“What I mean is if Umno is rejected, this country will be ruled by those who are against the Islamic struggle and those who reject the fight for Malays and bumiputeras,”

- PM Najib Razak

Before I begin, kudos to Bersih’s Maria Chin for not sacking Mandeep Karpall Singh for expressing an opinion that was contrary to the kool aid some opposition supporters keep dispensing. About the only thing I disagreed with in Mandeep's piece was that the opposition needed to be benched and a reset in order.

Nope. I think the opposition needs to be bold and go against conventional political wisdom; this way if they fail, at least they would have attempted something different instead of playing the same Umno game.

Since Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi called on “all levels of society to remain alert towards factors which encouraged youths to be affected by negative influences…” I thought I would do my part in engaging with my government by opining on why youths are radicalised in this country.

Mind you, I have been going on about this for years and each year the situation has got worse.

I am one of the few oppositional-leaning political pundits - maybe the only one - who views extreme Islamic imperatives as the existential threat facing our country at this time rather than the corruption scandals that plague this administration.

To me, the most dangerous thing about these corruption scandals is that it has crippled Umno to such an extent that it had to slay a sacred cow and make nice with the Abdul Hadi Awang-led PAS, something which was anathema back in the “managed corruption” days of past Umno administrations.

In this article, I will argue that the cultural and political ethos of this country is conducive to the kind of Islamic state religious dogma that finds an audience with disenfranchised youths looking to change the political paradigm through religious violence.

The reason why many youths embrace radical Islamic dogma is that in this country, Islam has been weaponised. These youths are merely turning the weapon against the state. Mainstream Islamic discourse in this country is essentially a Manichaean struggle between Muslims who are vilified as “deviants” and those who are the “defenders” of the faith.

A perfect example of this type of discourse is the Selangor religious department’s role in the case involving a fatwa claiming that Sisters in Islam is a group deviating from Islam by promoting "liberalism and pluralism". In an article about to changing the discourse, I referenced Shmuel Bar for the Hoover Institution, who wrote -

“Facing the radical Weltanschauung, the moderate but orthodox Muslim has to grapple with two main dilemmas: the difficulty of refuting the legal-religious arguments of the radical interpretation and the aversion to - or even prohibition of - inciting an Islamic Kulturkampf which would split the ranks of the ummah.”

When the state assumes the role of gatekeeper of the faith, does it surprise anyone that eventually people would want to storm the gates, especially if they believe that the purity of the faith has been supplanted by whatever compromises a functional democracy needs to sustain its social and economic wellbeing.

You would think that oppositional voices would stake out a new territory but there never has been a time when secular imperatives trumped the Islamic dogma that every Malay/Muslim political party has to embrace. We are constantly reminded that this is done because of the greater goal of removing a kleptocrat. Meanwhile the fragile secular bonds of this country are eroded by the Umno establishment and the opposition.

Two schools of thought

There are really only two schools of thought when it comes to turning Malaysia into an Islamic paradise. I am not talking about the Umno regime that claims that Malaysia is an already an “Islamic” state, using rather dodgy logic, while maintaining the illusion of being a “moderate” Muslim country.

The first school of thought are the hardliners within mainstream establishment and opposition political parties who are of the view that Islam is to be imposed on all using the argument that Malaysia is an Islamic nation in much the same way as Western Christian extremists make claims that certain countries in the West are “Christian” nations.

They of course ignore the reality that most Western countries have embraced secularism a long time ago and tensions between religious Christian extremists and those who believe in the separation of church and state manifest in the so-called culture war and various others issues that are conflated in right and left-wing politics.

Islamists from the first school of thought use instruments of the state to harass fellow Muslims and non-Muslims, dividing public spaces into Muslim and non-Muslims domains, hoping the former would overwhelm the latter and by sheer brute force of the state, a kind of Islamic state would be achieved in substance than in form.

The second school of thought are those Islamists who are willing to play the long game. They understand that the social and political landscape has gone through rapid changes during the long Umno watch.

They understand that demography is destiny, especially when the state has no interests in safeguarding secular democratic values. They understand that non-Muslims are losing the demographics game and will eventually be overrun by a Muslim polity, which would eventually lose its diversity because of the chokehold of a state-sanctioned Islam.

For instance, when I was arguing that Muslim unity was detrimental to the Malay community, I actually had to point out that contrary to what Global Movement of Moderates (GMM) chief executive officer Nasharudin Mat Isa said - that the reason young men in the “Arab world” turned to terrorism which destroyed their country was because of disunity.

The reason I argued was - “They fall because their rulers use Islam as a weapon against their population, repressing them while the elites of these regimes lead decadent lifestyles and live in a world far removed from the poverty of their brethren. These regimes fall because they failed to embrace secular democratic principles and brainwashed their population into believing that Islam was the panacea for all that ailed them.”

Do not act worried about radical Islamic dogma infecting Malay youths when the very basis of their identity is wrapped around the pillars of racial and religious superiority. Do not act surprised that a dogma that promulgates the meme that every other human being, including Muslims, is fair game when it comes to achieving Islamic statehood, though violence is attractive to certain youths when the same ideas could be discovered in the way how the state carries out its agenda against Muslims and non-Muslims.

When you:

1) Vilify political opponents as anti-Islam.

2) Persecute other Muslims and label them deviant.

3) Carry out propaganda programmes that claim that the Malay/Muslim community is under siege from religious and economic agendas supported by non-Muslim Malaysians.

4) Maintain that by virtue of race, you are superior to other Malaysians.

When you do all of the above in an effort to define what it means to be “Malay”, then do not act surprised that young Malays gravitate to similar ideologies that make them the centre of the universe, and violence an acceptable means to achieve hegemony.

Tomorrow: Who is afraid of an Islamic state?

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (RTD) of the Royal Malaysian Navy.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.