Part 3 of 3

In the same year that Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Gaafar Nimeiri of Sudan launched their nationwide crackdowns on the Islamists in their countries, the Malaysian government found itself having to deal with the first major violent clash with the Islamist opposition that took place in the village of Memali. PAS in turn was about to lose one of its most vocal and charismatic leaders and receive its first popular martyr in the bargain.

Ustaz Ibrahim Mahmood was a well-known ulama in Kedah who had studied at various madrasah (religious schools) and seminaries in India as well as the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt. He had also studied at the University of Tripoli. (Hence his nickname 'Ibrahim Libya'.) Upon his return to Malaysia, Ustaz Ibrahim first worked as an official in the dakwah department of the Pusat Islam that was based in Kuala Lumpur. During his time at the Pusat Islam, he was expected to help justify and rationalise many of the government's policies with regards to Islam and Muslim concerns in the country.

One of the tasks assigned to him was to approach the young Abim leader Anwar Ibrahim who was put under detention at the Kamunting detention camp in 1974 and to persuade Anwar to support the Umno-led government. The encounter was a fateful one, for it was Anwar who turned the tables on the ustaz and accused him of collaborating with the dominant ruling party. (1)

Following this decisive encounter with Anwar, Ustaz Ibrahim grew more determined to propagate his own understanding of Islam that was not entirely compatible with the official interpretation of Pusat Islam's. He decided to quit the capital and return to his village of Charok Puteh. Back in his village Ustaz Ibrahim opened his own school, the Madrasah Islahiah Diniyyah.

He also began to serve as an active member of PAS and the Dewan Pemuda PAS Kedah in particular. In time he gained a large following and his madrasah became a centre for Islamic teaching as well as political activities. The ustaz was invited to speak on Islamic matters on national television, and he engaged in numerous discussions with the ulama and religious functionaries of the state as well.

However his own defence of Islamist politics was soon articulated through an oppositional dialectics which drew a dividing line between 'authentic' Muslims and the inauthentic Islam of the munafikin (hypocrites).

When Anwar Ibrahim joined the Umno party in 1982, Ustaz Ibrahim was one of the PAS ulama who criticised him the most for his betrayal of the Islamist cause. Apart from his personal attacks on Anwar, Ibrahim Libya's controversial ideas regarding the need to create an Islamic state via revolutionary means caused the authorities to voice their concern about him. In time, this led to him being branded a 'deviationist' thinker by the state religious authorities. The Majlis Fatwa Kebangsaan (National Fatwa Council) which came under the Islamic Centre of the Prime Minister's department finally issued a fatwa against his teachings. Efforts were then made to control his activities.

In November 1985 the government responded to Ustaz Ibrahim's open defiance with the use of force. While the Dr Mahathir was abroad on a visit to China, then deputy prime minister Musa Hitam was given responsibility for the task. Malaysian security services were ordered to arrest the ustaz and his followers.

On Nov 19, the village of Memali was surrounded by state security forces which included both the army and the police. Eyewitness reports claim that nearly 4,000 security and armed forces personnel were present, along with armoured cars and trucks. Shortly after the ustaz had delivered his morning lecture ( kuliah subuh ) at the madrasah , the troops were ordered to move in. Ustaz Ibrahim and his followers resisted their entry with force, and the troops opened fire. In the course of the fighting, Ustaz Ibrahim was killed along with 14 of his followers. The ustaz was shot down by members of the Unit Tindakan Khas (UTK- Special Forces Unit). (2)

The killings at Memali came as a shock to the whole country. Although the Memali incident was pale in comparison to violence and atrocities meted out against Islamists elsewhere in the world at the time it was, nonetheless an unprecedented event in Malaysian history. This was the first time that the Malaysian government had used such force against the Islamic opposition in the country which led to so many deaths.

In the face of criticism from both the Islamist opposition and human rights organisations in the country, the government defended the actions of the security forces by insisting that those who resisted were armed religious fanatics and extremists who were prepared to fight to the death for their ustaz . Once again, Anwar Ibrahim was the one who was relied upon to give the government the Islamist credentials it badly needed.

The leadership of PAS was swift to respond to the government's depiction of events at Memali. The leaders of PAS exploited the event to the full, taking it as proof that the government of Dr Mahathir was fundamentally opposed to Islam and the success of Islamist movements in the country.

