In the case of book bans, JAKIM provides recommendations to the Ministry of Home Affairs (KDN). These are almost always adopted wholesale due to KDN’s historical mandate rooted in colonial era’s censorship laws, now weaponised as part of the divine bureaucracy. The Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984, which activists have long campaigned to abolish, remains a blunt tool for controlling dissent and differing views under the guise of preserving public order.

Importantly, as Mona Abaza argues, the Islamisation of Knowledge project is not purely academic but a state-sponsored initiative that institutionalises dogma and restricts knowledge production.[5] What we see today is the result of this project maturing into a full epistemic apparatus that polices knowledge itself.

The defense of these actions by figures aligned with the “Attasian” stream, as highlighted by Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib, further confirms the political nature of this project. Imran observes that the Attasians have split into two: one stream that engages in intellectual discourse, and another that is dangerously embedded within state power using bureaucracy to silence dissent, justify book bans, and monopolise Islamic discourse. But this political stream is no accident. It is the logical outcome of a design that merged Syed Naquib al-Attas’ intellectual vision with the machinery of the state.[6]

At the core of this design lies a deeply held conviction among many proponents of the Islamisation of Knowledge (IoK): that knowledge must be filtered to protect Muslims from epistemic corruption. This idea, framed as safeguarding the Muslim mind from Western secular, liberal, or pluralist ideologies, creates a gatekeeping system where only ideologically approved frameworks are permitted. What is presented as intellectual protection becomes, in practice, a mechanism of epistemic policing. Anything that falls outside the boundaries of sanctioned discourse is marked as deviant, confusing, or dangerous.

What JAKIM has done, by recommending the censorship of critical academic works, is a direct manifestation of the very anti-intellectualism that Ahmet T. Kuru critiques in his book. Kuru argues that the historical decline of Muslim societies was driven by a pact between the ulama class and authoritarian states, which together suppressed critical inquiry and monopolised religious discourse. In attempting to censor his work, Malaysia’s religious bureaucracy has not only proven his thesis, but it has also exposed the enduring logic of that alliance in contemporary governance.

At its core, this is not merely about silencing dissent. Epistemic control corrodes the foundations of Muslim knowledge production itself. When the state, in alliance with religious actors, determines what may or may not be thought, read, or published, it does not preserve Islamic knowledge – it impoverishes it. Anti-intellectualism becomes institutionalised, and what emerges is not an Islamic intellectual tradition, but an epistemic echo chamber guarded by divine bureaucracy.

Ultimately, the problem is not bureaucratic stupidity, it is the success of a blueprint designed to control knowledge, morals, and public discourse. The impact goes beyond the state: society itself internalises this epistemic violence, normalising censorship and punishing dissent, as anti-intellectualism becomes entrenched.