Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Read online

  Dr. Mahathir's high-wire act was never more obvious than in 1992, when the PAS-dominated Kelantan government proposed the adoption of hudud, the Islamic criminal code that prescribes such punishments as amputation of the hand for theft, flogging for drinking alcohol and fornication, and stoning to death for adultery. UMNO voted for the hudud laws. Dr. Mahathir did not object to the concept of Islamic law, but attempted to brand the Kelantan legislation as a deviation from true Islam.[76] While subtly indicating that his government had no intention of introducing similar legislation, he said, "This does not mean that we reject the hudud. We only reject the interpretation and laws of Kelantan PAS, which are not compatible with the sharia."[77] Although legislated in the state in 1993, hudud could not be implemented without Parliament amending the Constitution.

  So anxious was Dr. Mahathir to avoid handing PAS a political advantage that he chose not to round up a group of Indonesian Islamic extremists, who were on the run from the Suharto regime and proselytizing in Malaysia. Among them was Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, a preacher from Central Java, who emerged as the head of a regional terrorist organization, Jemaah Islamyiah, with links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamyiah later carried out a series of bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines in which hundreds of people died. Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who fled to Malaysia in 1985, remained in the country until after Suharto fell in 1998. According to Leslie Lopez, a Malaysian journalist whose reports did much to expose the shadowy network, Malaysian authorities monitored the group for years, but had no idea it was plotting violence. Dr. Mahathir vetoed police plans to detain the radicals because he had little time for Suharto and did not want to play into PAS's hands, Lopez said.[78]

  As UMNO and PAS engaged in yet another round of what was dubbed holier-than-thou polemics, the distinction between them blurred: What were once considered extreme demands by PAS became government policy.[79] The battle also opened the way for a vast expansion and empowerment of the religious bureaucracies at state and federal level, all filled with graduates of conservative Middle Eastern institutions whose understanding of Islam was a good deal more reactionary and narrow than that of the prime minister.[80] State Islamic departments reached beyond supervising mosques and Islamic schools, collecting zakat, the wealth tax, and certifying those authorized to preach. They enforced Islamic law much more strictly with their own moral police, whose job it was to ensure Muslims observed regulations relating to fasting, decent attire and khalwat, close proximity between unrelated members of the opposite sex. The mufti, an official appointed by each state administration who usually sat as an ex officio member of the state Executive Council, emerged as a particularly powerful individual. As a jurist, he had the authority to issue a fatwa, a legal opinion with the force of law.[81]

  For several reasons, including historical tension between the center and states, the jostling for authority and control did not always follow party lines. Many of the ulama had studied in the Middle East together and shared the same deeply conservative opinions, whether employed by UMNO or PAS.[82] As Dr. Mahathir clashed with ulama in National Front-controlled states as well as PAS strongholds, the ranks of religious officialdom swelled inexorably, with functionaries devising new laws and restrictions that invaded the most private spaces of Muslim lives. Rather than contributing to the opening of the Muslim mind in Malaysia, the Islamization race actually restricted it even further.[83]

  Objecting to "the steady encroachment of a particularly rigid" form of Islam, Farish Noor, a Malay intellectual, complained that Muslims were forced to negotiate "a gamut of bureaucratic hurdles" to do the most basic things like getting married. Farish, a political scientist specializing in Islamist politics, described as "pathetic" his own three-day marriage class. All he learned was "the benefit of strawberry-flavoured condoms", while the religious teacher compared making love to playing football "in such a ridiculous way that I now understand how the Malaysian football team could lose to Laos nil-6".[84]

  Farish and a number of like-minded liberal Muslims paid dearly for having the temerity to challenge Islamic clerics and scholars. Accused by the Malaysian Ulama Association of "insulting Islam", they were verbally abused and threatened with rape and death. Their "living hell" ended when they eventually were able to explain themselves at public forums and in talks with state religious authorities.[85]

