KUALA, LUMPUR, JUNE 3 — Aptly enough, the film “Mencari Kartika” starts off with the question: Did Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarnor, a Muslim, deserve to be caned six times for drinking alcohol in public?
It’s a no-brainer question if you’re non-Muslim. But for Muslims it’s not that simple.
The widely-held view is that the majority of Muslims think that fellow believers who booze should get the rod. In fact that’s what 74 per cent of Muslims polled by the Merdeka Center say.
Yet the film starts with sequences of a succession of ordinary, intelligent-looking Muslims declining to be interviewed by its director Norhayati Kaprawi.
The film then jumps to interviews with Muslims who did agree to be interviewed and they supported the sentence. Yet their number was almost equal to those who refused.
This, then, is one of the film’s main posers —going by the poll, almost two-thirds of Muslims in Malaysia believe in caning for boozers. But when a film crew goes down to test how true that is, they are nervously rebuffed by half the Muslims they approach.
This is one of the subtler ways “Mencari Kartika” challenges its audience to think. If Islam as it is practised in Malaysia and interpreted by its authorities is black-and-white, why do they feel nervous about talking about it?
After all, faith in a religion requires that you are convinced its tenets are right. Not only that, you are also supposed to be able to defend those convictions in public.
So the “search” in the film is not just for the story behind Kartika’s story, which set the public discourse on Islam on fire and which made Malaysia the centre of the world for a few weeks.
“Mencari Kartika” is also about searching for the truth behind the deep-rooted assumptions Muslims have about Islam and how those assumptions get turned into laws by Muslim authorities.
Essentially, the film is about the difference between what God wants and what man thinks God wants.
Pt 1 : Who speaks for God
“Mencari Kartika” does a fair job of trying to sketch out the layers of the controversy. In terms of the public reaction to the sentence, the laws that provided for that sentence and how those laws operate in Malaysian society.
It achieves this through seamlessly blending newspaper reports and television footage that capture the heat of the public debate with fresh interviews of conservative Muslim public figures.
The interviews drive home the point that though the episode has passed, the intensity of the sentiments behind them is still present and could be triggered again.
The 33-year-old part-time model was sentenced to be caned six times and fined RM5,000 for drinking alcohol at a hotel in Pahang’s famous seaside town of Cherating sometime in 2008.
The sentence, by the Kuantan Syariah court in July 2009, was the first time a woman was sentenced to be caned in Malaysia. And that is one reason why her case lit up the headlines.
Unfortunately, the film does not clearly spell out this aspect, that the sentence, while legal in Syariah Law, contradicts civil law.
Under the civil law, women cannot be caned. Such sentences are only for violent crimes committed by men.
Malaysian Syariah Law, the Muslim authorities claim, is based on what Islam demands of Muslims and applies only to them. The Penal Code however, is man-made.
Malaysian Muslims believe that unlike the Penal Code, Syariah is the law of God and the expression of what God wants for Muslims.
And this is the heart of the storm. It is not just a question of whether the “law of God” should supersede the law of man.
For Muslims, Kartika’s caning forced them to face the unspoken suggestion that the law of man appears to be better and more just.
You can see how obsessed the sentence’s defenders are with trying to deflect this implication.
“We have to implement caning for drinkers as Islam demands it. It will help us eventually bring hudud to Malaysia,” says one youth. “Kartika herself wants to be caned (as punishment). As Muslims, who are we to interfere,” says Kulim-Bandar Baharu MP Zulkilfli Nordin.
One phrase sticks out from newspaper clippings during the episode — “Jangan Persoalkan” or do not question Syariah law.
The film also reproduces the other part of the defence — the extensive explanations and illustrations in the mainstream media of how Syariah caning differs from that of the Penal Code.
It was drummed repeatedly into the public mind that Syariah caning “does not wound” unlike the secular version which actually rips flesh off.
The aim is to educate the offender and the public by humiliation, says one of the interviewees. The full impact of what this means has not really been fully understood until one sees an actual public caning in the film.
The clip in the film is taken from a session in Aceh, Indonesia where Muslims are caned for a variety of moral crimes.
Another interview says it well: “There is a perverse pleasure in seeing a hapless offender be subjected to further degradation. I am sure this is not Islam. I wouldn’t take my children to a whipping. It is not education. It is brutalisation.”
The vicious whacks on the woman’s back and the crowd unashamedly craning their heads to peer at the public caning also sets up another of the film’s important points.
Pt 3. “The Quran is not a criminal code”
Though it recaptures the tension surrounding controversy, the film is like cold water in the face of all the conservative browbeating.
It does this by putting up solid arguments that effectively counters the belief that by caning Kartika, Muslims are doing God’s will.
The experts are institutions themselves such as Constitutional Law expert Professor Shad Saleem Faruqi and Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies chief executive officer Professor Muhammad Hashim Kamali.
Together with Saadiah Din, who has been practising Syariah law for 15 years, they patiently explain how Muslims in Malaysia have gotten it wrong : Caning for drinking alcohol is not spelt out in the Quran.
The Quran treats drinking alcohol as a sin. But it does not prescribe that Muslims who drink, should be caned.
“The punishment falls under takzir (a category of Muslim law that allows judges to set appropriate punishments). It is open to rational interpretation,” stresses Hashim.
But “Mencari Kartika” goes one step further to also explain why no one still dares to question the sentence because of the thought control used by Muslim authorities.
The points are well argued with a cogent blend of logical interpretations that is supported by quotations from the Quran and Muslim intellectual tradition.
So what the viewer gets is a sober view of this aspect of Islamic law and the lesson is that it can be questioned.
The film does not just stop with a dissection of the issues but allows the victim herself and her father to recount the ordeal in their own words.
It is perhaps the only verbatim interview of Kartika and Shukarnor Abdul Mutalib where they debunk misconceptions about them created by conservatives in the mainstream media.
Though their interviews are eye-opening, it takes more than a superficial knowledge of the controversy to realise the full weight of their statements and to see them in the right context.
For instance, Kartika’s famous claim of “saya sanggup disebat” (I am willing to be caned) has to be understood in the context of how conservatives used it to drum up support for the sentence.
It would have helped if there were brief inserts at certain points in the interviews to give perspective to what is being said.
But even without them, seeing Kartika speak her mind about the ordeal is enough to challenge assumptions of what her and her family went through.
It is shame that the film would probably not get the wide viewing it deserves among the public. It is not just an effective critique of a discrepancy in Syariah law.
It invites Malaysian Muslims to have a sober look at their whole project of wanting to establish God’s will on earth without all the drama, paranoia and fear of hell.