BADAI - Birds of a Feather Storm Together
Technorati tags: Social Criticism, Sarcasm, Article 11, BADAI, Malaysia, Islam
BADAI - or Badan Anti-IFC (Anti-IFC Body) was the party responsible for illegally disrupting a forum in Penang organized (legally) to discuss the superiority of the Federal Constitution as the body of law in Malaysia ("Federal Constitution: Protection For All"), on May 14, 2006.
Walski's literary trivia note: The word badai is a Malay word meaning "storm". Not to be confused with Bandai, makers of excellent Power Rangers, Mobile Suit Gundam and Hello Kitty toys for young and old.
They see themselves as an Anti-Body fighting against the liberal disease that has plagued the nation. White blood cells, with turbans. Hmm... interesting image. I guess Walski better stop and let you, the reader, imagine it for yourself, lest someone accuses Walski of blaspheming turbans.
Back to BADAI. Sometime back, Walski found this neat site that deciphers a given name to tell you what kind of monster that name represents. It turns out that BADAI deciphers as:
Rather fitting, don't you think? The Arcane Isle being Penang, in this case (which is actually where BADAI was formed). And boy, are these folks blood-thirsty... okay, maybe not in the literal sense, since ingesting blood is haram in Islam.
The next vampire you meet will very likely not be a Muslim
So, what prompted this post? Well, it's this news report from Bernama : "Johor Umno Youth And Pas Oppose Forum On Article 11". And of course, Walski's favorite apostate-hitman did a post on this over the weekend. It's odd to see UMNO Youth and PAS to be in agreement, but Walski supposes that birds of a feather... and all that.
But what is it about IFC (Inter-Faith Council) that's gotten these storm-troopers all riled up? For one thing, they are opposed to freedom of religion for all Malaysians. They couldn't care less for them other godless heathens, but definitely not for the Malay-Muslims. No sir - that part of the constitution shouldn't apply to Malay-Muslims, as this will weaken the position of Islam, they say.
There's also the legal quagmire of a Malay's status should he or she leave Islam, because technically (per the Constitution), he or she would no longer be Malay. But that's not BADAI's concern. The real issue is apostacy.
(more apostacy, apostrophes and apothecaries in the full post)
The Perak State Mufti, not too long ago, issued a statement stating that there were 100,000 apostates in Malaysia. The figure comes from a group of "Muslim professionals" who conducted a research. Or were they professional Muslims? Walski doesn't really know.
No decent group of professionals would be
complete without a wrestler
It's not known what kind of research, or what kind of Muslim professionals were involved in the study, but the Mufti stands by his numbers.
But here's Walski's question: Why go for quantity, when it's quality that should be the goal? Or maybe, the Malay-Muslims really don't care about quality, and feel that it's the numbers that count.
While the Quran does state that apostacy, in Islam, is a grave sin, the holy book is also silent on what punishment should be meted out for an apostate in this life. The death penalty, which some conservative Muslims would really love to have instituted here in Malaysia as a punishment for apostacy, comes from numerous other non-Quranic sources. Basing on the Quran alone, it would imply that God will deal with them in his own way and wisdom.
This, of course, doesn't sit well with the conservative camp, because as mentioned earlier, they're just plain blood-thirsty - in the non-haemoglobal-ingesting sense, of course. Threatening others, crying bloody murder is all A-OK, as long as it's for Islam.
And it is the issue of apostacy (vis-a-vis Article 11 of the Constitution) that has blinded BADAI to the fact that the IFC is not about promoting apostacy (or apostrophes and apothecaries). Making freedom of religion an unalienable right of citizenship is not going to cause hundreds of thousands of Malay-Muslims leave their religion overnight, as they seem to alude to.
Give a cat enough catnip and it will spin itself into a silly frenzy - which is exactly the effect that the mere mention of IFC and Article 11 seems to have on BADAI and their storm-trooper kin.
The quest for knowledge, reason, and dialog seems to have given way to brute force and mob mentality with these people. The May 16 incident in Penang is proof of that.
And in the process they are doing Islam a big, big disfavor by showing the world how intollerant Muslims can be and how sieged their mentality has become. Not to mention promoting a face of Islam that's unpalatable.
And then they wonder why some people get disenchanted with it...
