Islam: facing two ways with Dr Mahathir

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2004 by Roger Kershaw

Yet there was distinct continuity in Mahathir's vision of change, for it continued to express his early secular ideals and ethnic nationalism. Any shift towards a more Islamic emphasis since the repression of Anwar may be explicable, precisely, in terms of the loss of Anwar's legitimising, though gradually compromised and diminishing, Islamist charisma. Nor had Mahathir ceased to cherish power, at least as a means of realizing the political 'redemption' of the Malay race through economics. But since Anwar's assimilation to conventional political norms had taken the form, partly, of an ambition to succeed Dr Mahathir at an earlier date than 'the boss' had in mind, the divergence between the two men had taken an even more fundamental turn.

Meanwhile, one constant imperative for Mahathir in his manipulation of religion had been to shield non-Muslim citizens--many of whom vote for his ruling coalition--from the more intrusive impacts of Islam on their lives, or certainly from fear of what may lie in store. Just as Malay communal militancy has been diverted by conjuring up a neo-colonialist British bogyman as a would-be 'threat to our survival' for all Malaysians, so also does the international scene provide rich opportunities for directing Muslim militancy outwards, away from potential domestic targets such as Christian Indians, Chinese, and natives of Borneo, but also from the more secular-minded and Westernised Malays of which Dr Mahathir himself is an example. (Although Mahathir's two most notable confrontations with Britain were in a secular-nationalist mould, the former British prime minister John Major is unlikely to forget Mahathir's protocol-defying attack with religious overtones, at an official banquet in Kuala Lumpur in 1993, over Britain's failure to intervene and save Muslims in Bosnia.) But even more to the point, today, is the need to forestall future electoral advances by PAS in face of what many Malay voters see as the 'corrupting influence of power' on UMNO (United Malays National Organisation): for UMNO has ruled the country in multi-racial coalition since Independence, apart from but including Mahathir's own years of increasingly authoritarian leadership, spanning just half the era.

Now while to some extent the Malaysian domestic scene can be 'brought to order' by these tactics, they presuppose an international stage on which Mahathir has a right to impose disorder, or risk disorder, by way of solidarity-rousing rhetoric for the whole Ummah. No doubt, he would call this prerogative his 'duty to lead', not a 'right to incite'. But this style of leadership is just the problem in the present world situation. Having for so long cast himself as a spokesman of genius for the Third World, he seems slow to reconceptualise the post-September 11th period in terms of a shared security interest of Muslim and non-Muslim states. At least the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur, 16 October 2003, heard an exercise in unreconstructed Judeophobia in the mould of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an insidious general paranoia about the political disunity and military failures of the Muslim world. The more emollient, anti-terroristic thoughts of Mahathir, directed towards the Western audience in some statements shortly after '9/11', now seem precisely that: diplomatic mood music designed to reassure 'the enemy', a tactic to conceal or belie Islamic strategic inclination in the 'clash of civilizations'. On this plane, so far from being diverted from non-Muslim targets as in Malaysia, the Ummah is being primed for greater battles to come--though not without some Quranically-correct diversion of the attention of the kafir camp from this scenario. If there is any 'diversion' for Muslims worldwide, one would judge that the exercise may divert them from discontent with their various national governments. This seems to be done by conjuring up a universal Jewish enemy without (Mahathir's overt pretensions notwithstanding) offering a realistically concrete formula for international action against Israel.