Sajakkini

I live somewhere near Kampung Kerinci, I told him. He’d been so curious to know where I go home to at the end of each night. Oh, he said, your own place? Yes, I said. You live alone? Yes, I said. Wow, he said, so you can walk around naked in your apartment then, huh?

And this was a straight Melayu guy.

You know, I don’t get it. That’s the third guy - three of them in six months - who’s said the same thing. I kid you not - they were, at best, only half joking. (Actually, it would be even more damning if they really were joking: you know what they say about jesting and the truth.)

It’s enough to make me wonder: what the hell is it with Malay guys and this fantasy of walking around starkers in the privacy of their homes, anyway? What is going on?

RUHAYAT X is a pussycat, a publisher, writer and thinker. He is inspired by life.. He would never kill or stub an ant out. He is also the type you would introduce to your mother, but not your father.

Swinging my nuts

Now, I don’t know about you, but going all natural in my home was not exactly the first thing to flash through my mind when I signed the sales-and-purchase agreement. Maybe it’s some kind of unspoken balak Melayu dream that my dad forgot to tell me about. Maybe, apart from the Volvo, one of the things we’re supposed to aspire to is to get our own pad so that we can then swing about freely in our birthday suits.

And now I’m imagining that, out there in KL right at this very moment, thousands of single Malay dudes are making a mug of Milo in the comfort of their kitchens, sans clothing. I don’t have to tell you how disturbing that is. It almost makes me want to call for a total ban on private ownership of telescopes and binoculars.

(Oh, I’m sure if you asked 100 Malay men right after this none of them would admit that the thought has ever occured to them. Like most research, making things obvious leads to false reactions. It’s when they voluntarily offer the information in an unguarded moment that is most telling.)

I suppose given a culture that consciously represses sexual expression, this is not something that should be surprising. When you’ve lived your life with everything forcibly zipped up, what ultimate form of fantasy can there be other than to let go of every single thread that cloaks your magnificent temple (I’m applying creative licence liberally here)? How we choose to express that fantasy is what should concern us.

Give it to me baby

Sex is high on any man’s mind, yes. Perversity, on the other hand, is quite another thing altogether. It is perhaps wrong of me to view the desire to lose all clothing as something perverse; nudity is, after all, the most natural state of all. But when society has been built up along modest lines, then the desire to shed all inhibitions does indeed become a perversity.

I’m not saying that all Malay men are perverse, but given the spate of odd sex crimes afflicting the Malay community, I wonder if something dark is not bubbling in our collective souls. And it wouldn’t surprise me a whit if it turns out the ulamas are, in a backhanded way, responsible for this.

I’ve always found it to be supremely ironic that the people who have religious stickers plastered on their windscreens are the very same ones who are likely to drive inconsiderately on the roads. Religious stickers smack of insecurity to me: if you feel good about being a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Christian, why do you need to shout about it? Where’s the modesty that your prophets called for?

(Evangelism? So that’s what you’d want your religion reduced to, some cheesy slogan on a peeling piece of plastic, half-legible from exposure to sunlight, tacked on to the back of a wreck? Forgive me, but that’s pathetic. Especially when your behaviour does nothing to reflect the words you deem to proclaim.)

Some people seem to think that just belonging to a religion - any religion - is good enough; that they are then somehow absolved of the social sins of behaving badly.

This is especially true of people who embrace a belief without actually understanding why. (And please note that this does not only apply to Muslims.) These are people, you will notice, who are most likely to become fanatics. Their flimsy hold on their (new) faiths makes them more willing to swallow dogma and doctrine blindly, in the mistaken belief that that is what true believers are made of.

Stark raving mad

But these are the very people that the ulamas, consciously or not, have given rise to with their vacuous proletysing. If they do not question it is because they have already closed their minds. This phenomenon is fascinating to me, because it can turn even the most educated professionals into raving loons.

I used to have a Chinese colleague, a trained lawyer who got her degree in Australia, with whom I enjoyed having conversations on current affairs with. But whenever the issue fell on terrorism she’d turn into a Christian zealot, blaming the Quran as the root of evil. I used to send her excerpts from the Quran to show her it ain’t so, but eventually I learned that save a bolt from God, nothing can force a bigot to open his or her mind.

People like this are impossible to reason with. I once tried having a decent “argument” with a Muslim colleague about rape. His view was that women who wear flimsy clothing deserve what they get because they are asking for it. He kept repeating it like an annoying sheep, and it angers me still, two years on, as I write this.

Ask him about that Malay girl in the bas kilang who got raped and murdered when she was wearing loose baju kurung and tudung and he will tell you that it was an aberration. By fixating only on the stimulus, what he’s missed is the far more important question of why men become rapists in the first place. (Which, to me, is really where we should spend our efforts investigating, rather than bleating the tired excuse.)

All in moderation

But that, I am reasonably sure, is not something that bothers people like him. He probably still doesn’t realise it, but he was, in effect, saying that men are mindless street mongrels, unable to control their lustful desires upon sight of a pretty face.

That’s not so surprising to me, because it is the same thing I have heard from the mouths of many religious men, too. The reason why they want to impose so many restrictions on women can only be because they believe men - the species they themselves belong to - to be nothing more than base animals. Just don’t try to get them to admit to it.

It’s like a spiralling nightmare. The more the religious types try to clamp down on personal freedom (in terms of thinking and behaviour), the more repressed people will become and the more they are wont to rebel. But the more they rebel, the tighter the screws turn. Eventually, the whole barrel will simply explode.

We are slowly getting there. But when it happens I am confident that the ulamas will simply be turning askance to other people’s faces, looking for someone to blame. For, are they not the divinely anointed ones? How is it that by preaching God’s words they could give rise to such deep perseversity, anyway?

Nudist colony

The irony is that it is the imams who keep goading people to go into themselves to become better people. This is called muhasabah in Islamic parlance, and refers to the act of sitting on your own at the end of each night remembering the good and bad things you’d done during the day, so that you may know where you can improve yourself.

Yet, the imams do not bother doing the muhasabah on themselves. After all, there can be no introspection if you already believe yourself to be saintly and absolved of all sins. And when there is no introspection, there can be no change.

And so we will continue having this weird phenomenon of Malay men who think that being naked in their home is some kind of groovy thing to do for some time yet.