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La Trobe University
Published online: 17 Aug 2011.
To cite this article: Sven Alexander Schottmann (2011) The Pillars of Mahathir's Islam: Mahathir
Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World, Asian Studies Review, 35:3, 355-372, DOI:
10.1080/10357823.2011.602663
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2011.602663
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way across Muslim societies (e.g. Esposito and Voll, 2001; Kurzman, 2002).
Conversely, most political science-type analyses of the legacy of one of Asias
longest-ruling elected leaders (19812003) have drawn our attention to everything
except his articulation of Islam and being-Muslim. While Mahathirs bourgeois
economic nationalism, increasingly strident anti-Western outbursts, alleged socialDarwinism or culturally-argued authoritarianism have been quite well examined,
his actual contribution to the Malaysian governments articulation of the role to be
played by Islam in a modern or modernising society such as Malaysia remains
comparatively understudied. The scholarship of, among many others, Hussin
Mutalib (1993), Khoo Boo Teik (2003), Patricia Martinez (2004), Meredith Weiss
(2004), Ooi Kee Beng (2006), Michael Peletz (2005) and Joseph Liow (2009) aords
excellent insights into the wider socio-cultural, economic and political contexts
within which Mahathirs engagement with Islam was set, but few of them have thus
far taken at face value Malaysias former prime ministers public religious discourse.
This essay argues that what Mahathir presented as the proper understanding of
our religion (e.g. Mahathir, 2000) was more than just a key component of his
political rhetoric. Because his representations of correctly understood Islam so
centrally underpinned the governments Islamic policies of the 1980s and 1990s,
looking at Mahathirs articulations of religion may indeed help provide fresh
insights into Malaysian politics during these decades of pivotal change. These
insights may be particularly relevant due to the potential long-term impact
of Mahathirs religious discourse, which appeared to have albeit largely
inadvertently underscored some very democratic qualities of Islam and of the
modern-day believer. In doing so, Mahathir may have helped to strengthen the
capacity of Islam as a facilitator rather than a hinderer of any future political
liberalisation and democratisation processes (see Schottmann, 2011). The fact that
Mahathirs insistence on Islams quintessentially democratic nature and his
underscoring of its practical and this-worldly qualities was in large part self-serving
and necessary to establish himself as a legitimate commentator on Islam should not
distract us from the potential long-term signicance of the former prime ministers
engagement with the religion.
This essay contends that it is possible to conceive of Mahathirs public
pronouncements on religion as Mahathirs Islam:1 a relatively coherent discourse
that emphasises pragmatic and rationalist interpretations of the teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad. Mahathirs Islam insisted that individual Muslims had the
right to engage in rationalistic re-readings of the sources of Islamic law. Every
suciently literate Muslim (and not just the religiously-trained ulama) thus had the
capacity to gain insights into the hikma or wisdom behind Gods revelation, enabling
them to reinterpret the Quran, the Prophetic Tradition and the works of the
classical scholars in light of the changing exigencies of time and space (e.g.
Mahathir, 1984a; Mahathir, 1996a). Mahathirs Islam not only incorporated his
assessment of the grim situation facing the Muslim world, but also proposed a range
of solutions and corrective measures that the faithful of the present day should
adopt.
This essay aims to provide a hitherto neglected Islamic account of the Mahathir
premiership. It seeks to take the Malaysian premier seriously as a late twentiethcentury Muslim social agent engaged in a meaningful conversation with the
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themselves with the mindset, attitude and skills required to prosper in the modern
age (Mahathir, 1983b).
Mahathir frequently stated that Islam not only permitted Muslims to progress
materially and amass worldly wealth, but that prospering on this earth was in fact
their religious duty.
It cannot be denied that the businesses and companies in this country, and
throughout the world in fact, are not owned by Muslims. The truth is that
because of their negligence, Muslims are very weak economically. The
manifold natural resources which the Lord has bestowed upon the Muslims
have not produced any strength for them, because they are more drawn to
activities that do not strengthen their position in this world (Mahathir, 1983b).
