As we celebrate Malaysia Day today, I invite my fellow Malaysians to reflect with me on a thought that has increasingly occupied my mind.
In celebrating the country we have built together, perhaps we should ask ourselves a difficult question: how much human suffering is unavoidable, and how much do we create ourselves?
There is much cruelty in life. Some of it we cannot prevent. A baby may be born with a severe disability or lifelong illness. A young person may be struck by cancer. Earthquakes, floods and disease can destroy lives without asking who deserves what.
Such tragedies test our compassion, resilience and willingness to help others through suffering.
But another category of cruelty troubles me even more because we create it ourselves. We design, institutionalise and sometimes legislate for it. We give it respectable names and sophisticated arguments. Intelligent people justify it, politicians promote it and, sometimes, religious scholars rationalise it.
Yet we continue to describe ourselves as a civilised and caring society.
Consider a child born today. That child chose nothing about the circumstances of his arrival. He did not choose his parents, ethnicity, nationality, religion or economic circumstances.
These are accidents of birth, yet human societies have repeatedly converted them into systems of advantage and disadvantage.
We decide that because one child was born into a particular racial, religious or social category, that child should enjoy opportunities another should not. Access to education, employment, land, natural resources or economic opportunities may be affected by classifications the child never chose. We then construct elaborate arguments explaining why this is reasonable.
That is perhaps the most disturbing part: cruelty ceases to look like cruelty once we have given it a theory.
Imagine two children born in the same hospital on the same morning. Neither knows his race, religion or social class. Both need affection and security, and both possess the capacity to learn and dream.
Yet adults may already have decided that one belongs to a category entitled to advantages denied to the other. What did either child do to deserve that difference?
Nothing. We created the distinction.
Of course, affirmative policies may sometimes be necessary to correct genuine historical or economic disadvantage. Helping the poor, marginalised and communities left behind can itself be an expression of justice.
But there is a moral difference between assisting people because they are disadvantaged and permanently advantaging or disadvantaging people because of ancestry.
When corrective measures become inherited entitlements or exclusions, we should ask whether something intended to achieve justice has itself become a source of injustice.
As a Muslim, I find it particularly troubling when discrimination is rationalised by people who profess to be Muslims. To me, a true Muslim must strive to be, among other things, an intelligent, compassionate and just human being. His sense of justice should not disappear when race, religion or group identity enters the discussion.
He should not defend an injustice merely because it benefits “his people”. Justice is surely tested precisely when being just is inconvenient to our own interests.
The Quran commands believers to stand firmly for justice even against themselves, their parents or close relatives (Quran 4:135). It also warns them not to allow even hatred of another people to cause them to depart from justice: “Be just; that is nearer to righteousness” (Quran 5:8).
This becomes especially troubling when the person disadvantaged is a child. What responsibility does a child bear for his ancestry? What choice did the child make about the ethnicity, religion or circumstances into which they were born? When we disadvantage such a child and invoke race, history, religion or some sophisticated theory to justify it, we should ask: is this truly justice, or have we simply found an intellectually respectable language for injustice?
For me, Islam should make that question harder to avoid, not easier. A Muslim should not pretend that privilege is justice merely because he benefits from it. If faith does not make us more compassionate towards the vulnerable, more conscious of injustice and more willing to question our own advantages, we should ask what our profession of faith has actually changed within us.
Religion can also become an instrument of manufactured cruelty when we use it to control another person’s conscience. We may believe our interpretation is correct and therefore that others can be compelled to conform.
But forced obedience can create fear and conflict within the conscience. We may produce conformity, but have we produced faith? For me, this is difficult to reconcile with the Quran’s declaration that “there shall be no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256).
The wider point is not about religion alone. It is about our capacity to inflict suffering while persuading ourselves that what we are doing is necessary, righteous or compassionate.
History should make us cautious. Slavery had intellectual defenders, racial segregation had legal defenders, apartheid had political and theological defenders, and the subordination of women had scholarly defenders.
Human beings have repeatedly constructed respectable explanations for cruelty, particularly when they benefit from the arrangement.
Perhaps people living a hundred years from now will look at some of our own laws and social practices and ask: how could intelligent and apparently decent people have believed this was acceptable?
There is a simple test I increasingly find useful. Strip away the labels – Malay and Chinese, Muslim and Christian, citizen and foreigner, rich and poor, majority and minority – and look at the person. There is a human being there whose hopes, fears, pain and dignity are as real as ours.
Civilisation cannot merely be measured by skyscrapers, universities, sophisticated laws, artificial intelligence or economic growth. Surely one of its measures must be how much unnecessary suffering we deliberately impose upon one another.
We may not be able to prevent every earthquake, disease or tragedy that life places before us.
But surely we can stop adding unnecessarily to that suffering. We can stop manufacturing cruelty and calling it policy, defending discrimination and calling it tradition, controlling conscience and calling it religion, or protecting privilege and calling it justice.
The cruelties beyond our control test our resilience. The cruelties within our control test our humanity.
Perhaps the more urgent question is not why life can sometimes be cruel. It is why, when life already contains so much unavoidable suffering, we human beings insist on creating more.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.
