Where will mandating strict Sunni religious correctness lead Malaysia? - Aminatta Forna

As Umno, PAS and other players push the country's Muslim communities down the slippery road of narrow-minded Sunni religious correctness, it is increasingly difficult to remain optimistic for the open-mindedness and tolerance which has characterised Islam for much of the country's history.

Yet, remain hopeful we must. Not just because to lose hope is to give in to authorities who have been emboldened and made blind by arrogance, power and privilege.

But also because there are many examples of ordinary Muslims who are challenging doctrines and practices of Sunni correctness that are unsustainable in a modern world which has moved well beyond medieval notions of piety and self righteousness.

One outstanding example comes from another country – one less fortunate? Much poorer and in many ways less developed than Malaysia.

The story of Dr Gudush Jalloh, a Muslim veterinarian working with dogs in Sierra Leone, a country ravaged by war for many years, should resonate with Malaysians for reasons such as its lesson in compassion and humanity, and for other reasons which we will leave it to readers to ponder upon.

Dr Jalloh is the only vet in the country. No, that is not quite true.

There are three government vets, employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They wear rubber boots, but mostly deal with deal with figures, with capacities, stock and yields.

There are also a small number of charlatans. Dr Jalloh is the only qualified vet in private practice. The single person in the country to whom you might bring your sick dog, cat, monkey or goat to.

That first meeting made a deep impression upon me. In the years that followed I met Dr Jalloh on one more occasion which was significant, and then socially perhaps five or six times more.

At one point somebody mentioned his work with the street dogs, in which they thought I might be interested. This is the country where I grew up. It was the 1970s.

Here, as a child, I gathered, rescued, raised and lost more dogs than I can now recall. I have some of their names: Jack. Jim. Tigger. Apollo. Pandora. Bingo. KaiKai. Jupiter. Pluto.

The turnover was so fast there are many more I have forgotten. My dogs died of disease, of being hit by cars, of falling off balconies, generally of life expectancy in the Third World.

Being the third child and the youngest, I passed my earliest years as the beneficiary of what the experts call benign neglect.

When I was three, my father became active in politics. He was detained several times, once for three years. Amnesty International named him a Prisoner of Conscience.

My stepmother kept the family together. I collected dogs. My parents, if they noticed, did not pass comment, even when the household total achieved a high score of six.

I read White Fang and Peter Pan and longed for a wolf and a dog which slept at the foot of my bed. Ours were strictly yard dogs.

Other animals passed through my life: a mongoose, a green parrot, a fawn. They interested me, fed my ambition to become a vet, but I did not love them.

I loved only the dogs for reasons too complicated to elaborate upon, and yet also painfully obvious. In a time of lies, I found honesty and loyalty among the dogs. And if the memory of particular dogs has grown unreliable, then the memory of what they offered me in that time has become indelible: a retreat from the mutability of the human world, a place of safety.

There were a lot more vets back in those days. In the intervening thirty-odd years they have all gone: pursuing opportunities overseas, fleeing a civil war that lasted 10 years and killed countless and uncounted numbers of us.

Dr Jalloh was born in Kono, Yengema, in the Camara Chiefdom. His parents were Fula Muslims, the nomadic cattle owners of West Africa who drive their herds through Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Nigeria.

By the time he was born in 1959, the first son of the first wife and eldest of 22, the family had abandoned their pastoral ways.

Still, the knowledge of his heritage interested the young Jalloh. His early ambition was to own a herd. His mother reared chickens and the occasional goat, dogs played an early role in his life.

When Dr Jalloh was 15 his father arranged a marriage to a local girl, told his son it was time to leave school and join the family business as petty traders of gasoline.

He refused either to marry or to leave school, finished his education with the help of a scholarship and a former teacher who employed him as a part-time lab assistant.

He began to apply for government scholarships to read engineering overseas. In 1978, he was one of a dozen who won scholarships to Hungary, but then, on the eve of travel, the scholarships were withdrawn and awarded to candidates with government connections.

A year later he won a scholarship to Moscow. The African students arrived in Rostov in late September, without a word of Russian between them.

They worried about how to make their stipends last, how to cook potatoes. Some time during the year-long induction, Dr Jalloh was persuaded by a colleague to switch courses and join him at the Moscow Veterinary Academy.

He returned to Sierra Leone in the mid-1980s, the rift with his father healed by the prestige of having been chosen to study abroad. Dr Jalloh tells me his father didn’t mind that he had become a vet; he didn’t know what a vet was. Later people said: “So your son spent six years in Russia just to treat dogs?”

And yet some people think it’s Dr Jalloh’s enterprise that is misplaced in a country officially the poorest in the world. Seventy-sixth out of 76 in the United Nations Human Development Index – a ranking we sometimes switch with Bangladesh.

When last that happened, the President announced a national celebration. In the early days Dr Jalloh found himself turned away by the World Health Organization and other international funding agencies, who told him animal welfare was not a priority.

