Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Read online

  With acute political instincts, Dr. Mahathir spotted the domestic effects of the international Islamic awakening before most others, and planned to engage and reshape it with Anwar's help. Nevertheless, he significantly underestimated the extent to which Malaysian Islam would be "Arabized" and come under Salafi influences from the Middle East.[29] As a member of UMNO's Supreme Council in the early 1970s, Dr. Mahathir had tabled a paper warning of a growing Islamization among Malays, but party seniors dismissed his concern because he was not a religious expert.[30] UMNO and the government were content to keep responding piecemeal to the proliferating and diverse dakwah groups, whose aspirations varied from communal living and producing their own products, to forming a religious party and establishing an Islamic state. State governments set up educational foundations in rural areas to compete with ABIM, while the federal authorities launched a "dakwah month" in 1978 and opened Pusat Islam, in effect the government's own dakwah group, in 1980.[31] These official efforts were widely derided by UMNO's opponents as little more than token concessions meant to control and manipulate the growing Islamic consciousness.[32]

  Dr. Mahathir's co-option of Anwar soon after becoming prime minister was a masterstroke, because it not only took much of the steam out of ABIM but also deprived PAS of a valuable ally, regardless of whether he would have joined the opposition party. Most of all, it gave the government the services of arguably the most influential thinker on religion and politics outside the political parties.[33] It also strengthened Dr. Mahathir's "Islamic" image and enabled him to make a coordinated and comprehensive response to the dakwah phenomenon. He entered directly into Islamic competition with PAS, choosing consciously to fight Islam with more Islam, which had the predictable effect of intensifying Islamization in Malaysia.[34]

  At the 1982 UMNO General Assembly, Dr. Mahathir declared that "the biggest struggle...[is] to change the attitude of the Malays in line with the requirements of Islam in this modern age...UMNO's task now is to enhance the Islamic practices and ensure that the Malay community truly adheres to Islamic teachings".[35] The government banned the import of non-halal beef, prohibited Muslims from entering the country's only casino at Genting Highlands and introduced compulsory courses on Islamic civilization at universities. Under a slogan of "Inculcation of Islamic Values", the government also promoted in the civil service such virtues as justice, honesty, dedication, diligence and self-discipline, which had the added attraction of being universal human values.

  Systematically, the government set up a series of Islamic institutions. An Islamic bank, which treated earnings as profits and not interest to conform to Islamic principles, opened in 1983. Catering mostly to rural Malays, it was offered as an addition to Malaysia's commercial banking system. An International Islamic University, co-sponsored by the multinational Organization of the Islamic Conference, aspired to be the Malaysian counterpart of Egypt's renowned Al Azhar University. It began teaching in 1983 with an international faculty and student body. There followed an Islamic insurance agency, a sharia advisory council for the Securities Commission and Islamic unit trusts for Muslim investors. The overtly political Institute for Islamic Understanding, known by its Malay acronym as IKIM, opened in 1992, with one of its main tasks to channel the ongoing Islamic revival along state-defined lines.[36]

  Dr. Mahathir had no patience with ikhtilaf the tradition of scholarly disagreements and varieties of opinion in interpreting Islam.[37] He complained that while Muslims endlessly debated "the minutiae of our religion", Islamic countries were unable to cope with change and were dominated by others.[38] Anyway, he argued, all those options confused Malays without specialized knowledge of religion, leading them to make unwise choices that were "dangerous to the individual and to society".[39] Consistent with his idea of strong leadership, he proceeded to make the interpretation himself.[40]

  Bold and driven as ever, Dr. Mahathir deployed an abiding pragmatism to accompany his deep conviction of what was necessary to develop Malaysia. As political scientist Khoo Boo Teik put it, Dr. Mahathir was not concerned with offering startling premises on Islam, or in seeking a systematic engagement with the principal debates sweeping Islamic communities worldwide. He was a Muslim politician "who, in surveying the world of Islam, thought he had important insights into the contemporary Muslim condition, its failings, and what is more, its much-needed correctives".[41]

