Listen or I will cut something off!

We are going through the fever of another by-election in Kuala Trengganu. Everything today can be politicized and build to epic propostions under the guise of "making it better for the people". The latest is the Malaysia's opposition party's wanting to implement the "hudud" law if they came into power.

Briefly defined by Wikipedia, hudud is "Hudud (Arabic حدود, also transliterated hadud, hudood; singular hadd, حد, literal meaning "limit", or "restriction") is the word often used in Islamic literature for the bounds of acceptable behaviour and the punishments for serious crimes. In Islamic law or Sharia, hudud usually refers to the class of punishments that are fixed for certain crimes that are considered to be "claims of God."

The offenses under hudud are:-
Drinking alcohol (sharb al-khamr, شرب الخمر)
1. Theft (sariqa, السرقة)
2. Highway robbery (qat' al-tariq, قطع الطريق)
3. Illegal sexual intercourse (zina', الزناء)
4. False accusation of zina' (qadhf, القذف) [1][3]
5. Rebellion against the ruler (sedition or high treason)
6. Apostasy (irtidād or ridda, ارتداد) includes blasphemy.

Punishments include:-
1. Capital punishments - by sword/crucifixion (for highway robbery with homicide), by stoning (for zina' when the offenders are mature, married Muslims)
2. Amputation of hands or feet (for theft and highway robbery without homicide)
3. Flogging with a varying number of strokes (for drinking, zina' when the offenders are unmarried or not Muslims, and false accusations of zina')

The beauty of the hudud law are the requirements for conviction. They are:-
"Only eye-witness testimony and confession were admitted. For eye-witness testimony, the number of witnesses required was doubled from Islamic law's usual standard of two to four. Moreover, only the testimony of free adult Muslim males was acceptable (in non-hudud cases the testimony of women, non-Muslims and slaves could be admitted in certain circumstances). A confession had to be repeated four times, the confessor had to be in a healthy state of mind, and he or she could retract the confession at any point before punishment."

So this seems to leave a lot to the discretion of certain people who have to be very trustworthy when left in charge. These laws and applications probably made sense during the time of the Prophet Mohammad but in these days where law and order are more matured and men are more crooked, I don't think it is applicable anymore. There needs to be more check and balance when it comes to the application of such laws.

How do you trust only one eye witness and one jury to pass judgement and punishment even if the crime cannot be proven?? Can you trust people who can blow others up with C4 to this kind of power? Or those who have no regard for other races and drum up their mosque loud speakers 5 times a day or those who call non-Muslim names and try to deprive them of basic civil rights??

If at all, leave the hudud to the Muslim folks and let it be applicable to them. I don't really care. But the hudud needs to be applicable to all, including those who are championing it now like those PAS cretins.

A more rationale way would be to study the law and evolve it to suit a multi-religious society. We don't have to adopt all of hudud. After all, the hudud law while being an Islamic law is also just a set of regulations that can be passed through the parliament. Just like our moronic ISA which states that you can be held indefinitely without trial (I think they may have changed it to 2 years...like that makes it better). So non-Muslims need to be clear how this will impact us.

From the looks of it, the full definition is obviously not for us. I mean for a Chindian, pork and alcohol are our staple diet. It's like telling a Malay that he/she has to work for a living and not depend on government hand outs. That would kill them, just like it will kill us pork loving, alcohol chugging and hard working non-Malays. (I realized I just made a race base generalization but like I said before, if God didn't want us to make race based generalization, he wouldn't have given us races).

So, as with the arrogant leaders of this country, no one feels the need to explain things to anyone and they just go about implementing policies as they see fit. When there is a protest, we are threatened with ISA or some other stupid name calling crap. I do hope hudud is passed so that we could use it to kick these idiots with it. For lying, we will cut off their tongue and for blowing somebody up with C4, we will stuff every orifice with C4 to blow them up. Hey, seems like hudud not so bad after all.