Sajakkini

4.30 on a Friday afternoon. I’m supposed to be working on the artwork for an upcoming exhibition to be held soon but I find myself discovering increasingly innovative ways to procrastinate. It doesn’t help that I am sitting in my glorious home in the middle of a balmy afternoon when everyone else is hunched over their keyboards in the office, busily working and trying to ignore e-mails like this.

How much would you pay for this kind of freedom? In my case, it’s costing about two-thirds of my last-drawn salary. I’d be happier with half, but it’s only been six months. So give me another year before you start proposing to me, yeah. Unless you don’t mind your (I mean, our future) children going to school wrapped in old pieces of carpet and eating the tupperware in which their bekal (rations) is supposed to come in every now and then.

A friend of mine who has been freelancing for the past six years and consequently has a conjugal relationship with maggi mee thinks this is the kind of life humans are meant to lead. I agree with him in that the 9 to 5 routine is sometimes unnecessary, but in terms of it being artificial, I’d now have to wonder. The Quran plainly states that God created the day for working and the night for remembrance, so spending half your life in an office must be how it’s meant to be.

RUHAYAT X is a thinker, writer and publisher. He’s 100 percent Malaysian. Don’t let his goatee fool you. Visit his blog: Neohikayat Press.

Muslim versus Mukmin

But there is, as you know, a gap between knowing and doing. To a Muslim, that gap is what separates a Muslim (one who merely has religion) from a Mukmin (a true believer). And so those who can, do, and those who are too lazy, write long e-mails to tell others to do it while hoping that God will forgive them for their weakness.

Which explains why, while I sort of know what the day and night are to be used for, I continue to work well into the night and get up well into the day. This morning I got up at 11 but only because the phone was ringing off the hook. I couldn’t go back to sleep because it’s Friday and I didn’t want to spoil my nap in the mosque later. As it turned out, the imam spent about 30 minutes talking about Islam, cleanliness and wabak denggi (dengue epidemic). I thought that was rather progressive. All they have to do now is make it interesting.

Presumably, the speaker system also found the electrical bits it was carrying to be so boring that part of it dozed off halfway through along with two-thirds of the jemaah (congregation), rendering large portions of the speech entirely illegible to me. All the snoring around me only served to compound the matter further.

But we in Malaysia are lucky to even have non-working PA systems in our mosques. Not too long ago, in a land far more pious than ours, the learned men who are convinced that only they knew the word of God had issued a fatwa (religious decree) condemning modern technology as being unnatural and, therefore, blasphemous. So they banned the use of speakers, claiming these to be - I kid you not - the work of the devil.

The key argument pivots around the idea of bid’ah, or “innovation”. Allow me to be as simplistic as always and explain that what this means is that things that were not present in the Prophet’s time are to be considered blasphemous innovations and therefore should not be used by modern Muslims who wish to go to heaven.

You are going to hell

This is what lies at the heart of the severe austerity that drives such fun-loving people like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. It’s also why once upon a time you could find pockets of Muslims here who refuse to have the television in their homes.

That the devil lives in speakers I have no problems with, surprisingly. Technology is like a knife: on its own it is benign. It has no motive to be either this or that. It is the human holding it who decides whether it will be used for good or evil. And so it speaks volumes of the human condition that a lot of technology is channelled into giving birth to mundane things that insidiously destroy our humanity.

Yet, if we believe, as Muslims do, that humans are intrinsically good, then they must be behaving this way because they have been seduced by the devil to use such things in a destructive way. Hence, the devil living in speakers is an apt metaphorical shortcut. But whether or not the fatwa-makers saw it as
metaphorical, God only knows.

Meanwhile, back in Malaysia, even PAS members were clever enough to realise that if they came up with such a statement they’d be forced to ride camels to the market and read the Quran by candlelight every night, even as they slowly go blind (it is safe to assume that reading glasses were also an unknown entity during the Prophet’s time). And so, as always, they have managed to find verses in the Quran that support their views and make technology kosher, thereby disputing the finding of their fellow ulama.

Lastly…

But there are paradoxical limits, as usual, to their thinking. And so while you will find the green masses piling onto the Internet as a mode of communicating their messages to the people, none of them have been smart enough to figure out that films are the perfect vehicle for dakwah.

In fact, to this day, they won’t even touch movies, because the devil, for them, lives still in movies, the way he used to in loudspeakers.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s horrific enough that we have to live with the “creative” output of Muslims like Yusof Haslam and Professor Abdul Razak Mohideen. To be confronted with movies that clobber your senses with incessant moralising is enough to make even the devil think seriously about moving home, I think.