POLITICAL ISLAM, SECULARISM, AND MODERNITY
There are several forms of political Islam, secularism, and modernity interacting in Malaysian society. As we have seen, Malay political elites have established sharia family and criminal laws and infused Islamic ethics into the economy and other social institutions within the secular format inherited from the British colonial era.
They remain committed to political Islam, even strengthening implementation of sharia laws and ethics and expanding the space of Islam in public life, within overarching secular legal, political, and constitutional structures. Recall that prime minister Najib Razak directed couples involved in conversion cases, caught between lower level civil and sharia courts, to turn to the Federal Court. This constrained, “moderate” political Islam is integral to their project of producing an Islamic modernity. Participant observation, interviews, and discussions with government ulama, religious officials, and civil servants has allowed me to shed some light on how their sharia cultural models vary from those of Malay political elites. Many of these respondents are part of generations of the Islamic resurgence that were heavily influenced by the ideas, emotions, and experiences related to political and piety movements of the last four decades. Malay political elites have filled the expanding religious bureaucracies and Islamic economy with these youth and adults of the Islamic resurgence as part of their Islamic modernity projects. Indeed, these religious scholars and officials operate with a sharia cultural model that entails combining many notions of modern development and administration within a traditional Islamic worldview. However, in contrast to Malay political elites, many of them are less committed to maintaining the secular format and want to see at least gradual progression toward a sociopolitical system that returns sharia to prominence beyond the bounds of secular legal, political, and constitutional structures. Islamic NGOs also devise their own educational and proselytizing projects to prepare the population for a shift in this direction, and some of them also establish miniature “Islamic states” throughout society.The Islamic Party of Malaysia promotes another variety of political Islam that explicitly rejects the secular structural format and aims to attain power in order to establish an Islamic state and fully implement sharia laws and ethics throughout society. They are critical of the limited institutionalization of sharia criminal laws and economic ethics under the UMNO-led Malaysian state and castigate UMNO’s sociopolitical project as secular. In addition, many PAS members consider UMNO-affiliated and government ulama as being co-opted and corrupted by positions and money. From their perspective, these social forces are not struggling for Islam and will not arrive at the full implementation of Allah’s hukum because they are reveling in worldly pleasures and materialism. Integral to their ongoing ideological and political competition, the discursive engagements of UMNO and PAS entail considerable accommodation and interdependence as they both strive to convince the electorate and Malaysian Muslim community that their version of political Islam is the best. Nevertheless, they often are pushed to set aside their differences to unite against the perceived rising tide of foreign-inspired and -supported secularism and liberal-pluralist modernity.
Secular and Muslim human rights activists from DAP, PKR, IRF, SIS, and a host of nongovernmental organizations are clamoring in electoral campaigns, Parliament, state assemblies, seminars, social media, and on the streets for sociopolitical reform. These social forces struggle for various forms of secularism and modernity in Malaysia, all of which entail a diminishing of the racial and religious hierarchies. In addition, many Malaysian Muslim youth are influenced by secular discourses and cultural models, and some of them perform secular body techniques in public.
As noted above, the interaction of these secular modernity projects with normative Islamic prosharia projects tend to be highly oppositional and lacking in conciliatory engagements. There appears to be an uncompromising clash of secular and political Islamic fundamentalisms. This study demonstrates that a close examination of the interplay between these various sociopolitical projects and the quality of their discursive engagements allows one to discern the direction of change. The ongoing Islamic resurgence, the competition between PAS and UMNO over Islamic credentials, and from the up and coming generations of pious Muslim youth were already pushing for greater sharia-tization. However, the direct and inflexible public challenging of the Malay Muslim–led sociopolitical order and the concomitant escalating polarization of liberal rights and normative sharia projects, has added incentive for dominant Malay political forces to move toward a more sharia-oriented state, lay greater stress on the Malay-preferred hierarchical image of the nation, and further infuse Islam into their versions of modernity. On the other hand, proponents of secular and liberal rights projects are digging in and intensifying their criticism of Malaysian Muslim leaders’ efforts to infuse more sharia laws and ethics into public life and to buttress their control over the political system.Conversely, if social forces from these two opposing camps were to begin discursive engagements with more accommodative, compromising, and interdependent positioning, new possibilities would emerge. To this end, I recommend that politically dominant Malay Muslims envision and produce more space for minority and individual rights within their normative Islamic worldviews and try to practice more adab (good manners) in relation to their neighbors and fellow Malaysians from non-Malay and non-Muslim backgrounds. Likewise, I recommend that subaltern secular and Muslim human rights activists adopt more flexible postures, allowing for more linking of Islam with the state and the infusion of sharia laws and ethics into public life.
More on the topic POLITICAL ISLAM, SECULARISM, AND MODERNITY:
- Into Modernity: New Political, Ecological and Economic Systems
- Asad Talal. Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press,2003. — 269 p., 2003
- The rise of political Islam
- Justice as a Political Principle in Islam
- Islam and Political Conflict in the World Today
- CHAPTER NINETEEN The rise of political Islam, 1928-2000
- What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?
- Introduction: Thinking about Secularism
- Secularism, Nation-State, Religion
- SECULARISM
- Modernity
- The dynamic of technological modernity
- Sunni political theology and the problem of political ordering
- The Malleability of Memory: From Modernity to Antiquity
- Modernity, state law, and bad maps
- Early Modernity
- 16 The Crisis of Modernity
- An Ocean of High Modernity
- Late Antiquity and Modernity
- Profanations: religious vs secular in the Temple of Western modernity