  The Mahathir administration's "correct" Islam was a close reflection of the prime minister's personal and political philosophy outlined years earlier. Essentially an interpretation of an Islamic value system, it specified what the religion did or did not encourage, what it prohibited and what it allowed. Islam was intimately linked to the government's development goals, specifically the NEP and Dr. Mahathir's declared objective of making Malaysia a fully developed nation by 2020. It was a modern Islam, progressive and open to foreign investment and technology, and prepared to learn from the West.[42]

  The core message, that there is no conflict between Islamic values and Malaysian-style capitalism, development and prosperity, was conveyed in speeches by cabinet ministers and leading government officials.[43] IKIM, the institute responsible for promoting an understanding of Islam as defined by the Mahathir administration, churned out books and articles making the point. One such article, directed at pious Muslims concerned about usury or interest, said that the basic aim in business "is to make profits, and making profits is nothing negative religiously".[44] In another publication, a writer claimed Islamic endorsement for the government's mega-projects, such as the Petronas Twin Towers, the new Putrajaya administrative capital and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.[45]

  Waging war against narrow-minded Islam, Dr. Mahathir lectured Malays with logic and commonsense. He said a Muslim who blamed fate when it was within his capacity to change his lot lacked faith in the justice of Allah. "Those with mouths but do not eat or drink will die," he said. "Death, when it comes, will be fate, but if the person had food and drink and had the energy to live, then that too would have been fated."[46]

  In a celebrated case, Dr. Mahathir chastised a Muslim woman doctor who, loath to touch a male patient during diagnosis, prodded him with a pencil. In a letter to a local newspaper, Dr. Mahathir wrote, "The purpose of treatment is to restore the patient's health, not to protect the doctor from sin. This failure to give him sincere and proper examination is an act of cruelty, and cruelty is not part of the teachings of Islam...". If a doctor's faith were shaken by the conduct of his or her duty, Dr. Mahathir said, it would be better for the person not to be a doctor at all. But then there would be no Muslim doctors, a situation he suggested that might be "in dereliction of the Muslims' general obligation".[47]

  Dr. Mahathir was withering about Muslims who opted for empty rituals and cosmetic appearances, valuing form over substance. He poured scorn on Malays who adopted an uncritical attachment to lifestyles from the early days of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, rebuking those who claimed women with covered heads were more virtuous and Islamic than others. At the National University of Malaysia, he intervened to prevent the cancellation of a concert by a popular male singer after Muslim undergraduates opposed it, keen to avoid the appearance of "a victory for the external groups that were orchestrating the opposition".[48]

  Quite apart from the fact that Dr. Mahathir appropriated Islam for political purposes and to confer legitimacy on his administration,[49] his validation of a singular approach to the religion was bound to be controversial. For a start, as Patricia Martinez, a non-Muslim Malaysian expert in Islam, pointed out, Dr. Mahathir did not follow traditional Islamic scholarly practice of invoking sources from tafsir, the formal discipline of Qur'anic interpretation.[50] He and his administration, "even the regular columns by government institutions", defined Islam largely through literal interpretations, the approach usually adopted by fundamentalists.

  But just as he had little use for theological interpretations of Islam,[51] Dr. Mahathir conceded not an inch to the theolo
gians and other intellectuals trained in Islam who objected to his pronouncements. Indeed, he willingly confronted the ulama, specialists highly educated about Islam, upon whom usually rested the task of interpreting the Qur'an and the Hadith, the account of the words and deeds of the Prophet.[52] Criticized by some ulama for venturing into their territory without the necessary academic credentials, Dr. Mahathir called them arrogant and ignorant, even if they had yards of paper qualifications. "Religion should bring success to its people, but what is being constantly hammered home to Muslims is happiness in the hereafter," he said. "And these interpreters of religion are the cause of backwardness and ignorance in Muslim society."[53]

  Dr. Mahathir linked his disdain for ulama critics to one of his favourite refrains, that what ailed Islam across the ages was bad leadership that abused the power to define the religion for followers.[54] An example he cited was a small group in Egypt, claiming to be following the only true teachings of Islam, who incited rebellion against the government when it was facing threats from Israel, knowing that if they were successful it would result in victory for the Israelis. "Thus something manifestly bad can be interpreted as being good by Muslims when they have a leader who deviates from the norm," he said.[55]

