It was argued last week that the recent election results point to a repeat of the 1986 election scenario. This holds true in the cast of PAS in particular, for the intervening years between 1999 to 2004 were loaded with a host of variable factors both local and global that were out of PAS' control and which played a pivotal role in shifting the discourse of PAS to a more radical register. The net result, as we have seen, has been the rejection of PAS in its current manifestation; as was the case in 1986 when the Malaysian public resoundingly rejected PAS' confrontational politics and determination to introduce an Islamic state in Malaysia by any means necessary.

Despite the attacks on PAS between 1984 to 1986, and the killing of some of its members and leaders such as Ustaz Ibrahim 'Libya' Mahmood at Memali, PAS failed to gain the victory that it (mistakenly) thought it had purchased with the blood of its 'martyrs'.

For PAS' nemesis Umno the recent election results seem to hold the same promise that it did in 1986 as well. Then, as now, Umno was keen to foreground its alternative model of 'moderate, progressive, modernist Islam'. But here the question has to be asked: If Umno wishes to present its version of normative Islamic politics as moderate and progressive, why has this vision not been hegemonised and consolidated till today? What went wrong and why was the Umno version of Islam rejected at the 1999 polls? Here we have to take another walk back down memory lane, and revisit the failed Modernist Islamic project of Umn during the Dr Mahathir Mohamad era.

Fighting Islam with Islam

The battle to determine the form, content and co-ordinates of the modernist Islamic project goes back to the post-colonial era and has been fought in earnest in both Malaysia and Indonesia. From the outset the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia could not ignore the political realities around them.

In Indonesia, the Islamists movements and organisations that helped in the anti-colonial struggle were not about to let the opportunity for setting up an Islamic state go by. In time this led to the Darul Islam revolt that ignited religious, ethnic and class tensions in the outer island provinces of Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Sumatra. In Malaysia, the country's first Islamist party the Hizb'ul Muslimin had been banned and had its leaders arrested by the departing British authorities in1948, but this opened the way for the emergence and rise of the country's next Islamist party, the Pan-Malaysian Islamist party (PAS).

For the first generation of postcolonial leaders in Malaysia and Indonesia, the priority at the time was rapid development and economic success. Worried that their fragile import-substitution economies would be left vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global market and the unpredictable currents of the Cold War that were sweeping across the region, they embarked on massive public educational programmes, infrastructural development and redirection of the economies.

The short-term goal was to break out the cycle of economic and intellectual dependency that had been the blight of many a postcolonial state. This, however, meant that Islam and the normative expression and practice of Islam were left to the ordinary Ulama and religious leaders whose power and charismatic authority lay in the enormous cultural capital they possessed.

As the development process pressed on regardless, the early signs of uneven development could be seen: Mass rural migration to urban industrial sectors led to the creation of huge overflowing slums where social problems like prostitution and drug abuse became commonplace. The rural-urban divide also coincided with cleavages of class, race and religion in both countries.

The ruling elite of both Malaysia and Indonesia were also more likely to be plugged into the global cosmopolitan networks of politics, trade and finance; alienating them from the rural indigenous constituencies who were trapped within the vectors of under development, homelessness and poverty.

By the 1970s, Malaysia and Indonesia were rife with Islamist movements of all shades and political persuasions. Islamisation had taken root in Malaysia in particular, thanks to the impact of the Iranian Revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet forces: The first factor suggested that the time was right for a major programme of social transformation along religio-political lines, while the second persuaded many ordinary Muslims that Islam was in danger of being wiped out by external enemies. The major Islamist movements in Malaysia: PAS, Abim and Darul Arqam grew more vocal in their demands for an Islamic state and the enforcement of Islamic law in the country.

Umno rises to the challenge

The leaders of Umno were not about to sit by and allow PAS, Abim and Arqam to gain the upper hand in the discursive contest to define the meaning and content of Islam. True to its form and calling, Umno rose to the challenge and once again attempted to play its role as 'protector'- but this time on behalf of not only the Malay race but for Islam as well.

Malaysia's experiment with 'statist-developmentalist-modernist' Islam began in 1981, when the country experienced its fourth peaceful transition of power which witnessed the ascendancy of the doctor-turned-politician Mahathir as the country's next premier. Mahathir's credentials and popularity lay in his claim of being a modernist leader who wanted to propel the country into the modern age through rapid development, modern education and the reformation of the normative understanding and practice of Islam itself.

The 1980s witnessed the implementation of the Umno-led state Islamisation policy, which was designed to promote and project Umno's vision of Islam as a modern way of life, culture and government. Mahathir had a clear idea of which course he wanted Islam to take in the country. If the discourse of PAS was shaped by a form of oppositional dialectics which divided the world between 'good Muslims' and 'kafirs', the Islamist worldview of Mahathir was one which divided Muslims into 'moderate progressives' and 'misguided fanatics' instead.

