Part 2 of 3

There were many roads that Malaysia could have travelled on in the 1980s. Looking back at the state of the Muslim world then, it is quite amazing to see how Malaysia managed to steer away from the path of civil conflict.

While the governments of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and others were forced to deal with the problem of an increasingly volatile public and a resurgent Islamic opposition, Malaysia was spared the trauma of violence and disintegration thanks to the working relationship between two of its most important and influential Muslim leaders: Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim.

There will, of course, be those who will claim that theirs was merely an instrumental coalition that was never destined to last. Others might say that while the concord between the two seemed to exist in public there were other moves being made in the background that prepared the way for the clash that was to come in the late 1990s. But whatever the case, the combination of these two men effectively prevented Malaysia from falling into the same basket of basket-cases that was the norm in other parts of the Muslim world.

Experiment with statist Islam

In the years to come we may well look back to the 1980s as a time when the country embarked on its most ambitious, and in the end, faulty, ideological project. For this was the time when the Malaysian government embarked on the state Islamisation programme in its bid to outflank its most powerful ideological nemesis, PAS.

Unlike the Islamophobic governments of many other Muslim countries, the Malaysian government under Dr Mahathir preferred to beat the Islamists at their own game. It has to be noted that throughout his political career Dr Mahathir had a different way of addressing the challenge posed by the Islamist opposition in his own country. He did not favour the confrontational approach of other leaders like Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba (1), the spectacular displays of piety by the likes of Nimeiri (2) or the vague conciliatory manoeuvres of Indonesia's Suharto (3).

Dr Mahathir directed the machinery of the state towards an Islamisation programme that was meant to eliminate the discrepancies between different sources of Islamic authority while out-doing the claims and promises of PAS and the other Islamist movements like Abim (Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement) in the country.

While other Muslim leaders had consciously tried to control the activities of Islamic centres and institutions of higher learning (Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak had clamped down on the activities of academics and students at al-Azhar while Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba went as far as closing down the famous az-Zaytounah university), Dr Mahathir did the opposite: he helped to launch even more Islamic universities, think tanks and research institutes as part of his effort to develop a new school of Islamic thought in Malaysia.

In 1983, the Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA- International Islamic University of Malaysia) was founded. The UIA project was announced after the prime minister's visit to the Arab Gulf states. Its initial funding came from Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Maldives, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Libya, Turkey and Egypt and the university's first president was the ex-Abim leader turned Umno politician, Anwar Ibrahim.

In the same year the Malaysian Islamic Bank (Bank Islam Malaysia) was launched by the government (on July 1, 1983). Bank Islam became the first bank in the country to offer regular banking services that were meant to be in accordance to Islamic restrictions and norms related to commerce. Despite the fact that the Islamic Bank was condemned as a cosmetic attempt to bolster the government's Islamic credentials by Islamist economists like Abdur Razzaq Lubis, other Islamic economic initiatives followed suit. (4)

Soon after the Islamic Insurance Company (Takaful) was launched as well as the Hajj Pilgrims Management Fund (Lembaga Urusan Tabung Haji, LUTH). By creating the UIA, Bank Islam, Takaful and LUTH it appeared as if Umno was the only party in the country that could keep its promises to the Malay-Muslim constituency.

Law of the land

By initiating its own Islamisation programme, the government of Dr Mahathir had effectively stolen a march from the Islamists of PAS. But PAS was quick to react to these policy initiatives by pointing out that some of the state-sponsored Islamic institutions were themselves deeply enmeshed within the local corporate culture and were directly involved in some decidedly dubious dealings.

For PAS no Islamisation programme could ever hope to succeed without the committed effort to make Islam the religion of state and Islamic law the supreme law of the land. The Umno-led government's Islamisation programme was therefore not without its critics. The government of Dr Mahathir was aware of the fact that by playing the Islamic card and upping the stakes in the Islamisation race it was bound to antagonise the other Islamist movements and parties in the country. For central to the conflicts and debates that were occurring all over the country was the question of the correct interpretation and practice of Islam: a factor which PAS still had in its favour.

By then the kafir-mengkafir (accusing Muslims as infidels) crisis had reached its peak and there were numerous reports of PAS and Umno members praying in separate congregations with separate imams (religious leader) in mosques all over the country.

Under Dr Mahathir the security apparatus of the Malaysian state had also grown to be more powerful. To foreclose any possibility of further doctrinal conflict in the area of religion and religious practice, the Umno-led government also began to empower the religious arm of the bureaucracy. In 1982 amendments were made to the penal and criminal code that would allow the state to take action against 'deviant' religious groups, 'cults' and alternative schools of Islamic thought that are regarded as being harmful to both the state and the Muslim community.

But the use of such state prerogatives could not, and did not, shield Umno and the ruling BN coalition from a host of political crises and scandals that followed in the years to come. The first constitutional crisis in 1983, the BMF scandal in 1984 and others effectively tarnished the image of the government and helped to discredit the new school of Islamic thought that it was trying to create.

The intensification of the PAS-Umno conflict led to a number of confrontations that marred the relations between the two parties even further. In time a number of PAS leaders were arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) on the grounds that their speeches and religious sermons were a threat to national security and racial harmony in the country.

