Islam, Politics and Youth in Malaysia

The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS

Dominik Mueller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415844758
• eBook ISBN: 9781317912972
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing an ethnographic account of the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) and its Youth Wing (Dewan Pemuda PAS), this book analyses the genesis and role of Islamic movements in terms of their engagement in mainstream politics. It explores the party's changing approach towards popular culture and critically investigates whether the narrative of a post-Islamist turn can be applied to the PAS Youth.

The book shows that in contrast to the assumption that Islamic marketization and post-Islamism are reinforcing each other, the PAS Youth has strategically appropriated and integrated Islamic consumerism to pursue a decidedly Islamist – or 'pop-Islamist' – political agenda. The media-savvy PAS Youth elites, which are at the forefront of implementing new outreach strategies for the party, categorically oppose tendencies of political moderation among the senior party. Instead, they are most passionately calling for the establishment of a Syariah-based Islamic oder for state and society, although these renewed calls are increasingly expressed through modern channels such as Facebook, YouTube, rock music, celebrity advertising, branded commodities and other market-driven forms of social movement mobilization.

A timely and significant contribution to the literature on Islam and politics in Malaysia and beyond, this book sheds new light on widespread assumptions or even hopes of "post-Islamism". It is of interest to students and scholars of Political Religion and Southeast Asian Politics.

1 Conceptual framework

Islamism, post-Islamism or pop-Islamism?

 

 

 

The Islamic Party of Malaysia, PAS, is a particularly insightful example for the complexity, cultural creativity and dynamicness of contemporary Islamic movements. It has long been perceived by outside observers as a group of ‘Islamist radicals’ who want to ban traditional dances, concerts, and everything ‘Western’. In recent years, however, the party underwent a far-reaching pop-cultural transformation. In addition to opening the party for a new genre of ‘Islamic entertainment’, PAS Youth activists have started experimenting with modern marketing approaches in order to advertise the party’s ‘Islamic struggle’. With their increasingly professionalized usage of social media, branding strategies, ‘pious’ rock music, and the language of entrepreneurialism, they try to link their party to contemporary trends in popular culture for the purpose of social movement mobilization. Although many PAS members stress that these changes were only technical and did not touch upon the contents of the Islamist message, the party has reinvented itself during this ongoing ‘popization’ process.¹ In contrast to the scholarly logic of a ‘post-Islamist turn’, my research findings suggest that the PAS Youth has chosen a pop-Islamist path instead. But before this argument will be contextualized and empirically substantiated, some constitutive ideas behind the narrative of post-Islamism shall be reviewed.

The evolutionary logic of post-Islamism

Parallel to questions regarding the compatibility of Islamist ideals such as God’s sovereignty and legislative power with democratically rooted popular sovereignty, observers of Muslim politics also widely discuss the idea of a transnational post-Islamist turn. One of its most prominent proponents, Asef Bayat (2007: 10–11), has famously argued that:

The appeal, energy, and sources of legitimacy of Islamism are exhausted, even among its once ardent supporters. Continuous trial and error makes the system susceptible to questions and criticism. Eventually, pragmatic attempts to maintain the system reinforce abandoning its underlying principles. Islamism becomes compelled, both by its own internal contradictions and by societal pressure, to reinvent itself, but it does so at the cost of a qualitative shift … (toward a project that emphasizes) rights instead of duties, plurality in place of a singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scripture.

For Bayat, the argument of ‘post-Islamism’ was initially a largely empirical claim to describe ‘the realities of the Islamic Republic (of Iran)’ (Bayat 2005: 7; cf. Bayat 1996; Kian 1997). Followed by many others, he later revised this position and transformed ‘post-Islamism’ into an ‘analytical category’ (Bayat 2005: 5) with a much wider claim of validity, arguing that it refers to the ‘metamorphosis of Islamism (in ideas, approaches and practices) from within and without’ (ibid.).

While the goal to create an Islamic State as a means to establish an Islamic society that lives in accordance with an all-encompassing divine legal order is a defining element of Islamism (Amin 2010: 242; Liow 2009: 6–7; Tibi 2007: 6), the abandoning of this goal and underlying ideology is a key characteristic of post-Islamism (Amin 2010: 242; Boubekeur and Roy 2012; Roy 2004; Schiffauer 2010). Nevertheless, a post-Islamist society or movement is not conceptualized as anti-Islamic or non-religious, but represents a ‘secularisation of state and prevalence of religious ethic in society’ (Bayat 2007: 5). Bayat (ibid.: 189) distinguishes ‘contrastive trajectories’ of post-Islamism in different countries, such as Iran and Egypt, but generalizes that, also beyond these cases, a ‘gradual change in the nature of Islamism’ has taken place as it has moved ‘from a political project challenging the state to one concerned with personal piety’ (ibid.: 146). In his view, this development was reinforced by post-Islamist tendencies within several Islamic movements, such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) in Turkey (Bayat 2005: 7; cf. Bayat 2007: 13, 189). Even in Saudi Arabia, Bayat observes signs of the transnational ‘post-Islamist trend’ that has ‘begun to accommodate aspects of democratization, pluralism, women’s rights, youth concerns and social development with adherence to religion’ (Bayat 2007: 13, 188–89).

