Are Muslims obsessed with human sexuality? Why do Muslim leaders and Islamist movements spend so much time and energy legislating laws and regulations regarding the most intimate workings of the human body? And why does the body feature so prominently in the discourse of Islamist politics?

These questions have been raised time and again by those who study the evolution of political Islam from the outside, and if we were to look at developments within the contemporary Muslim world today we might not be surprised by them.

The ruling that all Muslim women in the Malaysian state of Terengganu will have to wear a head scarf, dress "modestly" or face the prospect of a fine is old news by now.

Despite the fanfare and rhetoric that went into the package of Islamic reforms that was recently introduced by Abdul Hadi Awang in Terengganu, none of the policies were really novel or radical in any way. After all, the Islamic party had already introduced such measures 10 years earlier when it took control of Kelantan.

Following PAS's victory in Kelantan in 1990, the Murshid'ul Am (spiritual guide) of the Islamist party Nik Aziz Nik Mat became the first ulama in Malaysia to hold the position of chief minister.

As soon as he came to power, Nik Aziz introduced a package of radical reforms to the administration of the state. He announced that the legal system of the state would be changed to that of an Islamic one which was based on the syariah.

The new chief minister then stopped issuing gambling licences, prevented companies from using advertisements that displayed women in public, banned both modern and traditional cultural practices (like rock concerts, wayang kulit , mak yong and menora dances) that were regarded as un-Islamic, forbade public events (including religious ones like nasyid performances) where men and women could mix together and promoted the campaign for women to cover their bodies and to wear the tudung (head scarf).

The syariah bill proposed by the Islamist government introduced a host of punishments for a number of "sex crimes" which included zina (unlawful sexual intercourse), qazaf (wrongful accusation of zina ), al-li'an (wrongful accusation of zina by a husband against his wife), liwat ("unnatural sex" involving anal intercourse - i.e. sodomy), musahaqah ("unnatural sex" between women), ittiyan almaitah (necrophilia), ittiyan albahimah (bestiality) as well as syurb (intoxication or consumption of liquor) and irtidad or riddah (apostasy).

Despite the controversy that raged in the capital, the Islamists pressed on with their legal and social reforms, seemingly oblivious to the condemnation and criticism they were receiving from without.

By forcing through these controversial changes, PAS in the 1990s was showing that it was a party that was prepared to go all the way in its promise to radically reinvent the political terrain and political culture of the country while the conservative Malay leadership of Umno and the government were cast as perfidious and hypocritical "nominal" Muslims who were in reality "secular" Eurocentric compradores to Western interests.

The state's reaction was swift and equally spectacular. Knowing that its own Islamic credentials were under threat, the Malaysian government intensified its own Islamisation programme in other areas.

The latest instruments of surveillance were used to create a regime of policing where the bodies of Muslims were kept under control and "taught" to behave properly. Young Muslim couples were forced to take pre-marital religious courses so that they would become better Muslims once married.

In the streets close-circuit cameras spied on young couples holding hands and walking together. Youngsters who were caught in close proximity were fined. The state's own "moral police" were empowered to intervene directly into the lives of ordinary Muslims, to the point of forcing their way into the homes of people to check on their behaviour.

What is interesting to note is that many of PAS' and the government's reform policies were directed towards one area in particular: The policing of bodies, and women's bodies especially.

In both cases, the policing of bodies becomes the most visible means of policing the interior lives of Muslim subjects. This desire to reform society is in turn justified on a number of complex ideological and philosophical grounds.

The Islamist party's ideologues claim that the period before PAS came to power marked an "unnatural" intervention in the development of Malay-Muslim society, where the liberal-capitalist developmental paradigm introduced by the state had resulted in a breakdown of social values and moral standards in society: women were encouraged to work in factories and businesses (something which Kelantanese women have always done, by the way) and by so doing they had abandoned their "natural" duties as mothers and wives.

The traditional hierarchies of social power and patronage were broken; religious leaders and village elders were no longer respected, and the new group of arriviste entrepreneurs and business elite had taken over.

Like all Islamist parties and movements, PAS then began the task of reconstruction and reconstitution of law and order in society. This was done via a series of religiously-inspired social reforms that sought to reintroduce order and harmony in society.

The discursive conflict between the "decadent, corrupt" old order and the new order of the Islamists was fought out on a number of planes, and invariably the body of the Malay-Muslim woman was one of them.

In this respect, it must be noted that Islamist politics is not unique or different from any other ideology in the contemporary world. Practically every political movement with an ideological strand of its own has sought to identify the most appropriate recipient or target for its attention.

