Malaysia and Indonesia became independent following World War II. Indonesia declared its independence o­n Aug 18, 1945 though the new leaders of the country were adamant that the first day of independence would be declared in the year 2065, back-dating Indonesia's history long before the Roman and Islamic calendars to show the world just how old their civilisation was, dating as it did to the Hindu-Buddhist era.

Malaysia became independent o­n Aug 31, 1957, but unlike Indonesia, did not have to fight for it. Unlike Indonesia, the first generation of post-colonial leaders in Malaysia led by Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj (the country's first prime minister) and the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) party were mostly products of British colonial education and Malaysia inherited a system of secular democracy very much based o­n the Westminster model.

It is important to note that both Malaysia and Indonesia began with secular democratic constitutions. The leaders of both countries Soekarno and Hatta of Indonesia and the Tunku in Malaysia were clear as far as their stand o­n political Islam.

As far as the question of an Islamic state was concerned, the matter was well and truly outside the orbit of the Tunku's interests. Malaysia's first prime minister fell back o­n the political realities of the time as an excuse for not turning the country into an Islamic state as some of the leaders of opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) had demanded. In his own words:

"Our country has many races and unless we are prepared to drown every non-Malay in the sea, we can never think of an Islamic administration."(1)

But from the outset the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia could not ignore the political realities around them.

Development first

In Indonesia, the Islamists movements and organisations that helped in the anti-colonial struggle were not about to let the opportunity for setting up an Islamic state go by. In time this led to the Darul Islam revolt that ignited religious, ethnic and class tensions in the outer island provinces of Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Sumatra.

In Malaysia, the country's first Islamist party the Hizb'ul Muslimin had been banned and had its leaders arrested by the departing British authorities in 1948, but this opened the way for the emergence and rise of the country's next Islamist party, PAS.

For the first generation of post-colonial leaders in Malaysia and Indonesia, the priority at the time was rapid development and economic success. Worried that their fragile import-substitution economies would be left vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global market and the unpredictable currents of the Cold War that were sweeping across the region, they embarked o­n massive public educational programmes, infrastructural development and redirection of the economies. The short-term goal was to break out the cycle of economic and intellectual dependency that had been the blight of many a post-colonial state.

This, however, meant that Islam and the normative expression and practice of Islam was left to the ordinary ulama and religious leaders whose power and charismatic authority lay in the enormous cultural capital they possessed.

As the development process pressed o­n regardless, the early signs of uneven development could be seen: Mass rural migration to urban industrial sectors led to the creation of huge overflowing slums where social problems like urban overcrowding, crime, prostitution and drug abuse became commonplace. The rural-urban divide also coincided with cleavages of class, race and religion. The ruling elite of both countries were also more likely to be plugged into the global cosmopolitan networks of politics, trade and finance; alienating them from the rural indigenous constituencies who were trapped within the vectors of underdevelopment, homelessness and relative poverty.

The secular leftists in turn were cut off from their mass support bases thanks to the constant harassment and persecution of the Left that was the norm during the Cold War.

(It must be remembered that the Malaysian Communist Party or MCP was banned by the British before they left and were engaged in guerrilla warfare during the period known as the 'Emergency' from 1948 to 1960. The Indonesian Leftists were in turn wiped out during the anti-communist bloodbath that followed the unsuccessful coup attempt of 1965, which led to the fall of Soekarno and the ascendancy of the pro-American general Soeharto.)

Linked to this was the alienation of the urbanised, university-educated Muslim intelligentsia, who found their own links to the Muslim masses cut thanks to their own relative distance from them. This in turn opened the way for Islamist opposition parties, social movements and relief agencies who stepped into the vacuum that had been created, and who like their counterparts in other Muslim countries in the Arab world, South Asia and Africa (2) worked doubly hard to forge close partnerships and organic links to the lumpen ummah who felt themselves abandoned by statist elites, the urban bourgeoisie and Islamist intellectuals alike.

Rise of Islamic movements

In the Indonesian context, this helped to fuel the rise and spread of movements like the Nahdatul Ulama and Muhamadijjah.

In Malaysia, elite indifference to the plight of the rural poor gave the Islamists of PAS and groups like the neo-Sufi Darul Arqam movement the opportunity to gain support and membership from the Malays in both the urban and rural areas.

