Developmental Frenemies: Ideological Convers(at)ions between the State and Islam in Malaysia, 1970s-90s (original) (raw)
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This paper seeks to investigate the nature and vagaries of the developmental state within the context of the post-colonial political economy of Malaysia. The theoretical framework for this study is situated within the debates of the 1970s concerning the dynamic interactions of class, society and capital in charting the development path of newly emergent nation-states of Asia and Africa. While the preponderant role of the state is undisputed, the forces governing its behaviour are subject to varying interpretations. An overview of discourses on models of the post-colonial state is presented, followed by an exploration of their applicability to the Malaysian experience. The uniqueness of Malaysia's socio-cultural mosaic demands important adjustments to the established models. As a testament to Malaysia's uniqueness, reform of the post-colonial state is discussed in terms of an Islamist alternative; Islamic movements and initiatives being at the helm of development endeavours in Malaysia. However, such independent-based efforts have been misconstrued by the state as a threat to its legitimacy, thereby persuading influential sections of Islamists to seek reform from within the dominant system. Such a recourse presents its own set of problems, as the political-economic developments of the past two years have demonstrated. This puts to test the viability of a so-called Islamist alternative. Malaysian language abstract: Makalah ini bertujuan menyelidik perihal ciri-ciri negara membangun dalam konteks ekonomi politik pasca-penjajahan di Malaysia. Latar belakang teori kepada kajian ini didapati dalam perdebatan, pada dekad 1970an, tentang dinamika hubung kait antara kelas, masyarakat dan modal dalam pembangunan negara-bangsa yang baru muncul di Asia dan Afrika. Peranan meluas negara umumnya diterima, namun faktor yang mempengaruhinya telah diberikan pelbagai tafsiran. Perbahasan tentang model negara pasca-penjajahan dibentang, diikuti oleh aplikasinya kepada pengalaman Malaysia. Keunikan sosio-budaya Malaysia menyebabkan perlunya pengubahsuaian kepada model negara-bangsa yang lazimnya diguna. Keunikan Malaysia dipaparkan melalui perbincangan tentang pembaharuan kepada model negara pasca-penjajahan dalam rangka sebuah alternatif Islamis, yakni yang berhubung kait dengan inisiatif gerakan Islam selaku sebuah pendokong utama pembangunan di Malaysia. Namun begitu, inisiatif yang bebas dari cengkaman negara sering disalah tafsirkan sebagai ancaman. Lantas ramai pendokong gerakan Islam mencuba untuk mengubah sistem yang sedia ada dari dalam. Perkembangan ekonomi politik dalam dua tahun kebelakangan ini menggambarkan bahawa masalah tetap wujud, sekaligus menguji keupayaan apa yang dipanggil alternatif Islamis.
ISLAM AND DEVELOPMENT REVISITED WITH EVIDENCES FROM MALAYSIA
This study examines the relationship between Islam and development. While examining the theoretical underpinnings behind the goals of development within secular and Islamic worldviews it highlights the misconceptions developed by Western scholars pertaining to compatibility between Islam and development. The focus of this study is to test the relevance of policy practices and institutions to the distribution phase rather than the allocation and production phase. In pursuit of macroeconomic goals the core Islamic values such as development based on justice and compassion, tolerance, sharing and caring, cooperation and peaceful coexistence with others irrespective of belief systems are important. The micro level evidences are also presented to support our observations on the compatibility between Islam and development.
The Politicisation of Islam in Malaysia and its Opponents
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This article profiles four prominent detractors of Islam's politicisation in contemporary Malaysia. While much ink has been spilt profiling the promulgators of politicised Islam, whether in Malaysia or elsewhere, comparatively little has been written about those who oppose it. This article is a modest attempt to rectify that deficiency. It begins, however, with a brief history of that politicisation process as it has occurred in Malaysia, with particular reference to Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) and Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM). This brief overview traces Malaysia's unique form of politicised Islam to late twentieth-century intercommunal tensions driven by Malay poverty and cultural anxiety. These enabled long-standing ethno-religious associations to facilitate a blending of Islamist ideology with issues surrounding Malay rights. It is within this context that we then examine the social and educational backgrounds, principal publications, records of activism, and ideological positions of four prominent critics of Malaysian Islam's politicisation, namely: Chandra Muzaffar, Zainah Anwar, Marina Mahathir, and Siti Kasim. The article concludes that all four figures differ from their counterparts in PAS and ABIM by possessing Western-orientated backgrounds, a long-standing dedication to multiculturalism, and a desire to orientate their work around human rights-based issues. The article concludes by suggesting how (or if) these detractors can impact the future direction of Malaysian politics.
Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto), 2018
This article seeks to analyze the evolving development and contestations regarding the interplay of Islam and politics in Malaysia’s public space for a period of 60 years (1957–2017) since its independence as a nation-state. A crucial element in this discourse is the official position of Islam as the “religion of the federation” in the Malaysian Constitution, which simultaneously guarantees the freedom of other religions embraced by almost half of the country’s population. The population became even more diverse ethnically and religiously upon the formation of the Federation of Malaysia, which replaced Malaya, on September 16, 1963. Closely related to the discourse of political Islam in Malaysia, the evolving concepts of “religion” and “secularism” in Malaysia’s Islamic context have undergone considerable shifts as a result of constant public engagement by an assortment of politicians, commentators, scholars, bureaucrats, and civil society activists. As the argument develops, Malaysia’s interaction with Islam has been essentialized by political interests such that boundaries are hardened between what is considered Islamic and un-Islamic. The increasingly rigid positions adopted by Islamic stakeholders have arguably worsened both interreligious and intra-Muslim relations, with progressive Muslim voices increasingly finding themselves marginalized in the state-controlled political environment.
Book chapter in Zawawi Ibrahim, Gareth Richards and Victor T. King (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives, Singapore: Springer, 2021
The standard of living of a particular country is commonly measured by looking at its national income, which has been widely accepted as being broadly indicative of citizens’ material well-being. Progress in the attainment of such wellbeing reflects in turn the stage of development which that country is currently in. However, since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992, global concern over environmental damage has somewhat overshadowed national policy makers’ obsession with economic growth. Within the context of Malaysia’s politics of development, environmental problems associated with such phenomena as landslides, floods and haze have become more serious throughout the years. Unfortunately, in Malaysia, only non-governmental organisations (NGOs) openly linked to environmental causes are seen to exhibit any genuine concern over the rapidly depleting natural habitat and flora and fauna, and rising levels of pollution. Entities of the Malaysian state, belying its moderate and even Islamic pretensions, have hesitated to address environmental issues for fear of ruffling feathers that are potentially damaging to political and economic support of the powers at the federal or state levels of government. This is ironic considering that Islam, viewed in comprehensive terms as many Islamists would like to, supposedly abhors neglect or even pillage of the environment. Despite the increasing vociferousness of Islamist civil society in recent years, their response to environmental issues has been surprisingly muted. The discourse on Islam in Malaysia has been unduly dominated by politico-legal issues such that environmental decline, which arguably reflects also a general spiritual malaise, hardly figures among Islamist actors in both the state and civil society. Worse still, in states where Islamists control the government, such asKelantan, those championing Islam are seen as colluding with capitalist interests to the detriment of marginalised communities that Islam, by right, should be defending. Using empirical data from Kelantan, this chapter seeks to interrogate themanifest failure of Islamism as a political ideology in addressing worsening environmental standards, contrary to oft-cited claims of Islam being a solution to all problems. A lack of spirituality in the programme of activists and parties that purportedly champion Islam is identified as a bane that urgently needs addressing, especially if elements of the Malaysian state are adamant in maintaining Islam as a partner and contributor to development.
1998
As a case study, this thesis investigates the political challenge posed by Darul Arqam, an Islamic movement, to the Malaysian state from 1968 until 1996. As a general manifestation of Islamic resurgence, the challenge sheds light on three important issues: the tactics, methods and strategies pursued by Islamic movements; the secular authorities' pattern of response to Islamic movements; the impact of repression on Islamists. The Darul Arqam challenge was unique in dispensing with conventional Islamist ideas and practices, in generating an atypical reaction from the state and in producing an unconventional counter-response to state-initiated suppression. Darul Arqam's roots are traced to Malaysian Islam's largely sufi inclinations, which have been neglected by most contemporary Islamists for their perceived disadvantages, but which Darul Arqam successfully harnessed to its benefit.Given Darul Arqam's disavowal of political violence and the state's strategy of emphasising cooptation and accommodation of Islamists, its full blown repression of Darul Arqam in 1994 deserves scrutiny in its myriad aspects and implications. The paradox of Darul Arqam's challenge is underlined by its innate capacity to weather external pressure, showing that wholesale repression would not necessarily amount ot liquidation of a grassroots movement.
