Tuesday last, Datuk Dr. Abdullah Md Zin, a Minister in the Prime Minister’s Dept. said that the Islamic Development Department (Jakim) has been tasked with drawing up guidelines on entertainment in the country for submission to the cabinet. The proposed guidelines, he said, included stopping all live and broadcast entertainment programmes during Muslim prayer times, banning all songs with lyrics deemed contrary to Islamic teaching and also a proposal to segregate male and female audience at events.
I have been agonizing over the implications and consequences of these proposed guidelines since then. But it was a relief to note that other Malaysians have also felt the same way. The Sunday Times (22/5) carried an article headlined Religious Guidelines on Entertainment: “Consult Others”. The article mentioned several individuals representing a spectrum of Malaysian society urging the inclusion of the views of all Malaysians before the guidelines are finalized.
And today I received this piece written by Dr.Farish Noor, via the mailing list, Beritamalaysia, on the same matter. As always his article is thought provoking. Read it here.
And his plea to us merits consideration -
Where will this leave Malaysia as a whole? For now the country's non-Muslims and a significant section of Muslims as well (often erroneously labelled 'liberal')
has been left with no choice save muted protest. Our national identity and the common shared collective temporal-spatial framework upon which the nation is to
be built is being carved up by religious functionaries who seem to be driven only by their own communitarian exclusive concerns. Worst of all, these religious
functionaries are in the pay of the Malaysian government and state, which means that their schemes are being financed by the ordinary Malaysian tax-payer! Is this the Malaysia that our founding fathers envisaged, or are we actually witnessing the
nascent Balkanisation of our country?
Dear Malaysians, this is OUR nation, and OUR collective national temporal-spatial space. It is there for all of us, on the basis of Malaysian citizenship, to share and build together, for each other and the generations to come. Yet our social-cultural and even temporal-spatial map is being carved up before our very eyes. For the sake of Malaysia, Malaysians and the Malaysia to come, this steady compartmentalisation and balkanisation of the nation has to be critically interrogated now, and not later.