  In assuming the power to define, to impose his norm, Dr. Mahathir drew a line that was as much political as religious. With UMNO positioning itself as moderate and responsible, the ruling party freely assigned the label of extremism to its political opponents, including PAS and any religious movements expressing a dissenting Islamic interpretation.[56] The government banned dozens of books and leaflets judged contrary to Islam, and refused to allow Shi'a Muslims to practise openly, regarding their teachings as deviant.[57] It also allocated RM40 million to build two Islamic faith rehabilitation centres, which were "urgently needed" by the mid-1990s.[58]

  While Dr. Mahathir preferred to persuade, cajole and implore to enforce the official interpretation of Islam, he did not hesitate to threaten or use coercion when deemed necessary. Some leading UMNO politicians were even more heavy-handed.[59] A deputy minister said the Internal Security Act, which provides for indefinite detention without trial, would be used against persons promoting religious fanaticism among Muslims. He identified several PAS chiefs allegedly guilty of it, among them Kelantan Chief Minister Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, who served as the party's spiritual adviser.[60]

  For its part, PAS proved more than a willing participant in what turned out to be one of the nastiest features of Dr. Mahathir's tenure, a conflict with UMNO over Islam that tore apart the Malay heartland. Known as kafir-mengkafir, accusations of apostasy, it describes the fury of mutual condemnation. After an internal upheaval in which the so-called ulama faction took over in 1982 and established a supreme council of 12 religious scholars, PAS presented itself as the only true Islamic political party in the country. Leaders resorted to takfir, "the ultimate polemic in Muslim politics", by calling UMNO politicians not only infidels but apostates, persons who have abandoned their faith.[61] A journalist who visited rural communities in Trengganu, Kelantan and Kedah found PAS propagating "an extremist ideology of hate", which led to separate prayer services and burial grounds, boycotts of feasts and even family break-ups.[62] As government attempts to curb "extremism" increasingly involved questions of religious authority and the toleration of divergent views, the two sides engaged in recurrent cycles of abuse, slander and hate-mongering, all in the name of godliness.

  The government outlawed several Islamic groups after branding them deviant, though the circumstances served as a reminder that politics informed the definition of deviancy. In 1985, 18 people died, including four members of a police raiding party, as they attempted to arrest a PAS Islamic preacher named Ibrahim Libya, who had established a following in the remote village of Memali, Kedah. Tough action was also taken against the Al-Ma'unah cult, 15 of whose members attacked two army camps in Perak in 2000, seizing weapons and taking hostages, two of whom were later murdered. Government officials linked PAS to both groups, though many Malays believed otherwise, convinced that security forces mishandled the incidents or were implicated in them.[63]

  Even more suspect was the crushing of the passive Darul Arqam in 1994, a full 26 years after it was founded by a charismatic religious teacher, Ashaari Muhammed. The movement followed a traditionalist approach to Islam, with members eating Arab-style, the men wearing green robes and turbans and the women in purdah most of the time. Followers established self-contained communes with houses, mosques, schools, clinics and vegetable plots, their factories producing items for sale in their own shops. Nation-wide, Darul Arqam ran 250 kindergartens and grade schools, and operated enterprises spanning food processing and property to textiles and health services, with assets of about RM300 million.[64] In the years before it was banned, the government quietly cleared the way for the group to expand to counter PAS.[65] When the National Fatwa Council, a government body, declared Darul Arqam a deviant Islamic sect, its leaders were detained under the Internal Security Act for allegedly endangering national security. They were not charged with sharia violations. In the absence of any evidence to support a host of fuzzy accusations, including one that the organization was training a military wing in Thailand to wage war on the Malaysian government, analysts concluded that the reasons for the ban lay elsewhere. With a membership of tens of thousands and attracting upwardly mobile and professional Malays, not to mention founding a dynamic business conglomerate without NEP patronage, Darul Arqam presented essentially a political challenge to the government. Ashaari's claim, that he was more popular than Dr. Mahathir and would one day lead the country, could not be ignored.[66]

