Deviants in our midst
ST: April 15, 2007
A Sunday Times report last week on the deviant religious teacher with 10 wives and 64 children shows what can go wrong in a community if people surrender their common sense to charlatans who use religion as a cover, says Political Editor Zuraidah Ibrahim
THE gripping Sunday Times cover story last week of the mundane yet macabre lives of the 10 wives and 64 children of a convicted rapist was a talking point for my entire day.
Friends text-messaged me, a neighbour asked what I thought of them, family members called and that evening a nine-year-old nephew rattled off the figures: '10 wives, 64 children, one father. See, after one day, I can remember the numbers in your newspaper.'
Readers apparently devoured the details of the daily routine of this bizarre multi-nuclear family. It is organised with military precision, with an efficient division of labour among the wives. Before their husband was imprisoned, they followed a 'sleeping' roster to prevent any anxiety over conjugal favouritism.
What was hardest to come to terms with, though, was how this was not a wire story filed from a backward Third World village or some anthropologically anomalous island tribe. The man is from Marsiling, and his women are still there, raising their children in two jumbo HDB flats.
This serial polygamist was carrying on for years under the noses of HDB heartlanders. One neighbour was quoted in the report as saying: 'They're our neighbourhood's open secret. Everybody knows about this family, but feigns ignorance. We don't want to embarrass them further. They're normal people and, like us, they need to stay somewhere.'
Normal people?
This one-time religious teacher had already staked his claim to notoriety a decade ago, when he was the main protagonist in a much-publicised trial for cohabiting with six women in Johor. He served a jail sentence there before being deported.
He was hardly an anonymous individual operating under the radar of the authorities. In small, gossipy Singapore, it is equally hard to imagine that community leaders did not know about this man's lifestyle.
Yet, to all intents and purposes, no one took notice of him when he resumed his life as a hyper-sexed predator. He went on to rape six of his daughters with the support of some of his wives, who even set up 'appointments' for the girls to have sex with their father. Two girls later had to have abortions.
Apparently, this man also practised creative accounting. The Quran says a man may take 'either one, two, three or four wives'. Since it also says that a man should take only one wife if he cannot be just and fair towards more than one, the Muslim authorities in Singapore and other countries are very careful in their application of this rule.
The progressive interpretation is that Islam permits up to four wives in contexts of extreme hardship, where a charitable man of means should be allowed to extend his protection to more than one woman who needs shelter. It is about protecting women, not satiating men's lust.
Our man from Marsiling, though, read things differently. He decided that he was allowed 10 wives, because that's what 'one, two, three or four' add up to. He was not just a mathematician but also a salesman, since he succeeded in convincing 10 women of his fantastic formula.
Fortunately, if he ever shared this view in my religious class, I wasn't paying attention that day.
You see, while in junior college, I spent more than a year attending weekly religious classes conducted by this same person at a friend's house.
No, nothing happened that was out of the ordinary. One
vignette I can recall was my friend and I post-morteming a session, giggling over whether we had caught him stealing glances at us. Since he was a petite fellow, we were more amused than alarmed.
In most superficial aspects, he fitted the bill of a religious teacher. He looked like he had religion in him; he dressed like a religious teacher, always with a kopiah or skullcap and in a white baju. He sounded like he knew the Quran well and could recite chapter and verse. He spoke softly and always looked at the carpet when he addressed our circle of attendees, with women forming one half of the circle and men the other.
None of us in that class of young men and women ever thought to ask about this person's credentials.
I confidently say today that my friends and I would never have fallen for his wiles and the adults among us would have sent him packing if he had tried anything awful. Still, seeing The Sunday Times story and the picture of the 10 wives clad in black from head to toe did make my girlfriend and I pause as the phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I' came to mind.
We still joke about it in our text messages, of course. But there is a serious side to this story. It strikes at the heart of what can go wrong in a community if people are prepared to surrender their reason and common sense in the presence of someone who passes himself off as more learned in his religion than others.
For too long, as a community, Muslims here have been prepared to do just that. We rarely question the ustaz's credentials because we fear that our own lack of religious knowledge accords us little right to do so. Dress, demeanour and a degree of demonstrated ability to quote spiritual verses are often enough to inspire deference.
The other refuge from rational thinking is to dismiss inexplicable folly, like the wives' complete submission to their husbands, as a regrettable case of 'kena buat' - black magic. As sinister as this conclusion is, it is more comforting than the truth, which is that we are sometimes complicit in abandoning reason and allowing charlatans to wield power over us.