It was precisely in the applied eld of economics that Muslims, Mahathir suggested,
had failed to understand their religion as the dynamic way of life that it was meant
to be. He had identied this problem from very early on in his premiership, telling, for
example, his audience at the launch of the Takaful Islamic insurance scheme that
many Muslims had gone to great lengths to study their religions injunctions on
prayers, fasting and tithing, but had remained oblivious to the equally large need to
apply the principles and ideals of the sharia to the modern economy:
Muslims all over the world have failed to apply the laws of Islam in the eld of
muamalah (human interaction). This failure is most evident in the nancial
system. This failure does not stem from our ignorance of the laws . . . but from a
failure to implement them. It is clear that [nance, management and accounting]
all have a close link with the practice of Islam, but Islamic societies will
never succeed and be whole again (tidak akan berjaya dan sempurna) if Muslims,
apart from worshipping Allah, have no other skills (Mahathir, 1985a).
Fardhu kifayah: The way forward
In order to obtain religious validation for his argument, Mahathir turned to a basic
concept of Islamic law: fard al-kifaya, or in its Malay version, fardhu kifayah.
Conventionally, fardhu kifayah has been understood as communal responsibilities
such as enjoining good and forbidding evil, or the limited range of religious duties
that, when carried out by a single believer, expiated the entire community from the
sin of not having carried out this obligation. The most signicant contribution of the
Mahathir government to contemporary Islamic thought may have been the recasting
of fardhu kifayah as the conceptual basis of its Islamically articulated development
discourse. If fardhu kifayah was previously understood to be the religious duties
falling to some Muslims6 (i.e. becoming the prayer leaders or washing the corpse of
a deceased Muslim), Mahathir reinterpreted it as the communal duty of all Muslims
to bring the community forward materially, declaring material development to be
the communal religious duty of Muslims:
Let us provide our service to society, and let us make a success of the eort to
improve the conditions of Muslims (memperbaiki nasib umat). Remember, in
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Islam, even though we have carried out our fardhu ain, (individual religious
obligations) we are not free from sin until fardhu kifayah has been taken care
of by any one member of society. But fardhu kifayah is not for other people
alone to carry out. If everyone waits for someone else, nobody will perform it.
And then all of us will be in sin (Mahathir, 1984c).
Mahathir regularly stated that Islam could help inspire Malaysias socioeconomic
and cultural transformations, precisely because of what he portrayed as the
religions role in the successes of earlier Muslim generations. He argued that if the
ignorant Arabs, upon embracing Islam [had been] able to build a great civilisation
within a short space of time (Mahathir, 2004), present-day Muslims would be able
to do the same by returning to correct understandings of Islam. The early Arabs,
in fact, played an important role in Mahathirs articulation of Islams transformative capacities. Not only did the ever-didactic prime minister see parallels in how
Islam was able to engender socio-political unity among the hitherto hopelessly
feuding Arabs; he also sought to demonstrate how properly understood Islam
(in his view, the emphasis on communal duty, hard work and individual discipline)
had helped transform Arab society from pre-Islamic savagery, ignorance and
amorality to being at the centre of a dynamic civilisation.
The lesson, Mahathir averred, was that present-day Malays, and Muslims more
generally, could bring about a reversal of fortune in their own lifetime. They could
help bring about a renaissance of Islamic civilisation by returning to the properly
understood Islam of the Prophets time and the so-called golden age of the classical
Muslim world. Mahathir made regular mention of medieval scholar-theologians
such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, al-Farabi and al-Khwarzimi as Muslims
who had truly understood the message of the Prophet Muhammad (Mahathir,
1986b, pp. 2425). Underlying this was his assertion that properly understood
Islam meant that Muslims should not dierentiate qualitatively worldly and
religious knowledge, and that no Muslim could be satised by learning only one at
the exclusion of the other. Imam Ghazali was alim and so was Ibn Sina, Mahathir
(1986b, p. 98) wrote in The Challenge, referring to two eleventh-century luminaries
of Islamic thought the former a theologian-philosopher, the latter a polymath
better known in the West as Avicenna. Both are Muslims and none can say that
Ibn Sina is less Muslim than al-Ghazali. Such measurements and comparisons have
no meaning and no place in Islam (Mahathir, 1986b, p. 99).
Al-Din: The Union of the Sacred and Profane
The this-worldly focus of Mahathirs Islam or his essentially anti-secular
argument that Muslims could not in good faith distinguish between the sacred
and the profane (i.e. between the archetypes of the theologian Ghazali and the
philosopher-physician Ibn Sina) may appear rather this-worldly and un-spiritual. It
is important, however, to point out that many Muslims underscore that Islam for
them is not merely a pathway to heaven, but a way of life. While the everyday lives
of the worlds 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be explained by reference to Islam alone,
Islam is undoubtedly an extremely important dimension of the life of individual
Muslims and Muslim societies, and common Muslim insistence on the character of
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Islam as an all-encompassing way of life should not be taken lightly (Bijlefeld, 1984,
pp. 22021). It was in such a vein that Mahathir told his audience at the tenth
anniversary celebrations of the International Islamic University that:
We believe in life after death and in the rewards and punishments which will be
meted out then. But Islam, more than any other religion, is about life before
death. That is why Islam is a way of life. That is the only way that Islam can be
a way of life (Mahathir, 1993a).
Muslims, Mahathir argued, had never been content with deferring the establishment
of the Kingdom of God to a distant future. Their religion did not conceive of man,
the universe and nature as inherently evil, or of the material world as a realm of
darkness (e.g. Mahathir, 1993b). Even if life in this dunia (the present world) was a
test for believers (and when more so than in present times, when Islamic civilisation
as a whole seemed to have fallen from grace), he could nd in the teachings of
the Prophet Muhammad no justication for asceticism, quietism, fatalism, or any
turning away from the world in the hope of attaining justice in the akhirat
(hereafter).
Mahathir was adamant: as a way of life, rather than a mere religion, Islam
could not be secularised. Unlike for Westerners, whose tradition he saw as having
been shaped by church-state antagonism from the beginnings of Christianity,
secularism would remain an untenable principle for Muslims:
Islam is al-Din or a way of life. This way of life covers everything done in the
lifetime of a Muslim . . . Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims are part
of the Islamic way of life. Government, education, defence, health,
communications and transport, places of worship and creature comforts:
everything to do with human life is part of the Muslim way of life (Mahathir,
2002a).
Mahathirs denition of the term secularism, simply, was the assumption that life
could be divided into the sacred/spiritual/private realm that may or may not include
religion, and the profane/temporal/public sphere from which religion should as far
as possible be excluded. He often suggested that this concept had emerged from
the particular circumstances and historical experiences of Western Europe, but that
it was inapplicable, inappropriate, and in the nal instance, incomprehensible to
Muslims:
[The] separation of state from the church . . . may be possible in the Christian
context. It is not possible in the Muslim world. Islam is a way of life and a way
of life cannot be compartmentalised into spiritual and material. Everything
that a person does is part of a way of life. Certainly the system of government
of a country and its development is a part of the way of life (Mahathir, 2003a).
Faced with the conviction of many supporters of the Islamist opposition party PAS
that science, education, workplace relations, the media landscape and the whole of
present-day Malaysia were all secular (among many Malaysian Muslims a byword
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public articulations of how Muslims should carry themselves not only lent support
to the governments social engineering programs, but also encouraged greater
civility in the public sphere. Perhaps the strongest example of the potential of
Mahathirs Islam to become civil religion is the theoretical theological
validation it provided to the cosmopolitanism of the street and the everyday
instances of mutual understanding that still characterise everyday life in multicultural and multi-religious Malaysia. Apart from highlighting the Prophet
Muhammads reputed tolerance and equanimity in dealing with Jews, Christians
and polytheistic Arabs, Mahathir also regularly highlighted those verses of the
Quran that call for accommodation and dialogue (e.g. Mahathir, 1983c; Mahathir,
1999a).
Mahathirs Islam may not have been the warm-hearted embrace of pluralism
Hefner (2000, pp. 1420) was able to observe among some Muslim actors in postReformasi Indonesia. Mahathirs turn towards Islam, in particular, did little to
relieve the countrys non-Muslim minorities feelings of alienation from a state that
appeared to distance itself from its original multicultural premise. For instance,
many non-Muslims remain very uneasy about the implications of Mahathirs
statement that Malaysia already was an Islamic state. Some of the actual eects of
Malaysias four decade long march towards desecularisation (Kessler, 2004),
including the Islamisation of educational curricula, diculties in obtaining zoning
permits for churches or temples, or the bitter legal dispute over whether nonMuslims had the right to refer to their godhead as Allah, have intensied the fears
of non-Malays over the erosion of their civic and political rights.
