Historical Truth is a Choice
Precisely a week ago, the Monday after returning from the Nature Trip around Kuching a good friend dropped an article into my mailbox. It was one of Marina Mahathir's latest Musings. It trigerred an alarm - that I have yet to finish the Da Vinci Code. The book had been sitting on my wardrobe screaming to be read ever since I unpacked it from my camera bag. Determined to finish the book especially under the stress of the film premiering the following week, I was in full gear the whole Wesak weekend. My nose was buried under the 600-page novel instead of spending some quality time with dear Mommy at our Penang home (cruel irony that it was also Mother's Day Weekend). I just have to read a book before seeing the movie, a good one at that. Everybody's talking about it and I've been too embarassed to be publicly seen with one this late in publication, fretting the clan of ardent readers, which I proclaimed to belong to (yeah sure!), would mock me! The same thing occured with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Unfortunately I never did see the film. But no, this time it'll be different, I promised myself.One question that refuses to escape the mind post reading the passages is that concerning religion. I remember rather lucidly that while I was in school we were taught albeit 'taklid' is not the way to profess the Islamic faith (taklid, which is to follow blindly, if you remember in the Form Four's World History was the reason behind the church's immense and oppressive power during the Dark Ages), one should not question certain aspects of the religion. This, we were told, is because our intellect is not boundless hence there are things that are just way beyond our logical comprehension and imagination. So much so that if we delve into it too much, we might just deviate from the path of righteousness.
Fine.
Yet...
I do have a question and it might just cause a little unrest. We already know one huge disparity between Catholicism and Islam i.e. the status of Nabi Isa SA - divine vs mortal. So while the novel denounces the divinity - a software manufactured by the Catholics to manipulate the naive and the weak, it introduces a new anomaly. Was it true what is said about the prophet Isa AS being married to Mary Magdalene? I've never known of such claim. Brown maintained that the historical facts in his book are true. Have I misinterpreted him or are they really? I'm extremely intrigued and I cannot wait to get a hold of a book about the prophet by any Islamic scholar to see if any reference to Him being married was ever made. To clear the air.
Initially I thought I wanted to know this because I wanted to get my history right. In this context history = truth. But then what is history? Postulations that are backed by historical evidences such as documents? But documents are written by humans and humans lie, no doubt about it. So how convinced are we that the contents are genuine, real occurrences? How convinced are we that the history we know today are indeed facts, not fallacies? Remember that our text book depicted Mustafa Kamal Altartuk a great man, but as soon as we left school, we discovered that his modernisation was a religious catastrophe to Turkey.
What I'm trying to get at is that despite future findings of the the prophet's marital status, I'm sure I will believe what I choose to believe. That's what we humans do. Our logic shuts down when we're approaching a dead end, our belief system takes control and judges based entirely on intuition.
Isn't this 'taklid'? Or is this simply attributed to our bordered intelligence? How much can we trust our intuitive decisions? Shouldn't we be using 'akal' over 'perasaan'? Why is everything we were nurtured with so conflicting? We say we subscribe to a religion but we are selective with its various practices because we think they can be too rigid - can we explain that?
I guess when everything else is a GO (in my case such as that granted by Islam, the perfect religion in my opinion), one 'strange' detail must be explicable and almost negligible for the moment. It's partly statistics. The other portion is values. Armed with these, no matter what religion we are (atheist even) in the end we will only attain what we seek in life. It's a matter of choice, really.
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