Letter: Women, morality and earthquakes

Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi said recently, “Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”

A little while back an Indonesian minister preached that our disasters were due to much the same cause. Now local political candidates are to be vetted to make sure they have not been sleeping on the wrong side of the blanket.

A friend in the US, when I mentioned the weird notions of the Iranian cleric, made a suggestion that perhaps the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) should take up. She said, “Maybe women in Muslim countries should start wearing a fragrance like ‘Pepe Le Pew’. If smelling like a skunk doesn’t make them less attractive to men I don’t know what would.”

Earthquakes are natural phenomena occurring at the boundary of tectonic plates as a result of the build up of friction. If you live on the “ring of fire” you can expect them. The real immorality is in not building safe buildings and in allowing corruption to bypass what building codes you may have on the books, in not having efficient emergency services and free good quality health care.

I was brought up to believe that morality was about caring for our fellow creatures and not being cruel or dishonest. Public corruption, promoting cigarettes to the young, children riding on motorbikes, the unbelievable poor hygiene of warung (small food shops), the way we burn and slash our forests and clog our rivers with garbage, the noise pollution and desecration of everything with banners and other eyesores are far more immoral than what truly consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

We need a good shaking. We need to be shaken out of the stupid idea that women are inherently evil temptresses who men have to be protected from. We need to be shaken out of the notion that God is angry if a woman lets slip a wisp of hair.

The burka and niqab are truly immoral. They deprive women of their humanity and individuality. It is wrong to put people in cloth cages and try to wall them from society. It is time we learned what morality means.
 
Rafiq Mahmood
Bogor, West Java