  The export version of what sometimes was called the Malaysian model of Islam sold well in other Islamic countries.[67] What Dr. Mahathir devised for Malaysian Muslims, welding Islam with modernity, he essentially prescribed for the worldwide umma, the community of believers. At the same time, however, steps were taken to ensure that the many progressive Islamic books and articles being produced in Indonesia since the 1970s were not circulated widely in Malaysia. Leading Indonesian Islamic intellectuals, such as Nurcholish Majid, might have enjoyed good personal relations with figures as senior as Anwar Ibrahim, but their innovative ideas were regarded as too controversial for Malaysia.[68] In regular visits and speeches abroad, Dr. Mahathir said that if historically Islam had rescued the world from the Dark Ages and set it on course for modern civilization, Muslim society currently faced an aimless future. And while it was possible to see the hand of Islam's foes at work, the fault lay primarily with Muslims themselves. It was the same old problem of Muslims interpreting Islamic teachings "so that the bounties of Allah fall beyond our reach". Identifying with the major Islamic issues of the time, Dr. Mahathir used them as case studies to drive home his points. The plight of the Palestinians and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan showed "how frequently Muslim countries fall into the hands of non-Muslim enemies because of the weakness or incompetence of Muslims". As for the Iran-Iraq war, it was tragic proof that in the Middle East more Muslims were killed by Muslims than by their infidel enemies. Dr. Mahathir said violence had achieved nothing for Muslims, and their governments should be funding education rather than buying arms.[69] He urged them to embrace science and technology and build dynamic societies equal to the best in the West. The way for Muslims to regain respect was to seek knowledge, work hard, be thrifty, acquire wealth and achieve economic progress.

  From the periphery of Islam in Southeast Asia, Dr. Mahathir expressed an unpalatable critique that nevertheless resonated in the Middle East, the traditional heartland of Islamic teaching and political thought. Representing a successful and independent-minded Muslim country that sparkled in contrast with most economically and intellectually stagnant Arab states, he was heard with respect, garnering immense prestige for Malaysia. On the ground, he had name recognition. Abdul Rahman Aziz, an academic in Mecca for the hajj in 2005, was stopped at the Great Mosque's King Fahd Gate by a fellow pilgrim, a p
rovincial court judge from Pakistan, who wanted to know if he was a Malaysian. When Abdul Rahman confirmed it, the judge gushed, "Please send my regards to Dr. Mahathir. Tell him he is a great Muslim leader and will go straight to jannah," heaven.[70] No other Muslim with pretensions to leadership had the courage and credibility to "tell it like it is". As Patricia Martinez remarked, "In his pragmatic understanding of — and agenda for — Islam and its umma, Mahathir was the best contemporary leader in the Muslim world."[71]

  At the same time, Dr. Mahathir's international acclaim had an important domestic dimension. By focusing on Islamic trouble spots, he was able to contrast their problems with the success of his own government's Islamic policies. The implied warning, which he sometimes made explicit, was that if local Muslims did not unite and instead fell prey to different doctrines, they might end up like Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan or Azerbaijan, subjugated by their enemies. Translated, that meant support the government and reject PAS. Above all, "Mahathir's acquired status of an Islamic statesman" contributed significantly to "the propagation of his version of 'modern' Islam at home".[72]

  Still, the risks involved in Dr. Mahathir's Islamization programme in Malaysia were considerable. While he hoped to blunt PAS's appeal for the establishment of an Islamic state, which to all non-Muslims and a reasonable number of Muslims collided with the notion of a modern democracy, the conflict with PAS pushed Malaysia in a more conservative direction. In trying to match PAS, Dr. Mahathir made one concession after another, not just inflating and prolonging the Islamic resurgence but allowing it to move in dangerously illiberal directions, in ways that ultimately were completely at odds with the process of modernization and intellectual growth that Dr. Mahathir was seeking to promote.[73] In 1988, he amended the Constitution to raise the sharia courts to "co-equal" status with the civil law courts, which was to prove his "most fateful, yet ill-advised, innovation".[74] Henceforth, sharia court decisions, in their own area of jurisdiction, could not be appealed — and thus reversed — by any action in a civil court. The incessant UMNO-PAS contest raised expectations among some Muslims that the government would soon eradicate "all those values which were regarded as un-Islamic", leading to a more religious and puritanical order. Conservatives demanded the closure of nightclubs and discos, and attacked state-owned Radio Television Malaysia and UMNO-owned TV3 over their Western-oriented programmes and commercials.[75] The danger was that Dr. Mahathir would take one step too far and be unable to stop.