{"id":756,"date":"2006-03-25T11:02:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-25T11:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maddruid.com\/wp\/?p=756"},"modified":"2006-10-09T18:33:27","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T10:33:27","slug":"754-of-the-strengthening-role-of-religion-within-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/?p=756","title":{"rendered":"[754] Of the strengthening role of religion within the government"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read a disturbing article in Utusan Malaysia<\/a> (in Malay) earlier this week. A bill known as Enakment Zakat<\/em> (literally, Tithe Enactment) is set for enforcement next year at the latest in Selangor. The bill will enable the state’s Islamic religious authority to imprison any person that failed to pay alms or zakat; zakat<\/a> is obligatory alms on Muslims and part of five pillars of Islam. The troubling part here is the power the state government has to enforce religious tenets on its citizens. The state is enroaching on private citizens’ life in the name of religion.<\/p>\n

The past few years have seen the strengthening of role of religion, specifically Islam, within the Malaysian government. Not too many months ago, we saw how certain religious authority had the audacity to form moral police squads<\/a> despite public disapproval. It took several hard no’s to convince that religious authority to abandon that idea. More recently, policewomen had been ordered to wear headscarf at an official function<\/a> regardless of belief. The police stated that it was for the sake of uniformity but I suspect something more sinister going on. Though this enactment is only effective at state level, it may well be another step taken to further erode secularism in Malaysia.<\/p>\n

This trend is definitely the effect of intense UMNO-PAS rivalry that started in 1999. PAS managed a stunning win in the year’s general election<\/a>. In effort to counter PAS, UMNO tried to be more Islamic than PAS, enticing conservatives that would normally vote for PAS. It worked and in the 2004 general election<\/a>, UMNO gave PAS a severe beating.<\/p>\n

The “I’m more a Muslim than you” policy may have accomplished what UMNO desired but they’re disfranchising the more moderate Malaysians. For such reason, I hope to see UMNO’s current policy to backfire in 2008 or 2009, the year the next general election is due. Such backlash would halt UMNO and indirectly, the government’s march to the right. PAS suffered somewhat similar backlash<\/a> during the Pengkalan Pasir by-election, or not<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Else, soon, through extrapolation, maybe, the government would send Muslims to jail for missing prayers in the future. Hey, they’ve already sent those that don’t fast during Ramadan into a “timeout”. That could happen unless we stop giving those in the right more power to impose their self-proclaimed superior moral and other religious rules on the masses.<\/p>\n

The problem is, of course, we have a commie wannabe as an alternative to UMNO and PAS and that makes things tougher than it ought to be. In the end, it’s all about the lesser devil, unfortunately. And that lesser devil<\/a> is currently somewhere on the left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a disturbing article in Utusan Malaysia (in Malay) earlier this week. A bill known as Enakment Zakat (literally, Tithe Enactment) is set for enforcement next year at the latest in Selangor. The bill will enable the state’s Islamic religious authority to imprison any person that failed to pay alms or zakat; zakat is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-government","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}