Umno's brand of modernist and moderate Islam was based on a chain of equivalences that equated Islam with all that was positive in its eyes. Islam was equated with modernity, economic development, material progress, rationality and liberalism. (It is interesting to note that other values like democracy and human rights were not part of this chain of equivalences.) Umno's understanding of Islam was also framed against a negative chain of equivalences that equated PAS' brand of Islam with obscurantism, extremism, fanaticism, intolerance, backwardness and militancy. This was the 'wrong' version of Islam to which Umno's Islam was the answer.

The aim of the state's Islamisation policy was to normalise and institutionalise the 'right' version of Islam against the 'wrong' version promoted by PAS, both in terms of orthopractic behaviour as well as state policy.(1) The bone of contention between Umno and PAS at the time was not whether Islam was 'liberal' or 'tolerant' in the Western sense, but rather whether as a system of belief and values it could be used to promote a dynamic outlook towards economic and political issues instead. To this end the machinery of the State was directed towards an Islamisation programme that was meant to eliminate the discrepancies between different sites and sources of Islamic authority while out-doing the claims and promises of PAS and the other Islamist movements like Abim in the country.

To counter the growing influence of PAS and Abim on the international scene (both PAS and Abim had been invited to the International Islamic Congress for the Liberation of Muslim Lands in London in 1979), the government of Mahathir re-directed the country's foreign policy as well. The first decade of the Mahathir era was marked by a significant re-orientation of the country's political compass. A new formal ranking of external relations was announced, in the order of (1) Asean, (2) the Muslim world, (3) the non-aligned community and finally (4) the Commonwealth.

The move closer towards the Muslim world was obviously a case of 'foreign policy as domestic policy by other means' (to quote Shanti Nair's phrase), and the results did meet with the expectations of the leaders of Umno.(2) But even though nothing much came out of this re-orientation of geo-political priorities (America, Japan and the countries of Western Europe remained the biggest trading partners of Malaysia), the intended effects on the local political scene were considerable: It helped to improve Malaysia's self-image and standing as an Islamic country and it boosted the Islamist credentials of the Umno leadership in particular.

Umno's modernist Islam flounders

But none of these measures managed to appease the Islamist opposition; nor did they actually help to create a genuinely modern and progressive school of Islamic thought in Malaysia. As was mentioned above, Mahathir's vision of modernist Islam was more attuned to the needs of global capital and the developmental agenda, and little time and energy were spent on developing an interpretation and practice of normative Islam that was founded on Islamic notions of democracy, transparency and the respect for fundamental liberties and freedoms that are at the heart of Islamic jurisprudence and ethics.

Despite the rhetoric of Islamic modernity and reform, it was clear that the Malaysian state apparatus was conducting its business as usual: No attempt was made to remove or repeal laws such as the Internal Security Act (ISA), Sedition Act or other laws that were inherited from the colonial era. And despite the talk of opening the minds of Muslims and creating a more tolerant and liberal intellectual atmosphere in the country, laws such as the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) were maintained to keep an iron grip on student activities on campus. What emerged in the end was a state-sponsored and state-controlled discourse of Islam that was instrumentalist at best, distorted and made to serve the needs of an authoritarian state at worst.

To complicate things further, the Islamisation race between PAS and the Umno-led government led to an obvious attempt by both parties to out-Islamise each other. But despite the enormous advantages that the Malaysian (and Indonesian) governmental institutions had at their fingertips, they failed to make an impact among the ordinary Muslims themselves. Many of the government-sponsored institutions like ICMI in Indonesia and ISTAC, IKIM and UIA in Malaysia were seen as elitist institutions that were engaged in a top-down form of state-orchestrated Islamisation.

Neither Malaysia's IKIM or ISTAC nor Indonesia's ICMI were truly populist in the sense of being able to transcend the cleavages of class, wealth and power that remained all too-real in the lives of millions of ordinary Malay-Muslims in the country. What was needed was a 'third voice' that could speak the language of the man in the street, the farmer in the field and the corporate manager in the high-rise apartment block. But the convoluted national politics of Malaysia and Indonesia left no space for a middle-ground to emerge. Caught between the maximalist state with its hegemonic grip on society on the one hand and the radical Islamists with their narrow vision of an 'authentic' Islam based on the past on the other, the ordinary Muslims of Southeast Asia have not been able to turn to a third voice that could straddle the narrow divide. 'Progressive Islam' thus became hostage to the realpolitik concerns of governments, and the liminal and vulnerable constituency of progressive Muslim intellectuals and activists have been the first to suffer.

The 1980s and 1990s thus proved to be wasted decades when the opportunity to transform the understanding and practice of normative Islam was lost if not sacrificed for the sake of short-term goals. Despite winning a popular mandate at the elections of 1986, Umno under the leadership of Mahathir never really tried to create a school of modernist Islam that would have addressed the structural-economic problems of Malaysian society, or open itself to the marginalized voices of ordinary Malaysians thirsting for change and democratic reform.