Islam and Economic Development in Malaysia--A Reappraisal
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2001
Studies of the impact of religious resurgence on politics, economics, and society in general have increased over the last three decades. While in the 1960s it was conventional wisdom to see secularization as a natural concomitant (even a condition) of economic development and modernization, the turn of the century witnesses what Weigel terms the`unsecularization of the world'. 2 In the case of the Islamic world, the late Ernest Gellner stated very categorically that secularization, a central pillar of the modernization thesis, did not apply to Islam. 3 While politics has been the main arena of study in contemporary Islam, another area that has gained importance over these years is Islamic economics and its impact on economic development in particular in Muslim countries. In the 1980s, Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan undertook Islamization exercises, especially in banking and ®nance. While these countries, and the Middle East in general, became the standard examples of Islamic resurgence, other Muslim countries were also adopting their own`Islamic reforms', but with less attention and scrutiny from academic researchers and scholars of contemporary Islam. One of those other countries was Malaysia.
Political Islam and the Recent Rise of Islamist Conservatism in Malaysia
ISEAS Perspective No. 58, 2013
Under Prime Minister Najib Razak, Malaysia has witnessed vigorous drives towards multiple visions of political Islam. This is not surprising. In truth, Islam has always been a pivotal factor in Malaysian politics, and different interpretations in both doctrine and practice have often arisen among successive generations of Malaysian Muslims. In addition, the rich cultural diversity of Southeast Asia enriched Malaysian Islam with accommodating mores from a variety of civilisational traditions, a recent manifestation being Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s Islam Hadhari. After Abdullah lost power to Najib Razak in 2009, however, the defining of the Islamic framework of the nation has been effectively delegated to the official Islamic bureaucracy, whose horizons are coloured by Islamist uniformity rather than religiously acceptable Muslim plurality. This article discusses the impact of this delegation of power, which has exhibited ghastly consequences in the aftermath of Malaysia’s 13th General Elections.
IKIM Journal, 2002
This communication attempts to challenge implications of the sociological analysis of religions developed by Max Weber, whose thinking has been instrumental in shaping Western-based post-Second World War literature on political and economic development, as couched in the term 'modernisation'. Scholars in this field, high in expectation that the developing world was destined to toe the line of the secular, rational, industrial and democratic West, constructed deterministic theories of the global evolution of society which not only rejected the possibility of non-Western religions undergoing positive reformation, but moving a step ahead of Weber, also degraded the overall contribution of religion to the modernisation process. Weber was forthright in his condemnation of Islam as an obstacle to enterprising economic behaviour; the fact that Weber never conducted a systematic study of Islam himself but instead relied heavily on research by past orientalists was never seriously considered. Comparably, the fact that the post-War literature on modernisation has been invariably lacking in extensive research of developing societies, in primary data and in concrete illustrations from first-hand experience, is injudiciously ignored. Within the aforesaid paradigm, the contemporary Islamic resurgence represents a shock to the system: a move backward from the presumed evolution of society. But claims by Islamists that Islam is compatible with material progress and modernity are marred by an acute shortage of empirical examples, beyond a banal recourse to Islamic economic theory and evidence from history. This communication seeks to address the lack of contemporary evidence by citing the development experience of a Malaysian-based Islamic movement whose success combined the best of both sufism and economic activism. It argues that the movement's model of a self-sufficient Islamic society, built upon sufi-revivalist principles and a thriving economic enterprise, is evidence that Islam may act to foster the processes of modernisation and development.
Islamist Conservatism and the Demise of Islam Hadhari in Malaysia
This article argues that Islam Hadhari, as a model for development officially inaugurated during the administration of Malaysia’s fifth prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (2003–9), encountered failure. Its lack of success was significantly due to the rise of Islamist conservatives, who deliberately interpreted Islam Hadhari as a political instrument to impose Islamization from above in a manner not conducive to living in a spirit of peaceful coexistence in a multi-ethnic society. While on the one hand it promoted an Islam that cherishes the values of inclusivity, moderation and inter-religious tolerance, on the other hand Islam Hadhari unfortunately triggered defensive responses from Islamist conservatives. This ad hoc conservative alliance comprised religious leaders associated with the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), state religious functionaries, scholars affiliated to the opposition Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS: Parti Islam SeMalaysia) and Islamist non-governmental organizations. The rise of this Islamist conservatism aggravated ethno-religious relations during Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s premiership, leading to the setbacks experienced by his government in the general elections of 2008. By then, the death knell had been sounded for Islam Hadhari. It was steadily consigned to the graveyard of history by the administration of Najib Razak, who took over from Abdullah in April 2009.