“By insisting that a person who no longer professes the religion of Islam but has embraced another religion to seek an order of the Syariah Court is equivalent to insisting that a muallaf … is obliged to seek the clearance of the religious leaders or authority of his former religion. Mutual respect and tolerance surely cannot be fostered without due regard to the principle of reciprocity.”
I was very heartened to read a statement from the NECF, which was issued last Friday in response to this landmark case on religious freedom in
Malaysia. The paragraph above is an extract of that statement. I was heartened not because it was a statement I would have made myself (though I agree with it entirely) but because it was made at all. It is great to see a body like the NECF carefully articulate its position and publicly air it.It isn’t a statement I would have made myself because I haven’t yet thought through the issues of individual rights versus the collective good and of truth in religion and the exclusive nature of its result. The former always has a place for the notion of balance but the latter is a lot trickier. If a religion is true, how does it not also be exclusive (and therefore divisive) unless it is a religion which suggests an “all road leads to
Rome” approach, which in my mind, is always suspect?
Jesus said He is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one was to go to the Father except by Him. He acknowledged the divisive nature of this claim, saying he came as a sword, dividing families and communities. If truth divides, should it be sacrificed for the sake of unity? Can truth be upheld without necessarily causing division? Of course it can.
The answer lies with agreeing to disagree. I don’t become your enemy just because I disagree with you, and there shouldn’t be a barrier to 2 persons remaining friends and having a reasonably healthy and harmonious relationship, just because they have different opinions and beliefs. This is such a no-brainer I can’t believe I just wrote it. Yet, this simple and fundamental fact is one which seems to escape practitioners of a certain brand of Islam in
Malaysia, especially. To them, we cannot be their friends or part of a mutual community, unless we agree with them or we never express our opinions and beliefs. Christianity has always been an exclusive belief. With Jesus making those claims set out above, how can it not be? Christianity is basically saying unless you are one (a Christian), you’re going where the sun shines just a tad too hot. Yet, for all the divisive potential, Christianity has never killed for its own sakes. Those who have killed in its name did so for other reasons. Christianity was only a cover to make the killings less culpable, indeed, more noble. Is this the real cause for the division caused by or attributed to Islam today? Is it all for money and politics? In
Malaysia maybe but what of elsewhere? There is so much to know and so little time to.
I wonder too, about the issue of the relationship between individualism and the collective good. The law has long trekked and developed the idea of where the balance should be. What about religion? What does Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other religion say about where this spot of balance should be? The church I know would go a long way to sit down with someone who is having problems with his faith. He’d be advised, counselled and prayed for. He’d have visits to his home. All these however, seldom (if ever) carry any suggestions of threats of physical harm or ostracism. There is no law in any Christian country I know, which seeks to legislate against leaving the faith. The reason is simple – how do you legislate against personal beliefs? If someone chooses to stop believing in something, how does legislation make him believe it anyway? He’d just, at best, retain the form of that belief. If I were a pastor of a church, I’d rather a member of my congregation who no longer believes, stay out of the church, than for that person to be forced to keep showing up and perform the rituals because the law says he must. His relationship with God would have been non-existent. How could he sincerely worship God when he’s in my church?
Should I keep him in my church despite his (hopefully temporarily) dead faith, for the sake of keeping a lid on matters? No, of course not. Again, compulsion in matters of faith is a no-no. There is so much to think about, and articulate. It would have been such a luxury to be able to sit down with a clear mind to have all this set out.
Ante 