It was almost 12 am by the time we finished tending to our 106th resident who came to seek our assistance at the meet-the people session in Marsiling. It was a very long night indeed as we started our MPS at 7pm. Although I was dead tired, one case stuck in my mind. A 75 year old retired primary school teacher came to appeal for a HDB rental flat. She is currently living in one room, which she rented from the open market, with her low IQ daughter and grandson, both of whom she’s supporting.
She had been re-employed after her retirement by the school until recently when they no longer needed her services. Without an income, she can no longer afford the market rental and is eligible for a public rental flat. I told her that I would appeal for her but also asked her whether she needed financial assistance. She declined but asked me instead to write to another primary school that she had worked for before to enquire whether they had a vacancy for her.
I was quite astounded by the reply of this 75 year old as I have, on a few occasions, received requests from able bodied, younger men who refused to work but was expecting financial assistance which is really meant for the needy who cannot work or support themselves. Although she had politely declined, I will still proceed to secure financial assistance for her as she deserved it. It is cases like this that gives meaning to our work.
KUALA LUMPUR — The Malaysian Deputy Minister in charge of Islamic Affairs on Tuesday (April 19) defended the country’s decision to allow controversial Islamic scholar Zakir Naik (picture) to conduct his recent week-long lecture series on religion following an uproar from various quarters, including the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) component parties, because Dr Zakir is a “voice of moderation” for Islam.
Analysts, however, told TODAY the Malaysian government’s endorsement of Dr Zakir — including a meeting between the preacher and Prime Minister Najib Razak — was aimed at appealing to the Malay voter base, marking another level at which the country’s main ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), is using religion to shore up its political position.
In an interview with business radio station BFM on Tuesday morning, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki said the India-born preacher was needed in Malaysia to counter the rising extremist voices in Islam. “Islam is a misunderstood religion, and there are many voices that are perceived as being extremist. We need a voice of moderation,” said Mr Asyraf . “He could represent a voice of moderation, not only among Muslims, but especially non-Muslims.” Mr Asyraf said Dr Zakir was capable of convincing non-
Muslims that Islam is a “religion of moderation”. “We are facing plenty of problems right now with extremist groups. This is why we need iconic personalities to change this perception,” he added.
Mr Asyraf was among those who lobbied for Dr Zakir to be allowed to speak in Malaysia, despite objections from BN’s senior partners, Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) and the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), as well as from numerous non-governmental organisations.
NGO Hindu Rights Action Force had accused Dr Zakir of encouraging discord by allegedly promoting terrorism and criticising the various faiths practised in Malaysia. The preacher is controversial for his views, among them his support for Al Qaeda jihadists and Osama bin Laden, after, in a 2006 lecture, he called for “every Muslim to be a terrorist”. However, Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has defended the Islamic televangelist and even described the latter as a “very wise man”. During his week-long tour, Dr Zakir spoke in Kuala Lumpur, Terengganu and Malacca, after being given permission to do so by the police and the government.
Dr Lim Teck Ghee, director of the Centre for Policy Initiatives in Kuala Lumpur, told TODAY that the government’s move in greenlighting Dr Zakir’s speaking engagements was to appeal to the Malay-Muslim support base. “It is to make sure this audience continues to see the government as protecting Muslim and Malay dominance and hegemony,” said Dr Lim.
“The past two elections have shown that UMNO’s hold on power is precarious. Distracting the Malay Muslim audience with religious issues, which make it appear as if UMNO is the champion of Islam, is a straightforward and sure-to-win method to retain Malay votes; perhaps even a majority.”
Political analyst Wong Chin Huat noted the issue is about domestic positioning, to “lock in” Muslim voters who are eager to see Islam or Muslims emerging triumphant in any zero-sum game with other faiths or religious communities. “It’s a sign that the government is using the religious card to shore up its political position,” the head of political and social analysis at Penang Institute told TODAY.
In the space of three short months recently, Singaporean society witnessed outpourings of concern over the planned public performances of two major international stars: Adam Lambert and Madonna.
