In this era of heightening bullying cases, when small kids could even make their friends severely injured for whatever weird reason, my memory flew years back to my childhood. Sometimes I was bullied, sometimes I was also a bully.
But there was this experience where I couldn't differentiate whether I was that bully or the bullied. This experience has been engraved in my mind like some sort of certificate, and I was terrified to confess what I did until more than five years later to my parents when I was already in high school. But when I told them that, I didn't see any change of expression like... whether they were angry, upset at me, or things like that. Nor they responded verbally other than, "Oh... is that so... okay, that was already a long time ago..." Therefore, their lack of reaction had been making me kind of confused about whether that was something I should take as a passing memory or a sin that I should ask for forgiveness. Had... so now I already know the answer.
And yes, I should repent.
And I hope my kids in the future won't experience the same ordeal.
So... this tragedy happened in the second year I moved back to Sidoarjo, the house that my parents bought when they got married, and the place where we lived for the first four years of my life before we moved from place to place following my dad's work. I was in the fifth grade, I really remembered that. I was ten at that time, slightly younger than kids my age because I went to school early. I didn't really have a lot of friends in my neighborhood who were in the same school year as me, ALTHOUGH a lot was my age. So, the kids in my circle were the same age as me, but they were one or two school years under me. It was almost like... I was an OLDER SISTER to them. Even though some of them were older, they still called me 'Older Sister' because of my school year. Strangely, I slightly felt this urge to protect them...
And that was why the tragedy happened.
Actually, I was a nonchalant kid in nature. But I was easily provoked when it came to myself or my 'little sisters', or I could say... any friend who's close to me (and I still have this nature until now). So... I could say that this tragedy was some sort of 'manipulation'. We knew that that was danger there, but we wanted to fight that danger... Yes, kind of like that...
It was Ramadan. One of my 'sisters' told me that there was this girl gang who bullied kids at the masjid in the next village. Coincidentally, we wanted to go there for tarawih because the masjid in our neighborhood was so small that kids usually ended up praying in the yard made of paved blocks. Oww! Just thinking about that made us grimacing in pain. Also, that masjid was in our neighborhood, very close to home, no fun. We kids like to play and chatter after tarawih. Going to the next village's masjid could make us play a little longer! We thought.
So, that's how we ended up praying tarawih in the next village's masjid.
And we met THOSE BULLIES.
The gang consisted of three young girls. Older than us, I thought... older by far. They were at least in the middle school. Big girls. Probably aged thirteen or fourteen years old. Bigger and taller too. Even taller than me who was tall for my age.
Previously, we heard rumors that they pranked kids, snatched their money, hid kids' stuff, very unserious in praying... it was like they went to masjid not to pray, but to do bad things.
A week had passed and we felt very uneasy because up until now they hadn't done anything to us. So we're always asking whether today was going to be our turn. Ironically, we prepared ourselves to face that thing. We armed ourselves with small stones which we hid inside a black grocery bag and we brought that every night we went for tarawih.
And yes, that thing finally happened! In the next week, those girls were targeting us. They pranked us when we were praying, snatching our sajadah, pulling our mukenah (clothes to cover our bodies for praying)... and if I was not mistaken, once they also hid our sandals... but there was this one moment that I couldn't hold myself. I was boiling in anger.
So, when we were praying, one of those girls spit on one of my 'sisters' face! And it happened to be the youngest in our team. So it's like... very small kid. Those big girls did something to a kid 5+ years younger than them?!
Okay, I was fine with the snatching of sajadah and other tricks... See that we didn't use our pebbles up until now. But SPITTING? ON SOMEONE'S FACE? Hell, no! That was my limit.
So after tarawih, me and my sisters went to look for those girls to ask for payment. But I guess everybody was afraid to use our 'amenities', even though we had been keeping them in mind for more than a week. I saw my sister's hand tremble.
And so I walked up myself to meet that bully, I stood in front of the one who was the shortest among the three. She's about five centimetres taller than me, so not taller by much. And then I grabbed a pebble inside my grocery bag and hit her forehead—
The girl was in very much shock.
I was also in shock. Looking at my hand, it took me by surprise. I never thought that I could do this bad thing. My sisters were also in shock. We went home in silence. But before we entered our own house, one of them stopped us...
"I think we should act like nothing happened and just play like it was usual. Don't play outside, play at T's house where it was the furthest in our neighborhood".
The one who's talking was actually the sister who was notorious for being a prankster herself (but not bad pranks like the girl gang). Later I knew that she suggested this idea because she was also afraid of her parents and she KNEW that if something happened, the girl's family whose forehead I knocked with a stone were going to her house. Just call her D.
Whereas T was one of us whose house, in fact, was the furthest among us.
So, drenched in a cold sweat, we went to T's house and 'acted to play'.
But I guess, our 'grand idea' was not so grand, because after a while, D's dad came to T's house and interrogated us.
Yes, the bully girl and her parents indeed came to ask for accountability.
The bully girl described the one who knocked her forehead, D's dad said, "It was not my daughter then. It was that girl named Tia who lived in that house".
Unluckily (or should I say 'luckily'), it's said that they all went to my house but nobody responded because my mom was asleep with my brother who at that time was still a baby. And my father, just like everyone in my neighborhood knew, was working in Borneo for years and rarely at home.
That night I was crying. I was petrified to talk about it to my mom. On the surface I felt relieved because my mother was in a deep sleep she didn't know what bad thing I did outside. But deep inside of my heart, I felt like a monster. I was that monster. Because I was sometimes a bully, that was a fact, but I never used any tool to hit someone, just my bare hand. And I was a bully because somebody was bullying me FIRST so I got to stand up for myself and my rights.
But in this case?
It was different. Yes, of course, the girl was spitting... but not on my face. It was my sister's face, and that sister, even though she was angry, didn't want to repay the bully. But I was feeling so irritated that I let my emotion lead my action and I REALLY DID hit her with the pebble.
I cried even harder when I remembered D's dad's words: "Good thing that girl did not have a concussion or die. What were you going to do IF SHE WAS DEAD?"
After that night, I didn't go to any masjid to pray tarawih. I was so afraid to meet people. I felt bad when the rumor circulated, saying that D was the naughty kid who hit the girl. So one day, after Ramadan, I finally gathered my courage to go to the masjid, but now it was my neighborhood's masjid... and then the rumor came up again, I clarified to every kid that I WAS the one who knocked that girl's head because she was a bully. And I saw that everyone who befriended me and was nice to me started to avoid me.
Funny enough because bullying also happened in my neighborhood's masjid, they targeted this pretty girl. However, thinking about that... bullying happens everywhere.
At school, I also met the smart bully who underestimated other kids, the playboy bully who spread rumors about you if you rejected him, the bully who exploited you to do all the work in the group assignment, and other cases.
It feels like...
you know...
a ten-year-old kid... her energy wore off to fight bullies.
And my mother, I understood her exhaustion, she never stood up for me. Instead, she always filled my mind with goals for me to take. Without her husband, he needed to take care of her two kids. And my baby brother was quite a troublemaker himself. He was born with ADHD and was bullied at school. Other kids' moms would sometimes verbally 'bully' my mom and talk crap about my brother on her face. Saying that my brother is a wicked child, etc. etc. not acknowledging that sometimes their kids were also at the wrong... My mother NEVER ONCE fights them. I didn't know how she coped with that. But I guess, always being angry at home, especially towards me had paid it off.
So, sometimes when I dared to talk to her that I was bullied, or someone close to me was bullied, she always answered, "Be patient... be tolerant to them..."
I WAS ALWAYS TOLERATING THEM. So please don't be angry at me if I was the one who covered the group's assignment's efforts and costs! But she was always mad when I asked her to cover for my assignment's cost, saying that I was being manipulated.
So should I tolerate them or not?
Being confused about what's right and wrong, I grew up being a prick teen. I knew that sometimes I verbally bullied my middle school friends and early years of high school... Now I feel bad for every person who tasted my wrath and word spats in that time range.
I'm sorry...
I was such a bully...
But sometimes the bullying was crystal clear to me, and I had no regret fighting for my stand.
Sometimes in the bullying cases, I contribute to the wrong, sometimes it was pure hatred from the other party. If I was the one who contributed to the wrong, hopefully, I could learn to be a better person. But if that was hatred in the form of rumor or acts that other people did first to me, let me... please let me correct that... Only if I had the chance too. If I hadn't, I would just bury that in my heart and never ask for repayment again.
Just like that time when I was in middle school, I was ranked 22 out of 32 people. I didn't think I deserved that unless I was bullied. I remember at that time the school was upholding the curriculum when the students could grade other students' capacity. So, what do you think was gonna happen if kids in the class didn't like you?
And I saw that it didn't only happen to me. It also happened to my other friends—in turn. And they got bad scores because students grading other students was full of subjectivity.
The funny thing was at home... I was being scolded for my class ranking result, but when I said that I got bad scores because everyone bullied me and I was crying, my parents said to me, "Be patient... okay... be tolerant to them... And don't forget to study because you got bad ranks this semester."
Like what??
Okay, I think it's no use to talk to my parents.
But I guess, my parents did have that mentality engraved... Because I knew, they did that for their kids.
My dad, when he was working in that Japanese Pharmaceutical Company, I KNEW he was bullied by the working environment. So that the doctors would buy his products, he needed to 'serve' those doctors even in the things he did not need to do. You know: driving the doctors around, picking up the doctors from the airport, even buying the doctors' family members gifts. Even if it was in the middle of the night or early in the morning, he would do that.
