Wear White is an anti-LGBT movement in Singapore founded by Islamic religious leader Ustaz Noor Deros in 2014. It was taken over by Christian Pastor Lawrence Khong in 2016 but, after a five-year period of quiescence, reasserted its autonomy and relaunched its activism as an Islamic organisation in 2022.

2014[]

On Friday, 20 June 2014, it was announced in The Straits Times that a 28 year-old Islamic religious teacher, Ustaz Noor Deros, had launched an online campaign called Wear White asking Muslims to don white clothes the following Saturday evening to protest against homosexuality and to defend traditional family values [2]. A Facebook page, website and YouTube channel[3] were set up urging Muslims to "return to fitrah" and to support "what is good and pure". (Fitrah is an Arabic word referring to the primordial nature of the individual or its essential nature, moral constitution and original disposition. It generally implies an immutable natural predisposition for good, innate in every human being from birth.)

The following was the full press statement released by Noor Deros:

"The WearWhite movement is a social media initiative inviting Muslims to return to our natural disposition (fitrah) and the Sunnah (way) of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

The movement's genesis was from our observations of the growing normalization of LGBT in Singapore. However, we recognize the conduct and it's support among Muslims is due to the lack of understanding and connection with Islam and our fitrah. We thus came together initially with the expressed purpose of reminding Muslims not to participate in the LGBT event on 28th June.

The movement encourages a return to the values as guided by Islam. These values include prioritizing the family and marriage, responsibility and justice and fair dealings.

The initial campaign emphasizes a return to natural relationships as found in Islam. Given the clarity in Islam on the nature and conduct of family relationships, marriage between a man and a woman forms the basis of the family.

We hope to continue promoting family focused campaigns throughout the year. These campaigns will hopefully strengthen the family unit and result in healthy relationships. We also call for a return to fitrah through reconnecting the Muslims especially the youth, back to Islam and clarifying key concepts such as freedom and rights in Islam.

WearWhite supporters have indicated that some of the other family oriented campaigns they would like to promote in the near future include developing respect and recognizing responsibilities among family members as guided by the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

It is our hope that this campaign helps bring Muslims back to our fitrah and reconnect us with the Sunnah of the Prophet.

Let us return to family. Let us return to fitrah.

ABOUT WEAR WHITE

WearWhite is an informal grassroots movement that has come together to help Muslims return to their natural disposition.

As a social media initiative, it has no membership or institutionalised committee. WearWhite supporters discuss initiatives, gain advice and suggestions and develop family oriented plans. These initiatives are centred around developing family relationships as guided by the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

Individuals provide support based on their expertise and capabilities.

Given the holistic nature of Islam and it's beautiful exhortation to goodness, we do not limit the invitation to or against any specific group. Our invitation is for the return to fitrah in its entirety and for all humanity.

WearWhite is launching our initiative with a call for Muslims to attend the first Terawih prayer on 28th June 2014 in white.

#wearwhite

www.wearwhite.sg

– Noor Deros

20th June 2014 : 22 Syaaban 1435"

The campaign video was uploaded to YouTube [4]:

The Muslim month of Ramadan was due to start the following Sunday, 29 June 2014, and the first evening prayer to mark the fasting month would be held on Saturday evening, 28 June 2014, the same day that Pink Dot 2014 was due to be held at Hong Lim Park.

Noor, who taught religious classes at Hajar Consultancy Services in Joo Chiat, writing on the campaign website, said: "The natural state of human relationships is now under sustained attack by LGBT activists." He said that holding the Pink Dot 2014 event on the eve of Ramadan showed their "disdain for Islam and the family". He urged Muslims to "stand up and defend the sanctity of family" and wear white to the first terawih prayers that day.

His was not the first group to attempt a protest against Pink Dot that year. Non-profit organisation Touch Family Services wanted to hold a family picnic on the same day, 28 June 2014, but cancelled the event after the Urban Redevelopment Authority rejected its application to hold it at The Padang.

WearWhiteLogo001 — The **Wear White** campaign symbol.

