Does God get in the way of social cohesion?
Straits Times, 21st October 2006

"The way forward is not to sweep sensitive issues arising from religion under the carpet and pretend they do not exist.

Instead, what is needed is a frank yet sober discussion of religious issues in public, as even the religious leaders themselves admit.

As Brother Broughton puts it, "some religious problems cannot be settled by keeping quiet".

But the view among some is that inter-faith dialogue currently exists largely in the level of politically correct platitudes.

This is dangerous, says Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies analyst Yolanda Chin. "The tendency to silence or self-censor any debate broaching on conflicting views on religious issues may be well-meaning but also perpetuates the prejudices and stereotypes that are formed out of blissful ignorance."

Thus, the announcement from PM Lee of a national steering committee on racial and religious harmony was welcomed. It is chaired by Minister of Community Development, Youth and Sports vivian Balakrishnan, and comprises government ministers and religious leaders."


Nowadays the only time I read the Shitty Times is when it lines the dinner table, but my Little Bird recommended this article to me, from what he calls "The Religion Special" of the #140.

The first part of the extract is surprisingly enlightened, but the last illustrates a characteristic lack of awareness. A national steering committee should be condemned, since it would serve to restrict and manage discourse.

To have a "frank yet sober discussion of religious issues in public" instead of "politically correct platitudes", we need to abolish the Sedition Act and related bugaboos (eg the ban on religious issues at the Speakers' Corner), otherwise coherent and reasoned discourse is self-censored suppressed, ceding the ground to nonsensical rants, ad hominem attacks and baseless sliming (a la the Sammyboy Forums), which results in a self-perpetuating cycle.

One thing we absolutely *don't* need is these ridiculous corporatist steering committees composed of supposedly representative leaders. From the Young Republic archives:


A: 1- Representation on MDA advisory committees (and representation in our intellegence agencies including the ISD) appears to be quite multi-ethnic. ( I've seen proof of the latter).

If the minorities in those committees are of the opinion that they don't think that Singapore's liberal enough to risk fatwas and stuff, who are we to disagree?


B: There are a whole load of fascinating assumptions to be unpacked in your argument. Primarily they boil down to your belief that groups of people, identified by their religion or their status as a group of a particular identifiable and state-identified "minority", can have their interests adequately represented on the basis of a corporate, indivisible opinion representative of the "majority of this minority", and that this opinion can be accurately embodied by the actions of each minority's state-appointed mouthpieces

If that seems like a mouthful, it's because the problems in this point of view are manifold. Let me explain each one. First, power looks after its own. Who do you reckon gets appointed to these committees, given that the government does the appointing? There is every possibility - indeed probability - that these so-called representatives represent a particular agenda of the state instead of the minority group from which they also, coincidentally, hail. Or does religion or race define the totality of the person, so that a powerful Muslim person can never have closer interests with a fellow powerful Christian person than with another Muslim person? To my mind that is somehow both naive and racist at the same time. An interesting conflation.

Second, let's grant you that they sincerely believe themselves to be representing "their" minority and indeed reflect a numerically great proportion of persons sharing that minority status. Doesn't it strike you as potentially problematic that (I apologise for the capital letters, I don't want to shout but I want to emphasise this point and I don't know whether I can bold this successfully for all email formats) PEOPLE WITHIN THE SO-CALLED "SAME" MINORITY MIGHT DISAGREE, and that THE MINORITY OF THE MINORITY MIGHT NEED PROTECTION? Or should people with heterodox opinions be penalised because they happen to share a religion with a number of nutjobs? Why shouldn't the rest of the population stand side by side with the repressed female or gay or simply religiously unconventional opinion of a member of a minority? Does the fact that this person is from a state-identified racial/religious minority mean we should abandon them to the opinion of that minority's "group" as a whole? Doesn't this amount to abandoning people to only ever forming identities within a pre-defined religious/racial group since cross-pollination of beliefs is basically prevented? Why can't people have interests that transcend racial classification, so that the interests of a racial block (as defined by one government-appointed arbiter) do not trump the interests of the individuals composed within that classification?

To illustrate the artificiality - in other words, the reliance on stereotype - that your position involves, let's consider the feminism parallel we both seem to have adopted. Leaving aside questions of my highly dubious qualification as a feminist (I read Germaine Greer while wearing a little summer frock and high heels and watching my boyfriend play sport - not a little ironic) - why does this numerical majority matter so much to you? Why do I have to persuade the majority of women to agree with me before you will? The notion that the interests of women are completely uninterrogable to men, or that the interests of Muslims are completely uninterrogable to non-Muslims, is extremely bizarre. But let's say only 20% - a mere minority - of women did have feminist sentiments on a particular issue. That's what, 10% of the population? Going by your logic, by which we judge the interests of people by first segregating them into minorities and then saying, ok, we listen to the majority of those minorities, the claims of this 10% of the population should be ignored. But how is that logical when your same approach would grant people of Indian descent (also about 10%, slightly less I believe, of the population) an important corporate voice on the basis of a majority of them voicing a particular opinion? (Even using the word "majority" there is construing it favourably, for reasons I have already explained relating to the problems of appointing one person as arbiter of some indivisible "minority" opinion.)

I do think there are nuances to being of a particular religion or gender or sexuality or whatever which require especial study on the part of someone who does not share that religion or gender or sexuality in order to adequately understand. This compared to the experience of someone who lives in the role of a person of particular religion or gender or sexuality from day to day. But the idea that a liberal atheist cannot ever understand or explain the concerns of a liberal Muslim - that a feminist man cannot ever fight for the cause alongside a feminist woman - is just wrong. We're not defined by these narrow categories. They're components of who we are, but I reckon any one of us can have a lot more in common with someone who ticks all the different category boxes from us than from someone who apparently shares the same "minority" statuses. And to assume otherwise creates the tyranny of narrowed aspirations that is the precise problem that Singaporeans face now, that stands in the way of any of us developing our own individuality.


C: Thank you B. Which is why I felt offended in the first place - presuming that Muslims must all be fanatical illiberal creatures is speaking (presumptuously) for them - and therefore what gives A the right to shoot is (ugly) mouth off? I have friends who are gay and liberal - and they happen to be Muslim. What of them? Have they no individuality? No say? Nothing, because Muslims must needs be patriarchal, antifeminist, gun-toting, Israel-hating, anti-Semitic terrorists? It seems as if the great number of moderate Muslims (not only in Singapore, but in Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as the vast number of moderate Muslims in the Middle East who are not of Indochinese origin) have been eliminated by A's totalitarian and
totalising discourse. And nothing irritates me more than totalitarianism of any sort.

Dialogue with the Muslim community is in order, and yet A is so thankful that the MDA has stepped in again to protect the Muslims from themselves, and in so doing, us from the Muslims. It strikes that in this day and age, what we need are more opinions, more views, more voices to be heard, rather than less.


D: Yes I believe this is what Amartya Sen has been saying in his new book: by looking at individuals only through the lens of the 'community' identity (e.g. Islam, South Asian, Jewish, etc) and not engaging with Muslims, Asians, Jews etc individually but only through the established 'community' leaders, we not only compromise the individual rights of expression etc of members of such communities but in terms of policy-making we tend then to view these communities through the skewed perception of their established leaders ( e.g. imams, rabbis, etc). There is no reason why an individual member of a minority should be any less an individual than an individual member of the majority.