Preaching good sex, Muslim-inspired Obedient Wives Club spreads in Asia
Indonesian Gina Puspita traded a career in aircraft engineering for a mission to preach Islam and help young women build happy marriages through good sex. The French-educated mother of three hosts religious programmes through the Obedient Wives Club which is based on the belief that a fulfilling sex life is the cure for “Western-style” social problems such as divorce and abuse.
“Wives must obey the husbands in all aspect of life, such as serving food and drinks, giving calm and support for the husband, as well as in sex relations,” Pusipita, who shares her spouse with three other women, told Reuters.
A Muslim group which espouses good sex as a foundation for healthy marriages and a strong society, the Obedient Wives Club is gaining converts in the world’s most populous Muslim country after setting up in Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
Founded by Global Ikhwan, a Malaysian firm involved in businesses ranging from laundromats to pharmacies, the club was initially intended to help the company’s female staff to be good wives as well as productive employees. Global Ikhwan’s officials have been linked to the now-defunct Malaysia-based Al-Arqam religious sect which was banned by the government in 1994. Before the Obedient Wives Club, Global Ikhwan had earlier established the Polygamy Club which encourages polygamy among Muslims.
The Obedient Wives Club is open to women of all faiths but says its teachings are based on the edicts of Islam which require wives to submit to their husbands and meet their needs. “When men cannot get satisfaction at home, they will seek it elsewhere,” said Nurul, an Obedient Wives Club spokesperson. “When your wife is cool towards you because your wife is busy and has no time to attend to you whereas you need it that day, what are you going to do?”
Read the full story by Olivia Rondonuwu and Razak Ahmad here.
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Malaysia’s Young Imam reality TV show widens reach to Southeast Asia
A hit Malaysian Islamic reality TV show kicked off its second season this week after drawing more than 1,000 hopefuls from the region in a sign of the religion’s growing reach in Southeast Asia. Combining a reality TV format with Islamic teachings, the “Imam Muda” or “Young Imam” show is a talent contest for male Muslims aged between 18 and 27 who can speak Malay, with the winner crowned an Imam or religious leader.
The prime-time show features contestants in sharp-looking black suits who are judged on a variety of tasks including reciting Koranic verses, washing corpses, slaughtering sheep according to Muslim rules and counseling promiscuous young Muslim couples.
“Young Imam” first aired last year but was then only open to Malaysians. Its popularity led the producers to invite participants from other countries. More than 1,000 hopefuls from Malaysia as well as neighboring Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand auditioned for the show’s second season, and 10 were shortlisted, said Izelan.
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Lasers and iPods for a Singapore funeral of a lifetime
Death need not be a grim affair, especially for the living. At a new columbarium in Singapore, the deceased can depart, rock concert style. Unlike most traditional Buddhist funeral ceremonies that follow cremation, there is no incense and no monks offering prayers at the Nirvana Memorial Garden columbarium, where the urns holding the remains of the dead are stored.
Instead, curtains draw automatically to reveal the deceased’s urn which is placed atop a pedestal, machine-generated smoke fills the prayer hall and a booming recorded voice, accompanied by chants, speaks words of comfort and talks about death.
The columbarium boasts a $2 million sound and light system. Its resident Buddha statue pulsate gently with LED lights and, as a final touch, a ray of bright white light shines on the urn of the deceased symbolising the ascent to heaven.
The so-called “six star” columbarium is Singapore’s first luxury final resting place and the brainchild of Malaysian-based NV Multi Corp which has other similar projects in Southeast Asia.
Singapore raps evangelical pastor for ridiculing Buddhists, Taoists
Singapore has warned an evangelical Christian pastor that his online videos are offensive to Buddhists and Taoists, underlining the city-state’s concerns that religion is a potential faultline for its multicultural society.
Pastor Rony Tan, of the Lighthouse Evangelism megachurch, apologized and pulled the video clips off the internet after being visited by the government’s Internal Security Department (ISD) on Monday, the pastor and the government said on their websites. “I sincerely apologize for my insensitivity towards the Buddhists and Taoists, and solemnly promise that it will never happen again,” Tan said.
The Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement on Tuesday that “Pastor Tan’s comments were highly inappropriate and unacceptable as they trivialised and insulted the beliefs of Buddhists and Taoists. They can also give rise to tension and conflict between the Buddhist/Taoist and Christian communities. ISD told Pastor Tan that in preaching or proselytising his faith, he must not run down other religions, and must be mindful of the sensitivities of other religions.”
Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng repeated that in another statement the next day, adding that Tan had met with Buddhist and Taoist leaders and apologised personally for his coments. “While each of us is free to propagate our religious beliefs, it must never be by way of insulting or denigrating the religious beliefs of others,” Wong said.
The clips are no longer available online, but the Straits Times newspaper said they involved ridiculing beliefs, including Buddhist concepts of rebirth, karma and nirvana, drawing laughter from Tan’s audience. This Buddhist websites has posted what it says are the original videos.
Artist takes on censorship, porn law amid Indonesia restrictions
Indonesian artist Agus Suwage knows what it is like to run up against the religious conservatives. Four years ago, he was hauled into parliament, where lawmakers accused him of blasphemy and of producing pornography dressed up as art. Today, facing an even more restrictive climate in Indonesia, Suwage refuses to be silenced and has made those restrictions the focus of his art.
His latest exhibition, which opened at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute this month, highlights what he sees as a growing conservatism in majority Muslim but officially secular Indonesia. Many of the works probably could not be shown at a big public exhibition space in Indonesia following the passage of a controversial anti-pornography law last year.
