He did! Sort of.
After delivering the keynote address at the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2014 today, the still-influential former Prime Minister commented in response to last Friday’s landmark Court of Appeals ruling on a Negeri Sembilan Syariah law prohibiting Muslim men from cross-dressing, by saying that transgenders are people born “unsure of their gender, they may look like a man but are actually women, and vice versa.”
He added that “their feelings are different” from the sex they were born with.
The Kuala Lumpur Summit is an annual gathering of international Muslim thinkers to discuss current issues from an Islamic perspective.
The often-controversial Dr M also said that Islamic religious edicts, or fatwas, need to be based not only on classical Islamic teachings, but also on real-world facts, and that serious study needs to be conducted before a fatwa on a particular issue is put forward by Muslim scholars.
“We need to have fatwas on the many challenges facing Muslims. But the fatwas should only be made after a prolonged study and debate by all disciplines, including the realities of life,” he said, as reported by The Malaysian Insider‘s Lee Shi-An and Nathalie Tay.
He added that the Muslim community is having a hard time challenging the “excessive liberalism” of the West, because they it has not formulated strong arguments to rebut western positions on issues such as same-sex marriages, apart from the blanket reason of their being “unIslamic”.
“At the moment, we have not debated this except for religious scholars saying that these are sinful things which Muslims cannot accept.
“But additionally, we need experts in other fields to provide other inputs and reasons besides just saying that lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transvestites are wrong and sinful.
“We need to have experts in other fields, experts in sciences and in societal behaviour to challenge the liberalism of the West,” he said.
Mahathir also said that Muslims were laggind behind in understanding and utilising modern interpretations of democracy, human equality and liberalism, as they relied too much on the leadership of their traditional rulers and religious teachers.
“The Quran is perfect, it is not wrong, but the interpretations can be wrong or inaccurate and over time, they can become irrelevant, unable to cope with new ideas and realities.
“We have a need to do some heart searching, some revisions about the current teachings of Islam. We must go back to the real source of our religion, to the Quran.”
More on CoconutsKL:
Court of Appeal upholds transgender rights in landmark ruling
Human Rights Watch: Malaysia is one of the worst places in the world for transgenders
PAS wants a ‘jihad’ on last week’s transgender rights win in court
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