Rohingya refugees streaming to Malaysia

When 27-year-old Najumul Haq took to sea for the first time, he left behind all that he had ever known.Najumul is a Rohingya, born in Myanmar. For years, his family had run a sundry shop in the town of Maungdaw, on the country's western coast close to the border with Bangladesh.Travelling first to nearby Bangladesh, and then to a rendezvous with a boat carrying more than 230 other people, it took Najumul nearly a month to get to Malaysia. He and his family paid the brokers who control the escape routes nearly $2,200."As soon as I got on board, the brokers took away my money and my phone … anything valuable," he told Al Jazeera in Kuala Lumpur. "All we had to eat was dried noodles, and if we moved the broker would beat us." The only shelter from the rain and choppy seas was a tarpaulin.Najumul arrived in Malaysia two weeks ago, just as another outbreak of Buddhist verses Muslim Rohingya violence in his homeland began. More than 150 people have been killed since June.Rohingya on the marginsNajumul joined tens of thousands of Rohingya who've made their homes in Malaysia in the past few decades, eking out a living on the margins of society, unable to get a proper job or give their children an education because they don't have legal status in the country.Like many of Myanmar's immediate neighbors, Malaysia hasn't signed the UN Convention on Refugees. That means that those who arrive in the country are, as far as the government is concerned, illegal migrants."Malaysia has no law to protect refugees," said Chris Lewa, a director of the Bangkok-based Arakan Project, who's been working on Rohingya issues for more than a decade. "They allow the UNHCR [United Nations High Commission for Refugees] to register people, but that's only an informal protection."The UNHCR says there are 24,370 Rohingya registered in Malaysia, but the numbers actually living in the country are much higher. At a recent "data registration exercise" in Kuala Lumpur, thousands of unregistered Rohingya, Myanmar Muslims and Myanmar Tamils queued to give their details to the agency officials. While some were recent arrivals, many had been in Malaysia for years.Ajim, who goes by one name, arrived in Malaysia two months ago after his community of fishermen decided to use one of their boats to escape the violence. Activists in Myanmar say government policy has helped fuel ethnic tension, but even in the safety of Malaysia, 18-year-old Ajim feels little sense of security."I don't see any future here in Malaysia," he told Al Jazeera at a community centre run by other Rohingya refugees."I have no documents and without documents it's very difficult to get a job. It's hopeless."Most Rohingya find work through community networks - Nujumul works in a small shop catering to other Myanmar migrants - or take poorly paid jobs that have little appeal to others.Schooling is more difficult. The Tzu Chi Buddhist Foundation in partnership with the UNHCR runs seven schools for migrants from Myanmar, including three specifically for Rohingya.The children, aged 6-11, don’t follow a full curriculum but do get lessons in English, Malay, maths and science.Their parents pay about $1 a month for classes. They’re eager to learn and, like many children, have ambitions for the future.Umairah Begum, 11, left Sittwe - capital of Myanmar’s western Rakhine state - for Malaysia three years ago. She says she loves going to school and dreams of becoming a doctor. "I want to save people’s lives," Umairah says in fluent Malay that’s she’s picked up.The former UN special envoy to Myanmar, Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail, has called on the Malaysian government to make life "easier" for the Rohingya in Malaysia.It seems officials may be listening. In the past week, key agencies have met to discuss Rohingyas’ access to education. Jobs may also be on the agenda."Whatever happens to them is going to affect this country," Nazri Aziz of the Prime Minister’s Department told Al Jazeera. "If we don’t take action to help them, we’re going to create a group of people in society who may be considered as laggards. They’re going nowhere, they’re going to be here."Official estimates put the number of people displaced in this year’s ethnic violence in Rakhine at more than 110,000 people. Some 36,400 people were forced from the homes in October, many of them into squalid camps. Hundreds of thousands more are in Bangladesh. Activists expect that as the weather improves in the Bay of Bengal, more Rohingya may be tempted to make the trip to Malaysia.Diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the ethnic violence in Myanmar have made little progress. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has called on the country’s now quasi-democratic leaders to grant the Rohingya citizenship.Worried the situation could radicalize Rohingya and create tension throughout the region, Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan has offered ASEAN’s help, but Myanmar rejected the offer, insisting the dispute is a domestic issue. Despite recent reforms, not everyone’s surprised."I don’t think the junta is particularly interested in anything that ASEAN has to say," said Joshua Snider, assistant professor at the School of Politics, History & International Relations at the University of Nottingham Malaysia."I think they are playing their own game. Now that Myanmar is no longer a pariah, the question is whether the international community is willing to put its foot down and say that all the aid that’s pouring in could be withdrawn unless something is done."For now, the Rohingya in Malaysia see little chance that international action will give them the chance to return home, or an opportunity to settle permanently elsewhere. They will continue to spend their days worrying about the future, but mostly about those they’ve left behind.The tears well up in Nujumul’s eyes as he recounts his last conversation with his family."My two sisters and my mother have become homeless," he said. "Whatever we have has been looted. I worry about my family every second of every day and every second of every night."PHOTO CAPTIONEthnic Rohingya from Myanmar living in Malaysia hold placards calling for a stop to killings in June.Al-Jazeera

