PETALING JAYA - The Johor authorities have seized 11 door mats that appear to feature the image of a sacred structure in Islam, but the supplier and a hypermarket chain said those are actually prayer mats wrongly labelled as door mats.
Johor Islamic affairs committee chairman Mohd Fared Mohd Khalid said on April 13 that the mats were seized from a booth at a popular shopping complex on April 9, the eve of Hari Raya Aidilfitri, after the Johor Islamic Department (JAINJ) received a complaint from the public, The Star reported.
The mats appeared to carry the image of the Kaabah, a cuboid-shaped stone shrine located in Mecca. Muslims consider stepping on the image of the Kaabah to be disrespectful to the holy site.
Mr Fared said JAINJ had decided to delay a statement on the seizure out of respect for the Aidilfitri celebration.
He advised the public to stay calm and let the authorities investigate the matter.
“I hope people do not blow this out of proportion. I would also like to remind businesses to be more careful and ensure that this does not happen again,” he said.
In a joint statement on April 13, hypermarket chain Aeon Big and the supplier of the prayer mats, A&R Fashion Collection, said the mats are prayer mats that were mistakenly labelled as door mats.
They said the design is vertically oriented, which is common for prayer mats.
“In line with Aeon Big’s best practices for SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) suppliers, A&R proceeded to use an item code previously used for the company’s other products,” said the statement.
“As a result, the label tagged onto the product carried several descriptions, thus causing confusion.”
The error has since been rectified in Aeon Big’s stock management system.
“The supplier involved, A&R Fashion Collection, is a 100 per cent bumiputra/Muslim-owned small-medium enterprise that is in the business of supplying modest syariah-compliant clothing such as prayer robes, hijab, kurta, sampin (and) songkok, as well as products such as prayer mats, carpets and rugs,” said the statement.
Aeon Big added that it has provided a statement to JAINJ and is giving its full cooperation in the investigation.
This is the third time a consumer product has drawn the wrath of Muslims in Malaysia in the past month.
Photographs of socks with the word “Allah” printed on them, which were sold at a KK Super Mart outlet in Bandar Sunway, went viral online on March 13 and drew widespread condemnation from social media users.
Some outlets of the convenience store chain were attacked with Molotov cocktails, and the founder and a director of KK Super Mart were charged on March 26 with “wounding the religious feelings of others”.
The directors of Xin Jian Chang, which supplied the socks to KK Super Mart, were also charged.
But the prosecutions failed to ease public anger, prompting Malaysia’s King, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, to step in and warn people not to prolong the issue any further.
Last week, a shoe company apologised over its high heels that appeared to bear the word “Allah” in Arabic script on the sole. The company, Verns Holding, said the graphic is actually a stylised high-heeled shoe with straps.
