Intimating the Sacred: Religion in malaysian Fiction

Conclusion

202 Intimating the Sacred Yet, despite the narrative’s propensity for irony and criticism, its gender politics remains at best ambiguous since its plot does not challenge the existing ideological status quo. In other words, while I have demonstrated the way in which “Mariah” censures patriarchy for its coercion of religion to repress women, that the story refuses any direct attack against the imam, represents Cik Yam as a paragon, and Mariah as “untutored” and “blousy” (82), could be read as abetting in the practice of polygamy. Two factors compel this alternative argument: first, the story may be reflective of the ideological dilemma many Malay writers face in negotiating between modernity and Islam. As such, although “Mariah” straddles disparate ideologies to mount a criticism of polygamy, this can only be done obliquely because of the potential censure the writer may face if the criticism is made more explicit. Second, and perhaps an unconscious act on the part of the writer, that Cik Yam is celebrated as the Muslim wife and woman par excellence may be a refraction of Che Husna Azhari’s own bias toward the traditional Kelantanese woman when juxtaposed against the modern, secular Muslim woman from a cosmopolitan, modern background. It would seem then, according to this reading, that this Che Husna Azhari story is rehearsing the kind of nostalgic imagination similar to the one I identified in Shirley Lim’s narratives concerning middle-class Chinese women in Malaysia: Che Husna Azhari’s representation of a strong and dutiful Malay woman may stem from the author’s pride in both her heritage as Kelantanese and a brand of Islam associated with traditionalism, textually neglecting the fact that it is this same traditionalism , coupled with politics, that is today placing enormous social and religious stresses on Malay women.32 Not all writers, however, are equally deft in their effort at deploying textual ambiguity as a strategy for criticism, which may result in narrative bad faith that merely reifies the existing status quo and obfuscates the “real” issues (or dilemmas) at hand. One such writer, in my view, is Karim Raslan. Despite overt pronouncements of his commitment to modernity, what remain consistent in his stories are unsavory representations of “modern” characters drawn mainly from the “bumigeois ”. Tradition, on the other hand, is often evoked as a check against modern tendencies toward greed and hypocrisy, as in the case of the short story “The Inheritance”, in which polygamy (a metonym for Islam) disrupts the protagonist’s desire for familial control and financial manipulation.33 What is interesting with a writer like Karim Raslan is that there seems to be an overt schism at work in his writings which directly pits his ideological beliefs against his Muslim-Malay identity. He is a modern Malay who decries contemporary morality, and an advocate of Islamic liberation who nevertheless reprises traditionalism as a useful textual strategy to ironize modernity. In the case of his story “Neighbours”, it seems that liberal Islam is evoked principally to defuse the shock of homosexuality at the end story, but without actually attending to the problem of homosexuality in any serious way.34 This, to me, reads like a case of narrative bad faith. It is unclear what Islam’s function is in “Neighbours”, as the story shifts the focus of moral culpability from the homosexual character to the protagonist, the busybody and gossip Datin Sarina. In the story, Sarina’s (obviously a “bumigeois” from her title)35 excitement over her new neighbour soon turns into curiosity and she begins spying on him from her window. Kassim later pays Sarina and her husband a visit, significantly after isyak (evening prayer), to get acquainted. He is tall, educated, handsome and well-mannered. The next day (again, significantly after azan, the call for morning prayer), Sarina resumes her spying (although she half-heartedly tells herself that she should not), chancing, to her delight, on her neighbour’s love-making. Glee turns into shock however when she realizes that the woman is actually a pondan (transvestite) who at that moment “positioned herself behind Encik Kassim … her handsome Encik Kasim” (130).36 But any possibility of discussing the polemics of Islam and homosexuality is directly contravened when the narrative commits a strategic and all too abrupt displacement of the issue onto the lesser concern of moral lack in the Malay middle class. The witnessing of Kassim’s homosexual act causes Sarina to slowly become aware: of the unnaturalness of what she was doing. Why...