WHAT an uplifting news item, the Agong honoring retired 83-year-old kindergarten teacher Chee Hoi Lan with the 2022 National Maulidur Rasul Award Malaysia for being Ibu Sejati-Keluarga (A Mother True to her Family)! Kudos to the selection committee and those who nominated her.

Chee is the mother of Rohana Abdullah, whom the former had adopted at two months old. No, there is no error with that sentence. Chee is Rohana’s mother. Rohana was given up by her birth mother, an Indonesian maid who had worked for Chee and was later forced to return to Indonesia as per Malaysia’s strict immigration laws.

That was in 1980 when Indonesia was in chaos. Rohana’s birth mother decided her daughter would be better off remaining in Malaysia. It revealed volumes of her relationship with her employer that she had entrusted her daughter to Chee even though she is not Muslim. Recognising the baby’s mother’s Muslim heritage, Chee took extra effort to ensure the baby was brought up in the Islamic tradition.

Chee’s award, apart from recognising her extraordinary generosity and unconditional love for Rohana, highlights the current understanding of the concept and dynamics of motherhood (and also parenthood). It is as much biological as it is sociological. Depending on circumstances, one may take precedence over the other.

Muslim thinking and practices on adoption have remained rigid and stagnant against modern understanding, realities and complexities. The primacy of biological parenthood remains in Islam, as well as in many other traditions. This needs to be re-examined, with adoptions, orphanages, and foster parenthoods becoming widespread. Then we have surrogate motherhood and in-vitro fertilisation with that other than the husband’s sperm. If Muslim thinking were to remain unchanged, that would be as if despite satellites and people flying around the world, we still think the earth is flat.

Islam recognises only biological parenthood. Nonetheless, the Qur’an, as well as prophetic traditions, exhort us to be kind to orphans, with the concomitant benign dealt with severe punishments otherwise. This Islamic kindness, however, is limited only to material things, such as properties and living provisions. It does not extend to that most elemental need of any child, the emotional sense of belonging to and of being an integral part of a loving family.

Even the material things are circumscribed. An adopted child is denied lawful inheritance (faraid); adopted parents can only bequeath gifts (hibah), and even then to no more than a third of their assets. There are other subtle and not-so-subtle, overt and covert, and consequential as well as trivial matters to remind the adopted child that they remain different and separate from “real” or biological children.

During marriage, the kadi insists that an adopted daughter get her biological father’s consent even though he may never have appeared in her life or memory while growing up. As for the trivial, an adopted daughter still has to don a hijab in front of her non-biological brothers and male relatives. These and other rituals, as with the practice of naming “illegitimate” children as “bin Abdullah” or “binti Abdullah”, are there to remind them that they are “different,” meaning, not a “real” child of the family. That “binti Abdullah” appellation effectively brands the kid for life and beyond.

Western societies place a premium on the traditional family. That takes precedence over the child’s presumed faith at birth. This can be heartbreaking for mothers who by court order have to give their child to a family that does not share their faith.

Malay society is blighted by easy divorces and polygamy. I have not come across any local sociological studies, but anecdotally, the dynamics of those children (more so the sons) are similar to African-Americans with absent father figures. I wonder whether such dysfunctional phenomena as mat rempit and school dropouts are but manifestations of this “absent father” syndrome.

I was touched by a recent documentary of a Chinese girl who went (accompanied by her adopted American parents) on a visit to her village in China in search of her biological parents, a common yearning among adoptees. She found them, and was taken aback at the highly emotional demonstrations of guilt trip they had laid upon her in order to regain her affection as well as to excuse their giving her up at birth. That confused the teenager but her secure adopted parents reassured her.

“Yes, you came from her tummy,” referring to the biological mother, “but you came from our heart!”

The daughter returned home to America with her parents.

“Open adoption,” where birth parents are allowed varying degrees of access to the child, is common in the West. Muslim adoption practices have elements of that. However, it, too, is not without its own complications, as recounted by one mother of an adopted child in her memoir, Rock Needs River. One positive aspect of open adoption is that the child has access to their family’s medical history. With today’s genetic testing, that is becoming less of an issue.

We still read with horror the frequency of abandoned babies in Malaysia. California has the Safe Haven Law, where parents and others may safely surrender infants within 72 hours of birth with no charges filed and no questions asked. Outside emergency rooms, fire stations, and churches are warm cots placed just for that purpose. I have yet to see one at mosques.

I hope our ulama are not satisfied with just awarding Chee with this singular honour. It should inspire them and us to work with social workers, child psychologists, and lawmakers to make all babies wanted and loved. Issues such as faith and bureaucratic identity (as with race) are trivial if not irrelevant. – October 13, 2022.

* M. Bakri Musa reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.