According to the Facebook pages of the Wear White community and Noor, the campaign was launched two weeks before and discussions took place at the Hasanah Mosque in Jurong East. The campaign symbol was a white droplet against a black background, which some supporters had started to use as their Facebook profile picture. The teardrop represented taubah, signifying “repentance” as well as istighfar, meaning “seeking forgiveness.” They included National University of Singapore Malay Studies professor Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, who drew flak earlier in 2014 for describing lesbianism as "cancers"; and Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff, who in 2002 helped four Muslim parents mount a legal challenge against the Government's decision to suspend their daughters for wearing the Islamic headscarf to national schools.

The Wear White campaign video, presented in English, featured several Muslim men and women dressed in white and describing what is sunnah, or according to Prophetic tradition. These included, for example, playing with children, caring for the elderly, tending to the poor, travellers, orphans and widows, and being fair in business dealings. Noor appeared holding a baby, and said: "It is sunnah to marry and raise families."

NajibSoiman001 — Theatre actor Najib Soiman.

The video was changed on 19 June 2014 after theatre actor Najib Soiman, 36, asked to be removed from it, saying he had been misled about its purpose. Najid said that when Noor invited him to be featured, he thought it was meant to celebrate Ramadan. He had agreed because the community was trying to encourage young people to return to the mosques. It was only on Wednesday, 18 June 2014 that he discovered it was for the Wear White campaign, with its clear anti-homosexuality stance. He said people began calling him and he was shocked to see how it was being used. He called Noor, who said there had been a miscommunication. The video was then edited to leave out Najib.

Pink Dot had been held on the last Saturday of June for the previous three years. A spokesman for the organisers said they decided to hold that year's event on 28 June after checking with the MUIS (Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) website that Ramadan would on 29 June 2014. They also checked with "friends from the Muslim community" before proceeding with the event to be held at Hong Lim Park.

Ustaz Khair Rahmat from Sultan Mosque, who was not involved in the Wear White campaign but learnt about it from his daughter said: "My impression is that it is trying to rebut some of the things gay activists and Pink Dot have put out. I thought this was achieved in a non-accusatory manner. I don't know if it's the correct way to do it but it's a gentle way to remind Muslims that family is between a man and a woman."

The campaign was supported by Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap, Member of Parliament for Aljunied GRC and Vice-Chairman of the Workers' Party [5]. National University of Singapore Malay Studies professor Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, who drew flak earlier in 2014 for describing lesbianism as “cancers” and Zulfikar Bin Mohamad Shariff, a Singapore-born Australian detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 2016 were also among the supporters.

On Wednesday, 18 June 2014, writer Malay-Muslim writer Alfian Sa'at penned the following response to the Wear White campaign on his Facebook:

"There's a 'wear white' campaign which is supposed to be a protest against Pink Dot on 28 June. It is a call for Muslims to wear white for the evening prayers on the first day of Ramadan. (If some clueless people turn up wearing pink then how? But that's the downside of having a diffuse campaign which hitches a ride on something people do in Ramadan anyway--not everyone will get the memo). There's nothing wrong with expressing one's beliefs and opinions in this way, but I'm concerned with the way these are articulated on their website:

1) "There are groups that are trying to destroy the sanctity of the family. The natural state of human relationships is now under sustained attack by lgbt activists. For the lgbt movement, the natural family is no longer sacred."

This statement doesn't actually define what is a 'natural family'. One assumes then that it is one consisting of a man and a woman and preferably an offspring. But surely the definition of 'family' isn't so clear cut--there are single-parent families, as well as couples who don't have children. Some people don't think that a 'natural family' should consist of polygamous marriages, nor of marriages between those who are below 21 years old. A glaring omission however is the number one destroyer of families: namely, divorce. The divorce rates among Muslims is the highest among all the communities in Singapore, and while the number one cause for divorce in non-Muslim marriages is 'unreasonable behaviour', for Muslim marriages it is 'infidelity or extra-marital affairs' (Singstat 2012). If one needs to address the threats to the 'sanctity of the family', then one should cite the real ones. That gay couple who got attached isn't threatening your marriage; you sleeping around will.

2) "To underline their disdain for Islam and the family, lgbt activists are organising an event on the very evening of 1st Ramadan. They expect this event to be the biggest ever in their history."

This is rather incendiary, because it accuses the Pink Dot organisers of intentionally holding the event during Ramadan, and that this reveals 'disdain for Islam'. Pink Dot 2012 was on 30 June, 2013 on 29 June, so this seems to be a consistent tradition. Since the Muslim calendar is a lunar one, the event dates will vary on the Georgian calendar--Ramadan in 2013 was in July. Also, the 1st day of Ramadan could have fallen either on the 28 or 29 June, depending on the lunar sighting. To suggest that pernicious motives were at play when there is in all likelihood a coincidental overlap is to act in bad faith.

3) "The question for us is whether we will lie down while the sanctity of the family is being trampled upon?"

Incendiary language again. Strictly speaking, the only thing that will be trampled during Pink Dot is the poor grass at Hong Lim Park. Tempted to say homophobia trampled, but my 'strictly speaking' bars figurative speech."

On Sunday, 22 June 2014, in response to questions from the media about the Wear White campaign, then Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said: "All these matters, we just have to exercise a sense of balance and restraint, especially when it comes to matters that have to do with religion and personal preferences." He added that Singaporeans were "very moderate people" and he did not think the situation would escalate[6],[7],[8],[9].

Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs Dr Yaacob Ibrahim said that there were bound to be differences of opinion in a multicultural society such as Singapore. Thus, it was important to work in a spirit of quiet consultation and accommodation in dealing with such differences. He was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an award ceremony organised by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) on Saturday, 21 June 2014. His comments came after an online campaign was launched by a religious teacher urging fellow Muslims to wear white on 28 June 2014 as a sign of protest against homosexuality. The online campaign was followed by an advisory from MUIS, which cautioned against adopting a "confrontational approach" towards those who are involved in LGBT lifestyles. Yaacob, who was also the minister for communications and information, said: "So the approach that MUIS has taken, the advisory, is a right advisory because ultimately, what we want to do is avoid dividing society, dividing the community. "Let us find the big-heartedness that we have, to accommodate differences that exist in any society. "That is the approach that we should have taken and I think that is the approach that MUIS has adopted and that's the approach that I'd like to encourage all, not just Muslims, in Singapore to deal with differences."

2016[]

WearWhiteFCBC2014 — Thousands of worshippers wearing white at a Faith Community Baptist Church service in 2014. Photo source:[1].

In May 2016, the Wear White campaign was taken over by Christians led by Pastor Lawrence Khong. It espoused the same goals, urging the public to wear white to promote traditional family values and would be held to coincide with the Pink Dot event to be held in June 2016[10]. The original movement founded by Noor Deros had since moved on to focus on educational programmes, and had no plans to carry out the campaign in 2016. Lawrence Khong’s iteration of the campaign was dubbed We.Wear.White, and called on the public to wear white on 4 and 5 June 2016 as a “pro-family, pro-Government, pro-Singapore message”.

It came as Pink Dot, to be held at Hong Lim Park on 4 June 2016, was set to introduce a new format that year — allowing local participants to hold up placards instead of the customary pink torchlights, a move the organisers said was aimed at letting people “have a say”. The rally had seen attendance grow to a record 28,000 people in 2015.

Khong, chairman of LoveSingapore, a 100-strong network of Christian churches, said on the LoveSingapore Facebook page on 19 May 2016 that the campaign hoped to show that the church’s stance on heterosexual marriage and the “natural family” was in keeping with the social norms of “Singapore’s conservative majority”. “It is a message to LGBT activists that there is a conservative majority in Singapore who will push back and will not allow them to promote their homosexual lifestyle and liberal ideologies that openly and outrightly contradict our laws, our Government’s stated policies, our national core values, and the conservative majority’s views on public morality, marriage and family,” said Khong, who was also senior pastor at Faith Community Baptist Church. The call was open to all Singaporeans regardless of race, language or religion, as long as they supported “pro-natural family values”, he added.

Khong had regularly spoken out against homosexuality, and had also thrown his support behind the Wear White campaign in 2014, igniting vigorous public debate and prompting other religious organisations to interject, while Pink Dot organisers deployed additional security in light of the public opposition. The National Council of Churches of Singapore said then that while it did not condone homosexual or bisexual practices, it also did not condemn those who were struggling with their gender identity and sexual orientation.

MUIS, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore called for a non-confrontational approach and said that programmes conducted in mosques should not be seen as a movement to oppose members of the LGBT community. When contacted on Monday, 23 May 2016, Noor expressed support for LoveSingapore’s call, but said Wear White’s focus now was on “directed Islamic educational programmes” for youth. “We decided that real education in contrast to sloganeering and campaigning is the key to an effective and long-term change,” he said.

In 2015, LoveSingapore also called on church members to wear white to weekend services on the Pink Dot weekend. Wear White did not hold a campaign to coincide with the Pink Dot rally, but it called on Muslims to dress in white on the first evening prayer to mark the start of Ramadan on 17 June 2015. Noor said it was done not as a counter-reaction to Pink Dot, but to spread awareness on the concept of “freedom and love according to Islam”.

Pink Dot spokesperson Paerin Choa cited churches and religious communities that accepted and embraced LGBT people, such as the Free Community Church. “In a multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-racial country like Singapore, with secularism at its core, citizens are generally accepting of diversity,” he said. “We believe that families should be built on love and understanding, rather than exclusion.”

The executive committee of The Humanist Society (Singapore) also commented on LoveSingapore’s move, saying the group’s “repeated emphasis on the word ‘majority’ (in its Facebook post) is troubling”. “In Singapore’s multiracial, multireligious society, no particular religion or group can claim to speak for the majority,” it said in a Facebook post. “The Humanist Society (Singapore) calls for respectful, informed discussion on the topic, based on reason, evidence, and compassion around the cause.”

2022[]

In March 2022, Wear White promoted a forum targeted at countering LGBT “propaganda”. In its panel of speakers (besides Noor Deros) were Zulfikar Bin Mohamad Shariff, a Singapore-born Australian detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 2016, and Mohamed Acharki, an Australia-based Islamic sciences scholar. The Wear White forum, the first by the informal group to be held in 2022, was scheduled to be held online on Facebook on 26 March 2022 at 8pm but was postponed due to the death of one of Noor Deros' family members that morning[11].

The organisers described the event as such:

“Artificial ‘values’ such as ‘FREEDOM TO LOVE’ are those which are thrust upon nations and societies through political campaigning, media propaganda and threatful legislative coercions.

“Understand the role of modern liberalism for the success of LGBT agenda in today’s context as opposed to Islamic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality.”

The anti-LGBT forum was organised against the backdrop of the Government's feedback unit REACH doing an electronic Leaning Point (eLP) LGBT+ Survey which closed abruptly after just one day due to an overwhelming response that far exceeded the usual number of responses received for an eLP exercise.

Conversion Therapy forum[]

On Saturday, 16 April 2022 at 2pm, Wear White organised an online forum via Zoom entitled, "Return to Fitrah: CONVERSION THERAPY: History & Experience - An Islamic Perspective"[12]:

It was advertised thus:

"Assalaamualaikum wr wb

Ramadan Mubarak

Alhamdulillah, Wearwhite Forum-Return to Fitrah will resume...

Make a date with us on:

Saturday 16 Apr 2022

2pm (Singapore time)

Topic : CONVERSION THERAPY

History & Experience - An Islamic Perspective

Panelist 1 - Prof Madya Dr Rafidah Hanim Mokhtar

Panelist 2 - Cik Tina Rasidi (Special appearance)

Chairman/Moderator - Ustaz Noor Deros

“Conversion therapies” (or “reparative therapies”) are interventions purported - Conversion therapy is any emotional or physical therapy used to “cure” or “repair” a person’s attraction to the same sex, or their gender identity and expression."

Technical glitch[]

During the live streaming of the forum, there was an unexpected technical glitch which resulted in only the first ten minutes of the forum being viewable on Facebook. The organisers apologised to Muslim organisations WAFIQ, MACSA, Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM), Reform MUIS (Reform Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura) and Fikrah Siyasah, and especially its supporters who had been hoping for a successful event since Wear White was relaunched[13]

References[]

Acknowledgements[]

This article was written by Roy Tan.

Wear White

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