By the 1970s, Malaysia and Indonesia were rife with Islamist movements of all shades and political persuasions. Islamisation had taken root in Malaysia in particular, thanks to the impact of the Iranian Revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet forces: The first event suggested that the time was right for a major programme of social transformation along religio-political lines, while the second persuaded many ordinary Muslims that Islam was in danger of being wiped out by external enemies.

The major Islamist movements in Malaysia grew more vocal in their demands for an Islamic state and the enforcement of Islamic law in the country. The leaders of Umno were not about to sit by and allow the Islamists to gain the upper hand in the discursive contest to define the meaning and content of Islam.

Malaysia's experiment with 'statist-developmentalist-modernist' Islam began in 1981, when the country experienced its fourth peaceful transition of power which witnessed the ascendancy of the doctor-turned-politician Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the country's next prime minister.

Mahathir's credentials and popularity lay in his claim of being a modernist leader who wanted to propel the country into the modern age through rapid development, modern education and the reformation of the normative understanding and practice of Islam itself. He rose to power with the backing of millions of ordinary middle-class professional Malays who also supported his calls for affirmative action and pro-Malay economic policies.

Umno's vision of Islam

The 1980s witnessed the implementation of the Umno-led state Islamisation policy, which was designed to promote and project Umno's vision of Islam as a modern way of life, culture and government.

No stone would be left unturned in the pursuit to redefine the meaning and essence of Islam itself, as Umno sought to out-Islamise its nemesis PAS. Unlike the Islamophobic governments of many other Muslim countries, the Malaysian government under Mahathir preferred to beat the Islamists at their own game.

Mahathir did not favour the confrontational approach of other leaders like Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba; the spectacular displays of piety by the likes of Nimeiri or the vague conciliatory manoeuvres of Indonesia's Soeharto. He had a clear idea of which course he wanted Islam to take in the country. If the discourse of PAS was shaped by a form of oppositional dialectics which divided the world between 'good Muslims' and ' kafir ' (infidels), the Islamist worldview of Mahathir was o­ne which divided Muslims into 'moderate progressives' and 'misguided fanatics' instead.

Umno's brand of modernist and moderate Islam was based o­n a chain of equivalences that equated Islam with all that was positive in its eyes. Islam was equated with modernity, economic development, material progress, rationality and liberalism. (It is interesting to note that other values like democracy and human rights were not part of this chain of equivalences.)

Umno's understanding of Islam was also framed against a negative chain of equivalences which equated PAS' brand of Islam with obscurantism, extremism, fanaticism, intolerance, backwardness and militancy. This was the 'wrong' version of Islam to which Umno's Islam was the answer. The aim of the state's Islamisation policy was to normalise and institutionalise the 'right' version of Islam against the 'wrong' version promoted by PAS, both in terms of orthopractic behaviour as well as state policy.

The bone of contention between Umno and PAS at the time was not whether Islam was 'liberal' or 'tolerant' in the Western sense, but rather whether as a system of belief and values it could be used to promote a dynamic outlook towards economic and developmental issues instead.

In 1981 the Umno general assembly issued a resolution to the effect that the federal and state Islamic councils should enforce and defend the 'purity of Islam'.

Following this demand the religious arm of the state bureaucracy was expanded as never before. New policies were introduced that were meant to safeguard Islam and the Muslim ummah .

In 1981 the Pusat Islam began to identify various sects and groups that were said to be guilty of ajaran sesat (deviationist teachings), and in 1982 the Ahmadis in the country were stripped of the Malay/bumiputera status. By 1982 the Prime Minister's office had more than 100 ulama working under it and the Education Ministry had some 715 ulama o­n its payroll.

The Fourth Malaysia Plan (1981-1986) also explicitly declared that henceforth Islam would play a major role in the development of the country (albeit o­n an inspirational level).

Later in 1985 the head of the Religious Affairs Division of the Prime Minister's Department, Yusuf Noor, announced that the Unit Akidah dan Ajaran Sesat (unit for faith protection and deviationist teachings) would be revamped under the Pusat Penyelidikan Islam (Islamic Investigation Centre) to monitor and police the spread of 'deviationist' teachings (which included Shia teachings) in the country. 'Dakwah attaches' were also sent to various Malaysian embassies in Muslim countries to monitor the activities of Malay-Muslim students who were sent abroad to take up courses in Islamic studies, and to ensure that they would not be unduly influenced by 'extremist' ideas. (3)

While other Muslim leaders had consciously tried to control the activities of Islamic centres and institutions of higher learning (Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak had clamped down o­n the activities of academics and students at al-Azhar while Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba went as far as closing down the famous az-Zaytounah university), Mahathir did the opposite: He helped to launch even more Islamic universities, think tanks and research institutes as part of his effort to develop a new school of Islamic thought in Malaysia.

