For some years now, I’ve avoided performing my Friday prayers at a masjid that is run by State authorities, be it JAWI or JAIS or some other such organisation.
At first, it was merely a matter of style. Such masjids, from my perspective, have come to embrace a very officious, bland and staid form of khutbah. Always, the topic revolves around some “moral” that the state wants to have inculcated amongst the public. Sometimes khutbah airtime is taken up by some commemorative occasion: “Hari Polis” or “Hari Pahlawan” or “Hari Kemerdekaan”. Often the khutbah would conclude with “these are the key lessons for this khutbah”, assuming of course that the audience doesn’t have much by the way of critical thinking, and that such key takeaways needed to be served on a silver platter, week after week. Sometimes the khutbah would dwell on something absolutely banal, like “kepentingan menjaga kebersihan”, especially when all that anyone can talk about is some controversy like the 1MDB scandal. And almost always, the khatib themselves would deliver these committee-drafted sermons in one of either two modes: the self-important, declamatory tone of “I Am The State”, or the disinterested, flat drone of a bored bureaucrat just eager to tick the box for the week.
Later, as cultural and religious differences began to become more prominent in the bloodstream of Malaysian politics in more recent years, I began to detect a growing willingness amongst the religious bureaucracy to use the weekly Friday khutbah as a platform to wage their side of this growing divide. Sermons began to specifically denounce acts seen as “un-Islamic”; words like “liberal” and “human rights” became increasingly used as bogeymen to be sneered at and denigrated. The khutbah has become a political weapon. (In this sense, perhaps I am being somewhat naive. I am pretty sure that the weaponisation of the Friday khutbah has been going on for centuries and centuries throughout Muslim history.)
I began to miss the Friday prayers which marked my time during my undergraduate days in the UK. The sermons then felt more raw, more urgent, more sincere, more real. Students themselves would organise and deliver sermons touching on issues of real and immediate gravity to the audience: the challenge of being a good Muslim in a secular society; the adab of studying, the responsibility of da’wah.
Several years into my working life, I discovered the masjid at ISTAC on Persiaran Duta. Sometimes the professors would give the khutbah, sometimes it would be someone who looked like a student. Often we’d have foreign imams who have come to Malaysia on speaking tours, who would be invited to give the khutbah. One week, we had a Uighur imam from Australia come to give a khutbah on oppression, and drawing a direct line from the Prophet’s mission to undo the oppression of the Quraysh, to the ummah’s responsibility in 2019 to speak out against the oppression of the Chinese government on the Uighurs in the northern province of Xinjiang. Tears rolled down my cheeks as the imam evoked the sadness and grief of a Muslim people suffering under the yoke of Chinese tyranny.
I am grateful that amidst a sharpening of religious discord in this country, there are oases of religious independence and liberality where the State is kept at bay; where being Muslim does not necessarily mean being treated as “sheeple”.
Is it too much to hope that such oases shall grow in influence in the years to come? Can we try to foster a more tolerant, open approach to Islam; one that emphasises Mercy amongst fellow Muslims as well as amongst the citizens of our fragile nation? Perhaps the Friday khutbah ought to be a good place to start.