  Chinese and Indian Malaysians, the vast majority of whom are not Muslims, had their own complaints. In 1982, an Islamic consultative body proposed new regulations that would allow sharia courts to punish non-Muslims, as well as believers, in khalwat cases. The proposal was clearly in breach of the Constitution, which allows state governments to legislate on Islam only for Muslims. After non-Malays strongly protested, the mooted regulations were never implemented. In 1989, the Selangor government revised a law to permit, among other things, non-Muslim children to convert to Islam on reaching puberty. After behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Malaysian Chinese Association, UMNO's coalition ally, the offending provision was quietly withdrawn.[86]

  It was with his core Malay constituency, however, that Dr. Mahathir came unstuck. Their consciousness raised by years of immersion in narrow readings of Islam at odds with traditional Malay tolerance and creativity,[87] the Malays elevated Islam to the main marker of their identity, superseding language and custom, as defined in the Constitution. With economic progress an integral part of their Islamic lives, as hammered home in countless Dr. Mahathir harangues, many Malay-Muslims came to view critically the NEP and its successor policies. They were better educated and better off than their parents, with a nominally deeper commitment to the practice of Islam. While the country had experienced remarkable development, they could also see that the gains were not being distributed in a fair and reasonable manner. Indeed, Dr. Mahathir's objective of creating Malay millionaires by definition endorsed favouritism, if not cronyism, while financial scandals and massive corruption were endemic and seemingly tolerated. While the power and privilege of those in the upper echelons of a prosperous urban-industrial economy were reinforced, the poor and deprived struggled. In brief, the most basic principle of governance in Islam, social justice, was missing. As the Islam expert Patricia Martinez put it, "It is Islam that defines Malay identity and Islam that proscribes perceptions of wrong doing...".[88] Islam deployed as "catalyst and legitimacy" for the objectives of the Mahathir administration came home to roost as the "idiom and metaphor" for Malay disgruntlement.[89]

  A contributing factor was the alternative example provided by PAS, which expanded its membership and branch network with a limited budget and sheer hard work. Attracting little publicity or praise in the mainstream press, the party built a grassroots organization with individual donations and mass support on the back of volunteers willing to contribute without monetary reward.[90] In stark contrast with UMNO luminaries, PAS's ulama leaders for the most part led exemplary lives, free of ostentation and the hint of corruption.[91] Nik Abdul Aziz, the Kelantan PAS boss accused by the government of spreading religious fanaticism, set the tone. After being elected chief minister in 1990, he eschewed the grand official residence and continued to live in the humble wooden house in which he was born, ten kilometres outside the state capital, Kota Bharu.[92]

  For large numbers of Malay-Muslims, the dramatic sacking of Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, after a year of financial and economic turmoil, confirmed their judgment that the Mahathir administration was degenerate. Anwar, the second-most powerful politician in the nation and the one providing UMNO with its Islamic ballast, was denounced as both a womanizer and a gay. Dismissed as deputy prime minister and finance minister and stripped of his UMNO deputy presidency and party membership on successive days, he was in the dock a few weeks later being prosecuted as a common criminal. It was all too sudden and shocking. Moreover, it was unbelievable.

  Even less acceptable in Malay culture was the way Anwar was shamed and humiliated. Arrested at his home by balaclava
-clad, M-16 wielding police special forces who broke down an open door, he was held under the Internal Security Act for allegedly endangering public security. Bashed in custody by Malaysia's police chief, he was left untreated for days and without access to a lawyer or his family. When he appeared in court with a black eye nearly closed, his face bruised and puffy, Dr. Mahathir suggested Anwar may have inflicted the wounds himself to gain sympathy. The government's defensive response to Anwar's later physical deterioration in jail, together with reports showing a high level of arsenic in his blood, indicated little apparent concern for his physical safety. Anwar's chances of getting a fair trial — he was initially charged with five counts of corruption and five of sodomy — receded as Dr. Mahathir repeatedly declared, in disregard of court warnings, that Anwar was a homosexual and an adulterer.[93]