Last November, an online petition that objected to Lambert’s “promotion of a highly sexualised lifestyle and LGBT rights” collected about 20,000 signatures. In February, it was reported in the news that eight pastors representing various Christian denominations met Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam to express concerns over possible religiously offensive content in Madonna’s planned concert.
In each case, heated discussions followed everywhere online as ordinary Singaporeans argued for and against the merits of these objections.
These events point to two interesting features of current Singaporean politics.
First, while once communal concerns over issues of public morality were largely dealt with behind closed doors, over the past 10 years or so we have begun to see public lobbying over moral and cultural issues such as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) rights, “sanctity of life” issues including abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and others like the decision to build integrated resorts.
Second, social media platforms have become part of our public political space – an important outlet for people sharing political news and opinions – but some of this public interaction has historically been less than civil.
It was a product of these two observations that the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) recently carried out a study on “The New Singaporean Pluralism”. This involved closed-door focus group discussions and individual interviews with many prominent public advocates on all sides of the issues of LGBT rights and the “sanctity of life”.
We attempted to identify the specific basic points of contention and the objectionable advocacy tactics that have been used in recent years. But more importantly, we attempted to tease out the potential principles and practices of governance that may help maintain the civility of our shared political space so as to be able to apply them to future disagreements.
Some of the points of contention were expected. For example, LGBT rights advocates want the LGBT community to have protective rights because having an LGBT identity is not a choice, whereas anti-LGBT rights advocates think otherwise. They believe that even if same-sex attraction is not a choice, same-sex sexual behaviour is inescapably a choice. Whether LGBT identities are choices is an empirical question that scientists all over the world are still trying to answer, but since the issue is shifting towards behaviour rather than attraction, in the eyes of anti-LGBT rights advocates, even finding the gay gene may not be sufficient to convince them that LGBT persons deserve protective rights.
As for “sanctity of life” issues, it was perhaps also no surprise that each constituent issue revolved around contentions about how to measure the value of a life against other goods like autonomy or public safety, or how to measure longer lives against better quality lives. Of course, unsurprisingly, the role of the government and its ability to make final decisions in these areas is contentious as well.
These findings point towards a need for further research on the empirical claims of all sides of the two topics, but whether empirical evidence will settle these issues is an open question, because these types of disagreement are at bottom based on differences in how we value certain goods and principles. In order to maintain the civility of our political space, what we need are ways to manage these cleavages without either suppressing them or letting them boil over into violence.
Thus, it is heartening to note that there was a consensus against using hate speech, dehumanising speech and name-calling in public advocacy. It is interesting to note, however, the difficulties in the details.
First, there is little agreement on what exactly constitutes such unacceptable speech. Second, different groups and organisations have different levels of tolerance for these practices. And third, advocates can easily offend their opponents without meaning to. For example, the word “lifestyle” is intended by anti-LGBT rights advocates here to neutrally describe LGBT identities; however, the term is considered offensive in the LGBT community because the word implies that their identities are choices and it is taken as trivialising their identities.
Despite the kind of unsavoury language that might be used in online political discussions regarding moral and cultural disagreements, the majority of our participants valued the freedom of speech and information made possible by social media too much to try to institute further controls – though how effective communal self-policing can be going forward remains an open question.
It was nevertheless suggested that we would do well to teach civic and democratic values in schools. Our youth would learn not only how to comport themselves civilly in the unmediated realm of social media but also how to honestly negotiate democratic practices such as debating and lobbying for support. All these require them to develop the type of empathy needed to understand the perspectives of opponents even while fighting their own corner.
Additionally, the experiences we had in organising the focus group discussions were instructive on how we may be able to minimise the hostility and demonisation that often accompany such moral and cultural cleavages.
Beyond the more obvious principles such as having discussion platforms that are neutral as well as sufficiently authoritative to guarantee privacy and security, we learnt that having face-to-face meetings and the telling of stories help humanise each side to the other, impeding the tendency to demonise opponents and project sinister motivations on them. After all, in the new era of value pluralism, we cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Unlike the socio-economic issues that continue to dominate much of our local politics, we are seeing more and more disagreement regarding moral and cultural issues for which objective rational consensus is impossible.
