Expediency trumps principle in MJC debacle

IT WOULD be easy to scoff at the circuitous illogicality and lack of focus of Yagyah Adams’s response to the Mjc/orion debacle (“Muslims are losing perspective”, Cape Points, February 10).

One thing, though, is clear as far as Adams is concerned: principle does not enter the debate, expediency dominates and is pre-eminent.

The MJC is to be venerated for having contrived a means of generating money for the promotion of Muslim interests. The ethics and morality that should, in terms of its own mission statement, underpin that enterprise do not merit consideration. It is not how you get the money, or from whom, as long as you get the money.

Perhaps it is no surprise that no informed Muslim has responded to the request for clarification regarding the rules governing halaal certification sought by “Confused Christian”, Rondebosch (February 3), after implementing Adams’s dictum of seeking to be informed before committing pen to paper.

For the MJC and Muslims generally, what irks about the whole debacle is the embarrassment of having been caught in a lie in the glare of the public’s attention. The fiction of being truer and more devoted to religious principle has been undermined by showing greater concern for maintaining one’s source of income. What the MJC does is legally sanctioned.

The community it serves is complicit in and supportive of its methods.