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Reflecting on Intra-Muslim Prejudice in Contemporary Malay Muslim Society
The issue is not an abstract one; it has lived consequences on Muslims as social actors and how we engage with changes and issues in society.
Introduction
A lot has been written and discussed about the development of the Islamic resurgence in the Malay world. Different people have attempted to portray and analyse the phenomenon differently. Some have called it Islamic or dakwah revivalism, others have called it Islamisation, Islamic resurgence, or the ‘conservative turn’. The current buzzword, in reflection of the increasing support for the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS), is the ‘green wave’. Many are grappling as though it is a sudden and recent phenomenon. People are wondering, why are the young, technologically savvy and usually urban Muslims in Malaysia, supporting the kind of political and religious views espoused by PAS? In Singapore, we also share similar concerns whereby it seems like Muslims are growing in their religiosity and observance. While the increasing observance of religion and piety are not the problem, it is the almost rigid, intolerant, absolutist, often literal and non-contextualised understanding of Islam that is of concern.
Part of my interest in the topic of intra-Muslim prejudice – which led to my Masters’ dissertation in 2017 – was to also grapple with the social, political and religious realities around me. The issue is not an abstract one; it has lived consequences on Muslims as social actors and how we engage with changes and issues in society. I first heard of anti-liberal Islam and anti-Shi’a sentiments in the religious classes I was attending since the early 2010s. At the same time, in my university undergraduate classes, I was learning about diversity in Islamic intellectual history and the kinds of debates that took place in the Malay world, such as the debates between the Kaum Muda and Kaum Tua factions of the religious elites in the early 20th century. I was already getting used to the idea that diversity and differences in opinions and orientations within my, or any other religious community, is actually normal.
However, in my religious classes, especially in the subject of aqidah or religious creed, I was still being taught that only the Sunni school of Islam is true and that all other groups are false or deviant. Even then, it is a Sunni form of Islam that has been emptied of the diverse and contesting traditions within, whether they were of the different schools of jurisprudence or orientations. In these classes that I attended, we were taught to identify who the deviant groups are in the contemporary era, and these included the Shi’a and liberal Muslims. While these are entirely different groups and cannot be seen as the same, they were simply painted as deviant. Some of the traits of these groups of Muslims were highlighted, but it was not very clear to me why they were deviant, other than the fact that they were not Sunni. All these views were taken as facts, rather than opinions of certain groups of people. At one point, one of the teachers also cautioned us against the influence of liberal Islam in our midst, especially in the social science faculties in secular universities. Understandably, as a student, I felt like I was caught in between these debates and divides, and had to figure out where I stood as a Muslim. At that point, I even felt like it was a matter of my personal faith.
Fast forward to my Masters research, I felt that I needed to study this issue of intra-Muslim prejudices. This was driven by my observations of the persecution and discrimination against minority Muslims in our region, plus the raging sentiments online, including in Singapore where the prejudice and discrimination against minority Muslims may not be as evident. I understood it as prejudice because these deviant Muslims were viewed with hostility, fear and as sources of moral panic. I decided to study the issue of religious orientation through a social scientific lens, using the social psychology of prejudice and its connection to fundamentalism and authoritarianism as a political and religious orientation. This is to offer another perspective on the current discourse on Islamic resurgence in contemporary Malay-Indonesian society. If intra-Muslim diversity has always existed in our history, I wanted to understand what was driving the kind of fear and prejudice towards these ‘other’ Muslims in our contemporary society.
I found three key themes which underlie this intra-Muslim prejudice.
First, is the question of religious authority and dissent – who gets to speak and who is silenced? This is also tied to the bigger question of religious freedom within the Muslim community, whether Muslims can differ in their religious views and question their religious authorities.
Second, is the rise of right-wing religious and political authoritarianism, underlying which is a siege mentality or the perception that the Islamic faith and the Muslim community is under threat, both internally and externally.
Third, and relating to the second point, is the rise of a collective threat orientation in contemporary Malay Muslim society. This also points to the rise of ethnocentric nationalism that drives racism and Malay supremacism, particularly in Malaysia.
