COMMENT: Degrees of disappearance ...

It's amazing what can happen to one's education in a matter of years. My mother always warned me when I was young that I should never forget how to recite portions of the Qur'an previously memorised. "Forgetting Qur'an - it verry bad gunna," she would tell me.

["gunna" is an Urdu and Turkish word that means "sin]

But some people manage to lose entire university degrees. For instance, back in June 2005, the following appeared on the New Zealand Scoop news website:

Two eminent scholars on religion will be hosted in Auckland tomorrow (Friday) evening for public discussion on the topic of friendship between adherents of different faiths, specifically Islam and Christianity ...

... Mr. Afroz Ali of Sydney, also well versed in inter-religious matters, holding degrees in Islamic Studies and Shari'ah from Islamic University, Madina, Saudi Arabia, thereafter continuing through traditional Islamic learning styles under scholars such as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of the United States, Shaykh Salik bin Siddina and Shaykh Murabtal Hajj of Mauritania.

And so this eminent scholar has not one but two degrees from the Islamic University in Madina.

But alas, after a mere 4 years, this eminent scholar seems to have lost his two university degrees. Hence the following profile appears on the website of an upcoming interfaith conference to be held in Perth ...

He is a qualified Imam in the Islamic Tradition, having studied under Traditional Islam and received licence to teach in various Islamic Sciences. His studies have taken him from university-based Islamic University- Madina, Saudi Arabia then moving towards Traditional Scholarship in Yemen, United States and Mauritania, where he has spent considerable time to learn from the most esteemed Rightly Guided Islamic Scholars of our time.

Er ... what happened to those university degrees? I thought he had degrees in both Islamic Studies and Shariah. Did these degrees go missing?

Anwar Ibrahim will also be speaking at this interfaith gathering in Perth. I wonder if any of his degrees have also mysteriously disappeared. Somehow I doubt it.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO: BBC report on the Allah Made Me Funny tour ...

Here's a report from BBC about the UK tour of that awesome threesome known as Allah Made Me Funny from 17 April 2009.




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POLITICS: A liberal view of the Pan-Islamic Party of Malaysia ...

Keith Leong, an Associate at the Malaysia Think Tank, provides some interesting perspectives on PAS, a religious party that forms part of Malaysia's opposition.

As a young non-Muslim Malaysian with generally liberal leanings, I have always had mixed feelings about PAS. The party has been painted as the ultimate bogeyman by the establishment media and pundits to my demographic group, often with general success. Incidents like their periodic campaigns against alcohol consumption and teenybopper music only served to heighten my discontent towards the brand of politics that they practiced.

On the other hand, one cannot help but admire the dedication and perseverance that the PAS ranks have shown in their long, twilight struggle in Opposition. The high regard, even affection by which their leaders like Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat are accorded to, not only by Malaysian Muslims but their compatriots of other faiths as well suggest that there is more to PAS than what the powers-that-be would have us believe.

More importantly, however, is the small but growing number amongst them who realise, like their colleagues both in Pakatan Rakyat and Barisan Nasional that Malaysia can only be led effectively in a broad-based, inclusive manner. The politicians who realised this before and since the 8th of March 2008 have grown in stature, while those who have not or will not have only exacerbated the sectarian tensions that threaten to rend this country apart.

Malaysia may be a Muslim-majority country, but PAS cannot rely on Islam to gain anything even resembling an electoral majority. Religion and ethnicity are intertwined in Malaysian law and politics. If Malay nationalists worry non-Muslim minorities, imagine how they must feel about PAS.

... it seems many young leaders, regardless of their party, who want public life in Malaysia to be more than a zero-sum game dictated by archaic sectarian rivalries are being hounded into obscurity while the demagogues triumph.

The possibility of this happening in PAS is all the more sad because Malaysians have had, for the last couple of months the chance to see what the party could be like if it was led by moderates. The picture that that possibility presented was inspiring and promising.

MP for Shah Alam Khalid Samad visiting a Catholic Church (the construction of which had faced numerous bureaucratic obstacles) in his constituency and receiving rave reviews from the parishioners. Nik Abdul Aziz standing up for his fellow PKR and DAP leaders smeared by the reactionary press.

PAS has the ability to embrace a more pluralist approach that goes beyond pan-Islam and Malay chauvinism.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf