Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Barry Wain (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

For several reasons, including historical tension between the center and states, the jostling for authority and control did not always follow party lines. Many of the ulama had studied in the Middle East together and shared the same deeply conservative opinions, whether employed by UMNO or PAS.[82] As Dr. Mahathir clashed with ulama in National Front-controlled states as well as PAS strongholds, the ranks of religious officialdom swelled inexorably, with functionaries devising new laws and restrictions that invaded the most private spaces of Muslim lives. Rather than contributing to the opening of the Muslim mind in Malaysia, the Islamization race actually restricted it even further.[83]

Objecting to "the steady encroachment of a particularly rigid" form of Islam, Farish Noor, a Malay intellectual, complained that Muslims were forced to negotiate "a gamut of bureaucratic hurdles" to do the most basic things like getting married. Farish, a political scientist specializing in Islamist politics, described as "pathetic" his own three-day marriage class. All he learned was "the benefit of strawberry-flavoured condoms", while the religious teacher compared making love to playing football "in such a ridiculous way that I now understand how the Malaysian football team could lose to Laos nil-6".[84]

Farish and a number of like-minded liberal Muslims paid dearly for having the temerity to challenge Islamic clerics and scholars. Accused by the Malaysian Ulama Association of "insulting Islam", they were verbally abused and threatened with rape and death. Their "living hell" ended when they eventually were able to explain themselves at public forums and in talks with state religious authorities.[85]

Chinese and Indian Malaysians, the vast majority of whom are not Muslims, had their own complaints. In 1982, an Islamic consultative body proposed new regulations that would allow sharia courts to punish non-Muslims, as well as believers, in khalwat cases. The proposal was clearly in breach of the Constitution, which allows state governments to legislate on Islam only for Muslims. After non-Malays strongly protested, the mooted regulations were never implemented. In 1989, the Selangor government revised a law to permit, among other things, non-Muslim children to convert to Islam on reaching puberty. After behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Malaysian Chinese Association, UMNO's coalition ally, the offending provision was quietly withdrawn.[86]

It was with his core Malay constituency, however, that Dr. Mahathir came unstuck. Their consciousness raised by years of immersion in narrow readings of Islam at odds with traditional Malay tolerance and creativity,[87] the Malays elevated Islam to the main marker of their identity, superseding language and custom, as defined in the Constitution. With economic progress an integral part of their Islamic lives, as hammered home in countless Dr. Mahathir harangues, many Malay-Muslims came to view critically the NEP and its successor policies. They were better educated and better off than their parents, with a nominally deeper commitment to the practice of Islam. While the country had experienced remarkable development, they could also see that the gains were not being distributed in a fair and reasonable manner. Indeed, Dr. Mahathir's objective of creating Malay millionaires by definition endorsed favouritism, if not cronyism, while financial scandals and massive corruption were endemic and seemingly tolerated. While the power and privilege of those in the upper echelons of a prosperous urban-industrial economy were reinforced, the poor and deprived struggled. In brief, the most basic principle of governance in Islam, social justice, was missing. As the Islam expert Patricia Martinez put it, "It is Islam that defines Malay identity and Islam that proscribes perceptions of wrong doing...".[88] Islam deployed as "catalyst and legitimacy" for the objectives of the Mahathir administration came home to roost as the "idiom and metaphor" for Malay disgruntlement.[89]

A contributing factor was the alternative example provided by PAS, which expanded its membership and branch network with a limited budget and sheer hard work. Attracting little publicity or praise in the mainstream press, the party built a grassroots organization with individual donations and mass support on the back of volunteers willing to contribute without monetary reward.[90] In stark contrast with UMNO luminaries, PAS's ulama leaders for the most part led exemplary lives, free of ostentation and the hint of corruption.[91] Nik Abdul Aziz, the Kelantan PAS boss accused by the government of spreading religious fanaticism, set the tone. After being elected chief minister in 1990, he eschewed the grand official residence and continued to live in the humble wooden house in which he was born, ten kilometres outside the state capital, Kota Bharu.[92]

For large numbers of Malay-Muslims, the dramatic sacking of Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, after a year of financial and economic turmoil, confirmed their judgment that the Mahathir administration was degenerate. Anwar, the second-most powerful politician in the nation and the one providing UMNO with its Islamic ballast, was denounced as both a womanizer and a gay. Dismissed as deputy prime minister and finance minister and stripped of his UMNO deputy presidency and party membership on successive days, he was in the dock a few weeks later being prosecuted as a common criminal. It was all too sudden and shocking. Moreover, it was unbelievable.

Even less acceptable in Malay culture was the way Anwar was shamed and humiliated. Arrested at his home by balaclava-clad, M-16 wielding police special forces who broke down an open door, he was held under the Internal Security Act for allegedly endangering public security. Bashed in custody by Malaysia's police chief, he was left untreated for days and without access to a lawyer or his family. When he appeared in court with a black eye nearly closed, his face bruised and puffy, Dr. Mahathir suggested Anwar may have inflicted the wounds himself to gain sympathy. The government's defensive response to Anwar's later physical deterioration in jail, together with reports showing a high level of arsenic in his blood, indicated little apparent concern for his physical safety. Anwar's chances of getting a fair trial — he was initially charged with five counts of corruption and five of sodomy — receded as Dr. Mahathir repeatedly declared, in disregard of court warnings, that Anwar