Nonetheless, through its conscious reference to the pluralistic and tolerant spirit
of the Quran and the Sunnah (Mahathir, 1996b) and its description of cordial
Muslim/non-Muslim relations throughout history (Mahathir, 2003b), the prime
ministers discourse provided validation for a civil state and civility in the public
sphere both from Islams founding sources as well as from the precedent of Islamic
history. Malaysia, of course, remains a long way from realising the full civil
potential of Islam, and Mahathirs representations of Islam seldom lived up to their
own rhetoric. Conceptually, however, Mahathirs emphasis on the full dignity of all
the children of Adam (Mahathir, 1999b) and the need for the individuals
awareness of their ethical responsibility to the community as a whole (Mahathir,
2001b) can help to produce not a subject but a citizen imbued with a public
spiritedness, a willingness to sacrice his own interest for the common good (Bellah
and Hammond, 1980, p. 9). Such men and women are the very raw material of the
civitas.
The Islam of Mahathirs Islam
There was a fourth broad eld that could be made out in Mahathirs articulation of
properly understood Islam namely, his representations of religiosity itself, or of
the ways in which modern-day Muslims should interpret, practise and live their
faith. After having examined his depiction of Islam as a religion encouraging success
in the material world, his insistence that Muslims could not, in good faith, separate
religious from secular life-spheres, and the range of virtues he suggested they
should adopt, looking at the representations he made of the actual practice of Islam
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life while at the same time preserving the sanctity of Gods commandments
(Mahathir, 1984a). Mahathir argued that the permissibility under Islamic law of, for
example, commerce and the converse prohibition of usurious interest could help
inform the tenets of an Islamic theory of economics, Islamic nance and Islamic
nancial systems (Mahathir, 2002b). Similarly, the example set by the Prophet
Muhammad in running the aairs of Medinas plural population could help presentday Muslim managers to determine leadership style and techniques, as Mahathir
(1987b) told delegates at an Islamic Management seminar in the mid-1980s.
A penchant for such practical religion seems to have been a constant in how
Mahathir interpreted Islam in general, but in the religiosity he preached to the
Melayu Baru in particular. His preferred methodology of interpreting the textual
sources of this, in his own words, really simple religion (Mahathir, 2008) serves as
the best indication of this penchant. Martinez (2003) has pointed to Mahathirs
propensity for tafsir bi-l-rai (exegesis based on rational interpretation), whereas
amongst those schooled in the religious sciences, tafsir bi-l-rai has always been seen
as the less learned opposite to the more conventional method of tafsir bi-l-mathur.
The latter form of exegesis privileges the canonical commentaries, and takes into
account the grammatical intricacies of the original Arabic.
The dening quality of Mahathirs Islam can thus be described as the ability of
every suciently literate believer to comprehend the divine will through direct access
to the primary sources of Islamic law and in this way achieve an unmediated
communication between themselves and their Creator. It goes without saying that
tafsir bi-l-rai, on the other hand, of course also freed the believer from the dictate of
the religious scholars, which seems to have been an ardent desire of the individualist,
perhaps even protestant-type personal faith that Mahathir (who himself had
very little religious training) was preaching to Malaysias increasingly urban and
middle-class Muslim public. While political motivations were the driving forces
behind Mahathirs turn to Islam, there is little doubt that this understanding of
religion was personally more agreeable to him than the conservatism of the largely
rural ulama.
Kessler (2004, p. 22) has pointed to the incongruity of Mahathirs overall distrust
of individualism and his highly personalistic religiosity, since in religious matters an
individualist is exactly what Mahathir was. Mahathir asserted that an individual
believers conscience, based on a rm knowledge of the teachings of Islam and
rational thought, rather than the opinion of any scholar, represented the highest
form of Muslim-consciousness, of truly understanding the teachings of the Prophet
Muhammad. Similarly, in criticising Muslims for emphasising fardhu ain (individual
religious duties) over the communal duties of fardhu kifayah, Mahathir appeared to
suggest that the individual contemplating Allahs word preferably in translation
from the Arabic (Mahathir, 1996a) if they were unable to understand the language
of the Quran was the most worthwhile act of worship.
While Mahathir seemed to advocate a thorough rethinking of the mutaghayyir
(open and changeable) aspects of Islamic law covering muamalat (social dealings),
and on many occasions questioned the prerogative of the ulama, present or past, to
interpret scripture in absolute terms (e.g. in Islam there is no intermediary between
the believer and God, and no one is infallible [Mahathir, 1984d]), there was a limit
to how far he thought Muslims could go. His notable lack of enthusiasm for the
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4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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2000). Indeed, qh more accurately represents the sense I am trying to convey here i.e. the
justication of an argument based on evidence drawn from Islams sacred founding texts. For
reasons of diction, however, this essay will retain the English term theology of progress when
discussing Mahathirs qh kemajuan.
Mahathir recognised that a small number of Muslim-majority states, in particular the oil-rich
kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, had become fabulously wealthy after the oil boom of the 1970s.
Nonetheless, he was frequently dismissive of their wasting of wealth (e.g. Mahathir, 1983c;
Mahathir, 1984a) on supercial trappings of modernity. Without a real change in mindsets and
attitudes, Mahathir argued, the new-found wealth of these very few Muslims stood the danger of
disappearing as quickly as it had come. When I interviewed him in Putrajaya in May 2008,
Mahathir suggested that lasting wealth had to be earned by the sweat of the brow. It cant be
something that falls into the lap from heaven (Schottmann, 2008a).
In response to the devastating inter-communal clashes of May 1969, seen as resulting in part
from continued Malay socioeconomic marginalisation, the Malaysian government introduced
the New Economic Policy, designed to uplift indigenous bumiputera communities through
preferential access to education, housing, employment, government loans and public contracts.
See Gomez and Jomo (1999) for an assessment of the NEP.
Although this was not a radical departure from convention, Indonesian-Malaysian Muslim texts
do not generally evince a tenacious insistence that material development was the communal
religious duty of Muslims (see Hooker, 2000). Some leaders of the nascent nationalist movement
of the interwar years, for example, had described the ght against British colonial rule as a
fardhu kifayah falling to all Malays (see Mustapha, 2005, p. 132), while Muhammad Natsir,
a modernist Muslim Indonesian nationalist, is known to have linked fardhu kifayah to the spirit
of gotong-royong [mutual aid] and social conscience (see Kurzman, 2002, p. 65). None of them,
however, explicitly linked Islam to economic growth.
Although a medical doctor by training, Mahathir publicly insisted that as Islam was true, no
true science could challenge the truthfulness of its divine teachings. It is, however, impossible
to establish whether such statements reected his own opinion or whether they were largely
intended for public consumption. Mahathir underwent a spiritual challenge in the 1950s and
1960s, but turned towards greater personal observance of Islams injunctions later in life (see
Schottmann, 2010). I believe, however, that religion and science need not be in opposition, in
competition. Science is good at explaining how things happen, but it simply cannot provide an
answer for why, Mahathir told me. When my faith is being assailed, I just repeat that science
tells us how, but it cannot tell us why (Schottmann, 2008a).
This was of course not consistently the case; nor do pre-modern notions of the protection of
religious minorities reect present-day norms of minority rights, pluralism and citizenship. But
Mahathir was making a political point and was not engaged in historical polemics.
Although Islamisation has produced a number of highly problematic eects for the countrys
non-Muslim minorities (e.g. diculties in obtaining building permits for church or temple
construction, or the increasing religious content of the national education curriculum), problems
arising from an actual lack of religious freedoms have tended to aect Malaysian Muslims more
than non-Muslims, with the obvious exception of converts from Islam or the non-Muslim kin of
deceased converts to Islam, particularly where such conversion is disputed (see Farish, 2008). It
seems reasonable to surmise that while Malaysias Islamisation more immediately aects the
lives of Muslims, its overall eects have left non-Muslims feeling increasingly uncomfortable and
vulnerable.
Mahathir (perhaps taking the cue from Anwar, who had written at length on Andalusias
Muslim-Jewish-Christian convivencia in his 1996 book The Asian Renaissance), made frequent
mention of the inspiration that Andalusia could aord to present-day Muslims (e.g. Mahathir,
2003b). Andalusia was of personal interest to Mahathir, but also reverberates strongly in both
modernist and Islamist literature.
Modernist here refers to the Muslim worlds modernist movement of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
Malay identity in Malaysia is centrally dened by adherence to Islam, and being Malay is
assumed and asserted to automatically mean being-Muslim. The reverse also holds true, of
course, and an overwhelming majority of Muslims in Malaysia identify themselves as Malay.
370
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