For most of those in my generation, we grew up amidst a time of great change. Our parents were a guinea pig generation: young men and women who were wrenched out of their villages and kampungs, thrown up into schools and universities far away from their origins, and then told to keep their heads down and rebuild a young nation, still reeling from the ashes of racial unrest.
This social upheaval, this march towards the utopia of development, wreaked a heavy cost on those who had to live through it, and I think it is not unfair to say that for many young Malaysians living through this period, many of them suffered through their own individual crises of faith. For some, the white heat of science and technology was so searing that faith was no longer something to be indulged in. For many others, the frightening pace of change meant that religion was not only a custom to remain loyal to, but a safe harbour for the mind and the soul.
My own version of living through this period of great social change was that I was sent to religious school in the mornings, prior to attending government school in the afternoons. A middle-aged ustaz, white turban ever-present, would be holding his thin sliver of rotan and teaching us to recite the Quran, and while the rotan mostly never did anything more than thwack down onto the Quran that we held in front of us when we missed a step, the threat of it was always heart-stopping. We learnt everything by rote: the letters of the abjad. The short verses of the juz amma. The fundamentals of Sunni theology: the pillars of the Faith, the pillars of Islam, the twenty attributes of God.
Like many of us then, I was taught to give due deference to the ustaz and ustazah. The implicit principle was that religious education was also supposed to purify you, to give you a moral grounding in what it means to be a good Muslim and a good human being.
Now, as I am older, I think this assumption around the morality of religious preachers is fraying. Although the phenomenon of using religion as a means of waging politics is not new, it is telling that the Malay language now has a phrase for it – “penunggang agama“. And we can see the penunggangan taking place across the spectrum of contemporary Malay society: using religion to sell TV entertainment, using religion to sell tudung and telekung, using religion to sell bottled water. Religious preachers being arrested for lewd behaviour, for social abuse, for rape.
When I survey this sordid state of affairs in the religious life of the country that I live in, I am reminded again of that hadith narrated by Imam Malik in his classic work, Al Muwatta’: “I have been sent to perfect good character.” The implication here is that all your ritual, all your praying and almsgiving and Haj-going would be for naught, if at the end of it all, your personality and character remains untouched by His Message.
And it is this principle that has guided my interaction with others, especially with religious men and women. I try my best to read their character, searching through the tone of voice, the timbre and weight of words said, the nod of the head and the flick of the hand. How the words match against what is done.
Of course, for many of us, it is easier to just keep to a more basic heuristic: kalau pakai jubah or serban, mesti lah alim kan? And the next step: kalau alim, mestilah baik kan? But our experience surely must teach us now, that we need to look beyond the superficial. And the ultimate test of goodness, of morality, must surely be that your character reflects the dignity of your soul and the depth of your learning.
Harder to do, yes, but surely necessary in these troubled times!