One recent Saturday night, Sarinah Majid, a 23-year-old accountant, was dancing the night away with her Chinese boyfriend at Zouks nightclub - the most happening night spot here in Malaysia's capital city. Then suddenly the world as she knew it collapsed dramatically around her."The music suddenly stopped, the lights came on and dozens of uniformed and plainclothes Islamic police were crowding the dance floor, shouting, gesticulating and ordering," said Sarinah, using a pseudonym to avoid legal complications.
"What happened that night in January was humiliating, inhuman and thoroughly disgusting ... I felt ashamed to be a Muslim," Sarinah told Inter Press Service, relating to the shame and agony she and about 100 other Muslim youths suffered that night.
Police from the Federal Territory's Islamic Department separated Muslims from non-Muslims. While non-Muslims were told to party on, Muslims were herded into trucks and taken to the department's head office, where the youths' particulars were taken. They were held overnight and released the next day.
They were then ordered to return for counseling sessions with Islamic clerics to learn the "true" Islam. Some will be prosecuted under Shariah (Islamic) laws for "indecent behavior".
"They leered, jeered and ogled at us, took photographs of us and thoroughly humiliated us ... one of us even urinated in her pants out of shock and fright," Sarinah said.
"That night I became a criminal ... the Islamic police told me I had committed heinous sins forbidden by Islam," said Sarinah, who studied at top schools here and in Australia. "I have to appear before a Shariah court next month and be charged for indecent behavior and punished accordingly.
"I don't know what crime I had committed," she said, spitting out the words with bitterness. "I feel helpless and completely violated."
Many moderate Muslims in Malaysia are showing the same shock and anger felt by Sarinah. The incident has sparked a fiery debate focusing on morality, tolerance and compulsion in Islam and the clash between a secular constitution that guarantees fundamental rights and freedom of choice and Islamic Sharia laws that prescribe what a Muslim can and cannot wear and with whom he or she keeps company and where, and many other things.
The raid at Zouks has shaken moderate Muslims - and their fear and anger are palpable.
Moderate Muslims had felt comfortable and safe with the election of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and the elevation of his Islam Hadhari, or moderate Islam, to official status. They felt that the fundamentalist wave that had gripped the country with the ascendancy of the opposition Parti Islam seMalaysia (PAS) was defeated and over.
"We were naive to think fundamentalism was done away with when PAS was defeated at the polls last year and Abdullah announced his Islam Hadhari," said a prominent Muslim political analyst who declined to be named for fear of persecution by fundamentalist opponents.
Last March, in his first election since taking over as prime minister, Abdullah swept through parliament, with his coalition winning 198 out of the 219 parliamentary seats. The opposition only secured 20 seats, with PAS seeing its number of seats decline from 27 in 1999 to just seven.
"Fundamentalism and intolerance run very deep in Malay-Muslim society," the political analyst told IPS. "It is everywhere in the schools, academia, media, politics and everyday life.
"Muslims have few choices ... our life is regulated and regimented," he said.
The country's constitution guarantees fundamental freedom for all citizens, including Muslims. Nonetheless, Muslims are further governed by Sharia laws that each of the country's 13 states have enacted in the last decade. Within the capital, the applicable law is the Syariah (Sharia) Criminal Offenses (Federal Territories) Act of 1997.
Section 19(1) prohibits Muslims from imbibing any intoxicating drink and Section 19(2) refers generally to the selling of alcohol.
Section 29 is the catch-all killer. It states, "Any person who, contrary to Islamic Law, acts or behaves in an indecent manner in any public place shall be guilty of an offense." Under this vague section, Muslims are regularly arrested for "indecent" attire or behavior such as holding hands with someone from the opposite sex, an act that is common among non-Muslims.
Muslims charged under Section 29 usually plead guilty and quietly pay a fine, typically less than RM1,000 (roughly US$263).
But the raid as Zouks was different. This time it took place at a top nightclub frequented by Muslim youths from influential upper-class families with connections to powerful politicians. This time it was the cream of Malay society that was belittled and humiliated by the Islamic police.
Moreover, the law does not specify what constitutes "indecency", which, in light of the recent raid at Zouks, raises the question: is it an act of indecency to wear tight jeans or tank tops or dance at a nightclub where alcohol is served?
Human-rights activist Elizabeth Wong points out that there is nothing in Sharia law that says a Muslim can't be in a club, cafe, bar, restaurant or venue that serves alcohol.
"There is nothing that says one can't dance or listen to very loud mind-numbing music," said Wong, a lawyer and director of HAKAM, a human-rights organization. "The mere presence of Muslims in the nightclub does not constitute a criminal offense," she told IPS. "What constitutes indecent behavior is also highly subjective.
"The problem is not whether the religious authorities did their job in accordance with procedure. It's the existence of such laws that 'govern' moral behavior, which violates fundamental liberties," said Wong. "These laws should never exist in the first place."
(Inter Press Service)