Massacre trial reopens old Afghan wounds

Five months after a US soldier allegedly killed 16 people in Kandahar, Afghans say little has changed.Having just completed his dawn prayer, Mullah Baran was rolling up his prayer mat when he received the phone call: “The Americans came last night," a voice on the other end told him. “They raided your house and martyred your brother.” A few hours after that phone call in the early morning hours of March 12, 2012, details surrounding the death of Baran's brother Mohamad Daoud and 15 others were beginning to be pieced together by villagers in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar. Within days it made international headlines as the “Kandahar Massacre”. Now, five months after the March 11 killings in two Panjwai district villages, Robert Bales, the US soldier charged with the deaths of 16 people, including nine children, is in a US military court for a pre-trial hearing to determine whether he will be court-martialed. For many Americans, Bales’ alleged actions were the “act of a psychopath”, an isolated situation, said Glenn Greenwald, columnist for The Guardian .Heath Druzin, reporter for Stars and Stripes , an independent newspaper covering the US military, says the massacre was yet “another question about the role of the US in an already unpopular war”.Familiar scenesBut for many in Afghanistan, it was indicative of “hundreds” of other nights in the Central Asian nation.Initially, “they wouldn’t even admit to us it was their man”, Baran says of the US forces. When he returned to his 11-room house the following morning, Baran was confronted with the physical and emotional evidence: broken cupboards and doorways, bullet holes from the gunfire that had awoken his youngest nephew asleep in his crib. For many Afghans, the scene Baran describes is a familiar one. Residents interviewed by Al Jazeera in the south and east of the country all used terms like “oppression”, “brutality” and “inhuman” to describe the raids on their homes and wrongful killings they say have not subsided despite the attention surrounding the Kandahar Massacre. Seddiq, a resident of the Khogyani district in eastern Nangarhar province, says he “hates the Americans and those Afghans who work with them”, because of the treatment he and his wife, Homayra, received when their house was raided by US Special Forces last year. Wahid, who lives only minutes from Seddiq, says it was the noise of the explosion that brought his attention to the raid on his neighbor’s house. “They come and blow up the gate of your house and then go directly into people’s bedrooms and start blindfolding people with ‘black bags’”. For Wahid, the affronts to Afghan culture of the past decade have him looking back on the raids and searches conducted by the Russian-backed communist governments of Afghanistan. Though raids and searches are remembered as one of the most feared tactics of the communist years, Wahid says: “The Russians were far better. When they had a report about a suspect they would come with Afghans in toe and knock on your door."The Russians asked respectfully,” he said.An agreement signed only weeks after the Kandahar Massacre gave Afghan forces the ability to approve and lead raids into Afghan homes as well as detentions. The April 8, 2012, agreement between NATO and Afghanistan was heralded by Kabul as “big progress … what our president and people have been asking for since years ago”.But months later, locals still remain outraged by the conduct of the raids and subsequent detentions. A tribal elder in Kandahar told Al Jazeera eight members of his family were arrested in an October 24 raid. He described the 150-strong soldiers involved in the raid on the eve of the Eid-al-Adha holiday as a mix of Afghans and foreigners. “They blindfolded us and started searching our house. They came at 2 AM and left with the sunrise and took us with them.” Though his two sons remain in prison, the elder says the ordeal did not uncover so much as “a nail” that the family might have been using as a weapon. Haji Abdul Baqi, a resident of Panjwai says there have been three incidents of wrongful deaths in the past 13 months. The most recent, 20 days ago, saw a man killed for being a Taliban while watering his garden, a point of pride in many Afghan households. “But they came and apologized, saying they made a mistake … they always apologize”, Baqi told Al Jazeera.Pushed to his limitIn the days following the Kandahar Massacre, Afghans around the country were outraged as the details brought back stories and images of raids and killings they witnessed.But for the foreign forces, the news brought with it a heightened sense of unease. Druzin was embedded with US soldiers across the Arghandab River from Panjwai when the news of the massacre first broke. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Druzin recalls the changing tones of the conversation. Initially, for the US soldiers in the so-called spiritual homeland of the Taliban, there was a fear of "reverberations". The soldiers worried that the "black mark on the military" would lead to revenge attacks on anyone with US flags on their sleeves. As details emerged of Bales' personal setbacks - four tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, financial troubles, and descriptions of severe nightmares and flashbacks of a grizzly episode in Iraq - talk slowly changed. Though no one defended Bales' actions, Druzin said US soldiers, who recognized the serious stresses the war had placed on their own lives, wondered if Bales had not been "pushed to his limit".Some critics said media headlines such as “ Bales fought losing war on home front as mortgage debt mounted ” in the weeks following the attack were efforts to “humanize” the staff sergeant, but The Guardian ’s Greenwald says in any crime, you have to understand the accused’s motivations and the circumstances that led to the event.“What you shouldn’t be doing is looking for an ennobling explanation”, Greenwald told Al Jazeera. Baran has heard that Bales was “insane, that his mind didn’t work”. But, recalling images of his brother’s “blood-soaked” body after a fatal shot to the head, Baran says “this is just covering a crime”.“As humanized as he [Bales] became at times in the media, that’s how dehumanized the victims were”, Greenwald said.Justice at homeWhat the Afghans want is justice. "We want at least, according to their laws, the rights of the murdered and the injured", says Baqi. For many, one aspect of that justice is a criminal trial held in the nation where the crime took place. Greenwald describes a US trial as a symbol of “Afghan sovereignty being stomped on”.Baran echoes the call for an Afghan trial. Describing the worst case of civilian killings blamed on a single US soldier since the Vietnam War, he says: “This was a brutal crime to kill and burn the bodies. We won’t benefit from anything - from aid or money - we just want his execution."

What Do Scholars Say about Intermixing?

Imaam Ash-Shaafi‘i  said in his book Al-Umm, "I do not like women to be buried with men in a single grave as long as there is no necessity. However, if this is necessary, then the man should be in front and the woman in the back along with a separator of dust between them." Imaam Ash-Shaafi‘i  hated mixing men and women even if they were dead in the grave not feeling the presence of one another, so, what should we say about college students who sit with the boy’s thigh stuck to his girlfriend’s thigh while they are alive, with desire running in their veins and each of them wants the other? • Ibn Al-Qayyim  said in At-Turuq Al-Hukmiyyah fi As-Syaasah Ash-Shar‘iyyah:Some Islamic jurists rightly stated that it is allowable for the ruler (concerned authorities) to spoil the clothing of women who impermissibly expose their adornment with ink or so if this is suitable. This is considered the least financial punishment, as the Commander of the Believers ‘Umar ibn Al-Khattaab  prevented women from walking with men or intermixing with them in the roads.Shaykh Al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah  said in Al-Fataawa (15/297),"Unlike the man, the woman should be protected and preserved; hence, she was specified with the command to wear the Hijaab (Islamic covering) and refrain from showing her adornment before non-Mahram (marriageable) men. Therefore, she, unlike the man, must abide in her house and must abide by Hijaab, because the appearance of women without necessity causes temptation, and men are in charge of them." • Shaykh Ahmad Shaakir  said,Imaam Ahmad  narrated on the authority of Umm Salamah  that she said, “O Messenger of Allaah, why are we not allowed to perform Jihaad (armed struggle) like men? Why do we receive half the share of inheritance available to males?” Thereupon, Allaah The Almighty revealed (what means): {And do not wish for that by which Allaah has made some of you exceed others. For men is a share of what they have earned, and for women is a share of what they have earned. And ask Allaah of his bounty. Indeed Allaah is ever, of all things, knowing.} [Quran 4:32]Shaykh Ahmad Shaakir  commented on this Hadeeth (narration) saying, "This Hadeeth refutes the allegations made by the contemporary liars who are keen on spreading immorality among the believers to be as immoral as the non-Muslims. They encourage women to leave their houses to enlist in the army, where their arms and thighs are exposed and their front and back are shown, intending, in fact, to entertain the young soldiers who are deprived of women in the army; in imitation of the dissolute Jews and Westerners, may the successive curses of Allaah be upon them until the Day of Judgment." • Dr. Saalih ibn Fawzaan Al-Fawzaan said in his book Rulings Pertaining to Muslim Women: Today, the enemies of Islam - rather, the enemies of humanity, including the disbelievers and hypocrites who have a disease in their hearts -- are embittered by the chastity and honorable status of the Muslim woman under Islam.That is because the enemies of Islam want women to serve as a tool of destruction and a trap by which they can seduce and prey on those who have weak faith and those who have a perverted nature, after getting her to fulfill their frenzied desires. Allaah The Almighty Says (what means): {Allaah wants to accept your repentance, but those who follow [their] passions want you to digress [into] a great deviation.} [Quran 4:28]The Muslims who have a disease in their hearts want the woman to be a cheap commodity displayed before lascivious ‎people. They want her to be an object, exposed before their eyes so they can enjoy her beauty or reach of her what is uglier than that.That is why they endeavor to get the woman out of her house to work side by side with men, or to serve men as a nurse in hospitals, a stewardess on board planes, a teacher or professor in mixed schools, an actress or singer in theaters, or a broadcaster in the mass media where she would seduce men by her voice and beauty.Immoral magazines have taken seductive ‎pictures of girls as a means for promoting and marketing themselves. Similarly, some businessmen and companies exploit such pictures to promote their products. These conspiracies led women to abandon their natural and true duty inside her house, which forced husbands to hire foreign female maids to raise their children and take care of the affairs of their households, and this has resulted in great evil and much temptation.