Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib
In popular Malaysian discourse, conversations about local political developments tend to be reduced to the binary opposition between conservatism and liberalism. On the former end, the story goes that Malaysia is a Muslim country because its dominant indigenous population (i.e., the Malays) are, according to the Federal Constitution (FC), all Muslims. Therefore, Malaysia, as a national entity, rightfully belongs to the Malay people and should be governed in accordance with Islamic principles, understood as the implementation of Muslim-specific social, political, economic, legal, and cultural norms. On the other hand, it is said that Malaysia does not belong solely to the Malays, who, despite what the FC says, are not all Muslims, whether nominal or practising. It follows that Islam should have no place in the governance of the country, as that would most definitely lead to the marginalisation of other ethnic and religious groups that exist outside the Malay-Muslim racial category. Evidently, the fundamental disagreement between the two most prominent strands of political thought centers on the role of Islam in the governance of Malaysia.
The question of Islam and how it is to be understood is surely important in any attempt at conceptualising governance in this land. Apart from the fact that the majority of the people here are born into Muslim families and inducted into Muslim-normative superstructures, the Malay world as a multi-civilisational entity has had a long history with Islam and has been largely influenced and shaped by the faith at varying levels, from the structural to the individual. However, existing discussions surrounding Islam have mostly unfolded within idealist frameworks; that is, the debate has been restricted to whether Islam should influence governance today, when the material reality is that Islam exists within and interacts with the Malaysian sociopolitical landscape. Hence, to truly understand the place it should occupy within the local revolutionary movement, Islam must first be understood as it is in the current moment of Malaysian politics, which is not a spontaneous event but rather the historical continuity of its preceding material conditions.
The Federation of Malaysia is the neocolonial consolidation of three territories, namely Malaya, Sarawak, and Sabah, each of which had previously been under its own form of British colonial rule. This formation in 1963 was the result of a geopolitical plan concocted by British imperialist powers and their collaborators to create an anti-communist arc in Southeast Asia in response to the developmentalist nationalist project of liberated Indonesia under Sukarno’s rule. Their main goal was to obstruct the spread of socialist and communist ideologies within the region to prevent the establishment of even more socialist-oriented national liberation projects, as they understood these potential developments to be fundamentally anti-imperialist. The rise of socialism within the context of national liberation in the Third World would threaten the global hegemony of Western imperialism, effectively weakening its hold over the global economy, which subordinated Third World economies to the West’s capital centres through colonial rule. Thus, to subvert this historical trajectory, the colonial powers decided to “bestow” independence upon their colonies rather than allow the colonised to win it through successful political revolution.
The receipt of formal independence may seem like a positive development at first glance. On the contrary, it actually allowed the coloniser to dictate the conditions of independence. In the case of Malaya, the Merdeka (lit. independence) movement was initially conceived by the Malay left, comprising Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM), its women’s wing, Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS), and its youth wing, Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API). This vision of independence is clearly articulated in API’s political testament written by Ahmad Boestamam in 1946, which demanded merdeka sa-ratus peratus dengan darah (complete independence with blood). He wrote that this goal necessitated unity between all ethnicities within Malaya (i.e., the Malays, Chinese, Indians, etc.) against the British regime to upend the colonial order. Hence, the Malay left advocated for independence alongside the non-Malays, who had already been engaged in their own organised struggle against the British through worker and estate unions. This led to the formation of the PUTERA-AMCJA coalition, Malaya’s very first multi-ethnic and multi-religious political formation.
Through PUTERA-AMCJA, Malay and non-Malay representatives worked together to draft the 1947 People’s Constitutional Proposals, intended to be enforced as the supreme law of a newly liberated Malaya upon independence. This document was revolutionary, particularly for its treatment of the Malay question. Instead of being defined in terms of race, Malayness, specifically the Melayu citizenship provision, would have been broadened to encompass a nationality that was inclusive of all citizens regardless of ethnicity, and without religious implications. This means that the Melayu label would not have been restricted by religious identification, allowing the colonised people of Malaya to unite under a single Malay identity. Accordingly, serving also as a nationality, the Melayu citizenship provision of the People’s Constitution guaranteed equal civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights to all members of this inclusive nation of Malays, such as the right to strike and the right to leisure. This contrasts with the current FC, which codifies ethnic inequality by assigning the Malays as a racial category special rights and privileges.
Despite the submission of this constitutional document, the British colonial administration refused to entertain it. This prompted the PUTERA-AMCJA to organise a nationwide hartal (a form of mass protest adopted from the Indian independence movement) to show the masses’ support for the People’s Constitution. On 20 October 1947, as a result of grassroots efforts by 30 PUTERA-AMCJA centres across Malaya, the whole country observed an 18-hour hartal. During this period, the people stayed at home. Locally-owned shops were closed. Labourers refrained from going to work in the mines, factories, shipyards, and rubber plantations. Fishermen did not go to sea, homemakers did not go to the market, and even the youth stayed away from amusement parks. The only places that continued their daily operations were the colonial government offices, European stores, and several other shops. This nationwide strike, which inhibited business as usual, cost the British colonial government four million pounds in losses. It also became a unique form of political education, bringing the issue of the constitution into every household and developing the national consciousness of the Malayan masses.
Despite the gains made by the hartal, the British still outright rejected the People’s Constitution, in favour of its agreement with the Malay aristocrats to defend the Malayan Constitution (predecessor to the FC) drafted by the Reid Commission, the same Malay aristocrats who had initially dismissed the call for Merdeka from the Malay left as they did not believe the people were ready to self-govern without the British. Thus, to undermine this political project conceived within the broader struggle for national liberation, which had the backing of the masses, the British declared the Malayan Emergency in 1948, during which thousands of PUTERA-AMCJA leaders faced mass arrests under accusations of communist affiliation. All this occurred even though the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had refrained from officially participating in the coalition, having given only its endorsement for what the coalition attempted to achieve, as its cadres were busy preparing for the inevitable armed struggle. Funnily enough, it was fleeing British arrests that pushed some PUTERA-AMCJA members, including Malay nationalists, to join the guerrilla soldiers within the forests, as they had nowhere else to go and nothing left to lose. As such, PUTERA-AMCJA was effectively dissolved, allowing for the aristocratic right-wing United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) to co-opt Merdeka, thereby altering the trajectory of the Malayan independence movement and pushing the nation towards neocolonialism.
As Frantz Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), one of the pitfalls of bourgeois nationalism is the continuation of colonial forms of rule by local elites after formal independence. This allows the ruling natives to create the illusion of national liberation for all people, even though no change has been made to the former colony’s economic structure to benefit the local population. Instead, it remains oriented to meet the demands of the former coloniser, preserving the major economic benefit of the imperialist nations through international trade, even without direct colonial rule. In the case of Malaya, the British achieved this effect with the help of UMNO, which took over the task of “struggling” for independence in the absence of the left. With all the power to shape Merdeka discourse, UMNO chose a diplomatic approach in which the terms of independence were jointly negotiated between the British and the Malay aristocrats. This, of course, excluded other sectors of Malayan society, including the Malay peasants and the non-Malay working class.
The Malay elites were placed in a position to create an independent Malaya in their own image. By adopting the foreign-produced Malayan Constitution, they made racialised division the basis of the Federation of Malaya. Specifically, by integrating the colonial logic of race, the citizens of Malaya were divided into two main groups: the Malays and the non-Malays. The former group was guaranteed a special position along with special political, economic, and cultural rights and reservations, leading to a problem of polarisation between ethnic groups that has persisted to this day. The growing resentment between them is further fueled by the continued culture war that has been occurring between the conservatives and liberals, in which Islam has taken centre stage as the main object of contest. Is Malaysia a Muslim country? Should Islamic morals be imposed through institutional power? Do policies shaped by Muslim sensitivities infringe on the rights of non-Muslims? These are the questions that have preoccupied Malaysians, leading to disunity and concealing the real enemy: the Malay ruling class and its collaborators running the neocolonial Malay ethnostate.
