,
apart from Amina Wadud. Farid Esack's book "Quran, Liberation and
Pluralism" (Oneworld, Oxford, 1997) borrowed heavily from Liberation
Theology and proposed an iconoclastic revolution in Islamic methodology that
attempts to make Quranic ethics conform to post-modern, late twentieth
century western ideals. He demands the abolition of gender - related
dimensions of Quranic legislations which conflict with modern liberal
values, and among these, advocated female imams in mosques. In the early
1990s, Nelson Mandela had promised Muslim organizations that Muslim personal
law would be introduced following the abolition of apartheid. Esack however
led a determined protest against this move which resulted in the authorities
changing their mind. But views like Esack's and Wadud's can only thrive in
authoritarian societies where mainstream traditional discourse in the media
is hounded, caricatured or demonized, where anti-tradition zealotry
masquerades as liberalism. In South Africa, Esack's constituency for his
hyperliberalism shrank rapidly since Mandela's victory and his Call to Islam
Society no longer even exists. Similarly in Malaysia, the community would
be more intellectually robust and confident had the media been more balanced
allowed open discussion and debates on Dr. Wadud's book.
Despite the bitter and fractious confrontations that lasted almost
throughout the conference, at least the whole episode would serve as a
sobering starting point for a more civilized discourse between the
progressives and mainstream muslims in the future. AIDS prevention is much
more than condoms and safe-sex, especially in Malaysia where disease
transmission through sex accounts for only 12.9% of cases (and homosexual
sex, 0.9%). The rest is through contaminated needles in IV drug users. The
AIDS pandemic is too great a problem that no one group can appropriate the
cause against it and claim to have all the solutions. Calling oneself
progressive and those with differing views as obscurantists is hardly a good
beginning for consultation, it is just the other face of zealotry.
Dr. Mazeni Alwi
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