This time round the Umno-led government has been given a second chance by an electorate that is unable and unwilling to accept the hyperbole and confrontational pyrotechnics of some PAS leaders. But the new administration is also forced to deal with the problem of institutional inertia; invested political and economic interests; and a conservative bureaucracy that is adamant to shield itself from reforms. To make things worse the globalisation of Washington's 'war on terror' discourse has brought Malaysia into the orbit of Western geo-strategic interests and this in turn further politicises the modernist Islam agenda. Under such circumstances, what hope is there for a rebirth of progressive Islam in Malaysia?

A repeat of Umno's failures?

While controversy still rages about the results of the recent election in Malaysia, our concern here is to highlight the need for both Umno and PAS to discard the instrumentalist, political and ultimately distorted views on Islam that they have held for so long. The new administration that has been voted into office has made a public commitment to foreground a new approach to the question of political Islam. But for this to transform itself into meaningful reality, there will have to be some serious changes in the way politics is conducted in Malaysia first:

For a start, as any Islamist intellectual worth his/her salt will tell you, there is simply no place for communitarianism or sectarian politics in Islam. The Islamic worldview, predicated as it is on the fundamental concept of Tauhid (unity of God), views the human race as one and all communities as part of the human family. As component parts of the same creation from the same origin, we all share the same rights, privileges and responsibilities as the person next to us.

It follows from this that theories of racial supremacy or notions of 'special rights and privileges' for particular races/communities is an illogical and unethical fallacy alien to Islam. If the new Umno leadership wishes to promote a school of moderate Islamic thought, is it prepared to reject once and for all the distorted and divisive form of race-based politics that is the fundamental premise of Umno and the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition?

Secondly, any Islamic legal scholar will tell you that the appeal of Shariah law lies in its objectivity, consistency and transparency. The is no justification both legal or historical for the practice of detention without trial in Islam. And yet Malaysia, like many Muslim states, remains the home of repressive laws like the ISA and Sedition act. How can Malaysia claim to be a model moderate Islamic state as long as laws such as the ISA are maintained? Is the new administration prepared to pursue its modernist Islamic agenda to its logical conclusion and remove such laws which are antithetical to the spirit of Islamic law?

Thirdly, the scholar of Muslim history will tell you that the golden age of Islam was also a time when freedom of thought, speech and academia were guaranteed. The glory of the Abbasid, Ottoman, Moghul and Cordoban dynasties lay in their ability and willingness to tolerate plurality in opinion and legitimate critical dissent. There was not even a police force during the time of the great Caliph Harun-al-Rashid in his capital of Baghdad, for society was capable of governing itself according to its own social norms.

Yet today practically all modern Muslim states have internalised the logic of instrumental governmentality and we see the rise of the secret police and moral guardians in our midst. In the Malaysian case the primary obstacles to a rebirth of Islamic intellectual and civil culture are laws such as the UUCA and a mainstream media owned, controlled and cowered by the political-business elite. Can the new government live up to its claims and allow more freedom on the campuses and in the media of the country?

These are some of the most basic demands that have to be met before we can even begin to use terms like 'moderate, progressive' Islam in Malaysia today. After the 1986 election results, UMNO was given the chance to reinvent itself and to offer a new view of Islam. This it singularly failed to do, and the results were the debacle of the 1999 election. Can the present political administration under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi make the changes that we have been waiting for so long? Only time will tell, but in the meantime it is the Malaysian public as a whole that will bear the burden of Umno's successes or failures.


Next week: 1986 revisited: The future of the secular democrats

Endnotes

(1) It has to be noted that Dr. Mahathir's 'progressive' outlook on Islam did not mean that he was any less conservative than the Ulama of PAS when it came to matters of traditional 'Asian values', personal morality or ethics. On 28 July 1984 the Malay-language newspapers Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian reported that Dr. Mahathir, while speaking at a conference on Family Development, stated that women should stop working if their husbands earned enough income to maintain the family. In keeping with his conservative personality and values, the Prime Minister argued that women should concentrate on their household duties as wives and mothers instead. See: Berita Harian, 'PM: Wanita Patut Utamakan Keluarga'. (28 July 1984).

(2) Shanti Nair (1997) notes that 'expectations were not matched by reality. Although there were individual successes in specific areas of economic exchange, overall trade with other Muslim countries remained only a small sector of the total volume of Malaysian trade with the world and appeared strikingly minuscule compared to trade with developed countries and countries in the Southeast Asian region.' (pp. 103-104). In 1981 commodity trade with Arab countries comprising Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt and the UEA constituted only 2 percent of Malaysia's total exports and 8 per cent of Malaysia's imports. The figures were higher for trade with non-Arab Muslim countries: Pakistan remained Malaysia's biggest non-Arab Muslim trading partner, and Pakistan-Malaysian trade in 1984 amounted to 1 percent of total Malaysian trade.Turkey, Indonesia and Brunei also chalked up higher percentages than the other Arab Muslim countries. See: Shanti Nair, Islam in Malaysian Foreign Policy. Routledge and ISEAS, London, 1997.