When I got older I asked him why. He said, "It's okay, that was the nature of my job... We did good things, the doctors asked us to help him ease their activities so they could focus more on treating many patients and buying my products. That was business."
I translated that as "I did that so that you and your brother could get the perfect facility to live: new phones, new clothes, good food, painting courses at the notable academy, etc." But HE NEVER said that. He was a very non-emotional person. I almost saw him as a robot. He was a robot because he got to suppress his feelings for decades, for his kids. And that was why he didn't feel bullied or didn't want to feel like that. Because he needed to stand still for his family!
My mom on the other hand never fought back when she was bullied by other kids' moms at the kindergarten, never bullied when one or some neighbors acted up against her... I KNEW because she didn't want her kids or family being bullied by them too. If she fought back, I as a kid would be labeled as "the daughter of that mad woman". Same as my brother. Even if my mother was bullied by her mother-in-law—yeah, my grandmother—she never needed to clarify anything to uphold her stand. At most, she's probably crying in front of her.
And the reason why she, instead, brought the problems back into our house and started being angry when she was at home, because... yes... that was the reason. She was at home. She was with her family. The family could and would understand her more than those people outside. I knew that it was also not the right thing to do as a mom. But I understand her... Life has always been hard for her.
Everyone is bullied but they don't want to fight.
And that's the reason why they taught me that because that's what they experienced.
This year I was also bullied by an 'extraordinary person', labeling me as a really, really bad person. But instead of confronting that person, my parents asked me to step back... be patient... be tolerant...
That is their nature.
I understand.
But where did all of these start? Bullying is like a group of animals. They moved periodically. If they were done in one place, perhaps there were bushfires or attacks, or no resources or your flocks started to kill each other, they would move to the other parts of the jungle, only to move back here later when this place was healed. It's like a cycle.
It makes you wonder, are you the wrong one?
Or are you in the wrong jungle?
Bad jungle habitat that affects the animal's minds so that they hurt others for their own benefit...?
That bad jungle could be a family or a society...
See, that girl gang who spat on my friend's face, bullied younger kids because they could feel superior. Kids like them were usually trashed at home. They wanted to be acknowledged elsewhere.
I knew I was also wrong in this case. I was a mumayyiz (a kid who could already differentiate right and wrong, I was ten). But those girls are teens. They already baligh, which means that they should know more about the consequences because as Muslims, the angel had already taken notes of their actions. They couldn't just spit on someone's face just because it's fun.
But I was so mad at their parents... The so-called parents were only reacting after I knocked the head of their daughter with a pebble.
Hey??? Where were you yesterday guys?
When your daughters were snatching kids' money and spitting on kids' faces? Where were you?
And the adults that reacted and spread rumors that D was a naughty girl, or Tia was a naughty girl... what did you do when you saw with your own eyes those little bullies were bullying kids younger than them? You thought it was something ordinary?
That kids gonna resolve it by themselves?
Yes, this was what I did to resolve it, by almost killing my opponents with stones!
This story was dated back to 2011.
Now, after 12 years, I guess very much has happened. Increasing in quantity, and quality... (You see how kids hit each other today? Ck ck ck... They should join MMA).
I still don't know what am I going to do if I was bullied. 'Till now I usually fight back. But, is that the right thing to do?
The right thing to do is to make THE GOVERNMENT and THE LAW stands for you. But if some 16-year-old kids bully their friend to death, I guess nothing big could be done by the law except send them to the juvenile 'detention center'.
What I expected in law is "an eye for an eye". People call it Hammurabi, I call it qishash.
"... ' A life for a life, and an eye for an eye, and a nose for a nose, and an ear for an ear, and a tooth for a tooth, and for all wounds, like for like..." (Quran 5:45)
But the hard thing about qishash is... even though I was the one who was wronged, like for example... my family was killed or something... or somebody hurt my body... I DID NOT HAVE THE RIGHTS to kill them with my own hands.
For example, some girls are bullied and raped by boys... The qishash doesn't mean that you can punish them by raping them back (what? :v)
So what's then?
The government, which upholds the Islamic law should be the one who punishes them under the name of the law itself. Not even under the name of 'grudge'. That's how pure the punishment should be.
Not some kind of barbarians who kill each other just to uphold the "eye for an eye" principle.
The hardest thing about qishash is NOT when people are applying them... But to build the right people and the right government to uphold it.
Qishash is the best thing to make people think twice before bullying somebody, so they can imagine what kind of consequences they should accept.
But it's up to us...
In this Secular and Capitalist society, if people want more lenient consequences for their own benefit... they're going to live with increasing terror and bullying for the rest of their lives.
And perhaps, even less and less people who could fight back and take care of your mental wounds, even if it's your parents.
Wallahu a'lam bis shawab.
I was crying when I wrote this. Just to imagine what will happen in our kids' era...
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Planet Earth, 6 Oct 2023
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