COMMENT | I hadn’t expected my book tour in Malaysia to end with a confrontation with men who identified themselves as police at a Kuala Lumpur airport.

I arrived in the Muslim-majority country in early January to promote the Malay translation of my book “Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment,” an academic analysis of the political and socioeconomic crises facing many Muslim societies today.

However, my visit attracted unwarranted attention. Some conservatives and Islamists labelled me on social media a “liberal” - a term used by Malaysia’s federal agency administering Islamic affairs to denote those against the official religion, Sunni Islam.

This was followed by...