Dr MAZA to Selangor mufti: quit harping on about caning wives and children

Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, the loudly opinionated former mufti of Perlis, came out swinging against remarks made by the current mufti of Selangor on the subject of caning wives and children in Islam. 

Dr MAZA, as he is popularly known, wrote in response to statements made by Selangor mufti Tamyes Abdul Wahid in an article published in Utusan Malaysia on the “divinely guided methodology” of beating one’s wives or children to train them or keep them disciplined. 

Tamyes’s comments themselves were directed at a recent proposal by the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development to have corporal punishment declared illegal under a revised Child Act 2001, with several exceptions.

Dr MAZA’s response came in the form of a lengthy Facebook post on his official page:

He starts off saying that insisting on corporal punishment as some sort of Islamic tenet was damaging to the pacifist and conciliatory nature of Islam itself. His arguments are in-depth and rather academic, so we’ll list out what we’ve been able to parse from the rest of his post:
 

1. Dr MAZA stresses that before corporal punishment for family members is even an option, Islam calls for its adherents to focus more on reeducation, wisdom and leading by example – not violence, or the threat thereof;
2. He also reminds his audience that Islam proscribes physical discipline only in extreme cases, such as belligerent wives who act counter to the stability of the marriage, and only after all other diplomatic and consultative avenues have been exhausted;
3. Islam only proscribes physical discipline on children aged 10 years and above – after they’ve been properly educated on religious and behavioural do’s and don’ts. In other words, if you’ve taught your kids to do right, and after years of education they still want to do wrong, you can smack them – softly. Islam prohibits physical discipline which leaves lasting injury, or hitting a wife or child in sensitive parts of their anatomy;
4. Dr MAZA calls out what he calls hypocritical fathers, who beat their children for their misdeeds while not acting correctly themselves. He also accuses fathers who beat their children as a primary method of instilling obedience of plain bad parenting.;
5. He urges Muslims in Malaysia to focus more on improving the educational environment for children, and to make sure they have all the information they need presented to them before threatening them with shallow violence;
6. He condemns the act of wanton violence against wives and children by men as antithetical to Islamic teachings, and urges the government to persecute men who claim to adhere to Islam while they abuse their wives and children as criminals under the law.