Many Muslims will have recognised the "light but firm touch" to which deputy Women, Family, and Community Development Minister Siti Zailah Mohd Yusoff was referring in her advice to husbands for how they should reprimand their wayward wives.
The advice hearkens back to an incident where Prophet Muhammad was having an argument with his wife. The argument got so heated that, in a moment of exasperation, the prophet picked up a piece of cloth and flicked it at his wife.
Startled by that act, his wife laughed, and the tension was broken. As with many things that were introduced by Islam in unenlightened Arabian times some 1,400 years ago, this example of how the prophet reprimanded his wife was not meant to give licence to husbands to beat their wives, but rather, to set limits on how they could discipline them.
In the same way, the commandment that men may only marry up to four wives (but only one, if they cannot be fair to all) came down at a time when men had dozens of wives.
As society became more enlightened, laws were gradually abrogated to give birth to more civilised times. Today, the standard taqliq (marriage agreement in a Muslim marital union) contains a clause which says that if a husband strikes his wife, even once, the marriage is automatically dissolved.
So, while the deputy minister's advice would be logical if spoken to husbands who are prone to inflicting physical abuse on their wives, it is out of sync with modern times, when violence of any kind should be abhorred and rejected.
Even if this advice had come from a social media influencer, or an ustazah on a TV breakfast show, it would still have been objectionable; but more so because it came from the deputy minister in charge of women's affairs — because she should know better, and she should do better.
In a week when a 15-year-old child has been charged for murdering her baby; when yet another mother has been deprived of her children through unilateral conversion; and labour unions are demanding for an increase in the minimum wage, did the deputy minister not feel compelled to step in and press the case for oppressed and downtrodden women and children?
And with domestic violence on the rise during this pandemic, couldn't the deputy minister have taken a more strategic and less permissive stance on men raising their hands against their wives?
The people's frustration is not personal. Rather, it is concern that there is no one actually steering the ministry ship. The public cannot be faulted for this perception. The current minister is infamous for advising women to speak coquettishly like Doraemon, holding a post-weightloss photoshoot in the office, and helping Selangor flood victims by water-blasting the drains of a school that had not been affected by the natural disaster, among others.
The deputy minister is known for giving inane advice exclusively to Muslims. But, their opinions on issues that really matter, and what the ministry is doing or going to do to address them, are conspicuously absent.
Women in politics and in the executive are few and far between as it is. These publicised actions of the women's ministry's minister, and now her deputy minister, make their presence not only irrelevant, but also, counterproductive. Malaysian women deserve better.