"There is no room for civil discourse when it concerns religion here. We are lucky to have secular laws and people defending them still. But I’m not sure how long that will last."
Source/Credit: The Australian
By Amanda Hodge | August 17, 2017
For years Zahari has lived a double life in Malaysia: an observant Muslim in public and a devoted atheist in private.
But it all very nearly came crashing down last week when a photograph was uploaded to Facebook showing smiling members of his Kuala Lumpur-based atheist club at a rare social gathering of the largely online group.
The uproar in multi-religious, multiracial, moderate Malaysia was intense and intimidating.
Senior government ministers warned that members could be prosecuted for propagating atheism and demanded any Muslims involved be “hunted down” and re-educated.
Zahari* says he was careful to stay out of pictures taken that day, but has spent the past week looking over his shoulder.
Some in the photograph have received death threats and gone into hiding, fearing attacks from vigilantes or detention by Malaysia’s religious authorities in one of the country’s religious re-education centres.
Though the centres are used mostly for the state’s deradicalisation program, they are also used to guide “deviant” Muslims considered to have strayed from the religious path.
Unmarried, unveiled and living in a share house with non-Muslim men, Rosle* was singled out for re-education last year after a neighbour reported her to religious authorities for “un-Islamic behaviour”.
Initially forbidden to contact anyone and allowed a family visitor only after the first fortnight, she says she was subjected to weeks of indoctrination.
“I was accused of being a nonbeliever. Perhaps the neighbours didn’t like me living in a house with non-Muslims and not dressing like a Muslim woman,” Rosle tells The Australian.
“The whole program is designed to make you believe in Islam. They tell you that if you remain a deviant, you will become an outcast and there will be no one to support you. They threatened that I would be put in jail and my family would be ashamed of my conduct.”
Rehab didn’t work on Rosle and she made no attempt to hide it. Now, she says, she is constantly monitored and has been told to expect another re-education stint.
Such experiences are an open secret in Malaysia, a multi-religious, multi-ethnic country that has positioned itself internationally as the exemplar of a moderate Islamic nation but which some claim is showing signs of a “creeping Islamisation”.
As authorities continue their hunt this week for atheists, Zahari says they have singled out one of his group for questioning in the hope he “will break and rat us out”.
“He has been questioned by police for long stretches, asked to turn over his phone and his Facebook account,” he says.
He has also been interrogated by the authorities from Malaysia’s religious affairs department, who have threatened to try him in the country’s sharia courts for apostasy and to convince his wife to annul their marriage.
“There is no room for civil discourse when it concerns religion here,” says Zahari. “We are lucky to have secular laws and people defending them still. But I’m not sure how long that will last.
“This is a window into a moderate (Muslim) nation that is turning conservative.”
Among the more extreme reactions in recent days to the atheism furore was that of a prominent Malaysian cleric who warned the punishment for apostasy under the Islamic hudud penal code was death.
Hudud’s draconian penalties, which include stoning and amputations, have never been enforced in Malaysia, though not for want of campaigning by the country’s most prominent Islamic political force, the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS).
Malaysia has a dual-track legal system of federal criminal and civil law courts, and state Islamic courts that mainly handle religious and family matters such as divorce, custody and inheritance for Muslims as well as cases such as adultery. (Sharia courts may also try to punish Muslims for offences such as drinking alcohol, eating during fasting hours, persistent non-attendance at mosque, and khalwat, or suspect activity between unrelated men and women.)
Successive Malaysian governments since independence in 1957 — all led by the United Malays Nationalist Organisation party — have resisted attempts to increase the scope and sentencing power of the state sharia courts.
Until now.
With UMNO and its leader, Prime Minister Najib Razak, in coming months facing the most challenging election in the party’s 60-year history of unbroken rule, amid a financial scandal over the alleged misappropriation of more than $US4.5 billion from the 1MDB state investment fund, everything is on the table.
As the opposition has gained ground — UMNO lost the popular vote for the first time in the 2013 election but retained power under a gerrymandered system — the government has become ever more reliant on the Malay Muslim vote, accounting for about 55 per cent of the country’s electorate.