Those arrested included Ustaz (religious teacher) Abu Bakar Chik, Ustaz Bunyamin Yaacob, Ustaz Latif Muhammad, Ustaz Ghazalli Hasbullah, Mahfuz Omar and Muhammad Sabu. The Kelantanese PAS leader Muhammad Sabu was detained because of his inflammatory speeches against Christian missionary groups that were active in the country and which he claimed had been trying to convert Malay-Muslims.

Another PAS leader who was meant to be detained, but managed to escape, was the outspoken Ustaz Ibrahim Mahmood (also known as Ibrahim Libya). Ustaz Mahmood's fate would be decided in the following year, with tragic consequences for all parties involved.

Crackdown

Cognisant of the fact that its crackdown on the Islamist opposition was bound to damage its own Islamic image and standing before the Malay-Muslim constituency, the Umno leadership attempted to bolster its own Islamic credentials by promoting the one Umno leader whose personal reputation for piety and Islamic knowledge could match that of any PAS leader's - Anwar Ibrahim.

Umno also promoted a number of political events that were related to wider Muslim concerns. One of the more successful ones was the visit of the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat to Malaysia in July 1984. (5)

But despite the government's efforts to project the image of Malaysian leadership in the Muslim world at large, the leaders of PAS remained unimpressed. Soon after PAS challenged Dr Mahathir and the leaders of Umno to come out into the open and take part in a televised debate over the question of which of the two parties was more Islamic.

Preparations were underway but at the last minute the debate was cancelled by royal decree on Nov 8, 1984. PAS leaders like Ustaz Yusuf Rawa and Tuan Guru (religious teacher) Nik Aziz attacked the leadership of Dr Mahathir and accused the Umno party of hypocrisy and cowardice. Public sentiment shifted in favour of PAS at the time, as many felt that the Islamist party's leaders were more sincere while the leaders of Umno had panicked at the last minute.

In the following year (1985) the political temperature in the country was raised even further after the 'Lubuk Merbau incident' where a number of ordinary PAS members were attacked by a group of thugs who broke up a PAS rally in the area. One of the PAS members, Abdul Rahim Talib, was killed during the attack. It was alleged by PAS leaders that the thugs were hired and sent by Umno members in the area.

This spiral of confrontation and violence reached its peak on Nov 19-20, 1985 during the Memali incident which took place at the village of Charok Puteh, near Baling, Kedah. The controversial figure of the PAS ulama (religious scholar), Ustaz Haji Ibrahim Mahmood (a.k.a Ibrahim Libya) was at the centre of the crisis.

[#1] Part 1: A phantom menace - the saga of two Jedi knights in KL[/#]

[#2]Part 3: Shot at sunrise[/#]

Endnotes:

(1) The Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba came to power as Tunisia's first elected leader after the country gained its independence on March 20, 1956. But Bourguiba's conduct while leading the country showed that he had a strong authoritarian streak in him. Bourguiba recognised the Socialist Party of Tunisia and attempted to form an instrumental alliance with the leftists in order to persecute those who supported the al-Ittijah al-Islami (Islamic Tendency Movement).

One of Bourguiba's main aims was to modernise Islam and turn it into a modern ideology that was compatible with development and capitalism. Bourguiba claimed that the Quran contained many contradictions and that it needed to be re-interpreted in the light of present-day realities. He issued a law which forbade the use of the hijab (veil) in public offices. He made French the official language of the political administration of the country, and he replaced the Islamic Shariah courts with civil courts instead. A great believer in economic development and material progress, Bourguiba laid great emphasis on the need to modernise the Tunisian economy at all costs.

(2) Gaafar Muhammad Nimeiri's own Islamisation programme that was launched in the early 1980s in Sudan involved some spectacular (and some might argue, counter-productive) displays of religiosity on the part of the leader and his government. In 1983, Nimeiri ordered US$11 million worth of alcohol be thrown into the river Nile, marking the end of alcohol consumption in the country. In the following year his government banned all forms of mixed western dancing in public. A number of people found guilty of doing so were in turn publicly flogged.

(3) In the same year (1983) that Malaysia began its Islamisation programme in earnest, President Suharto of Indonesia ordered all Indonesian political movements and organisations to adopt the vague, non-sectarian Pancasila principles as their basic foundational philosophy ( asas tunggal ). This was rejected by many Indonesian Islamist movements, but it was accepted by the Nahdatul Ulama which was then under the influence of NU moderates who wished to co-operate with the government. The NU made the Pancasila its asas tunggal , and declared that Islam was its aqidah (faith).

(4) For a critique of the Bank Islam project, see: Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, 'Tidak Islamnya Bank Islam'. PAID Network, Georgetown, Penang, 1985. Lubis condemned the Islamic banking project in Malaysia on the grounds that the bank did not and could not represent a radical challenge to the existing global banking system that was rooted in the practice of interest.

(5) The peak of Yasser Arafat's visit was his televised speech to an audience of thousands at the National Stadium in Kuala Lumpur where he spoke of the plight of the Palestinian people and the support of the Malaysian government for the Palestinian cause. The Umno-led government gained considerable mileage from his visit and the image of Dr Mahathir as a defender of Muslim interests in the international scene was boosted accordingly.