A longer look at the Malaysian penalties for arbitrary ‘insults to islam’

In the links and news post below, there is an item that I think deserves special focus. The story on Malaysia withdrawing immigration status to a muslim who allowed a mosque to be used for Buddhist prayer services.

I find this story as well as the other examples cited in the article to be much more important than even many aspects of the horror we see every day from Egypt in fact.

I suspect that in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, a sensation which ranges from surreal to downright unpleasant, people will force things to fit their pre-existing models of the world. This is no flaw of a person, but is part of the basic set of operating  instructions. Seeing the horror in Egypt for most legacy-media watchers probably changes the minds about the nature and role of Islam in a society of very very few people as its easy to force it into something more familiar, such as domestic historical civil wars or other more classical geopolitical models which allow us to continue a feeling of personal and national safety and dismiss Egyptian horror as being a problem of ‘somewhere else.’

But with the Malaysian stories we can see several examples of a country commonly thought of as ‘moderate’ implementing sharia punishments on behaviours that are profoundly revealing of the islamic-sharia zeitgeist, as well as an example of ‘hijra’, or the determined escalation of degrees of islamic control in all places and by any means.

This is much more important than the violence in Egypt because this demonstrates the thinking which causes Egypt-style violence everywhere it gets sufficient authority that it feels it to be worth the risk. And, much more importantly than temporary violence no matter how dramatic, the death of rational inquiry, reason, freedoms, classically liberal values such as equality for all before the law, and so on.

The fact that a muslim had his immigration status revoked because he allowed a Buddhist to use a mosque as a space for meditation (to the best of my knowledge, Buddhists do not pray in the Western sense and this itself shows how Islam does not care about the pesky details) shows Islamic supremacism in perfect clarity. This is something we see everywhere including Ottawa where the ‘multi-faith’ prayer space at the Ottawa Airport is always kept free of any crosses or non-Islamic artifacts that might corrupt its islamic purity. But this is covert action and not official yet. So its more difficult to make a case about it. Malaysia however, took it to the federal level.

Then we have from the same article these examples:

Last month, prosecutors charged two non-Muslims with sedition and inciting religious enmity after they posted a photograph on Facebook of themselves eating pork while extending greetings during the Islamic holy month of fasting. They face up to eight years in prison if convicted. Consumption of pork is forbidden for Muslims.

Police also temporarily detained a Muslim woman featured in a YouTube video that showed her celebrating the end of the fasting month with her dogs, which some Muslims consider unclean.

Now we see in higher resolution how the state intends to use what are the more arcane aspects of islamic doctrine to force the public into a rigid compliance of all of them. One must not only respect Islam, but one must be aware of all the aspects of it and increasingly move towards greater and greater adherence to the most picayune details of it if one wishes to avoid prosecution and indeed, persecution.

While it is surprising in some ways that these penalties were all meted out on muslims, it is central dogma to islam that these punishments for these crimes must apply at least equally, and usually more so, to non-muslims. And this is why it should concern us.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

2 Replies to “A longer look at the Malaysian penalties for arbitrary ‘insults to islam’”

  1. Passage about a British revert from a pre-dhimmi English novel, set in (then) Malaya –

    ‘Nothing must pass your lips during the hours of fasting.’ The Kathi was a gentle old man but hard as a rock. ‘Fined ten dollars.’

    It was now that Hardman began to feel himself cut off completely from his own kind. He might before have deplored the fact that Islam left so little to the individual conscience, but his objections had been academic, because the teeth of Islam had not yet touched him. Now he was made to feel like a schoolboy chewing toffee in class….

    And there was no release. He could no longer look at himself from the outside, for there was no one to talk to now. He was genuinely drifting away from the West…. [H]e ordered beer…and drank the afternoon away…. For some reason he began to scribble pensées in his pocket diary:

    ‘The Arabian Nights is essentially a book for boys.’

    ‘The Koran is obviously the work of an illiterate.’

    ‘Proclaiming the oneness of God is like proclaiming the wetness of water.’

    ‘I shall go mad.’

    – Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket, 1958, Norton Library edition of The Long Day Wanes, p 280 – 281