“Peaceful Salafism” in Malaysia: Legitimising Comfort for Radicals (original) (raw)
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The form of Islam normatively understood and practised in Malaysia, i.e. Malaysian Islam, has undergone myriad changes since the 1970s as a result of gradual Salafization. Powered by Saudi Arabian largesse and buoyed by the advent of the Internet, this new wave of Salafization has eclipsed an earlier Salafi trend that spawned the Kaum Muda reformist movement. Recent surveys suggest that there has been a rise in the level of extremism among Muslims in Malaysia. While the majority is far from being enamoured by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine that ISIS claims to represent in unadulterated form does appeal to many of them following the decades-long Salafization of Islam in the country. This tallies with media reports on increasing numbers of Malay-Muslim youth harbouring an attraction towards radical Islamist movements such as ISIS. Salafization, referring to a process of mindset and attitudinal transformation rather than the growth of Salafi nodes per se, is not restricted to individuals or groups identified as “Salafi”, but rather affects practically all levels of Malay-Muslim society, cutting across political parties, governmental institutions and non-state actors. It has resulted in Islamist, rather than Islamic, ideals increasingly defining the tenor of mainstream Islam in Malaysia, with worrying consequences for both intra-Muslim and inter-religious relations. Responses to the Wahhabi-Salafi onslaught from the Malay-Muslim ruling elite in Malaysia have been ambivalent, and have had weak counteracting effects on the Salafization process.
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Salafi Jihadism -An Ideological Misnomer Salafi Jihadism -An Ideological Misnomer
Salafism, which for the majority of the twentieth century remained distinctly apolitical, has become a vehicle for political and social nihilism of Islamic State or Daesh. At the same time, there exist Salafi groups like Costa Salafis who have made attempts to counter the ideological intolerance which has come to be associated with Salafism, by rejecting violence as an instrument to impose the Salafi view.[i] It comes as a paradox of sorts that both Daesh, with its nihilistic worldview, and Salafyo Costa, with its conciliatory approach, can manage to find a place under the umbrella of Salafism. Salafis are not a homogenous entity; neither is Salafism a monolith. It consists of various strands and orientations – from moderate to extreme, from quietest to politically active and from peaceful Costa Salafis to the radical jihadists. There are many peace-loving and quietist Salafis that can be mapped on the Salafi canvas. Though such groups have rigorous religious standards for themselves that guide their behavior, their interaction with the society is not based on imposing those standards coercively on anyone else. Modern Salafism and Wahhabi Influence In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jamal ud din Afghani, an Islamic scholar of Persian origin, led a modernist Islamic revivalist movement against colonialism by emphasizing that Islam and modernity were not necessarily at odds with each other.[ii] Afghani and later his disciples Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, both from Egypt, started a movement aimed at ridding Islam of certain innovative practices, which they claimed went against the spirit of Islam. This new breed of Muslims reformers who adhered to the strict scriptural understanding of Islam but at the same time embraced rationalism and Western modernity were ironically labelled as Salafis and their movement as Salafiyya by the Western scholars of that time. Interestingly these reformers never called their movement as Salafiyya. Rashid Rida preferred to call his reform movement as 'Movement for Balanced Reform'.[iii] There is no ambiguity that both Afghani and Abduh and Rida to a large extent saw themselves as reformers and sought to reconcile the teachings of Islam with the challenges of modernity.[iv] For these modern scholars, Salafism was not necessarily a strict theological conception which was non-rationalist, non-metaphorical Madhhab al-Salaf (doctrine of forefathers) as explicated by Ibn Taymiyya,, the 13 century Islamic scholar, but became synonymous with balanced reform. Though not much is known about Jamal-ud-din Afghani's views about Wahhabism, Muhammad Abduh repeatedly criticized the Wahhabis for their approach of opposing the intellectual and social objectives of Islamic modernism. It was, therefore, surprising that Rashid Rida during the later years of his life, made a dramatic shift towards Wahhabism and grew closer to the Wahhabis and their ideational approach. The
Interaction between Muslims in Malaysia and their Middle Eastern brethren has consistently been a source of apprehension to the powers-that-be from colonial times till today. Islamist activism in Malaysia has indeed undergone changes, and these did indeed arise from contemporary Middle Eastern influences. The Malaysian version of Islamist puritanism has always been pragmatic rather than dogmatic, moderated by its multi-cultural and multi-religious setting. But newer strands of Islamism influenced by developments in the Middle East have alarmed authorities. Newly formed Muslim organisations such as Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA: Muslim Solidarity Front), the Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF) and Hizb at-Tahrir Malaysia (HTM) are all found to have maintained strong Middle Eastern links, both at the discursive or organisational levels. • All three movements in question have so far not displayed violent tendencies although their versions of Islamism exhibit varying degrees of ideological absolutism, distinguishing them markedly from the wave of Islamism that engulfed Malaysia in the 1980s.
Salafism: From a Religious Movement to a Political Force
Globalization has introduced rapid changes in the social, political and economic realms of life. It has provoked perturbing and turbulent effects and has challenged established and rooted notions of identity. Globalization has also changed the essence of religion and its role in international affairs. Religion is growing in countries with a wide variety of religious traditions and levels of economic development. Islam is also experiencing a genuine revival. Salafism is a primarily theological movement in Sunni Islam concerned with purifying the faith. Islamic Salafism, as other major religious movements of today, has become universal and less affiliated with any one territory, and more personal and private, increasingly embodying a spiritual search for self-fulfilment. Salafism has also evolved from being a non-political ideology to develop into a political force.