In 1983, the Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA- International Islamic University of Malaysia) was founded. The UIA project was announced after the Prime Minister's visit to the Arab Gulf States. (The announcement was made just a few months before the 1982 general election in fact- something that the Umno-led government claimed was purely coincidental).

The UIA's initial funding came from Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Libya, Turkey and Egypt and the university's first President was the ex-Abim (Muslim Youth Association of Malaysia) leader turned Umno politician, Anwar Ibrahim.

To add substance to the UIA initiative a string of international conferences around the theme of Islamic knowledge and science were held. Between 1983 and 1989 Kuala Lumpur became the host to the International Conference o­n the Islamic Approach towards Technological Development (1983), Islamic Civilisation (1984), Islamic Thought (1984), International Islamic Symposium (1986), Islamic Economics (1987), Islam and Media (1987), Religious Extremism (1987) and Islam and the Philosophy of Science (1989).

In the same year that the UIA was opened the Malaysian Islamic Bank (Bank Islam Malaysia) was launched by the government (on July 1, 1983). Bank Islam became the first bank in the country to offer regular banking services that were meant to be in accordance to Islamic restrictions and norms related to commerce. It did not charge interest o­n loans and (on paper at least) avoided the practice of riba . Despite the fact that the Islamic Bank was condemned as a cosmetic attempt to bolster the government's Islamic credentials by Islamist economists like Abdur Razzaq Lubis (1985), other Islamic economic initiatives followed suit.(4) Soon after the Islamic Insurance Company (Tafakul) was launched as well as the Hajj Pilgrims Management Fund (Lembaga Urusan Tabung Haji, LUTH). By creating the UIA, Bank Islam, Tafakul and LUTH it appeared as if Umno was the o­nly party in the country that could keep its promises to the Malay-Muslim constituency.

Mere surface phenomena?

In response to Umno's attempt to push its own Islamisation programme the Islamist opposition party PAS stepped up its ideological offensive. The ulama of PAS argued that the Islamisation programme proposed by the Umno-led government was not really designed to lay the foundations of an Islamic state but was in fact part of an elaborate scheme to make the country appear more Islamic while remaining firmly entrenched within the global liberal-capitalist economic system.

The fact that some of these state-sponsored Islamic institutions were themselves deeply enmeshed within the local corporate culture and were directly involved in some decidedly dubious dealings made it all the more easier of the Islamists of PAS to dismiss them as being cosmetic in nature.

The LUTH, for instance, was involved in the operations of the Malaysian Rare Earth (ARE) company along with the Japanese concern Mitsubishi Chemicals. The company was later accused of dumping radioactive waste in the state of Perak.(5)

For the leaders of PAS no Islamisation programme could ever hope to succeed without the committed effort to make Islam the religion of state and Islamic law the supreme law of the land. They regarded the Malaysian government's attempts at Islamisation as hollow and of little consequence, o­n the grounds that the inculcation of Islamic values and norms would not be possible unless the state was prepared to enforce these norms through legal means.

The Umno-led government's Islamisation programme was therefore not without its critics. The government of Mahathir was aware of the fact that by playing the Islamic card and upping the stakes in the Islamisation race it was bound to antagonise the other Islamist movements and parties in the country. For central to the conflicts and debates that were occurring all over the country was the question of the correct interpretation and practice of Islam: a factor that PAS still had in its favour. By entering into the Islamist arena, the Umno-led government was aware of the fact that it was entering a political and discursive space that was bound to be fiercely contested by the Islamists of PAS.

By creating so many Islamist think tanks and research centres in Malaysia and Indonesia, the governments of both countries hoped to take the wind out of the sails of the resurgent forces of Islam in their own backyards. But by trying to fight the tide of oppositional Islam with their own brand of statist-developmentalist-modernist Islam, they had effectively added to the inflation of Islamist discourse and raised the levels of expectations among their own people as well. It was this inflation of Islamist discourse and normative practices, and the normalisation of religion in public life, that effectively made it impossible for both governments to control the form and content of the discourse of Islam and its circulation within their respective nation-states.