  As the Malay community split into two mutually antagonistic and irreconcilable camps, members left UMNO in droves for the only logical alternative, PAS, among them many young, middle-class professionals. PAS offices worked around the clock, signing up 15,000 new members a month at the height of the stampede. Smaller numbers joined the National Justice Party, a multi-ethnic grouping formed much later by Anwar's wife. As if Anwar's incarceration was not enough, the arrest of many of his supporters, sometimes in mosques, left the government's Islamic image in tatters. To his many detractors, Dr. Mahathir was identified with everything un-Islamic in Malaysia. Farish Noor, the academic-commentator, wrote that "whatever the man says — even if he claims that two plus two equals four — is now dismissed as the words of the great Mahazalim, who is cruel, tyrannical and unjust...the charm of the old spell has been broken".[94] The minimum standards of respect, which had remained intact through the most bitter political clashes in the past, collapsed. Dr. Mahathir was pelted with used paper drinking cups by Anwar supporters as he left the UMNO Supreme Council meeting that expelled Anwar, and Malaysia's foremost novelist, Shahnon Ahmad, directed a political satire at the prime minister. It was simply titled Shit, and it became a best seller.

  Anwar's treatment dominated the dirtiest election campaign in Malaysian history, held in late 1999 after another year of high drama and confrontational politics. Dr. Mahathir prepared for the poll on 29 November by relinquishing the finance and home affairs portfolios, appointing Abdullah Badawi deputy prime minister and reshuffling his Cabinet. The ruling National Front faced a coalition of major opposition parties that for the first time was pledged to a common reform platform. Four parties — PAS, the Democratic Action Party, the National Justice Party and the small socialist People's Party of Malaysia — formed the Alternative Front. They named Anwar, who at that time had been sentenced to six years imprisonment for corruption and faced further charges in a legally disputed trial, as their leader.

  Apart from the government's alleged cruelty, symbolized by ubiquitous posters of Anwar and his black eye, issues that figured prominently were those highlighted by the Reformasi movement that emerged with the Asian economic crisis in 1997 — corruption, economic mismanagement, injustice and lack of transparency and accountability. Islam was also a factor, the prime minister having defined his deputy's dismissal with the statement, "I am a better Muslim than Anwar is."[95] As if to underline the point, Dr. Mahathir and several close associates went on the hajj to Mecca early in the year. PAS's goal of an Islamic state was not included in the manifesto of the Alternative Front, which campaigned generally for vastly improved democratic governance.

  Although the government retained a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives, regarded as a necessary minimum, UMNO suffered the worst electoral setback since the first post-independence election in 1959. Its parliamentary representation collapsed from 94 seats to 72, with four ministers and five deputy ministers being defeated. In his constituency, Dr. Mahathir's majority fell from 17,226 to 10,138. Overall, more than half the Malay vote went to the opposition. PAS retained power in Kelantan and took control of Trengganu for the first time since 1959. Holding 27 of the 45 non-government seats in Parliament, PAS assumed the leadership of the opposition from the Democratic Action Party.[96]

  It seemed obvious that UMNO needed to change its policies and address demands for reform in order to rescue the party's claim to majority Malay support. Anecdotal evidence, supported by subsequent interviews, confirmed that UMNO was identified with gross abuse of power. For example, the majority of Muslims interviewed in Trengganu who voted for PAS said they cast their ballots in anger and frustration: Like their non-Muslim counterparts, they regarded the National Front state government as thoroughly corrupt. They did not vote for PAS because they wanted to live in an Islamic state.[97] Dr. Mahathir claimed otherwise. He insisted UMNO's reversal was due to Anwar and allies spreading lies, Malay ingratitude and PAS's bribery in promising a passage to heaven for its followers.[98] Rather than admit to a deficient performance that might warrant a mea culpa over Anwar and a wide policy front, Dr. Mahathir embarked on what he portrayed as a renewed mission to thoroughly Islamize the party, the government and the nation.[99]

  Although popular sentiment clearly favoured good governance, PAS sometimes acted as if it had received an endorsement of its Islamic state agenda. After party leaders continued to restate their intention to create a juridical Islamic state if they obtained power at the federal level, the Democratic Action Party withdrew from the opposition coalition, effectively dismantling the Alternative Front. At the state level, PAS demonstrated its commitment by trying to impose the kharaj, land tax, on non-Muslims in Trengganu, the scene of its latest electoral triumph.[100] Following Kelantan's earlier example, Trengganu's PAS government forced through unconstitutional legislation adopting hudud, but went further by providing for the execution of apostates.[101] Those laws were "inspired by the most conservative, narrow and chauvinistic interpretation of the Qur'an".[102] Prodded by the Dr. Mahathir-directed federal government, UMNO-ruled states began passing Islamic laws that were almost as harsh.[103] Thus was "moderate" Malaysia subjected to an ever-escalating "Islamic policy auction", with mounting implications.[104]

  From April 2000, various National Front-controlled state legislatures began considering their own laws to stop Muslims from straying religiously. Perlis adopted legislation, prepared in the Prime Minister's Department, which allowed the state's religious authorities to take criminal proceedings against Muslims accused of heresy, deviation or other "crimes" related to their beliefs. The bill provided for an accused to be confined to a "faith rehabilitation centre" for up to a year, to allow him or her to be "brought back" to the proper fold of Islam. Those judged unredeemable would be declared apostates and lose their rights as Muslims.[105] A more extreme version of the law, which would have allowed for the prosecution of a Muslim accused of misleading fellow Muslims to vote for an opposition party, was considered during the debate.[106] Johore provided for caning and jail sentences for lesbians, prostitutes and pimps, and for those found guilty of sodomy, pre-marital sex and incest.[107] At a special meeting, UMNO agreed to introduce full Islamic law, including hudud in the state at an appropriate time.[108] In Pahang, all Muslim businesses were required to close during evening prayers, and in Malacca the state government issued an edict directing all female employees, non-Muslims included, not to reveal their elbows and knees.[109]

  The federal government began monitoring mosques to ensure that the standard sermon was delivered, and to keep tabs on other activities. In 2001, 15 Muslims were charged in the sharia court for contravening an order by the Federal Territory Islamic Council regarding Friday prayers. It was a criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in jail or a hefty fine, to pray separately from the main congregation or question the authority of the imam leading the prayers — a PAS tactic. Although there was no basis in Islam for criminalizing such disobedience, a version of the law was enacted in many states.[110]

  An attempt to force PAS to drop its Islamic banner failed when the Council of Rulers, consisting of the nine sultans who have authority over reli
gion in their states, denied a federal government request to ban Islam from the names of political parties. The government kept the heat on PAS in threatening to criminalize the party's "religious extremism" by using the Penal Code, which prohibits uttering words to deliberately wound religious feelings or cause disharmony. In another move to check "extremism" — and PAS — Dr. Mahathir in late 2002 halted state funding for private Islamic schools, hoping to strangle them financially and encourage their student body of up to 100,000 to attend "national" schools instead.[111]

  Having abandoned its historically moderate position in the course of the struggle with PAS for Islamic legitimacy, UMNO teetered on the brink of radicalism. On 29 September 2001, two weeks after Islamic terrorists mounted devastating suicide attacks on New York and Washington, Dr. Mahathir stepped off the cliff by declaring Malaysia an "Islamic state". Although he had often said the same thing before, and he no doubt sought to outflank PAS tactically after declaring all-out support for the United States in the "war on terror" that followed "September 11", Dr. Mahathir was serious this time. He made the announcement at a meeting of Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, an UMNO coalition partner, and called a gathering of all National Front members to endorse the move. He later told Parliament that Malaysia was a "fundamentalist Islamic state".