Thankfully, attitudes are changing as people become better educated, more widely travelled and more questioning. The fight against terrorism and extremist ideology has also made Muslims more vigilant.
One characteristic of Islam I admire is the absence of a rigid hierarchical structure. Individual Muslims are supposed to study their faith and exercise their own reasoning, instead of abrogating it to poseurs.
My intention is not to tar those who are inspirational, truly erudite teachers, and there are many.
But we collude in letting their good name be sullied when we stay quiet before religious teachers who dispense edicts we cannot reconcile with our conscience.
I say this with some measure of shame.
I once attended a class by a teacher who said rape was physiologically impossible: Penetration could only happen with the woman's consent, even if she pretended otherwise. In my class of about 30 people, I was the only one who tried to argue with him, as the others cringed. In the end, the embarrassment of having to debate this issue in public and in such a setting made me sink back in my chair in enraged silence.
Recently, I heard on the grapevine about another teacher who said that it was a woman's duty to encourage her husband to take more wives.
Unwilling to make waves, we stay silent.
This is what troubles me the most about this ghastly saga of this man and his 10 wives.
Those who encounter such corrupt teaching that violates their own sense of right and wrong prefer to pretend they heard nothing. Neighbours who know of abusive perverts in their midst mistake apathy for tolerance.
Perhaps there are cultural roots to this community instinct to close one or both eyes. As has been pointed out by South-east Asian scholars, like Anthony Reid in his two-part work, Southeast Asia In The Age Of Commerce, there was a tolerant attitude towards marriages of convenience. In the busy ports, traders in town to await the next monsoon frequently formed sexual and commercial liaisons with a local woman.
Singaporeans may have developed a cultural habit to politely avert their eyes when they sense something wrong happening in another man's household - a habit that this polygamist and rapist exploited to the hilt.
But whatever the sociological reasons for community inaction, this question needs to weigh heavily on all of us: Could this man's daughters have been saved if those in the local community had responded to the danger signs?
We'll never know. But, for allowing this man to create his own amoral world in our midst, we must take some responsibility.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access
http://www.straitstimes.com/portal/site/STI/menuitem
ST: April 15, 2007
A Sunday Times report last week on the deviant religious teacher with 10 wives and 64 children shows what can go wrong in a community if people surrender their common sense to charlatans who use religion as a cover, says Political Editor Zuraidah Ibrahim
THE gripping Sunday Times cover story last week of the mundane yet macabre lives of the 10 wives and 64 children of a convicted rapist was a talking point for my entire day.
Friends text-messaged me, a neighbour asked what I thought of them, family members called and that evening a nine-year-old nephew rattled off the figures: '10 wives, 64 children, one father. See, after one day, I can remember the numbers in your newspaper.'
Readers apparently devoured the details of the daily routine of this bizarre multi-nuclear family. It is organised with military precision, with an efficient division of labour among the wives. Before their husband was imprisoned, they followed a 'sleeping' roster to prevent any anxiety over conjugal favouritism.
What was hardest to come to terms with, though, was how this was not a wire story filed from a backward Third World village or some anthropologically anomalous island tribe. The man is from Marsiling, and his women are still there, raising their children in two jumbo HDB flats.
This serial polygamist was carrying on for years under the noses of HDB heartlanders. One neighbour was quoted in the report as saying: 'They're our neighbourhood's open secret. Everybody knows about this family, but feigns ignorance. We don't want to embarrass them further. They're normal people and, like us, they need to stay somewhere.'
Normal people?
This one-time religious teacher had already staked his claim to notoriety a decade ago, when he was the main protagonist in a much-publicised trial for cohabiting with six women in Johor. He served a jail sentence there before being deported.
He was hardly an anonymous individual operating under the radar of the authorities. In small, gossipy Singapore, it is equally hard to imagine that community leaders did not know about this man's lifestyle.
Yet, to all intents and purposes, no one took notice of him when he resumed his life as a hyper-sexed predator. He went on to rape six of his daughters with the support of some of his wives, who even set up 'appointments' for the girls to have sex with their father. Two girls later had to have abortions.
Apparently, this man also practised creative accounting. The Quran says a man may take 'either one, two, three or four wives'. Since it also says that a man should take only one wife if he cannot be just and fair towards more than one, the Muslim authorities in Singapore and other countries are very careful in their application of this rule.
