Indeed, claiming one’s right must be matched with discharging one’s duty and obligation.
Likewise, demand for freedom must be made on the basis of fulfilling moral responsibility.
Demanding freedom in the spirit of compromising with forces hostile to religion is at best merely a legal chicanery, and at worst, a morally illegitimate demand.
In the Malaysian context, for example, demanding freedom for a religious adherent to profess and practise his own religion in peace and harmony must be matched with recognising earnestly Islam as the religion of the Federation and acknowledging its proper institutionalisation.
A real menace begins with those who promote secularisation, which seeks to abolish the institutionalisation of religious beliefs. Secularism diminishes the role of religion to the merely subjective, personal, individual and privatised domain shorn of its social dimension.
Another relevant instance is that, Malays who claim the special position privileges must match it with selflessly discharging their duty to make the religion of Islam, the nation, and the national language qualitatively high in position.
Such a special position places a heavy moral responsibility upon Malay leaders not to mislead and consequently ruin the country in the long run by neglecting to safeguard its ethico-religious underpinning and national language as the effective unifying factor.
On balance, Islam prioritises human responsibility over freedom; sources of Islam particularly the Qur’an lay greater emphasis upon obligation than rights, without sacrificing the latter.
The first teaching of Islam in ethics is that, every human being has certain obligations which he owes and must discharge to the best of his ability, not only to God, but also to other human beings including people of other religious traditions.
In Islam, man has well-defined duties even toward animals and inanimate things.
To quote Fazlur Rahman again, “the Qur’an primarily exhorts to virtue and a strong sense of moral responsibility.
“A comprehensive sense of responsibility can very well take care of all human rights; but the converse is not so true.
“Indeed, a society that begins to understand ‘rights’ in terms of permissiveness and lawlessness spells its own inevitable doom.”
Permissiveness and lawlessness are effects of the deliberate failure to grasp the moral truth.
God criticised men who “have hearts, but understand not with them; they have eyes, but perceive not with them; they have ears, but they hear not with them” (al-A‘raf, 7:179), and consequently, are “deaf, dumb, blind” (al-Baqarah, 2:18) of what is ethical and what is not.
In relation to God’s guidance, men are equipped with the faculties of reason and perception, but some of them have deadened them with hypocrisy toward others and self-deception, to the extent that those faculties do not function anymore.
Inasmuch as they are heedless, “they are like cattle-nay, rather they are further astray,” seeing that animals follow only their instinct and natural needs, and thus, are not conscious of morality or religious guidance (al-A‘raf, 7:179).
Let us not identify heedlessness with freedom, nor permissiveness with human rights.
On the contrary, let us Malaysians help one another in furthering virtue and God-consciousness.
We, men, transcend the levels of animal, beast and brute by realising that we have responsibility-nay, weighty responsibility. Through such a consciousness, man acquires his freedom to fulfil the purpose for his existence both at individual and social levels, of which family is the basic unit.
This insight is relevant not just to the so-called personal freedom of sexual acts, but also to freedom and responsibility in political and economic domains.
