Political Islam: Control and Conflict

In the last decades the Islamic world has seen a steady rise in religious politics. From northern Africa, to the Middle East and Asia, Islam has either been employed as a tool of top-down control or as a means for social mobilization. Islam, therefore, has been used for a variety of purposes and in a variety of circumstances, resulting in a staggering range of Islamic political expression worldwide.

In Southeast Asia, an often ignored corner of the Islamic world, Islamic politics have embodied the complex interplay among cultural, ethnic, religious and political forces unique to the region. Islam, as a relative latecomer to the island world of Asia, only spread to significant parts of the local population in the 12th century. Its character and customs were also influenced by a variety of sources, including Shi'ism, Sufism and local pagan and Hindu customs, adding unique features to the Sunni Islam that is most prevalent today. This resulted in an inherent pluralism in religious expression – a pluralism that has struggled to exist in the political realm under the pressures of colonial rule and messy post-colonial politics. 

To truly understand Islam as a political force – and perhaps release it from its Arab-centered shackles – it is vital to look at how it has featured in the lives of its 240 million Southeast Asian adherents.  

'Under control or in control': Islam and politics in Indonesia and Malaysia

Indonesia and Malaysia, two regional giants with majority-Muslim populations (90 and 60 percent respectively), have struggled to incorporate Islamic values and forms of political expression into their multiethnic and multicultural politics since independence. Both suffered from difficult colonial legacies – colonial policies that had favored one ethnic group over the other, for example – violent struggles for independence, and long periods of dictatorship that severely curtailed the political expression of religious values. Under dictatorship, however, a diverse set of Islamic groups, movements and leaders also found themselves co-opted into state structures that were staunchly secular in nature. As a tactic of 'divide and rule' these leaders selectively accommodated the Islamic demands of groups that had grown increasingly restless under authoritarian rule.

Suharto – the long-running dictator that ruled Indonesia until 1998 – used Islam when his personal popularity was waning and sought to tap into the momentum of rising Islamic consciousness in the 1980s. His regime formed various, often short-lived and heavily controlled alliances with Islamic parties, thus contributing to the fragmented nature of Islamic politics in Indonesia. Democratization gave further expression and space to this diversity, resulting in the mushrooming of Islamic civic and political organizations in the past decade; each one with a different vision of Islam as an organizing principle in state affairs. Crucially, and in contrast to many Middle Eastern states, the pluralist state philosophy promoted by Sukarno and later Suharto (known as 'Pancasila') has continued to color even Islamic politics. Few parties in Indonesia advocate outright Islamization (à la Iran) and most seek to marry religious values with the imperatives of a pluralist, multicultural democracy. A fringe element of fundamentalist groups has continued to lose ground, and since the 2002 Bali bombings by the Jemaah Islamiyah group, the threat of terrorist violence in Indonesia has been reduced through effective counterterrorist campaigns. In the past election, which extended the term of Indonesia's secular (albeit religiously styled) President Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, secular parties triumphed as support for Islamic parties collectively slumped by nearly ten percentage points to 29 percent. Although religious politics periodically rise to the surface – in the form of the 2008 anti-pornography law, for example – the relative success of a democratic system in an Islamic country has brought hope to those that believe in the fundamental compatibility of the two.

Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, conversely, merged Islam with ethnic politics, incorporating these dual forces into the drive to modernize Malaysia in the post-colonial era. Mahathir was concerned with elevating the status of the socio-economically disadvantaged Malays (the largest ethnic group in Malaysia) in contrast to the traditionally more privileged and powerful Chinese and Indian groups. By equating 'Malayness' with being a Muslim (a constitutional stipulation), Mahathir set in motion a self-strengthening process of Islamization that has often threatened to get out of control. The political competition between Mahathir's United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) has been a driving force in this process. By investing heavily in Islamic education, for example, the state has given rise to an increasingly pious Malay population, threatening the carefully constructed political alliances and ethnic balances that have underpinned decades of economic growth. Although the more moderate UMNO controls national politics, four states within Malaysia are currently ruled by the distinctly more conservative PAS. Although PAS has attempted to forge alliances with secular parties (in an effort to unseat UMNO), its support base in the countryside in particular often demands policies that are at odds with an inclusive and pragmatically oriented agenda. In the past ethnic and political balances have fallen apart, resulting in sporadic violence between the Malays, Chinese and Indians, but on the whole the government – still under Mahathir's tutelage – has managed to contain such episodes and forge a predominantly moderate line.

'Us versus them': Islam and separatism in the Philippines and Thailand

In the Philippines and Thailand Islamic politics are inseparable from age-old ethnic divisions and longstanding separatist struggles. Both countries have only small Muslim minorities, representing about five percent of the population and are concentrated in the southernmost provinces and regions of each country. Geographically isolated and historically marginalized, these groups have engaged in protracted struggles against central control and for their ethnic, religious and socio-political rights.

The Muslims of southern Thailand – many of them ethnically Malay and inhabiting the regions bordering Malaysia – have only recently risen to notoriety as a separatist force fighting central control and what they perceive to be Thai Buddhist chauvinism. Mixed-up with cross-border criminal activities, the insurgency has resulted in nearly 3,500 deaths in the past five years – from police and army recruits to teachers and monks. An implicit agreement between government forces and Muslims contained this conflict until Thaksin Shinawatra's reign but has not been revitalized since the 2006 coup. The region is still officially in a state of emergency and current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has failed to move the region toward peace, despite promises. A sense of 'not belonging' mixed with old political grievances and a complex patchwork of cross-border criminality have contributed to an Islamic politics in southern Thailand that is more about identity and self-rule than Islam, more about opposing central control than imposing anything Islamic.

The struggle for a Muslim homeland in the southern islands of the Philippines has proven even more intractable and violent. With centuries-old roots, the conflict has pitted the predominantly Christian establishment in Manila against the socio-economically marginalized southern 'Moro.' The Moro are a diverse group of Muslim inhabitants of the Mindanao islands with roots dating back nearly seven centuries. Colonial-era struggles against the Spanish and Americans translated into armed opposition to central control in the independence period; a struggle articulated in the language of Islam and born out of a gradual process of imposed isolation. At once a struggle for independence as well as inclusion, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), its predecessors and religious-cum-criminal groups such as the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) have spent decades fighting on their own land against the military. Although some progress has been made in the past decades – an autonomous region consisting of parts of the Moro lands was set up in 1990 – the government's unwillingness to address the socioeconomic roots of the conflict and tendency to rely on military operations has resulted in the seemingly complete collapse of the once-promising peace process and the alienation of local populations. Key grievances have still not been addressed, leaving Islam and Islamic politics entangled with separatist violence for the foreseeable future.