In order to negotiate this new politics, we need new democratic tools. The sooner we learn how to talk among ourselves as well as with the authorities in multi-logical processes, the healthier our political space will be. We have to learn how to treat new laws and policies as provisional decisions still open to future challenge, because only then can losing sides have hope for the future and remain justifiably committed to the democratic process instead of using force. We have to learn to agree to disagree and take every loss on the chin, knowing that there will always be a rematch.
These new democratic practices are not perfect, but against a background of irreducible pluralism, they can help reaffirm a unity of purpose where a unity of views is impossible.
•The writer, Johannis Bin Abdul Aziz, was a co-investigator in the Institute of Policy Studies’ 2015-2016 project on The New Singaporean Pluralism. He has a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
In battling his illness, CPL Muhammad Khairul Ikwan has shown us what it means to be resilient, to be hopeful, and to fight unyieldingly, even in the face of cancer.
“I want people to see that hope can be anything – even negative things, like illness, can become positive things as well. I don’t want people to see pain as a hindrance to stop them from what they want to do in life.”
This is why Khairul chose the title ‘Hope’ for his solo art exhibition.
A naval material assistant with Naval Logistics Command (NALCOM), Khairul was diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer last year and lost much of his vision and hearing since. Despite the pain and the side effects from his fortnightly chemotherapy, he continues to stay positive by directing his attention to arts – a passion of his since young.
And this Thursday, he will be fulfilling his greatest wish of holding an exhibition to showcase his art works, expressing the experience in which he battled his illness. Jointly organised by Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and HCA Hospice Care, it will be held at NAFA on-air gallery from 21 – 25 Apr.
Your support would mean much to Khairul and us here in the Navy.
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The nightmare began with a ringing in Mr Muhammad Khairul Ikwan’s ears last July.
Then he developed a migraine so severe he could barely stand and had to crawl to the toilet.
Doctors discovered he had Stage 4 colorectal cancer, which had spread from his intestines to his brain.
At age 23, the young man has lost much of his vision, hearing and hair, and no longer parties as he once did with friends.
But the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Nafa) graduate is not wallowing in despair. Instead, he is launching an exhibition of 87 art pieces at the school on Thursday.
Titled Hope, the works represent his experience battling his illness.
He said: “I want people to see that hope can be anything – even negative things, like illness, can become positive things as well.
“I don’t want people to see pain as a hindrance to stop them from what they want to do in life. ”
Jointly organised by Nafa and HCA Hospice Care, the exhibition fulfils one of Mr Khairul’s greatest wishes under the Star Pals palliative care programme for youth with life-limiting illnesses.
Mr Khairul is the second of four children. His mother is a secretary in a law firm, while his father is a safety supervisor in a shipping company.
Ms Nur Alwiyah, 25, a customer service officer at a call centre, said her brother is expected to live about nine more months .
Said Mr Khairul: “It’s shocking to go from healthy to seriously ill, but anger won’t make the illness go away.”
He now has chemotherapy fortnightly and wears a stoma bag to collect his waste, which goes out of his body through a hole in his abdomen.
In the four months he spent on art, he had to battle the side effects of chemotherapy, such as fatigue and vomiting but he soldiered on.
He used to listen to music while painting, but having lost most of his hearing. He now reads song lyrics or poetry for inspiration.
His favourite work in the exhibition is a series titled Spirits & I (Eye), a set of six watercolour paintings.
Three are in red and have an eye motif, which he describes as “surgical, with veins”, while three in blue are “water spirits rising up”.
“Because of my affected vision, I am going through so much pain. But at the same time, there are so many people lifting my spirits,” he said.
Apart from paintings, he is also exhibiting mixed media works with synthetic hair, photographs, a video and a fabric piece.
Calling art a therapeutic outlet, Mr Khairul said his role model is Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who uses her artwork as a way to express her mental illness.
The exhibition, which is free, will be at the Nafa on-air gallery from April 21 to 25.
And he is already dreaming of his next project, a photography exhibition with himself as the subject.
He said: “What’s the point of giving up when you’re still living? The only moment you give up is when you’re dead.
“If I can recover, it will be a miracle, but if I can’t, I will just keep on fighting, make more works of art and leave a legacy.”