Ustaz Ibrahim and his followers were described by PAS as martyrs ( syuhada ) who had died for the struggle of Islam against a kufr government led by the mustakbirin elite of Umno. PAS condemned the Umno-led government in toto, including Anwar Ibrahim who was a member of the cabinet at the time. (3)

The nadir of the Islamists

PAS prepared itself for the general elections of August 1986 with confidence. The confrontation against the Umno-led government had cost it dearly, but it had also gained the Islamists recognition at home and abroad, as well as a considerable degree of sympathy from the Malaysian public.

PAS's arch-rival Umno also seemed to be in dire straits of its own: Earlier in the year Umno's '2-M' leadership had split apart when then deputy prime minister Musa Hitam had resigned from his post on Feb 26. Apart from having to cope with internal leadership problems within Umno, the Umno-led government was also forced to deal with an increasingly hostile public that was frustrated by the government's inability to steer the country out of its first post-independence recession.

But what Yusuf Rawa and the leaders of PAS had not counted upon was the tenacity of the Umno party's machinery and its determination to stay in power. The other factor that was left out of the equation was Umno's ultimate weapon against PAS: Anwar Ibrahim.

PAS suffered the worst political defeat in its entire history at the 1986 elections. In the end PAS's belated efforts to improve its reputation and tone down its militant image came to naught. Thanks to the devastating media campaign that had been directed against PAS by the state-controlled and Barisan-owned media in the country, PAS was thoroughly defeated. The party managed to win only one parliamentary seat in Kelantan in the constituency of Pengkalan Chepa, then held by Ustaz Nik Abdullah Arshad (also known as Pak Nik Lah). PAS's share of the vote was 15.3% and its share of parliamentary seats dropped to 0.6%, its lowest ever.

It cannot be denied that PAS's catastrophic defeat at the polls in 1986 was due to the fact that Umno was able to present the public with its own vision of 'progressive Islam' that was embodied in the personality of Anwar. Though Anwar himself was once closely linked to PAS (see part 1), it was he who effectively served as Umno's 'hammer against PAS' during the pre-election campaign of 1986. On top of that PAS was also hampered by the antics of some its members that went a tad too far by Malaysian standards. (4)

In the years that followed, the conflict between PAS and Umno would intensify even further. The 1987 nationwide crackdown codenamed Operation Lalang would lead to the arrest and detention of a number of Islamist leaders. During Operation Kenari (1988) that was centred around the conflict over the PAS seminary Muassasah Darul 'Ulum, even more PAS members would be rounded up. (5)

Yet the Umno-led government was able to weather the storm of protests for the simple reason that the combined leadership of Dr Mahathir and Anwar was able to give the Malaysian public something that none of the other Islamist movements in the country could offer: a tangible example of modern progressive Islam at work.

The peak of this working partnership came during the nationwide crackdown on the neo-Sufi Islamist movement Darul Arqam that was led by Ustaz Ashaari Mohammad in 1994. The state's decision to totally obliterate this popular urban-based Islamist movement could not have succeeded were it not for the fact that Anwar was one of the main architects behind the affair.

While human rights groups and NGOs both within and without the country condemned the Malaysian government for its merciless (and highly efficient) elimination of the movement, it was Anwar that gave the whole affair the Islamist gloss that it desperately needed. Anwar justified the attack on Al-Arqam on the grounds that it was a deviationist and fundamentalist movement that promoted reactionary ideas towards women and non-Muslims.

He also claimed that the movement marked a return to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam (which it did) and which would effectively take the Malay-Muslims back to the dark days of the past if it was allowed to thrive and prosper in the country.

The spell is broken

If Malaysia was able to develop and prosper at such an unprecedented rate in the 1980s and 1990s it was partly due to the fact that the country was spared the ravages of civil conflict and sectarian bloodshed. Sadly the same could not be said of many (if not all) of the other countries in the Muslim world then.

But this was due in part to the working relationship between two men who were at the same time very much similar and yet totally different from each other. While both Dr Mahathir and Anwar Ibrahim held clearcut views of what sort of country they wished Malaysia to be, it is hard to say just how close (or far apart) their visions were. Had it not been for that great unpredicted variable - the 1997 economic and financial crisis that shook apart the foundations of all the countries of East Asia - the history of Malaysia may have taken a different turn altogether.