Like all statist bureaucrats and technocrats, the nation-builders of Malaysia and Indonesia regarded normative Islam as a factor that could be inculcated into the developmental process to produce the desired results.

What they forgot or overlooked was the fact that Islam like all religions happens to be a variable factor that is beyond the control of anybody.

In time, the modernist-developmentalist model of statist Islam collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and the impossibility of policing the discursive frontiers of Islamism itself. The modernist message was simply not getting through to the ummah , for a variety of reasons: The tools of dissemination were either inadequate or faulty; the Islamologues themselves proved to be inarticulate or alienated from the believers; and the message itself became sullied and discredited thanks to the lack of credibility of its primary articulator.

A hostage to statist politics

While the Islamist institutions of Malaysia and Indonesia were engaged in their project of reinventing Islam as a modern system of values and progressive way of life, they overlooked the fact that their message was not being delivered to all quarters of their respective societies.

In Indonesia the modernising project of the Soeharto establishment was quickly discredited thanks to the human costs involved: The interference of Indonesia's armed forces in national politics meant that the country had been turned into a de facto military state, with a human rights record as appalling as any other banana republic. The actions of the Indonesian armed forces and the covert military and intelligence units that were given a free hand to do whatever they liked in the outer island provinces meant that Soeharto's brand of 'modernist, progressive' Islam was bloodied from the start.

The Islamists of Indonesia were particularly cynical of Soeharto's belated 'conversion' to 'progressive' Islam, after suffering outright repression and persecution for decades. Key Indonesian political and military personnel like General AM Hendropriyono had made it their personal cause to eliminate as many Islamists opponents as humanly possible. In places like Lampung, Aceh, Palembang and many parts of Central and Eastern Java, the Indonesian army was directly responsible for the killings, torture, rape and disappearances of thousands of Islamist activists, intellectuals, writers and political leaders.

The incessant attacks o­n Islamists movements in Indonesia led to what could be described as a low-level undeclared war against the country's Islamists. This state of hostility partly supported and backed by a host of international actors, most notably America and Australia did little to contain the so-called 'threat' of militant Islam in Indonesia, but o­nly made things much worse.

As a result of this campaign to demonise Islam, many of the Islamists of Indonesia developed a persecution complex coupled with the incarceration psycho-pathology of the oppressed. Hardly a surprise, then, that the country witnessed the birth of a number of radical Islamist groupings from the Negara Islam Indonesia movement founded by Lukman Hakim in the 1970s to the arrival of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin and Hizb al-Tahrir in the 1980s.

In Malaysia the efforts of the state's Islamist institutions were being negated by the other policies that were being pursued by the government at the same time. Some of the government's more controversial measures proved to be a boon for the Islamist party in opposition that was always o­n the lookout for the chinks in Umno's armour. The leaders of Umno claimed that they had fought against the encroachment of western secular and Zionist influences that threatened to undermine the faith and unity of the Malay-Muslims (the film Schindler's List had been banned in Malaysia the year before o­n the grounds that it was 'Zionist propaganda'), and argued that it was they who had managed to put Malaysia o­n the map of the Islamic world (Malaysia had just launched the Voice of Islam radio network in Southeast Asia with the help of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Brunei). Furthermore, the Mahathir administration reiterated the claim that it had challenged the double-standards and hypocrisy of the Western powers at numerous international meetings and that under the leadership of Mahathir Malaysia had played a leading role (among the Muslim states) in trying to bring about a peaceful and lasting peace in the troubled state of Bosnia where thousands of Muslims had suffered at the hands of Serbian nationalist extremists. (Malaysia, along with several other OIC countries like Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Palestine, had sent a total of 20,000 troops to serve in Bosnia as part of the international peacekeeping force since 1992.)

The 'third voice'

But none of these measures assuaged the anger and frustration of the Islamists who in turn pointed out the human rights abuses of the Malaysian government, particularly against the Islamists: In 1985, Malaysian state security forces were responsible for the killing of the radical PAS ulama Ustaz Ibrahim 'Libya' Mahmood.

The killing of Ibrahim Libya and his followers gave PAS and the Islamist opposition additional moral leverage against the government and was exploited to the full by PAS leaders, who declared that Ibrahim Libya was a shahid (martyr) to the Islamist cause. Further attacks and harassment of the Islamists in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988 helped o­nly to radicalise PAS and shift the centre of Islamist discourse closer to the radical register.

