by VIRIGINIA HAUSSEGGER
f all my women friends – with a few exceptions – lived in Malaysia, and we happened to be Muslim, we’d all be badly battered and bruised. Our bodies would be red raw from constant thrashing. I wonder if we’d wear those lashing marks with pride. Or would the pain and humiliation of official caning eventually break our spirit, and reduce us to a pitiful submission?
The humiliation certainly got to 32 year old Kartika Shukarno. Last year when the former model and mother of two, was sentenced to a flogging for the crime of drinking a beer in a nightclub, she asked them to get on with it. As the judge in the Syariah High Court read out her sentence – six strokes of the rotan and a three year jail term or hefty fine – he explained the caning would make the accused “repent and serves as a lesson to Muslims”. Kartika bowed her head, kept calm, and after withdrawing her appeal said, “I will accept this earthly punishment, let Allah decide my punishment in the hereafter”.
Which raises an interesting point about Allah and his own interpretation of the Quran. Given so much of the foul treatment meted out to Muslim women is argued as justifiable according to the Quran, one can only wonder which of the myriad scholarly interpretations Allah himself might rely on.
There is Islamic scholarship that interprets verses of the Quran and cites various Hadith to argue that Allah preached respect for females, and equality between men and women. And then there are those scholars who interpret the sacred text as prescribing all manner of evils against women: so that they can be beaten by their husbands; shrouded in cloth; starved of food; forbidden to work, laugh or love whomever they choose. And even flogged for drinking a beer.
But it’s not just beer drinking that would make many of the women I know cop a flogging every weekend –if they lived in Malaysia. It’s sex. Two weeks ago the Malaysian government announced that three women have been imprisoned and caned for having sex out of wedlock.
Given just about every woman I know – again with a few exceptions – had a sexual encounter before marriage, we’d all qualify for a caning. It’s no wonder then that the Muslim editor of Malaysia’s The Star Online wrote in his editorial that news of the flogging would mean foreigners “are inevitably going to equate us with the Taliban. And who can blame them?”
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