Last April PAS was allowed to introduce a private member’s bill in parliament seeking to empower state governments to decide whether to impose more extreme sharia law, to extend the remit of sharia courts, and to lift a ceiling on punishments (currently set at six lashes, a 5000 ringgit, or $1485, fine or three years’ jail) to allow aspects of the hudud code.
Months earlier, amid criticism of UMNO support for the PAS bill, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, in a speech to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, challenged the Western view of a moderate Muslim as one who questioned fundamental Islamic practices and principles and accepted secular moral standards.
Muslims who “intelligently accepted traditional Islamic spiritual, moral and legal principles” but were critical of some secular, Western matters should not be branded fundamentalists, he said.
With the imprimatur of UMNO and the Prime Minister, the sharia bill was to have been debated last week.
Instead it was deferred as the government walks a political tightrope between wooing PAS, a party that could mean the difference between winning and losing government, and maintaining its alliance with East Malaysian Christian parties, whose support is equally critical to retaining power.
Oh Ei Sun, a former Najib political adviser turned analyst and senior adjunct fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, predicts a strong electoral showing by PAS will increase the likelihood of the sharia bill (RUU355) eventually being passed.
“But if (PAS) don’t do so well then the ruling government will have to rely on the East Malaysia constituency to retain government, and we won’t see this bill again for a while,” he says.
Right now, he says, “UMNO elites are going out of their way to be religious”.
Every week it seems a fresh Islamic debate dominates public discourse and headlines in the state-owned or sympathetic media.
Last week it was atheists spreading godlessness through the land. Also this month, the government withdrew proposed legislation that would have prevented a child’s conversion to Islam without the consent of both parents — long a thorny legal issue in Malaysia that both sides of politics have worked hard to address.
It has recently banned several academic books discussing moderate Islam. And last month the National Registration Department controversially defied a civil court of appeal that granted a Muslim child born out of wedlock the right to carry his father’s surname. It chose instead to follow the non-binding advice of the Fatwa Committee that the Koran does not allow the practice.
Conservative PAS leaders have championed each decision, even as they have drawn condemnation from moderates and opposition parties.
Yet in Malaysia’s complicated political landscape, the PAS-UMNO alliance that would cement Malay Muslim dominance — and potentially pave the way for an Islamic state — is not a done deal.
PAS appears to be rethinking its decision to sever its long alliance with the opposition coalition — now nominally led by 92-year-old former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad and his imprisoned former political nemesis Anwar Ibrahim — in return for UMNO support for its sharia bill.
The besieged ruling party may be its best chance at realising its sharia ambitions. But, says Merdeka pollster Ibrahim Suffian, such an alliance would likely lead to PAS’s political obliteration in multi-cornered election contests that would ultimately favour UMNO. “It’s a very dynamic, moving picture, things change every single day,” says Suffian, who suspects the government’s commitment to a more Islamic state is mainly rhetorical.
“People in the Islamic party realise if they proceed with that (UMNO) plan they will lose everything: the state they control, their seats in parliament and any constituency they currently possess.
“They’re trying to find a face-saving way of getting back with the opposition. They need each other because the rest of the opposition does not have the kind of Muslim support that PAS commands. But they don’t trust each other.”
Meanwhile, in a bid to keep PAS’s sharia dream alive while allaying the fears of his ruling alliance partners, Prime Minister Najib last week set up a cabinet committee to investigate how to elevate the scope and power of state sharia courts.
At present only two Malaysian states, Terengganu and Kelantan, impose more extreme versions of sharia law.
In Kelantan, the only state ruled by a PAS government, there are separate supermarket aisles for women and men, shops must close during Friday prayers and Ramadan fasting hours, and women are required to cover up in offices and government buildings.
Two years ago the PAS-dominated Kelantan assembly reasserted its commitment to hudud punishments by updating a law mandating the draconian legal code, even though it cannot be implemented without amending the federal constitution.
Last month it moved to make caning — a punishment previously meted out in private — a public spectacle for sharia law infringements, sparking outrage among the country’s increasingly marginalised moderate voices.
The Sisters in Islam (SIS) group was among those to challenge the caning decision, warning it presented a threat to the nation’s values and aspirations.