Olivier Roy, besides Gilles Kepel arguably the most distinguished French scholar of Muslim politics, has extensively published on the ‘collapse of Islamism as a political ideology’ (Roy 2013: 16), which, in his understanding, is caused by disillusionment, the lack of a convincing ‘blueprint for ruling’ (ibid.: 14), and also by the secularizing constraints of politics (Roy 2012: 8, see also Roy 1992; Kepel 2000). According to Roy, the Islamic State utopia and holistic ideologies have ‘lost credibility’ especially among the educated youth. In his view, modernization and the rise of new media have undermined the young generation’s receptiveness for the Islamist ‘top-down, authoritarian’ structure ‘of knowledge transmission’ (Roy 2013: 14), even among the youth in Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The German anthropologist Werner Schiffauer (2010: 359, author’s translation) similarly argues that post-Islamism has taken root ‘in wide parts of the Muslim world’, resulting from a general ‘disillusionment’ with the state-political orientation of Islamism since the 1990s. He relates this argument to his empirical observation of young ‘organic intellectuals’ within the second generation of the Milli Görüs movement in Germany, pious activists in a diasporic situation who have access to and are forced to interact with other worldviews, who mediate between in-group and out-group, and pursue a much more flexible agenda than ‘classical Islamists’ of the past (ibid.: 24, author’s translations). Schiffauer (ibid.: 377) suggests that post-Islamism is less dogmatic in terms of the Islamist amalgamation of religion and politics, but very systematic when it comes to the Islamic way of life at an individual level.

Husnul Amin, who applied the concept of post-Islamism to Muslim politics in Pakistan, rejects any ‘crude generalisation’ (Amin 2010: 18) and suggests a structure of multiple pathways within one transnationally observable phenomenon, with specific trajectories varying ‘across time and geographical location’ (ibid.: 17). Accordingly, Pakistan represents only ‘a small subset of the broader post-Islamist project in other Muslim societies like Iran, Sudan and Turkey’ (ibid.: 18). Ihsan Yilmaz (2008, no page), on the other hand, recognized ‘multiple post-Islamisms’.

However, there are also authors (Fradkin 2013; Sinanovic 2005) who are more skeptical about the universalist claim and evolutionary logic of post-Islamism. Schwedler (2011: 371) reminds us that an unreflected bias in favor of post-Islamist ‘moderation’ may have a respective impact on our research focus and evaluation of data:

Many studies are biased toward more liberal individuals within these groups—those to whom foreign researchers have the greatest access—leaving open questions of whether the individuals examined are in any way representative … We want Islamists to become more moderate, and so we prioritize causal arguments about which mechanisms produce … ideological moderation.

Finally, and most crucially for the ethnographic scope of this book, post-Islamism is often described as modern, marketized, media-savvy and consumption-oriented. The post-Islamist turn is therefore, according to Boubekeur and Roy (2012: 13), embodied by ‘a younger post-Islamist generation which has used Facebook and social networking, not to talk about the Islamic State, but to join global discourses on freedom and pluralist societies’. In the present book, however, we will see that in fact, the PAS Youth in Malaysia, a popular mass-organization, is dominated by young media-savvy activists with significant grassroots support who are still, or rather again, calling for an Islamic State. They passionately, albeit paradoxically, distribute their urgent emphasis on decidedly Islamist positions via Facebook, YouTube, and consumerist Islam, and uncompromisingly defend a top-down structure of knowledge-transmission, the ‘leadership of religious scholars’ (kepimpinan ulama), within their party.

The second wave of Islamism

The sociologist Nilüfer Göle (2002: 67) notes in the context of a rising public visibility of Islam in Turkey, that the ‘“original” European code of modernity … is continuously and creatively appropriated and altered’ by public Islamic actors, a transnationally observable phenomenon that she perceives as both a critique and transformative fetishization of Western modernity. Departing from the ‘multiple modernities’ approach of Eisenstadt and Schluchter (1998), which pursues the project of a de-Westernization of the understanding of modernity, Göle (2002: 176) argues that manifestations of ‘Islamic modernity’ should be analyzed ‘not only in terms of their approximation to the West but also in their own terms’. As such non-occidental forms of modernity provide space for being ‘both modern and Muslim’ (Göle 2010: 113), they challenge the hegemonial claim of Western-style secular notions of modernity and re-define it to suit their own context (see also Göle 1993). The very nature of multiple modernities rests on the fact that when modernity is indigenized for different contexts, it acquires partially different meanings (Göle 2002: 184). Göle (ibid.: 184, 187) interprets such differences (or ‘extra’) and ‘the search for difference’ as inherent components of Islamic modernity, the expression of ‘a critical resistance to the assimilative strategies and homogenizing practices of modernity’.