In both Malaysia and Indonesia the appeal and influence of the state's religious functionaries and spokes persons o­n Islam were limited because they were seen as elitists and their institutions were open o­nly to a limited following. While the Islamist institutions of the state like IKIM and ISTAC were engaged in their project of re-presenting Islam as a modern system of values and way of life, they overlooked the fact that their message was not being delivered to the rest of society. Despite all its efforts, Institut Kefahaman Islam Malaysia (Ikim) and International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (Istac) were seen as institutions that had been set up under the patronage of the Mahathir administration and as part of the government's own Islamisation campaign (described as a cosmetic gesture at best by the ulama of PAS).

Neither Malaysia's Istac/Ikim nor Indonesia's Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim (ICMI) were truly populist in the sense of being able to transcend the cleavages of class, wealth and power that remained all too-real in the lives of millions of ordinary Malay-Muslims in the country.

What was needed was a 'third voice' that could speak the language of the person in the street, the farmer in the field and the corporate manager in the high-rise apartment block.

But the convoluted national politics of Malaysia and Indonesia left no space for a middle-ground to emerge. Caught between the maximalist state with its hegemonic grip o­n society o­n the o­ne hand and the radical Islamists with their narrow vision of an 'authentic' Islam based o­n the past o­n the other, the ordinary Muslims of Southeast Asia have not been able to turn to a third voice that could straddle the narrow divide.

'Progressive Islam' thus became hostage to the realpolitik concerns of governments, and the liminal and vulnerable constituency of progressive Islamists have been the first to suffer. Under such circumstances, what hope is there for a rebirth of progressive Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia?

Endnotes:

(1) Quoted in KJ Ratnam, Communalism and the political process in Malaysia . University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur. 1965. pg 122.

(2) See, for example, Paul Lubeck, Islam and urban labour in northern Nigeria: the making of a Muslim working class . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1986. Paul Lubeck's (1986) study o­n the use of Islamic discourse by Islamists activists in northern Nigeria has shown how Islam was used as a means of creating a new Islamically-oriented urban labour class that would

later serve as the bedrock for Nigeria's nascent Islamist revival. Focusing o­n the political economy of Kano in Northern Nigeria between 1966-79, Lubeck has studied the process of the creation of a new urban working class ( leburori ) that was held together by appeals to Islamic nationalism and class integration. Working through traditional networks such as Sufi Tariqas and Islamic educational institutions (madrasahs), the Nigerian Islamists took advantage of the weakening Nigerian state in order to create new bonds of commonality and association among Nigerian Muslim workers known as the urban leburori .

The net result was the emergence of a new Muslim urban class that was open to the appeals of the Islamist movements and parties that came o­n the scene later. This approach, as we have shown in the previous chapters, has also been employed by Islamist movements elsewhere, from Iran and Turkey to Southeast Asia.

(3) The first batch of 'dakwah attaches' were sent to Malaysian embassies in Jakarta, Cairo and London in 1981. Their original function was to monitor the activities of Malaysian students there and to make sure that they did not come under the influence of 'extremist' groups that might try to influence their ideas about their home country. By 1982, they had increased in number and their task was to establish contact with local Islamist organisations and networks and to meet with Malaysian students regularly.

(4) For a critique of the Bank Islam project, see: Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, 'Tidak Islamnya Bank Islam'. PAID Network, Georgetown, Penang. 1985. Lubis condemned the Islamic banking project in Malaysia o­n the grounds that the bank did not and could not represent a radical challenge to the existing global banking system that was rooted in the practice of interest. Lubis argued that the Islamic Bank in Malaysia was doing the same thing and basically collective interest in a different form. Such nominal changes were for him cosmetic and ineffectual.

(5) The Asian Rare Earth (ARE) company was a multinational concern that brought together the Japanese Mitsubishi Chemicals company and the Malaysian BEH Minerals company. The Lembaga Urusan Tabung Haji was also o­ne of the major partners in ARE. The company was first set up to extract rare trace elements from tin tailings. But the factory that was based in the state of Perak was also producing thorium hydroxide which was a radioactive waste product. This radioactive waste had to be disposed of, and in the end dumping sites were found in the state itself - first in the area of Papan and later near Bukit Merah. Local residents and environmental groups protested against the dumping of radioactive waste in the area and this led to an international outcry from local and foreign environmental groups. [See: Tan Sooi Beng, The Papan-Bukit Merah protest. In tangled web . Carpa, 1988. pp28-29.]