Khalwat law, the reliable trouble maker

We may be better off without the religious police.

COMMENT

The only significant lesson the moral police force has given us in recent memory is that we need neither itself nor the law against khalwat that it so zealously upholds.

That zeal killed a man last year. More recently, the basic Islamic principle against invasion of privacy was violated when our religious police barged in on a married couple.

The recent case involves Mohd Ridhuan Giman and his wife. According to Ridhuan, he told the officers from the Federal Territories Islamic Affairs Department (Jawi) not to go into the room because his wife was not decently dressed, but a male officer went in anyway. Ridhuan’s lawyer alleged that other male officers followed and watched as the woman got herself dressed.

After last year’s incident, in which a man fell to his death trying to escape a khalwat raid, the press carried a slew of reports that quoted Islamic scholars as saying that both the Quran and the Prophet frowned upon invasion of privacy.

In countries where the oh-so-horrifying hudud is enforced, those who accuse people of zina (fornication) without producing four pious eyewitnesses are punished with 80 lashes of the whip. It’s pertinent to remember this because most khalwat raids are made after anonymous tips.

It should also be noted that marriage is one of the most respected institutions in Islam. If the allegations made by Ridhuan and his lawyer are true, then the religious policemen have committed an abominable offence indeed.

In Malaysia, both Muslims and non-Muslims know that terrorists who call themselves Muslims are not representative of the religion. Wouldn’t we be right to say that neither are the religious police representative of Islam? If so, then what is the point of having them around?
Those who are serious about empowering the shariah laws should perhaps start by calling for the erasure of the law against khalwat. -FMT