The Cleansing Ritual

I hadn’t had the time to have my say here about the recent Halal logo brouhaha, so this is more like a compilation of the catastrophe and me as the careless casualty. It has been more than a week now but the story still lingers with the usual excuses given by the unreliable religious authority: lack of enforcers!

For God's sake if you can form the despicable ‘snoop squad’ and with the 80,000 unemployed graduates being the hot news now, I don’t see why it’s hard to hire hundreds more enforcers!

But then it’s too late now. I’m not ashamed to admit here that I’m one of those apathetic Muslims who went to Ikea and having those pig-intestine-encased sausages. Twice.

So today, I have taken the initiative out of my religious obligation to perform the samak(cleansing ritual) with the guide given by the clerics who appeared on the prime-time news last 2 nights. I had never perform it before since I have no reason to do so (though I had learnt to do it during my school years but it had faded) and the awkwardness naturally came and I had to consult this friend for assurance. So there I go, cleansing my hands and mouth with 1 part of soiled water and with another 6 part of water(7 parts). Something had occurred in my mind while I’m doing this. Why it has to be soiled-water and all those numbers? I had never think about this before (during my school years) but these kind of questions keep coming in ever since I had learnt not to say yes to everything. I hope I will meet someone who really knows what he knows, not like the people I asked who’d always trying to give answers, foolishly. It’s not like I’m going to call them stupid when they couldn’t come with acceptable answers every time I came out with all these bizarre questions! Just say “I don’t know” and I’d leave them die happy!

Anyway, the way I see it, the Halal logo/certificates should only be given to the Muslims food producers to overcome things like these to happen again. It may sounds rigorous but this Halal issue is very sensitive to the muslims. Even now I feel like vomiting when thinking about sausages...