On pN32 of The Star today, there is a report of a judicial hearing on a “cleansing ritual” that went hideously wrong. Two people ended up brutally murdered – beaten to death in a “religious” ritual supposed to rid them of their demons.

On p N4 we have a report of something that is not yet violent but which is also diabolically nasty and could head down the same path, as it cons people into believing they – or members of their families/communities – are cursed, hexed by witches or possessed by demons. And this happens…where? Seventeenth century Salem? Nope. In the UK. Among gullible Malaysians who fall victim to wily Malaysian con artists.

Is it bad luck that makes you sick/stressed/fail your exams? Nope. Was it your fault, because you didn’t study hard enough, or because you have a mental illness? Nope. Is it a personality clash that makes your marriage fail? Nope.

It’s witchcraft. Or possession by evil spirits. How long before we’ll have a howling mob stoning supposed witches, one wonders, because people won’t accept they are responsible for their own lives, both successes and failures?

Beware. These two supposed exorcists clothe their nastiness under a veneer of religion and call themselves “The Professional Islamic Support and Nurture Group” or P.I.S.A.N.G (allow me to roll around the floor laughing here – pisang means banana!! These two guys are laughing at you and your gullibility!!)

If you are a Malaysian in UK, or have children studying in the UK, tell your fellow Malaysians to stand up and be adults, not superstitious idiots swayed by the clever con spiel of unscrupulous men like Hamidi and Trimizi. They are taking you for a ride, and making it seem legit by preaching their piety.

I blogged about this once before, here, but if today’s paper is to be believed, this pair of nasties are going from strength to strength. Does no one else care?

I have just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love and Other Demons”. That should be required reading for all those Malaysian students in the UK* who think they were possessed of djinns. (Alternatively, they could start studying their own religion for themselves, instead of believing the rubbish others say they ought to believe.)

A lovely, lyrical book – and a look at what can happen when people use their fear of the unknown and hysteria to make decisions, instead of reason and rationale and science.

An education is supposed to make you think.

This is a direct quote from the article in The Star* newspaper the other day:

“While there are cyber laws to nab high-tech criminals, those who practise black magic get off scott free due to a lack of legislation to bring them to book. Towards this end, a non-governmental organisation in Britain has proposed the introduction of sihir laws to nail those who cast evil spells.” … “Without sihir laws, anybody is free to practise black magic without fear of being arrested…” etc etc. (They are Malaysians, aiming for such laws in Malaysia, rather than UK, I suppose).

In other words, these maniacs want to return us to a time similar to those centuries when women (and you know what? It almost always was women!) were killed for owning a black cat, or because the man next door had a mysterious illness the doctors couldn’t cure, or the neighbour’s cow died. Salem, anyone?

This pernicious rubbish being spouted in UK is not Islam. It is superstition, and vicious at that, because there is always a victim to be villified. And the victim is the person accused, not the person who had bad luck or a sick cow or who failed their exams.

And of course, black magic was always so easy to prove. For example, in days gone by, what you did was throw a person in the local duck pond with their hands bound. If they drowned, they were innocent… I wonder what the modern equivalent is? I’m sure these clowns will think of something. The djinns apparently chat to them quite happily – in Malay, of course.

*See my post of 31st March. Or see The Star 30th March
*To be fair to The Star, I imagine that they are bringing this to the attention of the public because they are as alarmed as I am…

When it comes to the apparently inexplicable, people like explanations that make sense to them. When they are failing (on any level – academically, socially, economically, spiritually or even on their level of contentment or happiness), they seek reasons – and an explanation that doesn’t blame them is obviously more palatable.

In extreme cases throughout history in many parts of the world, they blame the witch down the street and stone her to death. And they often paint their crime with a veneer of religion in order to make it seem legal and acceptable. In less horrible cases they make up stories. Marsh lights today have a scientific explanation. In the past, you blamed the Will-o’-the-Wisp trying to lure you to your death in the bog.

Nowadays, when confronted with troubles, people go to the self-help section of the bookshop and buy books titled “How to…” or “The Secret” and start believing all you have to do is think positively, and you’ll win the lottery or whatever you want. You don’t have to, well, you know, actually work to solve your problems.

Students – especially those from a background of a loving, close-knit extended family with strong cultural and religious taboos and mores – are especially vulnerable when they are sent off to university in another part of the world. They not only have to accept an academia where they are not spoon-fed as they were back home, but they have to cope with a freer society. They are surrounded by temptation, or by pitfalls they never had back home. Their families are not there to consult or to intervene.

Students have to manage everything from their studies and finances to clashes with their flatmates and their landlady. They are faced with foods they may not like and they have to dodge foods that are not religiously acceptable. Problems abound. They make mistakes and feel guilty, or are unable to cope.

Unfortunately, all too often someone comes along with his/her own agenda to con them. It may not be for money; it may be simply to make himself/herself feel big and important. He or she says, “It’s not your fault.” And these people make their intervention and solutions sound acceptable and unassailable by calling it religion, or they make use of religion in their “cure” to gain acceptability. They prey on the gullible.

They preach magic, call it religion, use pop psychology – and you have the beginnings of a cult or a con or an unhealthy emphasis on blaming outside causes for a personal problem.

It makes me sad. Young people who will one day be future leaders, teachers, scientists or technocrats are buying into a belief in hocus pocus. They are rejecting reason and the rational for magic and fantasy and the unseen and unprovable. They seek learning and knowledge, yet fall prey to superstition and scare tactics.

The ultimate irony – I write fantasy. But hey, folks, it’s not real.

Want to know what prompted me to say all this?

Read this: Djinn and Tonic , also titled “Evil be gone!” in The Star on line, or see the StarTwo section of yesterday’s The Star newspaper.

Here’s a true story, just related to me today over a coffee at my kitchen table.

The woman chatting to me has recently had a medical problem diagnosed (after an CT scan and ultrasound) as kidney stones, and is due to go for laser treatment in the local hospital here in Selangor. Her close relative, however, said he knows a very good traditional medicine man (bomoh), and why doesn’t she try him first for some non-invasive treatment, especially as he is renowned for his treatment of kidney stones.

Having a “try anything” attitude, she said OK, and off they went to visit the bomoh in Durian Tunggal, Malacca. Her first shock was the number of people lining up to see him. So many that he had a “Take a number” system. He was giving out between 50 to 70 numbers a day, 5 days a week, and sometimes there was more than one person to a number. The fee was a “donation”. The woman and her relative both paid 20RM (about $US6 or $AUD8 each).

Do the arithmetic. The guy is earning considerably more than my husband who has a Ph.D in science.

So the bomoh asks the woman what’s the matter, she explains and he cautions her not to have the laser treatment because it is dangerous. In other words, he is actively advising her to go against her doctor’s advice. He then massages the area over the kidneys and produces, one after the other, three “kidney stones” which he gives to her. Problem solved, no need to go for that pesky hospital visit.

Woman – highly suspicious – phones her doctor and asks to have another ultrasound. He very kindly doesn’t scold her and obliging sets one up. Of course, the kidney stones are still there, and woman is still scheduled for her laser treatment.

I dunno why I write stories about magic (which stories no one believes for a minute) and get paid so little. I should be setting up a bomoh clinic, have everyone believing in my magic, and earn a fortune at the same time (apparently immune from the law too, on the grounds of…what? Traditional cultural practices of cheating the public are sacrosanct?).

This man is a menace. He is a crook. He is ripping off the gullible public and possibly putting people in danger at the same time by persuading them to avoid medical treatment. Why is he allowed to practice? Why on earth do people believe in this crap?

–

Before and after pix:

When my friend Hrugaar was coming to stay, I cleaned the spare bedroom. And I noticed that there were two items missing from the walls. Which was a bit freaky. Someone been sneaking into the house to pinch items from the bedrooms?

I turned the place upsidedown, wondering if this was the first signs of senile dementia or Alzheimer’s in yours truly. Perhaps in some unremembered moment of scattiness, I had tucked them away in the freezer or washing machine or something.

Commonsense prevailed. The room gets periodically used by visitors. One of my guests just didn’t like what was on the walls and took them down and hid them. They were eventually found – after Hrugaar had long gone – tucked away under all the items in a storage drawer of the room.

I’m afraid this just strikes me as weird. They were carvings made of wood, collected by my husband on his travels. Wood, you know. Dead trees. They aren’t emitting radiation. They don’t contain hidden cameras or microphones. They are harmless bits of wood, lovingly and beautifully carved for tourists, by not-very-wealthy artisans trying to make a living out of travellers coming to their country to gawk at them.

Yeah, I am intolerant of superstition. Very. Call it cultural differences if you like; I tend to think of it as the kind of thinking that keeps people poor and backward, that makes a women suffering from cancer seek out a witchdoctor or traditional medicine man, and end up dead as a result. The kind of thinking that makes someone gullible to conmen. The kind of thinking that makes conservation students too scared to go into the forest because of the “spirits” there. The kind of thinking that makes people try to find easy substitutes for hard work and commonsense, you know, “think positively and you’ll end up rich”. And before you laugh at that, think of the wild success that feng shui proponents have had, or that ghastly book called “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne.

Maybe she was right at that – guess who made a fortune by believing she could write and market a book about wealth and health through positive thinking, positive that hundreds of thousands of the gullible public would buy it? Now there’s proof for you!

Unfortunately, the Malaysian education system has – through the years – done an excellent job in teaching Malaysians to accept what they are told, rather than develop their critical faculties.

The MCA* Public Services and Complaints Department often has its hands full trying to persuade Malaysians not to fall prey to con artists and scams – from whom it then has to try and extricate the victims.

Now the MCA has come out with a book containing guidelines on how to recognise a true medium, which includes 20 pointers on how to to distinguish a crook from a real medium.

A real medium. Right.

I have fairies at the bottom of my garden. I’ll show you for 500 RM. Of course, if you fail to see them, it’s not my fault. It’s because you just don’t have faith…

* Malaysian Chinese Association – a political party which is part of the ruling government.

Weekend break from answering questions. Not to worry, if you asked one, it will be answered…

Instead, today I just have to tell you about this news item that appeared in today’s paper here.

A bomoh [translation: witchdoctoring con-artist] in the northern state of Kelantan was treating a Penang family for something or other. His diagnosis was that the family’s problems were caused by some bad spirits or demons. He – being a skilled bomoh – caught these spirits and imprisoned them inside the trunks of banana plants, a process which included driving huge nails into the stems and then burying them in the local cemetery.

The photo below comes from the New Straits Times online page. See here
for a bigger shot and more details about the story.

Hocus pocus, you say? Of course it was. And did the the sensible people of the local village believe this tale? Of course not! They had far more sense. They rang up the local police to tell them that someone had buried space aliens in the graveyard. Which in the end resulted in the police exhuming the bodies (with hands clad in rubber gloves…just in case?)

And the bomoh? Well, he says he’s not responsible for whatever happens to the Penang people now that the spirits are free. He’s just got himself an out – if the patients don’t improve, it’s not his fault. He can blame it on the police. Who says witchdoctors aren’t clever?

Fantasy is not half as weird as the stuff real people will believe…

Ok, so I write fantasy. But, quite frankly, I think the really, really weird stuff is found in the real world.

One of my husband’s family told me this story yesterday. She has misplaced a box of gold and diamond jewellery, collected over a lifetime of saving. (This is a common way women have of investing their savings, particularly among Muslim women.) She couldn’t be sure if she had just hidden it so well that she can’t find it, or if some workmen she had in her house not so very long ago had helped themselves…

So she went to a bomoh* to find out.

She went to his house, waited her turn, paid him twenty ringgit and asked him if he could find her jewellery in her house. He turned out all the lights, cut a lime in two and rubbed the cut fruit with kapor (natural chalk). Then told her that the jewellery was no longer in the house. Alas, he couldn’t tell her where it was.

Afterwards, her sceptical sister snorted, remarking that it was no wonder he couldn’t see the jewellery – it was dark. And I added that he was obviously looking in the wrong house; she ought to have taken him to her house, not gone to his…

Joking aside, I think he did quite well. At the cost of a couple of minutes of his time, one lime and a smidgen of chalk, he just made himself twenty ringgit. I should be so lucky.

Call yourself Tillian Loo and an expert on Feng Shui, write a number of nonsensical books on the subject that purport to be scientific, give a number of lectures about how to stop luck from running out of your house or office – and bingo, you’re a millionaire in no time.

Isn’t that a lovely irony? I write fantasy, tell everyone it is fantasy, and stay poverty stricken. But if I wrote fantasy and called it the truth, I’d be rich….

*translates rather inaccurately as “witchdoctor”, but it shouldn’t really be translated at all. A bomoh is usually a Malay, a Muslim, and he mixes local traditional medicine, spells, magic, and religion in a glorious hotchpotch of nonsense.

Years ago, we visited a village in rural Malacca, to interview a lass who wanted to be our maid. All I can remember about the place now was that it was poverty-stricken (this was in 1971) and that the girl had a relative, a two-year old boy, who had been born with a severe case of cleft palate/hare-lip. I had never seen anyone like that before: surgery fixed kids up pretty smartly in the West.
We asked why it hadn’t been done with this child, seeing as an operation would have been free of charge at a government hospital. The parents replied, “Oh, pity him, having an operation, going to a hospital. He’s just a little boy. How can we do that to him? He would cry! It would hurt him!”

I tried to explain that the surgery needed to be done early, otherwise it would not be as effective. It was like talking to a brick wall. The maid only stayed 3 months, and then asked to be taken back because she was lonely for her family. I never found out what happened to the boy.

It had a profound effect on me, though. Up until that point I was all certain that one should respect other people’s cultures and not drag them kicking and screaming into a world they didn’t want to inhabit. That was the moment when I realised that ignorance and innocence often go hand in hand, and can have dire consequences. Do you think that boy, now a man of 35 or so, unable to speak clearly because he had an operation far too late (at whatever age they were finally took him to the hospital) thinks his parents were right? I doubt it.

That was the moment I decided ignorance is to be despised, no matter what it’s cultural base. That was the moment I decided that there are some people who need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world, and damn their culture. If it stinks, why tolerate it? And when kids get hurt, it stinks.

When the wife of a Pakistani child-rapist is ordered by a tribal council to be given to the father of the girl he raped in retribution (today’s paper), it stinks.

When 38% of Indian-Malaysian women suffer abuse (today’s paper) it stinks.

The cultures that encourage those horrors should be tossed.

I am constantly amazed that Malaysians, who pay – let’s say 50,000RM plus, and possibly a helluva lot more for a car – will then not bother to pay a couple of hundred ringgit to buy a car seat to secure their small children properly.

Every time I open up the paper and read of kids dead in road accidents, I wonder if it was one of those children I saw standing up in between the front seats of the car, chatting to Mummy and Daddy. Or sitting on Daddy or Mummy’s lap in the front seat.

Brake suddenly, and child goes headfirst into the windscreen, a little flying three-year-old missile hurtling into oblivion … all for the want of a little common sense and a little less ignorance.

But sometimes I wonder if people have any sense. It’s certainly not common. They’ll call in a feng shui specialist to tell them the most ridiculous load of garbage on how to save their marriage by rearranging the house furniture, or how to get rich by flushing the loo a different way so your luck won’t run away. And they believe the con artists who tell them that feng shui is a science and offer to advise them using age-long wisdom…

People get rich on feng shui, certainly. But it’s not the gullible idiot who pays for advice that ends up in the money.

What happened to rational thought? Down with ignorance and the culture that spawns it. Every society (including Western ones) needs to look at itself and decide what is culturally worth keeping, and what should be thrown out.

Tropical Temper Rant over…

[Pix from Danum: a pill millipede and an agamid lizard, plus the rainforest.]