Malaysia’s moderate Islam project off the rails?

Farish A Noor

Today in the wake of September 11 and the so-called war on terror, Malaysia’s state-oriented top-down form of statist Islam is being brought off the shelf and sold as a model for other countries, including Iraq. Yet a closer inspection of the realities on the ground would indicate that Malaysia is no closer to realising the goals of a universal, humanist, tolerant, progressive and democratic Islam than it ever was

Over the past few weeks it would appear as if Malaysia’s brand of moderate Islam, hastily repackaged as it is, is going off the rails.

Among the more recent important developments is the case of a Malaysian former commando, M Moorthy, a member of the Malaysian mountain-climbing team that scaled Mount Everest. Moorthy was paralysed after an accident during training. When he passed away his body was claimed by the federal government’s religious authorities claiming that he had converted to Islam. His Hindu wife and relatives were unaware of this. Moorthy was thus given a Muslim burial despite his wife and family’s insistence that his conversion was never revealed to them and their protest that he must not be denied proper Hindu cremation rituals.

Then came the news of the new Muslim marriage and family law ordinance, that apparently has made it easier for Muslim men to marry more than one woman. It also makes it easier for men to claim a part of their first wife’s property to support their second, third and/or fourth wife/wives. Needless to say the passage of the law has caused an uproar among Muslim women’s groups in the country who are arguing that the law marks a return to the bad old days of patriarchy where men could marry several wives with impunity.

The Malaysian public, jaded as it is by developments such as these for so long now, seemed resigned to the fact that despite the froth and rhetoric of reform and moderation there is little to show for as far as Malaysia’s experiment with moderate Islam is concerned. During the Mahathir era of 1981-2003, the Islamisation process in Malaysia had more to do with the instrumentalisation of religion for clearly obvious political ends. Islam was instrumentalised as part of the establishment’s effort to create a school of thought similar to Japan’s work ethic. At the same time it was intended to counter the revolutionary thrust of political Islam that was sweeping across the globe in the wake of the Iranian revolution.

But even then Malaysia’s Islamisation programme had little to do with the universal values of Islam and its inclusive view of humanity: Malaysian politics and its political culture remained mired in the logic of institutionalised racism; its economic trajectory remained determined by a decidedly capitalist compass; Malaysia’s civil society remained suppressed and on the margins. Overriding all other concerns was the desire to ensure the dominance of the Malay-Muslim political constituency and the fortunes of the Malay political elite along with their Chinese compradore partners.

Today in the wake of September 11 and the so-called war on terror, Malaysia’s state-oriented top-down form of statist Islam is being brought off the shelf and sold as a model for other countries, including Iraq. Yet a closer inspection of the realities on the ground would indicate that Malaysia is no closer to realising the goals of a universal, humanist, tolerant, progressive and democratic Islam than it ever was.

Islam can, and needs to, grow in the fertile environment of a free and tolerant society where Muslims can develop their personal capacity and exercise their individual agency to the fullest, realising the goal of the insan ul kamil — the perfect being in all of us. Police states, authoritarian regimes and maximalist governments bent on extending their spheres of power and control to all areas of human life invariably destroy the climate that normative Islam needs to flourish; yet the case of Malaysia is hardly any different from so many other Muslim-majority states today. It was hoped that the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi would mark a new beginning for the country at last and perhaps allow for the true flowering of progressive Islam. But as the latest developments indicate, despite the talk of a new school of Islamic thought and the dawning of a new age of Islamic moderation, Malaysia’s official Islam remains elite-oriented, communitarian, patriarchal and divisive.

This in itself is no loss to Islam, but it certainly is a loss and a shame for Malaysia and Malaysians.

Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist, based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin