Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib
A few months ago, during a conversation regarding global and local politics, my Maoist friend was surprised to hear me say that Hadi Awang, the current president of the controversial Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), had expressed support for Iran’s struggle against Israel. His shock was due to the widespread chronic online assumption that the president was a Shia-hating Salafi. This, however, is far from reality. A quick internet search would reveal that Hadi Awang has many times, through speeches and written statements, affirmed that the Shia, although considered outside the creed of Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama’ah, are still within the fold of Islam. He even stated in a video once that Shias are welcome to join PAS as members, provided they understood that the usul of the party’s constitution remains as the Quran, followed by the Sunnah, ijma’, and qiyas, thereby reiterating that the party adopts Shafi’i jurisprudence, in line with the historically normative practice of the Malays.
Besides affirming the Muslimhood of the Shia, Hadi Awang has for a long time shown great support for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his regularly published column Minda Presiden, which is available on the party’s news site, he has, on several occasions, highlighted the necessity of unity within the ummah. He considers it essential in the struggle against US imperialism, the great enemy of Islam in our time. He has even gone a step beyond to speak positively about the republic’s state ideology: the Guardianship of the Jurist (wilayah al-faqih). He likens it to the party’s own governance model known as the Leadership of the Scholars (kepimpinan ulama), which was first conceptualised by PAS’s youth leaders in 1982, some years after the Iranian Revolution. It is no secret that the Iranian Revolution had reinvigorated Islamic politics in Malaysia, as it did in the rest of the world. As recently as this year, PAS’s youth wing held a protest near the US embassy in response to Israeli missile attacks on Iranian civilians.
So how is it that my friend seems to have a drastically different expectation of Hadi Awang’s attitude towards sectarianism, given that Shia-Sunni unity has been and continues to be a no-brainer to party leadership? This has to do with the party’s recent track record of appealing to racist ethnonationalist sentiment in their political messaging, reinforcing the status quo of Malay supremacy and contributing to the polarisation between Malays and non-Malays. This behaviour, however, contradicts a public statement made by Hadi Awang himself in 1985 that the party had no intentions of defending Malay special rights as they deemed it an un-Islamic concept. Yet the party’s attitude today reflects none of that. They have even been silent on the plight of the Rohingyas since 2020, despite being among the Islamic groups that popularised the issue before that, simply because the general Malay population today views Rohingya refugees negatively. This contradictory trajectory may seem peculiar at first glance, but it becomes clear once understood within the context of how Malay(si) and neocolonialism have historically shaped Islam and Malayness.
Contrary to mainstream narratives, the people of Malaya (including Singapore), Sabah, and Sarawak have never achieved true independence from British colonialism. Malaya, specifically, retained its colonial mode of governance in a new form, whereby the role of the reactionary government was passed on from the white man to the Malay ruling class and its collaborators. A legacy of British rule over the Malay states is the complete reconfiguration of religious knowledge, authority, and identity, an approach they developed after their experiences in India, Afghanistan, and Africa. Through agreements such as the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 and the Pahang Treaty of 1888, they assigned the Malay kings, who received personal stipends and state allowances from the British, as the sole heads of Islam in each king’s respective territory. Consequently, religious authority became centralised in colonial intermediaries, with the structural backing of salaried civil servants who served as religious officials.
The formation of this colonial hierarchy allowed the British to wield power over the material dimensions of Malay life without inciting religio-political backlash. This was achieved by bureaucratising Malay religious practice, which, before colonialism, was effectively decentralised and often community-based. People who once sought guidance in Islamic matters from pondok scholars, local teachers, and itinerant people of knowledge who wielded influence were now forced to seek guidance solely from the colonially subjugated Malay kings and their underlings. This made the British successful in distancing Islam from grassroots actors, protecting colonial administration from accusations of directly intervening in Islamic issues. This created an illusion of religious freedom for the Malay people under colonialism, an illusion that would begin to shatter in the early 1900s, when the Malay kings were weaponised to suppress the political movement of Kaum Muda, a group of anti-colonial Islamic reformists inspired by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.
Despite claims of impartial governance in matters of religion, there was no actual separation between religious affairs and state interest. Instead, the British had attempted to conceal their subordination of religion to colonial rule by making puppets out of the Malay rulers. They put up the facade that they did not meddle in the Islamic practices of the Malay people, when it was clear that only some forms of Islam were allowed, while others were not. It is no coincidence that the former included the traditionalist, feudalist, and generally apolitical Kaum Tua, while the latter included the politically-conscious Kaum Muda. Kaum Muda faced many obstacles to the propagation of their movement, from the banning of their books to the prohibition on their members teaching and preaching in certain Malay states. The kings even went so far as to legally enforce fatwas issued by Kaum Tua scholars, thereby reifying Kaum Tua’s Islam as the status quo.
Such an image of control over religious practice is not alien to the Malay people today. Apart from enshrining the special status of the Malays and codifying inequality between ethnicities, the Federal Constitution has, since so-called independence, retained the colonial approach of placing Islam under the power of the Malay kings. In 1969, the very same kings under the Conference of Rulers decided that it was necessary to establish an official religious body. The purported purpose of this move was to create a mechanism to ensure the development and progress of Muslims in Malaysia. However, throughout the period of growing tensions between PAS and the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in their race towards winning the Malay Muslim vote in the electoral realm, the move would soon reveal its obvious politicised function.
The competition between PAS and UMNO is central to the unfolding of Islamic politics in Malaysia. UMNO, towards the end of the colonial era, had played the role of the primary collaborator of the British under the leadership of liberal right-wing nationalist Tunku Abdul Rahman. PAS, on the other hand, was established by a group of Malay Islamic scholars after the anti-colonial Islamist party Hizbul Muslimin was outlawed alongside other anti-colonial leftist organisations during the Malayan Emergency. In the years leading up to what was called ‘independence’, many PAS members initially held overlapping memberships, simultaneously belonging to UMNO. However, the Islamic party revised its constitution to no longer permit dual membership, thereby completely demarcating itself from UMNO in preparation for the 1955 federal elections.
In the early days of the federation, PAS was critical of UMNO leadership. They disagreed with Tunku’s blatant and unapologetic embrace of a decadent Western lifestyle, which took the form of enjoyment in sports cars, racehorses, dancing, and drinking. They felt it was unbefitting of a man who claimed to protect the rights and interests of the Malay people. This disagreement would later sharpen during the 1980s, when PAS, under the leadership of Yusof Rawa, adopted a fully confrontational stance against UMNO and its ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional. This period marked the most salient conflict between the two parties, as both PAS and UMNO articulated competing visions of what Islamic governance should look like in the modern age.
Mahathir Mohamad, both the president of UMNO and the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time, envisioned a form of Islam compatible with modernity. He placed significant emphasis on the profit-driven material development of the nation, insisting on the need to emulate the economic models of Japan and South Korea under his Look East Policy, promoting a neoliberal agenda of aggressive privatisation under the guise of uplifting the financial position of the Malays, and strongly opposing forms of Islam that he deemed were either too radical or too traditional. This was vehemently challenged by PAS, who saw it as the pursuit of a secular materialistic society that contradicted the principles of the sharia. As such, they began explicitly calling for jihad against the UMNO government, openly declaring the ruling class as disbelievers and hypocrites who were only nominally Muslim while failing to uphold Islamic law.
The UMNO government wasted no time in initiating extensive media and propaganda campaigns to paint PAS as a group of extremists. Despite this, the Islamists continued in their struggle because they believed in the possible victory of an Islamic movement as demonstrated by the Iranian Revolution. As a result, many PAS leaders were detained for making public inflammatory speeches against the ruling government. This culminated in the Memali Incident of 1985, in which the government deployed 576 security and armed forces personnel, armed with armoured vehicles, to surround a village of Malay rice farmers and rubber smallholders in the northern state of Kedah. They aimed to detain Ustaz Ibrahim Libya, who had been articulating and disseminating a revolutionary form of Islam to the rural peasants. He had called on the people to inculcate in themselves the spirit of martyrdom that was seen in Iran and Pakistan, where Muslims were prepared to die in the cause of Allah.
The outcome of the Memali Incident was the martyrdom of Ustaz Ibrahim Libya and 14 of the villagers. Many of the remaining villagers were detained and later released. To this day, the government labels those who died at Memali as criminals, but the Islamists refute this and insist that they were martyrs. Whatever the case, this became grounds for the state to justify clamping down on “deviant teachings,” as it was already dealing with the troublesome revolutionary forces of the communist guerrillas, who were still waging an anti-colonial struggle in the jungles. The government found an excuse to suppress Islamic ideologies that encouraged political dissent. Hence, despite the initial recognition of Ja’fari and Zaydi Shi’ism as valid teachings in a 1984 national fatwa, all teachings other than Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama’ah were officially deemed intolerable in 1996. Accordingly, this paved the way for the outlawing of their propagation under state laws.
The following year, 1997, Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (JAKIM) was officially established and legally empowered to enforce these laws. This led to raid after raid on Shia communities during their communal affairs, such as majaalis. Their hauzahs, which used to exist in parts of the country prominently, are seen no more, for they are no longer legally allowed to operate, forcing a whole sect of Muslims to practise their faith underground. Additionally, Islamic studies in the public school syllabus began including lessons on the Shias, feeding generations of students with propagandised misrepresentations of Shia doctrine. Even on the internet, one will find many state-accredited preachers who warn the general public about the deviance of the Shia. Continuing the British model of religious containment to preserve neocolonial interest, the government made the Shias targets of the state apparatus and what was essentially a state-sponsored hate campaign.
There is evidently so much hostility and aggression towards the Shia, among other sects that are also persecuted for not being Sunni, all the while the bravest groups who have been tirelessly supporting the Palestinian resistance have been Shia, whether it be Hezbollah, Ansarallah, or even the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unsurprisingly, when the International Union of Muslim Scholars declared it an obligation for Muslim nations to provide military support to the Resistance, the Religious Affairs Department of the Prime Minister’s office released a statement saying that it would need to hold a meeting to discuss first the implications of the fatwa on Malaysia’s diplomatic ties, a meeting of which no further public update can be found anywhere. This, yet again, exposes the Malaysian government’s distaste for an Islam that is packaged in revolutionary language.
With the recent Trump visit during the ASEAN Summit, which saw the signing of a grossly imbalanced trade deal that subordinates Malaysian sovereignty to imperialist interests, and the Malaysian government’s support for Trump’s 20-point plan, which includes the disarmament of the resistance forces, the neocolonial character of the Malaysian government has never been clearer. Moreover, the voices of zealous state supporters who defend Anwar Ibrahim’s actions as skilful diplomacy continue to pollute social media, leading some of them even to make disgusting and traitorous remarks against Palestinians who rightfully express their disappointment at him. Some may consider this a mask-off moment, as their beloved Anwar Ibrahim himself has, ironically, been honoured as the 10th most influential Muslim in the world. Still, it is perfectly consistent with the actions of those who have no sense of solidarity with the Muslim migrants and refugees already in our land, who continue to cheer for the persecution and mistreatment of the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Rohingyas in our country.
In the final analysis, the Malaysian neocolony, by instrumentalising Malay supremacy, has moulded Islamic politics and discourse through the same divide-and-conquer tactic used by its British colonial predecessors to breed divisions, both among the Malaysian people and among the Muslims themselves. Thus, part of what is desperately needed in building a solid anti-imperialist movement in Malaysia today is a return to Islamic unity. This unity should be understood beyond the narrow racialised association of Muslims with Malays. Islam encompasses a diversity of people around the world, including those within our borders, whether by ethnicity, national origin, or even simply by sect. Only by transcending these superficial differences can we unify our actions and contribute to a mass movement alongside the non-Muslim population to uphold justice for all people. As Imam Ali (pbuh) once said, the people are of two kinds: your brother in religion or your equal in creation.
Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib is a student and a writer
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