“This corruption and use of Islam to deal with social issues is seeping into every aspect of our lives and will destroy the very social fabric on which our forefathers built this great country,” it said in a statement. “How far away are we from other uncivilised punishments such as stoning being introduced?”
The Malaysian Chinese Association, an ethnic Chinese party within UMNO’s ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, said the move represented a breach of the federal constitution and a “dangerous trend of riding rough over the laws of the land”.
Critics suspect the Islamic party of seeking ultimately to impose hudud punishments in a country where 23 per cent of the population is ethnic Chinese and 7 per cent Indian. PAS says sharia would apply only to Muslims.
A 2014 Merdeka Centre poll found 71 per cent of Malay Muslims backed the introduction of sharia law.
Chandra Muzaffar, an eminent Malaysian Muslim academic, says he is deeply concerned at the direction in which Malaysian society is heading and at the growing power wielded by “fringe voices” from the Islamic right.
“These voices are getting louder and louder and the powers-that-be are inclined towards accommodating them,” he says.
“What concerns me also is UMNO sort of playing footsie with PAS” — a group Muzaffar regards as representing “ultraconservative Muslim society” on subjects such as Islamic law, the role of women, non-Muslim minorities and economic policy.
While Malaysians understand the need for inclusiveness, it is important for them to recognise signs of growing intolerance and authoritarianism, and speak out against the trend, he says.
“What really concerns me is whether the government is in a position to handle the fallout from 1MDB, which is related to what we’re talking about.”
He sketches a dark scenario in which Najib — unable to keep a lid on the scandal or allegations he profited from it — could use extraordinary powers under the National Security Act to call a state of emergency.
“That’s something we should all be concerned about. I don’t think Najib, or anyone else, should be allowed to hold society to ransom because of something like this,” Muzaffar says.
Another Malaysian analyst likens the current political environment to that of pre-martial law Philippines in 1971.
“It’s very similar in that (like Najib) Marcos rose to prominence as a reformer and then a few years into his tenure all this corruption started to take place. The opposition against him became so strong he declared a state of emergency,” the analyst says.
Sixty years of patronage politics — singling out Malay Muslims for positive discrimination — may be at the root of the growing religious and racial divisions feeding the climate of fear and suspicion in Malaysia today.
But Oh blames a broader regional and global trend towards Islamic conservatism for the multiplier effect that is causing unease among Malaysia’s minorities.
“On the one hand the government of the day is allowing this swing to the right in the hope it will return votes for them,” he says. “But there is a genuine sentiment among many Muslims in this country that they would like to go for more conservative ways of life. There is a huge group who would like to see this country become more religiously conservative.”
And they’re not alone: he points to similar movements in Indonesia, southern Thailand and the southern Philippines.
As the government increasingly plays to that conservative Muslim vote bank, Oh says some in Malaysia are now seeking potential escape routes in neighbouring countries such as Australia and Singapore.
“These are politically uncertain times,” he explains. “And from time to time the government of the day likes to pick up one or two people to make an example of them.”
How much the 1MDB corruption scandal has contributed to Malaysia’s apparent lurch to the right is debatable.
Clive Kessler, an emeritus professor at the University of NSW and a Malaysia observer for more than half a century, says the country has seen a “progressive de-secularisation” that has intensified over the past decade.
Among the most obvious signs has been the explosion in the numbers of women wearing the hijab, and an increasingly heavy-handed state insistence that all Malay Muslims comply with Islamic practices such as Friday prayers and fasting during Ramadan.
Malaysia’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Islamic law prohibits so-called “deviant” Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslim sects and it frowns on non-Muslims saying the word Allah, using the universal Islamic salutation, assalamu alaikum, or entering mosques.
But Kessler sees the push for sharia law as simply the culmination of a process started by Mahathir who in 1982 sought to outflank PAS by aligning with a young Islamic politician — Anwar Ibrahim — and absorbing Islamic values within the state.
He predicts Malaysia’s progress towards sharia law “will continue over the next five, 10, 20 years and will not be diminished without a major reversal of historical direction”.
As he says: “It is getting closer and closer.”
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Amanda Hodge is South East Asia correspondent for The Australian, reporting from Jakarta
Read original post here: Malaysia's moderation under threat as country faces Islamic tide
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