Secularism and Ethno-religious Nationalist Hegemony in Malaysia

Chapter 8 investigates the efforts of parties to navigate their way within the dominant discourse of hegemonic ethnoreligious nationalism in Malaysia. It discusses the way politics has addressed the question of identity—a corollary of the nation’s colonial experience and segmented socio-economic set-up. The post-Independence practice of consociational democracy served to cement ethnic-oriented politics, which blended with religious boundaries of Malaysia’s plural society. Since the late 1990s, however, emerging ‘new politics’ characterised by middle class–based civil activism has gradually shifted the political narrative away from issues of identity to universal values such as social justice, good governance and human rights. In this light, the chapter discusses the role of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Malaysia’s largest opposition party in Parliament.

Protecting the Sāsana through Law

This chapter is about Myanmar’s rapid political and social change, after decades-long isolation under military rule. It raises questions about the role of religious actors in the democratization processes. In 2015, four laws to ‘protect race and religion’ were passed in Myanmar’s Parliament, during a critical time in Myanmar’s political transition to democracy, and in the same year as the country’s first free elections in 25 years. The laws seek to regulate marriages between Buddhist women and non-Buddhist men, to prevent forceful conversion through state control of conversion from one religion to another, to abolish polygamy, and to promote birth control and family planning in certain regions of the country. Drawing on empirical data from Myanmar, the chapter argues that the rise of Buddhist nationalism during Myanmar’s democratization process primarily needs to be understood as a form of cultural defence in times of transition, cultural change, and societal insecurity.

Piety, Purity, and Nationalism

In the post-Suharto era, freedom of speech, particularly the press, quickly gained stronger legal protections in the constitutional reforms of the early 2000s. Its exercise by citizens and journalists alike has been a key force in warding off a democratic reversal. Yet, following the unshackling of religious expression, a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and a backlash against Western liberalism have inspired new religious intolerance that has circumscribed certain forms of speech and threatened the embrace of diversity long central to Indonesia’s identity. Chapter 6 examines the intersection of religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and political pluralism to understand the relationship between regulating blasphemy and the future of Indonesia’s new democracy. Specifically, it studies the way Indonesia surged forward economically and politically in establishing a more modern democracy while atavistic elements from its past continue to complicate its transition.

Problems of Representation

Chapter one questions the religious–secular binary in its various forms as a key part of the cognitive apparatus of liberal ideology. The religious and the non-religious secular form a mutually parasitic binary with a difficult-to-discern imagined border. These discursive formations construct the right to the unlimited accumulation of private property as the modern sacred, and yet simultaneously disguise and mystify liberal market economics as a hard-nosed science revealing empirical facts about the world. By looking carefully at an example of an academic representation of Burmese collective identity, it tries to show how binary categories of the understanding with no clear content, work to give secular liberal market values to appear as normal and inevitable. These values, which appear in consciousness as common sense empirical reality, are themselves metaphysical faith postulates.

Political Islam and Democracy in Malaysia

The third chapter discusses the current discourse of political Islam in Malaysia. It analyses the complex relations between religion, ethnic identity, and politics. It also seeks to understand how domestic and regional dynamisms affect the religious and ethnic understandings in the country. After decades of economic growth coupled with the expansion of middle-class Malaysia has also given rise to a new generation of politically conscious society. But this economic growth, fuelled by both domestic and external dynamics, has had some contradictory impacts on the evolution of Malaysian democracy. Society appears to have been further divided along sectarian and religious lines. While hopes were for a more tolerant and open society, the majority of conservative Malay-Muslims appear to have rejected the notion. The debates over the exclusive use of the word ‘Allah’ between the minority Christians and the majority Muslims illustrate the renewed religious tensions in Malaysia.

The Secular and the Religious

Chapter four highlights two crucial issues that modern Indonesia has faced as a nation state: a systematic and passionate inclusion of Sharia into the legal and public sphere of this country (Shariatization), and secularization, applied to guard Indonesia, which fulfils the standard of a democratic modern state. These two are problematic considering Indonesia is neither an Islamic nor a secular State. As a non-theocratic State, in fact, Indonesia remains unable to completely stop several efforts of Shariatization promoted by some groups of Muslim society, and as non-secular State, Indonesia cannot adopt a total separation of religion and politics either. This chapter traces the first moment of Indonesia adopting Sharia on one hand and selecting compatible aspects of secularism on the other hand, and analyses how both are maintained in the configuration of the Indonesian nation state.

Religious Minorities in Southeast Asia

Chapter five studies the process of successful democratization in Indonesia after 1998. During the transition and consolidation of democracy, Indonesia was rocked by religious and ethnic violence. Despite the levelling off of some kinds of conflict, threats and violence remained high against minority communities in Indonesia, particularly against the Ahmadiyah. Much of the explanation for persisting nature of the violence can be explained by: firstly, the political timidity of elected officials to stand up to religious groups pushing greater intolerance on a range of issues; and secondly, the Ahmadis’ self-identification as Muslims. The Rohingya, as well as Muslims more generally, are scapegoats and viewed as extreme ‘outsiders’ in a society now opening up to the world. The chapter concludes that democratic reforms cannot be considered complete or consolidated until minority rights, human rights more generally, are protected, and that democracy, modernity, and secularism do not necessarily coincide.

Ambivalence, Accommodation, Antipathy, and Anxiety

Religion and religiosity have flourished as Singapore has modernized and industrialized, bucking the secularization thesis originating from the particular context of the post-sacred West. While the government is committed to an anti-theocratic rather than anti-theistic model of secularism, which is pragmatic, not doctrinaire, there are hints of a growing form of militant secularism from sectors of society, which is inimical to democracy and human rights such as religious freedom and free speech. The government has had to devise rules of engagement to deal with the role of religious views in public policy making, particularly given the increasingly confrontational stance adopted by those with religiously and secularly influenced views in the ‘culture wars’ over matters implicating public morality. Formerly authoritarian, the government and style of governance based on the Westminster parliamentary system is in a transitional state, with increasing democratization in the promotion of a more participatory and consensualist political culture.

Introduction

In this introduction, the volume’s regional focus is embedded in the wider context of changing debates on secularism. While a new appreciation of the works on secularism in the world order in a post–Cold War era has played a part in overcoming some of the assumptions in the Western public domain, others have cautioned against an essentialist understanding of culture and religion. The chapter traces the contemporary challenges and responses to the decline of the old pattern of state regulation of religion found in Europe. It argues that there existed a greater variety and heterogeneity of religious practices and beliefs than was presumed in the homogenizing models of the nation states of Southeast Asia. The chapter argues for a complex interaction between politics, religion, and state policies to better understand the select countries of this region.