State use of public order and social cohesion concerns in the securitisation of non-mainstream Muslims in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This paper posits that certain Muslim minority and Muslim reformist groups that propagate non-mainstream viewpoints on Islam were securitised by the Malaysian state as societal threats when the state perceived its own interests to be potentially threatened. An examination of recent religious deviancy restrictions on two examples from these groups termed broadly in this paper as non-mainstream Muslims (NMM) shows that both arms of the Malaysian state—politicians in the UMNO-led government and the religious bureaucracy—used the same public order and social cohesion concerns to characterise the NMM as threats sufficiently dangerous that restrictive means were required to quell them. With the state’s use of the public order and social cohesion concerns, the paper argues that the way in which the NMM were labelled as deviant and securitised was dependent on the local political and social contexts and not solely tied to theological reasoning. Lastly, the paper puts forth a comprehensive argument that accounts for the different interests and motivations of both the politicians and the religious bureaucracy in the securitisation of the NMM, the roots of which lie in the processes of progressive Islamisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-mainstream Muslims
• Muslim minorities
• Shias
• securitisation
• Malaysia

Acknowledgments

The initial work on this paper began when I was a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). I thank NTU and Dr. Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman (NTU) for providing me with the opportunity, resources and support to work on this topic. I also thank Dr. Leon Moosavi (University of Liverpool) for his insightful comments on an earlier draft, which improved the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Approximately 61% of the population in Malaysia is Muslim (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2010).

2. The Malay rulers (Sultans) in the Malaysian Federation are the heads of Islam in their respective states and they have authority over appointments in the religious bureaucracy, including the appointment of the state Muftis. The Malay rulers also have a final say on whether the fatwa (Islamic ruling) formulated by councils within the religious bureaucracy become legally binding on Malaysian Muslims in the respective state jurisdictions.

3. The attribution of the influence of the religious bureaucracy is reflected in the tendency to conflate Islamic law, religious practices and occurrences of problematic societal injustices as indicative of creeping Islamisation—the notion that an Islamic state could someday supplant the secular state in Malaysia (see Martinez 2001; Byrnes 2007; Tan and Lee 2008; Abdul Rahman 2016).

4. The hot campaign issues in the election were about corruption and cost of living rather than Islam. It was significant that segments of Malay Muslim voters decided to swing to the opposition coalition party that included secular and non-Malay political parties over UMNO, which was the dominant Malay Muslim political party in the ruling Barisan Nasional government that had long championed both Malay ethnic rights and Islam.

5. The ISA, which allowed for detention without trial, was also used by the Mahathir government to detain opposition political figures.

6. Fatwa declarations by the federal religious body are non-binding and serve as a fatwa guidance for state religious bodies. The fatwa becomes legally binding only when it is adopted by the state religious bodies with authorisation by the state Sultan (ruler).

7. For example, the evolution in the interpretation of public order in French law is indicative of the French state’s increasing willingness to limit expressions of religion to a strictly private sphere, which can be restrictive to some of its religious minority citizens (Alouane 2015).

8. The Ahmadiyya sect has its roots in Qadian, Punjab, India. It was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889, who declared himself the prophesised Mahdi (redeemer of Islam). The religious beliefs and practices of the Ahmadis are similar to Sunni Muslims; the only exception is that some Ahmadis believe that Mirza is the Mahdi and also regard him as a prophet. As the notion of the finality of prophethood is a central tenet in Sunni Islam, Sunni theologians reject the prophethood status of Mirza, and they regard the Ahmadis as unbelievers.

9. Personal communication with Dr. Mohd Faizal Musa (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia), an expert on the Shia community in Malaysia (24 February 2017).

10. The adoption of the various state-level fatwas on the illegality of public practice and propagation of Shia Islam occurred at different times—while the state of Selangor adopted it soon after the 1996 non-binding federal-level fatwa, the states of Perak, Pahang, Johor, and Perlis followed suit only after a decade. Elements within the religious bureaucracy pushed for even more restrictions on the basis that marriages between Sunnis and Shias could be an avenue for the propagation of deviant Shia Islam teachings; in at least one state, Sabah, the religious bureaucracy issued a fatwa in 2016 that made unlawful marriages between Sunnis and Shias (Musa and Tan 2017).