The progressive interpretation is that Islam permits up to four wives in contexts of extreme hardship, where a charitable man of means should be allowed to extend his protection to more than one woman who needs shelter. It is about protecting women, not satiating men's lust.
Our man from Marsiling, though, read things differently. He decided that he was allowed 10 wives, because that's what 'one, two, three or four' add up to. He was not just a mathematician but also a salesman, since he succeeded in convincing 10 women of his fantastic formula.
Fortunately, if he ever shared this view in my religious class, I wasn't paying attention that day.
You see, while in junior college, I spent more than a year attending weekly religious classes conducted by this same person at a friend's house.
No, nothing happened that was out of the ordinary. One
vignette I can recall was my friend and I post-morteming a session, giggling over whether we had caught him stealing glances at us. Since he was a petite fellow, we were more amused than alarmed.
In most superficial aspects, he fitted the bill of a religious teacher. He looked like he had religion in him; he dressed like a religious teacher, always with a kopiah or skullcap and in a white baju. He sounded like he knew the Quran well and could recite chapter and verse. He spoke softly and always looked at the carpet when he addressed our circle of attendees, with women forming one half of the circle and men the other.
None of us in that class of young men and women ever thought to ask about this person's credentials.
I confidently say today that my friends and I would never have fallen for his wiles and the adults among us would have sent him packing if he had tried anything awful. Still, seeing The Sunday Times story and the picture of the 10 wives clad in black from head to toe did make my girlfriend and I pause as the phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I' came to mind.
We still joke about it in our text messages, of course. But there is a serious side to this story. It strikes at the heart of what can go wrong in a community if people are prepared to surrender their reason and common sense in the presence of someone who passes himself off as more learned in his religion than others.
For too long, as a community, Muslims here have been prepared to do just that. We rarely question the ustaz's credentials because we fear that our own lack of religious knowledge accords us little right to do so. Dress, demeanour and a degree of demonstrated ability to quote spiritual verses are often enough to inspire deference.
The other refuge from rational thinking is to dismiss inexplicable folly, like the wives' complete submission to their husbands, as a regrettable case of 'kena buat' - black magic. As sinister as this conclusion is, it is more comforting than the truth, which is that we are sometimes complicit in abandoning reason and allowing charlatans to wield power over us.
Thankfully, attitudes are changing as people become better educated, more widely travelled and more questioning. The fight against terrorism and extremist ideology has also made Muslims more vigilant.
One characteristic of Islam I admire is the absence of a rigid hierarchical structure. Individual Muslims are supposed to study their faith and exercise their own reasoning, instead of abrogating it to poseurs.
My intention is not to tar those who are inspirational, truly erudite teachers, and there are many.
But we collude in letting their good name be sullied when we stay quiet before religious teachers who dispense edicts we cannot reconcile with our conscience.
I say this with some measure of shame.
I once attended a class by a teacher who said rape was physiologically impossible: Penetration could only happen with the woman's consent, even if she pretended otherwise. In my class of about 30 people, I was the only one who tried to argue with him, as the others cringed. In the end, the embarrassment of having to debate this issue in public and in such a setting made me sink back in my chair in enraged silence.
Recently, I heard on the grapevine about another teacher who said that it was a woman's duty to encourage her husband to take more wives.
Unwilling to make waves, we stay silent.
This is what troubles me the most about this ghastly saga of this man and his 10 wives.
Those who encounter such corrupt teaching that violates their own sense of right and wrong prefer to pretend they heard nothing. Neighbours who know of abusive perverts in their midst mistake apathy for tolerance.
Perhaps there are cultural roots to this community instinct to close one or both eyes. As has been pointed out by South-east Asian scholars, like Anthony Reid in his two-part work, Southeast Asia In The Age Of Commerce, there was a tolerant attitude towards marriages of convenience. In the busy ports, traders in town to await the next monsoon frequently formed sexual and commercial liaisons with a local woman.
Singaporeans may have developed a cultural habit to politely avert their eyes when they sense something wrong happening in another man's household - a habit that this polygamist and rapist exploited to the hilt.
But whatever the sociological reasons for community inaction, this question needs to weigh heavily on all of us: Could this man's daughters have been saved if those in the local community had responded to the danger signs?
We'll never know. But, for allowing this man to create his own amoral world in our midst, we must take some responsibility.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access
http://www.straitstimes.com/portal/site/STI/menuitem
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