As I have discussed previously in a separate piece, the Malay neocolony has bred divisions not just among the Malaysian people but also among Muslims themselves. This is due to the development of a bureaucratised Islamic practice that has been subjected to (neo)colonial interests. This stands in contrast to pre-colonial Islamic practices in the Malay world, which were decentralised and allowed for Muslims to take their teachings from any qualified Islamic teacher or scholar to whom they had access. Through this arrangement, theological diversity thrived, encouraging the establishment of many Sufi tariqas, which largely shaped the Malay people’s understandings of Islamic ontologies. Even Shia influences could be found in Malay Islamicate cultural production, in the form of the veneration of the Prophet’s household (pbut), due to the presence of Persian traders, Hadhrami Arabs, and Indian Muslims in the region. Unfortunately, this ummatic diversity has gradually been constricted by the historical emergence of colonial structures, culminating in the formation of institutions like Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM) that serve to make Islamic practice conform to a particular mould compatible with neocolonial rule.
The suppression of Islam under the Malay neocolony is a reality that the divisive workings of race have largely obfuscated. Due to the current constitutional merging between Islam and Malayness as a rigid racial formulation, the two have been taken to be synonymous by virtually everyone, whether it be state actors or sectors of the laypeople. Consequently, Islam is not only heavily policed by the state, but has been used to commit injustices against the non-Malay people, such as the seizures of the bodies of deceased non-Malays from their families, who have been claimed by the state to be registered as Muslims, preventing them from being buried according to the family’s religious and cultural rites. Besides that, Islam has also been used to impose Malay hegemony upon the aboriginal peoples of Sarawak and Sabah. Some Sabahans, especially, have been forced by bureaucratic and economic pressures to convert to Islam. These kinds of encounters with the faith have resulted in Islam being viewed, understandably, as an oppressive force by the non-Malays due to its conflation with Malay supremacy when, truthfully, there is nothing Islamic about Malay supremacy.
A truly Islamic mode of governance refuses any distortion of Islam that sows division amongst the people, and it has already been articulated within the People’s Constitution. In line with the Islamic commitment to justice, Section 26 provided for the establishment of an independent Council of Races composed of two members from each ethnic community, including Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, Ceylonese, Aborigines, Arabs, Europeans, Jews, and others. This council would have functioned as a genuine check-and-balance mechanism to ensure that no bill passed by the Federal Legislative Assembly was discriminatory on racial or religious grounds. Additionally, Section 29 declared that all matters about Islam shall be outside the control and jurisdiction of any institution set up by the constitution’s own provisions, other than those set up by the Muslims themselves out of their own need to self-govern in religious affairs. These institutions were to be the sole concern of the Muslims and would not be influenced by the legislative bodies of the Malayan administration. Only when the Muslims decided that there were Islamic matters requiring legislation would they make recommendations to the Assembly, thereby making possible the exercise of genuine Muslim communal autonomy in Malayan governance.
All in all, the place of Islam in Malaysian governance is a matter that cannot be divorced from the racialisation project of the Malay neocolony. Islam has been conflated with Malayness by colonially-inherited legal and political structures, as a weapon to create rifts between the Malays and non-Malays, as well as between Muslims of different ethnicities and sects. Hence, the Malay neocolony, governed by the racialised logic of the FC, is the primary contradiction of the national struggle today. It is pertinent, now more than ever, that the spirit of the People’s Constitution be revived not only in its legislation, but also in its collective determination through the political alliance forged between various ethnic groups towards the unified goal of a free and truly independent Malaya for all people of one inclusive Malay nation. This revival must necessarily be situated alongside the respective struggles of the peoples of Sarawak and Sabah for autonomy, so that we can all achieve genuine Merdeka on our own terms. To quote a verse by radical left-wing Malay nationalist Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy: Di atas robohan kota Melaka / Kita dirikan jiwa merdeka / Bersatu padu segenap baka / Untuk membela tanah pusaka (Upon the ruins of Malacca / We raise the spirit of independence / Let us unite all our peoples / To defend our own inheritances).
Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib is a student and a writer.
