AUG 24 — The Kota Tinggi Municipal Council is reported to have served a demolition order on the Tanjung Resort Sutera to demolish the spiritually-defiled surau that the owner had permitted a few Buddhists to use for their meditation session.

Let’s stretch our imagination a bit and see what else could be spiritually defiled and what can be done about that.

Hotel rooms. When Muslims stay in these rooms, they would be praying there. All rooms have an arrow pointing to the “kiblat” and prayer mats are provided. The same rooms are also used by non-Muslims who may also be praying, meditating or chanting their holy verses. Besides that, we don’t know what “maksiat” activities could have taken place in them. How to purify these rooms and keep them purified at all times? Will orders be issued to demolish all these rooms too? We may then be left without any hotels for our tourists.

Money. Coins and notes are handled by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Among the non-Muslims who handle these are non-halal meat sellers. Money circulates from person to person regardless of race or religion. It goes back to the banks and comes out again. Banks have no technology for identifying money that has been “defiled”. Banks do not give out new coins and notes all the time. This is done from time to time to replace worn-out notes or when new design money is issued. So what do we do to ensure that defiled notes and coins are not given to those who are sensitive to them? I have no suggestion.

Water. Turn on the tap and you get clean water. But it is only clean from physical impurities such as silt, etc. Raw water that is taken from rivers is also spiritually unclean. Sometimes you can see animal carcasses floating in the rivers. Treatment plants only remove the solid impurities. They do not purify the water in the sense that they remove the defilement of the water by the carcasses. So what do we do? Again I have no suggestion.

Air. If you don’t breathe for a few minutes, your brain cells begin to die. Does air breathed out by people eating non-halal food defile the air around them or not? If so, up to what distance from them? If not, how is that, for the air breathed in by non-halal food eaters goes into an “impure” body, picks up some of the impurities and is breathed out to mix with outside air and be breathed in by others. How to solve this?

You see, if you stretch the imagination, you can come up with things that you normally do not pay attention to. It would be interesting to hear what the experts have to comment on these. These are not imaginary scenarios but everyday happenings, only that we don’t give a thought to them.  

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.