More often than not, women are regarded to be the most deserving for the simple reason that they are a visible (though often economically and politically weaker) constituency. Witness the so-called "liberal reforms" that were undertaken in East Europe in the wake of the Cold War, for instance.

As soon as the great Iron curtain was torn asunder, hordes of Western economists, political theorists, strategists and managers flooded the capitals of East Europe. They brought with them all kinds of miracle cures that they claimed would restore economic order and harmony to the East. They brought with them lots of American dollars as well, and promises of a better life as enjoyed by those in the "free world" next door.

One of the first signs of East Europe "opening itself up to the world" came in the form of beauty contests where the daughters of Stalin were encouraged to throw off their drab and dreary grey overalls and opt for bright and colourful bikinis instead. As they paraded themselves along the catwalk showing off their assets, the headlines in the newspapers and news reports in the West claimed: "East Europe is free at last!"

In the liberal-capitalist West, less seems best and women are "liberated" as soon as they begin to undress in public. While in the lands of the Islamists, more is morally better and women are "liberated" as soon as they cover up in public.

The differences may be cosmetic, but the underlying logic of the Islamists remains the same: at the heart of Islamist politics lies the idea that society needs to be redeemed and brought into harmony with nature once again.

The Islamists' obsession with social order and cohesion, which is more often than not expressed in terms of their perennial struggle against chaos and fragmentation ( fitnah and mihna ) in society, is underpinned by their own attempts to reconstitute (Islamic) law and order in society.

To cover up, to police one's dress, decorum and carriage in society, to eliminate the possibility of proximity and social scandal - these seem the paramount concerns of Islamism as a religio-political discourse that harbours its own notion of what is natural and right.

This preoccupation is easily understood when we look at the philosophical framework of Islamism itself. Being part of a Semitic tradition that is bound together by a number of foundational myths such as the Temptation and the Fall of Man, Islam's view of the world (like Christianity and Judaism) is a cautious one.

For the Islamists, chaos and strife constantly inhabit the interior life of society for the simple reason that sin and error have already been introduced to the world from the early days of creation itself. This explains their obsession with moral policing and enforcing good conduct among the people.

Ultimately, setting aside their party-political differences, the ulama of PAS and the state religious authorities share fundamental agreements over questions of dress, behaviour and moral conduct in society.

The ideal Islamic society they aim to create is one where each individual obeys the commandments of God both in his interior and exterior life. Only then can harmony be established and society protected from its constituents.

The perfect moral citizen-subject in the eyes of the Islamists is therefore more akin to the subject of Thomas Hobbes' Christian Commonwealth who is a domesticated subject rendered fit for society.

But in the final analysis, there are two points that need to be critically addressed:

The first is the underlying notion of "the natural order" itself, which is often used as the rationale and justification for all kinds of political projects be they religio-political or secular. Ideologues from all sides of the political spectrum have claimed that their own projects aim to restore some form of order to society.

More often than not, this sense of order is underpinned by an unstated assumption that the order being proposed is a natural (and thus commendable) one. After all, it would be difficult to imagine a political movement that hopes to put into place an unnatural order that goes against human nature.

But it must be remembered that all our notions of "nature" and what is "natural" are necessarily contingent, historically specific, culturally circumscribed and thus relative. Falling back on theological premises does not necessarily get one out of this problem. Nor would an appeal to universalism as so often made by the practitioners of religious politics.

In all such cases, the critical relativist might simply respond by pointing out that the truths of one religious discourse could be the falsehoods of another. Likewise universalism is also the inheritor of homogenising and hegemonising propensities that cannot be said to be open to all.

The second factor is that of the body itself, and the body of women in particular. Most (men-made) ideologies and philosophies invariably have something to say about the policing of bodies and women's bodies especially.

Be it secular liberal-capitalists who think that freedom lies in women taking their clothes off or religious activists who believe that the God has ordained that women should cover themselves completely and remove their physical presence from society as a whole, it is always the figure of the woman that ends up being inscribed as if it was a passive, blank surface to be filled with ideological meanings and values imposed by others.

The control of bodies, gender relations and sexuality have always been part and parcel of politics in general. Brought under regimes of care, policing and tutelage, human bodies and sexuality have never been accidental partners in the process of politics - they are key nodal points in a contested political and discursive terrain.

That is why bodies and sexuality cannot be separated from the ulama : the former invariably becomes the ideological goals and instruments of the latter, as there can be no better way to control the interior life of a human being than by gaining control of the body that contains it.