A Guy's Dream
Good-lookin', drinks beer, and knows her place: A Muslim model has been sentenced to six cane strokes for drinking a beer. Her actions were pretty insidious:
The young women in the hotel bar raised their glasses to each other at around 6 p.m. Kartika was the only Muslim in the group -- the rest were Chinese and Indian. None of them seem to take particularly seriously the strict alcohol ban that applied to Kartika. The waiter didn't seem to care either; at least, he didn't ask to see her identity card, which would have shown her religious affiliation.
Half an hour later, religious police came storming into the hotel foyer. Was it a routine check? Or had an informer in the hotel blown the whistle? Kartika was the only one brought in to the station, where she had to give a urine sample.
There's a bright side to all this, though: She is becoming the poster girl of all that's wrong with the Islamists. Her family, in fact, is insisting that the caning be carried out: in order to embarrass the government.
Her relatives are self-confident, modern Muslims. Kartika's father, who owns palm oil plantations and a safari lodge, regularly took his nine children skiing in Switzerland or shopping in Amsterdam. Most of the family members have attended university, many of them abroad. They're religious, but the idea that Kartika should be humiliated with a caning just for enjoying a little beer would never have crossed their minds.
This makes her father's news on this evening in Kuala Kangsar all the more surprising. He's engaged a team of well-known lawyers, the family patriarch explains, and given them a clear assignment. The attorneys are to make sure Kartika is declared fully fit for punishment and that the Shariah law sentence is executed, in public.
This is his challenge to the government, Shukarno Abdul Mutalib declares, because Malaysia needs to finally admit one important thing -- that it's not, in fact, ruled by the Taliban.
