Managing minorities in competitive authoritarian states: multiracialism and the hijab issue in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the Singapore state's approach towards multiracialism by focusing on the hijab issue. I argue that a combination of elite ideology and regime type can explain the state's overall stances on religion, including the hijab issue. Previously, when the state was hegemonic, its policies were determined solely by the ideologies held by its key elites. However, as the state moves towards competitive authoritarianism with increased electoral competition, the dominant party will no longer be able to act solely based on its ideological predispositions. This explains why a staunch no-hijab stand was held by the state in the past, whereas in recent years, there appears to be a softening of this stance.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian
• elite ideology
• hijab
• multiracialism
• Singapore

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Erratum

Notes on contributor

Walid Jumblatt Abdullah is a PhD candidate in Political Science under the Joint Degree Programme between the National University of Singapore and King's College London.

Notes

¹It is important to note that the PAP is a cadre party, where leaders are selected and not elected, and coupled with the small number of Members of Parliament (MPs), all of whom are chosen directly to stand as candidates by the prime minister, party ideologies are likely to perpetuate.

²These include the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), a form of party block vote whereby parties compete in teams. The PAP will always field one or two ‘heavyweight’ ministers in the GRC, hence severely disadvantaging the opposition. For a more thorough discussion on electoral engineering in Singapore, see Mutalib (2002); Sun (2015); N. Tan (2014).

³Levitsky and Way (2010: 34) considered Singapore to be a borderline case between competitive and fully authoritarian, but eventually settled it to be of the latter category. However, this was before the 2011 general election and subsequent by-elections in 2012 and 2013, in which the PAP suffered substantial losses. Thus, I concur with Ortmann (2011) that Singapore can be considered a competitive authoritarian regime.

⁴See the literature on competitive authoritarian or hybrid regimes, including Diamond (2002), Howard and Roessler (2006), Schedler (2006) and Bunce and Wolchik (2010).

⁵For the Muslims especially, ethnicity and religion are entangled. ‘Malay’ is often conflated with ‘Muslim’, despite there being non-Malay Muslims (Arabs, Indians, inter alia). Nevertheless, most Malays are Muslims, and the majority of Muslims belong to the Malay race. As such, the term Malay-Muslim is often used in official discourses to refer to Muslims (see Lily Zubaidah 2012).

⁶The Maria-Hertogh riots occurred in 1950, when mobs of Muslims attacked Europeans and Eurasians in Singapore. This was after the colonial court (Singapore was still under British rule) ruled that a Dutch girl who was raised by Muslim parents in Singapore had to be returned to her Dutch Catholic parents (see Aljunied 2009).

⁷I do not seek to make a normative stance on the jurisprudential obligations of donning the hijab for Muslims, though two points are instructive. Firstly, while there are some Muslim scholars who argue against the obligatory nature of the hijab, the dominant position within the Sunni school of thought, including Al-Azhar University (the leading Sunni authority), is that wearing the hijab is compulsory. Secondly, MUIS and most religious scholars in Singapore subscribe to this opinion too, which is most pertinent for this article.

⁸For a further discussion on the interaction between MUIS and the state, see Kong (1993).

⁹The new developments in the political scene, whereby the Workers’ Party has emerged as a significant challenger to PAP hegemony, have led analysts to term politics in Singapore as the ‘new normal’, see for e.g. K.P. Tan (2012a).