“There are more important things to address in law than pornography, like education. But everyone wants to win a political point and on this issue the politics come easily,” Suwage told Reuters in an interview.
Suwage’s latest works are a series of prints of female nudes overlaid with the actual text of Indonesia’s 2008 anti-pornography law, under which a person can be charged for any public activity that “incites sexual desire.”
See the full feature here.
Indonesia should be more concern about local economy and harmony between different faiths.
from Global News Journal:
Southeast Asia’s Islamists try the domino theory
Photo: Jihad book collection in Jakarta Sept.21, 2009. REUTERS/Supr
A half-century ago, Washington worried about Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to an international communist movement backed by Maoist China, and became bogged down in the Vietnam War.
Noordin Top, believed to be the mastermind behind most of the suicide bombings in Indonesia -- including the July 17 attacks on two luxury Jakarta hotels -- pronounced himself to be al Qaeda's franchise in Southeast Asia.
Top and his allies in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) aimed to create an Islamic caliphate across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. Even before the 9/11 suicide airliner attacks, they were trying to spark an Islamic revolution with ambitious plots and attacks.
Their young foot soldiers dreamed these pro-Western nations (which had banded together to form ASEAN under the U.S. military umbrella at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967) might fall like dominoes to the righteousness of an Islamic jihad. Their martyrdom to the cause would given them a blissful reward in Heaven.
But just as Communism was not the monolith it was feared to be in the 1960s -- China and the Soviet Union had split for one thing -- so too has the Southeast Asian jihadist movement failed to cohere into a singular movement.
africa needs to stop being so violence toward other
african it prove how silly they are
Recession-hit Asians pray for jobs, luck, recovery
As companies shed jobs and governments inject funds to stimulate economies, recession-hit believers in once-booming Southeast Asia are flocking to temples, churches and mosques to seek solace in religion — and pray for a quick economic recovery.
Meditation centres have also seen an upswing in attendance and people seek peace and calm amid the economic downturn.
Reuters correspondent Nopporn Wong-Anan has a feature here looking at how people seek spiritual solace at a time of material loss in Asia, home to all the major religions and any number of minor ones.
The impulse to return to religion in a crisis may be universal — we’ve looked at various aspects of this on FaithWorld in recent months — but there are some interesting local twists.
In Hong Kong, for example, business has slowed for feng shui masters, or geomancers, because the property sector is suffering a severe contraction. Feng shui masters say they use the laws of heaven and earth to give advice on how to design buildings to bring wealth and luck. They advise architects on how to place doors, windows and even furniture to avoid the bad spirits they say could otherwise infiltrate a building.
“From 1991 until about 1998, when the last big economic crisis happened, a lot of people went to geomancers to get help. But the economy never got better and people didn’t think feng shui helped them,” said Edwin Ma, a feng shui consultant to top property firms. “So a lot of people got disappointed and they would now rather keep their money in their own pockets.”
If Hillary goes to Jakarta, can Barack be far behind?
Is U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Jakarta a hint that President Barack Obama will pick Indonesia as the first Muslim country he visits in his drive to improve U.S. relations with the Islamic world? There were lots of other suggestions when he first mentioned this back in December, including Egypt (the New York Times pick) and Morocco (judging by what might have been a write-in campaign on our comments page).
My tip at the time was either Indonesia or Turkey. In recent weeks, Turkey’s star has probably faded as its relations with Israel soured recently. Those strains came after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily accused Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill” in Gaza during a debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos and then stormed off the stage.
Clinton said all the right things today, like telling the country where Obama spent four years as a boy that it was proof that modernity and Islam can coexist. “As I travel around the world over the next years, I will be saying to people: if you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity and women’s rights can co-exist, go to Indonesia,” she said at a dinner with civil society activists. Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda reciprocated by telling her Indonesia shared the United States’ joy at Obama’s election and she should tell the U.S. president “we cannot wait too long” for a visit.
Obama spent four years in Indonesia after his American mother, Ann Dunham, married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro following the end of her marriage to Obama’s Kenyan father. He told President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono during a phone call after his election that he’d like to visit Indonesia again. It would help forge greater cooperation between the two nations and give him a chance to try local food again including meatball soup, nasi goreng and rambutan, a local newspaper reported him as saying.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) will meet in Singapore in November. It’s just a short flight from there to Jakarta.
If, as this article suggests, Turkey’s star has faded because it democratically elected Prime Minister had the audacity to tell it like it is to Shimon Peres, then I hope Turkey’s crescent fades alongside the star. The Turkish Prime Minister was rightly commended for saying what needs to be said.
Faith-based body piercing in Southeast Asia
In the “one picture worth 1,000 words” category, check out Sulastri Osman’s feature on a Singapore festival of body-piercing in honour of the Hindu god Shiva’s youngest son, Lord Murugan. “They believe the piercings will leave no scars and they will feel no pain, .protected from bodily harm by the strict regime of abstinence, piety and vegetarianism they follow for a month before the festival,” she writes.
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Melvin Ho (right), a first-time participant in the Thaipusam festival, said the motivation for the piercing is simple. “I believe in gods,” the 49-year-old man of Chinese origin said, minutes before a friend inserted a meter-long metal skewer through his cheeks.
The man who pierced Ho appeared to feel more pain than he did, grimacing as he pushed the skewer through his friend’s flesh.
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The women with pierced cheeks and men sporting hooks and skewers all over their bare chests and backs carry wooden kavadis, or portable altars, for 4-1/2 kilometers (three miles) to Sri Thendayuthapani Temple where the procession ends.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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It is not the teaching of Quran or Prophet Muhammad. This group is misleading people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Arqam ~I have wrote a report to JAKIM.