Prejudice and Its Relation to Islamism
Prejudice, as the social psychologist Gordon Allport described in his seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice, can be understood as “a pattern of hostility in interpersonal relations which is directed against an entire group, or against its individual members”. Prejudice is an outlook of the authoritarian fundamentalist personality; in this case it is taken to the societal level where such an outlook is privileged and made mainstream. By ‘fundamentalist’, I mean a style of thinking that sees things in binary, absolutist and fixed ways without the ability to entertain doubts or questioning of truths that reside outside of his or her subjective understanding.
Collective prejudice often grows in a socio-political climate where the leaders in the society thrive on fear-mongering and demonising others who are perceived as threats to the society. These leaders also use the language of moral panic through demagoguery to rouse public sentiments. Hence, there is a symbiotic relationship between collective prejudice and the socio-political climate driven by fear, anxiety and manipulation.
Authoritarianism and exclusivism are traits of the prejudiced and fundamentalist mind. Underlying these traits are the ‘threat orientation’ that Allport and another social psychologist, Theodore Newcomb had analysed. This threat orientation seeks definiteness, and projects its insecurities towards out-groups. Hence, religious belief is seen in black-and-white and absolute terms, and people who challenge this absolutism are deemed as out-groups, threats or enemies from within.
In the context of Muslim politics in general, we can see how the politics of threat and insecurity is always played up by Islamist groups and their key proponents. By ‘Islamist’, I mean those whose main quest is to gain power and control over others in society in the name of religion (Islam), which often involves politics from the top-down or bottom-up. For these Islamist groups who are driven by the quest for power and control over the Muslim population, the ‘other’ Muslims cannot just exist, or be disagreed with. Because they have an authoritarian and exclusivist outlook, these differences threaten to undermine the perceived unity of the group. Homogeneity and conformity in religious thought and expression is often mistaken for unity. When it is said that the Islamic faith is ‘under threat’, it is actually a way to say that the group’s identity, as defined by those in power, as well as the authorities’ hold over the populace, is being threatened.
Case study: Anti-Shi’a and anti-liberal Islam sentiments
The demonisation of ‘deviant’ Muslims in Singapore (with influences from broader dynamics in Malaysia and Indonesia) involves the stereotyping and labelling of ‘other’ Muslims not just as deviants but as an existential threat to Islam itself. Because these other Muslims are reduced to stereotypes and caricatures, there is no clear understanding about these ‘other’ Muslims in mainstream public discourse, other than the idea that society must be wary of them. There is no contextualisation and actual understanding of these groups, for example, why Shi’a Muslims practice Islamic rituals in a certain manner or why liberal Muslims uphold the value of gender and religious equality. In the case of Shi’a Islam, the mere difference from Sunnis in certain religious practices are simply taken as proof of the former’s deviancy. Similarly, disagreements or objections to widely accepted views on Islam, even if these disagreements or objections are grounded in the same sacred sources albeit re-interpreted or understood in a changing context, are deemed as heretical.
Such a posture then became the justification for the policing, surveillance and even raiding of places and organisations (in Malaysia) perceived as ‘promoting’ deviant brands of Islam. This approach is in keeping with similar trends to combat deviant teachings through religious bureaucracies since the rise of Islamism in the 1970s and 1980s. In Singapore, we occasionally hear of calls from Muslim organisations and vocal members of the public for the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) to take action against instances of religious deviances, such as banning certain scholars who are deemed as liberal Muslims from speaking in Singapore.
In my research, I had employed a critical discourse analysis of public discourse, both online and offline. I wanted to capture how these views and sentiments have become normalised and part of the mainstream. A lot of these views have been taken for granted as facts about these so-called deviant Muslims. I wanted to demonstrate that these prejudicial views are not simply individual views, but are reproduced at the collective level, and often from influential members of the Malay Muslim community.
Analysis of key themes
Manifestations of authoritarianism and prejudice is fundamentally a contestation for power and monopoly for truth and orthodoxy. Islamists are not able to deal with diversity in Islamic thought and traditions and seek to impose a narrow and singular understanding of Islam. It can be argued here that the issue is not so much about what true Islam means, but who possesses the monopoly of truth-claims and the production of Islamic knowledge in society.
The traditionalist religious elites have a role to play in contributing to the rise of exclusivist and prejudicial attitudes towards the intra-Muslim Other. In Singapore, since the 1970s and 1980s, the elites have been preoccupied with clamping down on religious deviance or ajaran sesat. This included calls to ban Shi’as and the purported anti-Hadith groups. This has repercussions on how the issue of intra-religious diversity is handled through increasing forms of social control. Today, the mode of policing, surveillance and disciplining cuts across every group that happen to be against the ‘orthodoxy’ of those vested with authority to determine what Islam is and should be. Of course, what Islam is and should be, has always been negotiated and evolving in relation to the discursive community of practice and belief. In today’s context, they are often enforced through state powers and monopoly over coercive instruments.
Prejudicial views without recourse to dialogues and civil engagements can fester into hate if they are normalised through the religious education and generally go unchallenged, and thus accepted as the dominant truth because of the top-down transfer of knowledge and rote learning in religious education settings. It is also often accepted that laypersons are not supposed to challenge their religious teachers, and those who do so, are sometimes seen as challenging the Islamic faith itself. The imbalance in power can be seen in terms of how public talks can be organised to demonise liberal Muslims, but so-called liberal Muslims are not allowed to talk in mosques or mainstream religious spaces. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the state religious departments employ tools of state control to discipline and even persecute minority Muslim groups, while also normalising prejudice through various public platforms.
Current state of affairs
Six years on after the completion of my research and dissertation, the sense of collective threat and fear of the intra-Muslim Other, remain prevalent. The mainstreaming of Islamism results in the silencing of alternatives through instruments of power, fear-mongering and shaming. It also comes with the control over intra-Muslim diversity and religious freedom for Muslims. It is not just that Islamism impacts non-Muslims, but it also affects the internal development of Islamic thought and culture. As such, the Islamisation project by Islamists cannot be seen as just a political project of establishing an Islamic state, but also an economic and cultural project aimed at transforming society. Islamism is also fluid and dynamic, and transcends nation-state boundaries through the exchange of ideas and establishment of regional networks. As discussed earlier, the rise of ethnoreligious chauvinism, entrenchment of patriarchal norms and rising intolerance towards plurality in society comes with the rise of right-wing religious and political authoritarianism. This explains why the ideas of liberal Muslims, such as on gender equality are continuously presented as threats and imports from the West. At the same time, these issues must be understood through the lens of colonised societies who are still grappling with the impact of colonialism, modernisation and the rise of globalised capitalism. These postcolonial conditions become the added layers of insecurity, fear and anxiety.
These issues have real implications on the region and affects the possibilities to really come up with alternatives to the Islamist vision of society. We see how the recent examples of concert-banning in Malaysia and the increasing crackdown on minority groups, call for the greater need for spaces for alternative views to develop beyond the reaches of state control. Even in secular states like Singapore, similar attitudes persist and liberal or progressive Muslims are still demonised. For example, when the essay anthology Budi Kritik in which I was a co-editor was released in 2018 and re-printed in 2019, complaints were made about this book which were escalated to MUIS and other Singaporean Muslim authorities as the authors and editors were all simply labelled as ‘liberal Muslims’. The ‘Wear White’ movement, which gained traction in the mid-2010s as a protest against LGBT rights advocacy, were also targetting progressive Muslim allies who are against discriminatory and oppressive practices against sexual minorities.
As a takeaway, perhaps the bigger question is how do we deal with the politics of insecurity among Malay Muslims and how do we provide a better alternative beyond talking about alternative theologies and interpretations? I do believe that change must happen both at the structural and discursive level. Progressive change cannot simply be within the purview of academics and professionals, but they must also have a real impact on the lived experiences of Muslims. More dialogues and engagements must be done among Muslims of different orientations to build the capacity of Muslims for critical reflections on our changing social context. The hope is to expand the possibility of true diversity within the Muslim community by challenging the authoritarianism in our midst, and to see how, in the words of Prophet Muhammad, that diversity within the community is a sign of mercy.
References
Allport, Gordon W. (1955), The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.; Boston: Beacon Press
Newcomb, Theodore M. (1952), Social Psychology, London: Tavistock Publications
Nurul Fadiah Johari
Nurul Fadiah Johari is a Research Associate at the Social Service Research Centre in NUS. Her research interests include the interplay of power and ideology in the construction of dominant narratives on socio-economic issues, as well as the intersection of socio-economic class, ethnicity and gender in the shaping of policies and their impact on marginalised communities.