Given that much of Göle’s (2002) argumentation about Islamic modernity as a reaction to and critique of an established order of overemphasized, fetishized secular modernity is tailored to the case of Turkey, its applicability for Malaysia is limited. This becomes obvious given the fact that, as Farish Noor (quoted in Liow 2009: 177) illustrates, in contrast to the Turkish context, ‘the idea of a secular state is dead in Malaysia’, and, as such, there is hardly a secular public order left for Islamic modernity to subversively appropriate and alter. Nevertheless, Göle’s analysis does apply to Malaysia when it comes to the amalgamation of Islamic modernity and the ‘second period’ of Islamism. The ‘first wave’ of Islamism is said to have reached its peak with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1979. This period was ‘characterized by mass mobilizations, Islamic militancy, a quest for an Islamic collective identity, and the implementation of a political and religious rule’ (Göle 2002: 174). The Islamism of that time was, aside from some militant tendencies in terms of strategy, ideologically shaped by the ‘systematic attempt from above to Islamicize society and the economy’ (Bayat 1996: 55), as well as the state’s legal system. The second wave, in contrast, witnessed a shift away from state-politically oriented ‘classical Islamism’ to a more individualized, culturally oriented, marketized and modern form of Islamist piety from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Göle (2002: 174) argues that during this second phase ‘a multiplicity of voices’ replaces ‘the ideological chorus’, where:

Actors of Islam blend into modern urban spaces, use global communication networks, engage in public debates, follow consumption patterns, learn market rules, enter into secular time, get acquainted with values of individuation, professionalism, and consumerism, and reflect upon their new practices. Hence we observe a transformation of these movements from a radical political stance to a more social and cultural orientation, accompanied by a loss of mass mobilization capacity, which led some researchers to pronounce the end of Islamism and the ‘failure of political Islam’.²

However, Göle rejects the hegemonial assumption that the political nature of Islamism is declining. Accordingly,

A more cultural orientation does not mean a less political one. Indeed, instead of disappearing as a reference, Islam penetrates even more into the social fiber and imaginary, thereby raising new political questions, questions not addressed solely to Muslims but concerning the foundational principles of collective life in general.

(Ibid.)

Despite this argument primarily referring to political dimensions beyond state, governmental or party politics, it is clear that these dimensions—politics and culture—are interlinked in the democratically constitutive discursive space of public spheres.

The rise of modern Islamic popular culture, or ‘pop-Islam’ (Heryanto 2010), as expressed through various forms of Islamic consumption and marketization, is an integral element of both Islamic non-Western modernities and the ‘second wave’ of Islamism.

The question whether the turn toward Islamic consumption and pop-Islam has a political impact on the biggest and de facto only local Islamist opposition party, PAS, remains empirically open. Does the cultural turn toward Islamic marketization in the ‘second wave of Islamism’ produce a post-Islamist turn among the PAS Youth? Does the PAS Youth’s exposure to non-Western modernization, globalized communication technologies and higher education undermine its adherence to the holistic ideology of Islamism, and its top-down structure of knowledge transmission? Or does the PAS Youth integrate and subordinate the spectacular rise of marketized Islamic popular culture in order to pursue a substantially Islamist political agenda?

Notes

1 The term ‘popization’ denotes processes of adjustment to popular culture in order to widen popular appeal. It has been used elsewhere for art (Pine 2006: 418) and music (Lucas 2000: 44). In my usage, the ‘popization’ of PAS describes the strategy of adapting the party’s profile and activities to contemporary popular (‘pop’) culture, with the target of increasing PAS’ appeal, especially among the young generation.

2 Original footnote in Göle (2002: 174): Olivier Roy, L’échec de l’Islam politique (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Gilles Kepel, Jihad: Expansion et déclin de l’Islamisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2000)’.

2 The politics of Islam in Malaysia

Ethnicity and Islam in the Malaysian nation state

In Malaysia, Islam constitutionally enjoys the privileged status of ‘the religion of the Federation’ (Federal Constitution of Malaysia 2010, Article 3 [1]). At the same time, ever since its foundation as an independent state in 1957, Malaysia consists of a thoroughly multi-religious and multi-ethnic society in which more than one-third of the population are non-Muslims. Non-Muslim religions are, at least in constitutional theory, allowed to ‘be practised in peace and harmony’ (ibid.). The largest ethnic group is, and has—with the exception of a short period in the 1930s and 1940s—always been, the Malays, with different sources suggesting that they represent between 50 and 55 percent of the population.¹ Malays are constitutionally required to be Muslims (Federal Constitution of Malaysia 2010, Article 160). Ethnic Chinese make up the second biggest community (24.6 percent in 2010), comprising followers of various religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2011, no page). Ethnic Indians (7.3 percent) are the third largest group, consisting of Hindus, Christians and Muslims (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2011, no page). Therefore, although Malaysia is a Malay-majority country, this majority is precarious and has been since the colonial era when the British administration brought in large numbers of Chinese and In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• A note on names, pseudonyms and spelling
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptual framework: Islamism, post-Islamism or pop-Islamism?
• 2 The politics of Islam in Malaysia
• 3 The Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) and its Youth Wing
• 4 The pop-Islamist reinvention of PAS: anthropological observations
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index