In the end, the differences between the two men came out in the open in a clumsy, ill-organised and ill-conceived leadership challenge that took place during the Umno general assembly of 1998. The rest of the story is history by now: Anwar's subsequent expulsion from the government and the Umno party, his arrest and detention, his assault at the hands of the head of the Malaysian police and the trials that followed have all broken the magic spell that once kept the Umno narrative going.

(It is ironic to note that when Anwar was apprehended at gunpoint, the unit that was given the responsibility for the task was the Unit Tindakan Khas (UTK) - the very same unit that was responsible for the killing of Ibrahim Libya, whose life was touched and changed forever through his meeting with Anwar years before.)

After the split between Dr Mahathir and Anwar, the supporters of both men were quick to redraw the political boundaries between the two. Dr Mahathir's supporters claim that he was betrayed by his own protege while Anwar's supporters claim that he was the victim of a high-level conspiracy. But all of them seem to have forgotten the fact that both these men were intimately linked together and that the success of each depended on the other.

Dr Mahathir's ambitious plan to redefine the meaning of Islam in the light of present-day realities would not have succeeded without Anwar providing him the Islamist voice he so badly needed. Anwar's own rise to power was likewise dependent on the goodwill of the man who gave him the ladder to reach the international political scene.

Those who claim that Anwar was untainted despite his long sojourn in Umno should also look back to the days when Anwar was very much part of Umno's political culture: his role in events leading to the 1987 political crisis and his own political manoeuvres during the 1993 campaign to oust the then-deputy prime minister Ghafar Baba, come to mind.

Umno has now lost the one man who gave it the Islamist credentials that it badly needed (and still does). While many of Anwar's supporters now claim that his was the true (and only) voice of Islam within Umno all the time, what cannot be forgotten is the fact that Anwar was also the tool that was used to silence the other competing Islamist voices in the country then.

Thanks to the intensification of the Islamisation programme that both Dr Mahathir and Anwar presided over, Islam has become the master signifier in Malay political discourse as well as the mainstream political discourse of the country as a whole. When Dr Mahathir and Anwar were working together at the helm of the state, there was still some hope that this religio-political discourse could be kept together and to prevent it from falling into the hands of religious fanatics and demagogues. That opportunity now seems to be lost forever.

Today we live in a country where the political boundaries between the government and the opposition has been drawn in moral and religious terms instead, with no one having enough charisma and scriptural authority to keep these forces in check. What the future holds remains an open question, but one thing is certain: the Mahathir-Anwar story has become one of the epics of everyday life that will live on in the annals of Malaysian history.

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

[#2] Part 2: An epic in the making[/#]

Endnotes:

(1) An account of this private encounter is found in C N Al-Afghani's "Rakyat Makin Mantang", Corak Memali, Memali, Kedah, 1998. Pp. 5-7.

(2) For an account of the killings at Memali and Charok Puteh seen through the eyes of those present including Mohamad Piah Yunus, see C N Al-Afghani, "Perisai Memali". 1997.

(3) Al-Afghani notes that ' Semasa peristiwa Memali November 1985, Anwar sudah berada dalam kabinet pemerintah, seorang menteri. Maka Anwar terlibat. Sungguhpun di tangannya tidak berlumuran dengan darah shuhada Memali, tetapi percikan darah itu tetap mengenai tubuh badannya. Anwar tetap bersubahat '. (Al-Afghani, 1998, pg 40).

(4) Apart from the scare tactics used against it, the tactics employed by PAS also alienated the party from some sections of the Malay-Muslim community. In Terengganu the party failed to win a single parliamentary seat and managed to keep only two of the seats in the Dewan Undangan Negeri. PAS's deplorable showing in the state was due in part to the antics of its own members there. Just two days before polling day errant groups of young PAS supporters held a premature 'victory drive' around the capital of Kuala Terengganu on their motorbikes.

The next day an even bigger drive was held with even more PAS members taking part. The move backfired seriously as local residents felt that the PAS members were too arrogant for their own good and counting their chickens before they hatched. Come polling day the party was effectively wiped out in the state: the only state assembly seats they managed to keep were at Rhu Rendang and Wakaf Mempelam that were held by Ustaz Abdul Hadi Awang and Mustafa Ali.

(5) For a full account of the whole Muassasah Darul 'Ulum affair and the principle characters involved, see: C N Al-Afghani, "Operasi Kenari: Suatu Hukuman Tampa Bicara". Penerbit Pemuda Press, Datuk Keramat, Kuala Lumpur, 1990.