Former Perlis mufti Asri Zainul Abidin has condemned as un-Islamic the method used by the Islamic department's anti-vice officers, which in recent times had caused lives to be lost when their target tried to flee from being caught in khalwat (close proximity between sexes).
"The action by any anti-vice team whose raids on private offences such as khalwat and liquor drinking, which caused death, is a sin.
"Members of the raiding party must be prosecuted and charged for murder," said Asri.
He was commenting on the latest such incident, in which a former policeman believed to be in a room with a female companion fell to his death yesterday from a 16th floor hotel as he tried to evade a raid by officers from the Federal Territory Islamic Department (JAWI).
"This is not the first such case. How many times have such cases happened, and although numerous criticisms have been levelled, it keeps repeating," said Asri when asked on his blog to respond on the case.
Quoting prominent Muslim jurists such as Imam al-Tabari and Imam Ghazali, Asri said such acts of spying had no basis in Islamic Shariah.
Saying such raids only fuelled the misunderstandings and prejudices about Islam in the country, Asri stressed that under Islamic laws, a person cannot be accused of the crime of illicit sex as long as his accusers could not produce four reliable witnesses who had actually seen the act of sexual intercourse taking place.
He explained that in the absence of such a strict requirement for witnesses, the most a person can be accused of was the offence of khalwat.
Hidden offenders and blatant offenders
Asri however reminded that Islamic laws were not designed to devulge a person's secret life to the extent that the Shariah refuses to punish even those who admit to such a crime in the absence of required evidences.
Asri said while khalwat was an offence, there was a difference between such acts being done in the open and in private.
He quoted a saying by Prophet Muhammad, who said all believers would be given salvation except those who were blatant in committing wrongdoing.
"Strange enough, in our country, we see open vices being committed depicting men and women embracing in films and stage, yet they are ignored by anti-vice officers.
"When the wife of a VIP hugged in public a foreign celebrity, it was ignored. The hidden is hunted down," said Asri.
Qur'an against snooping
Asri said the Qu'ran warned against spying for private and non-criminal offences, quoting verse 12 from Surah al-Hujurat:
O People who Believe! Avoid excessive assumptions; indeed assumption sometimes becomes a sin, and do not seek faults, and do not slander one another; would any one among you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? So you will hate that! And fear Allah; indeed Allah is Most Acceptor of Repentance, Most Merciful (49:12).
He said Imam al-Tabari, an early authority of Qur'anic exegesis, had explained the verse as to mean prohibition against looking for the faults of other human beings.
"Muslim scholars have from the beginning prohibited spying as a means to prevent vice. I have repeatedly said this. Such fondness for snooping also led to the 'sex video' controversy which will become a trend to bring down a person," he warned, referring to the pornographic video released by several UMNO leaders, depicting a man resembling Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim.
Asri forwarded a view by Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the act of intruding privacy to nab sex offenders.
“If an offender commits such an offence in private away from the public view, with the doors of his house closed, no one has the right to spy on him or to record his acts using electronic devices, or to barge into his house to confirm the suspicion (of his act)," Asri quoted the prominent Egyptian scholar, adding that it was due to this principle that the Islamic adage "fight vice when you see it" had been based.
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