To Hudud or Not To Hudud

In the last few months, the question of the Hudud law has again resurfaced with PAS again saying that they will go ahead with their plan to have Hudud laws in Malaysia.  The DAP is again voicing their opposition. UMNO is, this time, playing the “we have never opposed Hudud” card.  The masses is as always utterly confused.

Personally, I think we need to go to the most basic level of the question.  Let me simplify the matter, at least to the way that I understand it.

The DAP’s opposition is due to two reasons; firstly, most of the DAP and their supporters are simply ignorant because they are merely robots of the Orientalist image of Islam and Hudud.  To these people, Hudud is hand-cutting, lashings, executions and nothing else.  The solution is education and nothing else but they would need to let go of their arrogance of thinking they are right because the West agrees with them.  The second group of DAP opponents need to be taken more seriously because they oppose Hudud on the grounds that agreeing to its implementation in place of the mode secularised laws we inherited from our colonial past and built upon, will fly in the face of the constitution of Malaysia and the very basis upon which our country was built.  In this they need to be heeded, they are disagree not because they reject hudud per se nor Islam but because these are not the foundations upon which our forefathers agreed to form this country. 

UMNO, well, they are now saying that they had never disagreed with Hudud in the first place. What they oppose, they say, is PAS’s hudud interpretation which is a faulty interpretation of the laws as set out by the Quran and the Prophet’s hadiths.  In a way they too are correct because as we have all seen in the past, even simple reading of the hudud laws as proposed by some of PAS’s people have been shown to have horrendous loopholes. Just look up the cases that were argued under the issue for example, the issue of anal sex with spouses et cetera.

As for PAS, they first need to eject the idea that if anyone is against them then they are against Islam.  Islam, is far greater than PAS.  In the many times that I have heard PAS people talk, I had never heard them expressing openness to the idea that there might be other interpretations of the hudud laws that are correct. To them, their interpretation is the absolute definitive interpretation of the laws.  This begs the question, what other possible interpretations of the law can there be? How can there be a different hudud?

Allow me to illustrate.  To my unnderstanding of PAS’s hudud the penalty for murder is death, the penalty for theft is hand amputation and so on. This is where it stops.

The hudud practiced by the caliphs was not like this. I remember a story related by a certain ustadz, I’ll let our learned ustadzs supply the references for this for I know it not.  I’ll summarize. Two men got into an argument and one ended up dead while the other was convicted and sentenced to die. The man begged the caliph to allow his to settle his affairs. the Caliph allowed it. The people opposed but the caliph said, if he does not return the caliph will take his place. On that day the man was late. The people hesitated to kill the caliph but he insisted. However, before they could do the deed, the man came rushing.  He told the caliph that he had to see to it that his children were cared for and more importantly, he had two orphans in his care.  So he had to find someone to care for them after his death. The caliph then reminded the people of what the Prophet PBUH had said about those who care for orphans and he would not want the blood of such a person on his hands. They then took a closer look at the case. It turned out that the dead man was the one who started it but the murder still remained.  They referred the matter to the dead man’s family and after hearing the details, they came to an alternative punishment. I think part of it was that the man was now responsible for the dead man’s children.

In this case, three groups of children ended up being cared for.  Follow PAS’s interpretation of Hudud, there would be three groups of orphans when there were two in the beginning. I think, if the Hudud proposed by PAS is anything like that practiced by the caliph in this story, there would be far less opposition to it.