He argued, with incontrovertible logic, that human health and animal health were inseparable. He won.

The deputy Foreign Minister, lunching at a table nearby, comes over to say hello on his way out. The minister donated the old trailer Dr Jalloh has converted in to holding kennels behind his surgery where a small shanty town is growing.

Part of an old truck is being fashioned into a second unit. He keeps his vaccines in the freezer of the restaurant where we are lunching: the surgery is without electricity.

His is a makeshift existence. Before I arrived, Dr Jalloh had e-mailed asking if I might help him obtain consumables for a VeTest, an elaborate piece of diagnostic equipment someone had given him. The cost would have come to GBP2,800, the materials required an unbroken cold chain between the factory in Holland and Freetown. The VeTest sits, unused, beneath his desk.

He tells me of a British woman who wanted to set up a dogs’ home in Sierra Leone. Who would pay for it? Who would adopt all those dogs? Of the international companies who offer him vast sums to exterminate the strays that roam their compounds.

The conversation will range over days: African pragmatism and reality, Western sentiment, the schism between the values of the two and the West’s own conflicted treatment of animals. Of Dr Jalloh’s lot in trying to embrace, negotiate and reconcile so many ways of thinking.

Two years later Dr Jalloh and his wife Memuna returned in time for the rebels’ big push on Freetown. The city was overrun with dogs. Jalloh chose that year to launch his campaign to protect them.

More than once I have heard the story of how it all started. Now I hear it from his wife: “He gathered 80 dogs and brought them to the compound. I had to cook rice three times a day to feed them all. That night it was a full moon. The dogs began to howl. Next day I had to go to each of my neighbours to beg.” She laughs for a long time.

Today is Saturday. We are sitting together in the surgery and Memuna enters with wet hands, touching the back of hers to the back of mine. She excuses herself to return to the kitchen and oversee the cooking of tonight’s feast. It is the first day of Ramadan.

It vexes Dr Jalloh – the new fundamentalism spreading from Saudi Arabia has now reached even Sierra Leone.

It breaks down the relationship between man and dog, he says. Teddy gives an account of a cleric who told one of his congregation to scrape the skin away from his arm where he had allowed a dog to touch it.

At that Dr Jalloh jumps up, begins searching for the papers upon which he has copied Hadiths about animals from the Quran. He talks fast and waves a finger in the air.

He went on Radio Islam to talk about the treatment of animals under Islam. Now he’s persuaded Alhaji Sillah, the city’s chief Imam, to read out some of the Hadiths during Friday prayers at the Central Mosque.

Saturday is the day the responsible middle classes bring their dogs to the clinic. Dr Jalloh cleans out ear infections, administers antibiotics and vaccines.

The vaccines carried a half-dozen at a time in an ice-packed Thermos from the restaurant down the road. At my behest, he demonstrates the correct way to remove a tick: burst the body and let it detach naturally.

Make the mistake of pulling and the head will remain inside. Dogs, his own, move freely in and out of the surgery. Dr Jalloh, his assistants and I circle each other in the narrow space between his desk, examining table and shelves labelled: Orals/Endoparasites and Ectoparasites/Emergency Injectables/Injectables for Infectious Diseases, Catgut Suture Needles/Surgical Gloves.

New supplies have been stuck in the port for two months now. His wishlist for a far-off future: an orthopaedic surgical kit (most dogs are hurt in traffic accidents); a binocular microscope (he can’t use his old monocular scope because of his eyes); an auroscope and – dream time now – solar power to run lights and a fridge.

We treated Emaka, Joffy, Fluffy, Cannis, Tiger, Rambo and Combat.

One day, during dinner at the British High Commission, I told the story. My audience were mainly expats, people sent to the country in the wake of war for one reason or another.

One man took exception to the waste of time and resources on an animal in a country where people had so little. He told me so as he walked away.

But, you see, here’s why I think he was wrong. The people who had helped Mathilda: the man who reached into the ditch and brought her out, Dr Jalloh in his makeshift surgery, the Haja and her patients – they were Africans.

They lived in the poorest country in the world. We were, all of us, two years out of a decade of civil war. We had survived the darkest place and we had all lost a great deal.

This is Milan Kundera’s test of humanity:

“True human goodness can manifest itself, in all its purity and liberty, only in regard to those who have no power. The true moral test of humanity lies in those who are at its mercy: the animals.”

I did not see foolishness or indulgence in all those people coming together on a single day to save the life of a street dog. What I saw was compassion, a sense of community, the sweetening of a soured spirit. In other words, I saw hope.

* The writer is described as having an “increasing reputation [which] has led to regular appearances at literary conferences and festivals worldwide”. Her writing encompasses journalism, memoir, and the highly-praised novels, Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Memory of Love (2010), the latter winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize and being shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction.