Paving the ground? Malaysia’s democratic prospects and the Mahathir government’s Islamic discourse

The common theme of this book is the management of the religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity of Southeast Asia. Most of the contributors focus on the implications of inter-communal differences, and in many, relations between Muslims and non-Muslims loom large. This chapter also examines the management of Southeast Asia’s religious, cultural and ethnic diversity, but seeks to do so by exploring what is in many ways an intra-communal debate about the proper relationship between the state and its official religion among Malaysian Muslims. Focusing on the Mahathir government’s (1981-2003) articulation of Islam’s place in the public sphere, this chapter argues for the need to examine the role of the state as an important but hitherto under-recognized enabler of what has been described elsewhere as ‘post-Islamism’ or, parallels with Europe’s post-war Christian Democrats intended, as ‘Muslim Democracy’ (Anwar 2006; Bayat 2007). Voices associated with these still-emerging currents of thought remain critical of the basic assumptions of secularism. They argue that Muslims cannot draw meaningful distinctions between profane and sacred spheres of life, and that they rather should seek to influence public policy through their conceptions of the good, the desirable and the permissible. However, in contradistinction to their Islamist predecessors, the so-called post-Islamists1 see the defence of social justice across all ethnic and religious divisions as a religious duty, and view rule of law and the democratic deliberative process as ends rather than means. While this paper does not consider Mahathir himself an exponent of this particular current within contemporary Islamic thought, his government’s articulation of the ‘correct’ understanding of Islam arguably lent strength to the growing calls for a decidedly non-secular and yet democratic Malaysia. The growing role played by Islam in Malaysian politics over the past decade has attracted the keen interest of journalists, graduate students and senior scholars (e.g. Fischer 2008; Lee 2009; Liow 2009). A number of these commentators have highlighted the adoption, since the early 1980s, of ‘more Arabic inflections of the religion that really reflect the culture of gender and family relations of a patriarchal and tribal Middle Eastern society’ (Zainah 2001: 234) and the supplanting of the allegedly more ‘tolerant’, ‘easy-going’ or ‘adat-oriented’ practices of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Abaza 2002; Peletz 2002). Present-day Malaysian Islam is portrayed as a sometimes more, sometimes less foreign import, but almost invariably as a divisive force. A substantial number of Malaysian Muslims are thus assumed to be sanctioning or at least acquiescing in what Bat Ye’or has controversially described as the ‘dhimmitude’ of their non-Muslim compatriots, while the representatives of the state’s bureaucratized faith are described as seeking to control the minds and discipline the bodies of their fellow-believers. ‘Body snatchings’, the desecration of sacred places, and the bitter legal dispute over whether the country’s Catholic minority had the right to use the word Allah to refer to God in their Malay-language publications are just some of the better-known examples of the apparent divisiveness of Islam in Malaysia. Given the longstanding bridging and assimilative role the faith has played in the Malay world, it is indeed deplorable for Islam to have emerged as a divisive force even as what Sumit Mandal describes as ‘trans-ethnic solidarities’ and supra-ethnic conceptions of national identity have started to emerge among the middle classes and among younger Malaysians (Mandal 2004: 50; also Lee 2010). But despite the fissures resulting from the disagreement over what public role the country’s official religion should play (a disagreement that, by the way, splits the Muslim community almost as much as it pits Muslim against nonMuslim Malaysians), Islam is clearly one of the most important forces shaping present-day Malaysian politics. Although professing Islam has been an important constituting element of Malay identity for several centuries, Islam has crystallized over the past fifty years as the principal, perhaps final determinant of Malayness and adherence to Islam has become an increasingly dominant aspect of the Malay imaginaire. Even as observers of Malaysian society have put forward a range of different explanations in order to account for the ‘rise of Islam’ in Malay culture and its growing public role, it seems relatively safe to assume that Islam, for the foreseeable future at least, will remain a central feature of Malaysian politics.