Three girls from a Madrasah were at an MRT station when…

You are at the MRT station with two schoolmates. You are in your school uniform. Then someone comes by and kicks you in the left thigh. The person swings something heavy in a plastic bag at one of your friends. Your third friend was hit in the eye. What do you do? You’re probably too shocked to react. Maybe you scream for help. Maybe some people come to your aid. After all, it’s 7.20am and there’s bound to be some kind of crowd at Paya Lebar MRT station. Or maybe, you and your friends continue your way to Madrasah Al-Ma’arif Al-Islamiah, which is in Geylang.

It strikes you that this cannot be an April Fool’s joke, some kind of prank. How can a grown man do this to three defenceless girls? In fact, you wonder if this was something that was bound to happen sooner or later. After all, your uniforms mark you out as students in a Madrasah. You and your friends wear the headscarf. The girls wear the tudung, something their counterparts in secular schools are not allowed to do.

You think back to the dialogue that was held three days ago with Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam. What did he say?

“In Singapore, you’re not going to see violence in the near term or maybe even the medium term, because we take a very strict approach. But what I fear is that as a reaction to all of this that’s going around the world, that the non-Muslim community will start developing a set of attitudes internally. People will be too politically correct to express them but internally they’ll start looking at Muslims differently and that’s something I think will be very destructive to the soul and spirit of Singapore that we’ve created.”

You would rather that people remained politically correct… That blow certainly hurts! You think about the fears that your fellow Muslims have expressed. Some who said that they worry about going to religious classes in mosques. Hah! And these are students in secular schools, not in Madrasahs which offer an Islamic education! There was even an occasion when “Islam murderers” was scribbled at a bus stop in Bukit Panjang.

You are wondering now about the rest of your fellow students in the six full-time Madrasahs here. You hope that they are not going to think that being in uniform makes them targets. You also hope that the opposite won’t happen – that they start becoming even more exclusive and view non-Muslims through a lens of fear. But wait a minute, the non-Muslims are probably looking at the Muslims that way too!

You worry. You are in the minority. You worry about the privileges you have that might now be resented. A Madrasah education is after all a privilege, given what the Chinese population had to give up in the past… People are talking about inter-faith dialogues but this is really preaching to the converted who already know the value of peace and harmony among the races and religions here. Non-Muslims have been advised to proactively reach out to Muslims. Maybe the Madrasahs should do the same too, like having joint CCAs with secular schools?

You nurse the blow to your thigh. You realise it’s not as bad a blow as the one to your psyche. You hope they catch the assailant – and find out what’s behind the attack. You remember the middle-aged man wearing a red T-shirt, light brown bermudas with black boots, and carrying a green backpack and white plastic bag. What was he thinking, hitting three girls?

Meanwhile, somewhere else in Singapore… There was a 13-hour stand-off that began on Thursday night between a suspected drug abuser and the authorities in an Ang Mo Kio flat. The man was holding his mother hostage. Some neighbours had to be evacuated for their safety. No worries, he was arrested in the end and everybody is safe.

And in the Internet world… There is a spat going on between a teen blogger who started a blog documenting the construction of the Thomson Line. He’s closed it down alleging threats made by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) which it, of course, denied.

And all over Singapore, it’s going to be hot and dry for the next two weeks. We know that already but the weatherman is saying so this time.

 

Featured image from TMG file. 

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