The Other Malaysia

It would appear that there are some in Malaysia who are fearful of the influence of Wahabis in the country, and what this might entail in the future. But before I continue this writer would like to congratulate Abdar Rahman Koya for his article ‘Asri’s Arrest Born of Ignorance and Fear‘, where he correctly notes that the term ‘Wahabi’ is often taken out of context and sometimes incorrectly or indiscriminately applied.

From that premise, allow me to write about the use (and abuse) of the term Wahabi in the history of Malaysia and the Southeast Asian region, which ultimately has brought us to the present state of affairs in Malaysia where the former Mufti of the state of Perlis, Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, was recently taken to task for preaching in public without a permit issued by the religious authorities of Selangor.

The former Mufti has become the target of much speculation and slander, and among the accusations leveled at him is the claim that he is a Wahabi, or has allowed himself to be influenced by the school of Wahabi thought.

That such a charge can be made today in Malaysia is interesting for the precedent has been set from the turn of the century at precisely the moment when modernist-reformist Islam was in the ascendant in the former colony of British Malaya. During the early 1900s, a number of progressive Ulama and Islamist educational activists gathered in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore and came to be known as the ‘Kaum Muda’ generation. They were made up of prominent Ulama like Syed Sheikh Al-Hady, Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin and others. Many of them were deeply influenced by the writings of the Egyptian reformist thinkers like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, and were themselves persuaded that the time had come for Muslims to free themselves from the shackles of superstition, chauvinism, bigotry and outdated traditional practices that were neither Islamic nor rational.

To this end men like Syed Sheikh Al-Hady and Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin formed the nucleus of what would become the nascent modernist Muslim movement in Malaya. The launched journals, magazines and set up modern madrasahs that were different from the pondok schools of the past that were still teaching a mode of traditionalist Islam based on the kitab kuning texts. Syed Sheikh Al-Hady was himself responsible for the launching of many educational initiatives in order to teach Muslims to think and act rationally, as he was convinced that Islam was a religion of reason and the intellect. His fear was that the state of Muslim thinking among many traditionalist Ulama had crippled the Muslims of Malaya to such an extent that they were reduced to the status of slave-subjects to the colonial order, and unable to improve their economic and political condition themselves. Reason, he argued, was at the heart of Islam and rational agency was the universal quality that equalizes all human beings. To this end he even wrote the first feminist novel in Malay literature - the Hikayat Faridah Hanum - where the heroine was a woman who rationally chooses to determine her own future and place in society.

For their efforts, men like Syed Sheikh Al-Hady and Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin were condemned by traditional Ulama as being ‘Wahabis’ and Syed Al-Hady was even called the ‘Khalifah Wahabi’ in Malaya. They were banned from the Malay states, their journals stopped and they were not allowed to teach and preach anywhere except the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore.

At the same time, the Kaum Muda movement in Indonesia was also growing strong and being led by the Muhamadiyah movement that likewise pioneered modern Islamic education through new modern schools that taught Islam as well as the hard sciences and social sciences. In Indonesia the modernist movement was likewise accused of being ‘Wahabi’, but this did not stop them from spreading the message of a rational Islam that was founded on reason and will. Among the greatest modernist intellectuals that emerged from this movement were men like Hamka and Mohammad Natsir, who later led the Islamist challenge to Dutch colonialism while also battling against the forces of neo-feudalism and blind traditionalism in their own society.

Today the Muhamadiyah movement remains as one of the biggest Islamist movements in Indonesia and the world, and it still leads the way in the struggle for intellectual emancipation through universal education for all. Those who have seen the film ‘Laskar Pelangi’ will note that it is the tale of a school boy who managed against the odds to get a decent education that eventually led him to pursue his studies in France, all thanks to the effort of the school teachers in a small Muhamadiyah school in Banka-Belitung.

With these efforts behind them, why is it that modernist and rationalist Muslim thinkers in Malaysia still have to face the constant accusation of being Wahabis? The term here is taken out of context to apply to any Muslim intellectual who insists that faith cannot be blind and that reason is also one of the paths to God. If the former Mufti has been criticised by some, it may be due to the fact that he has constantly spoken out against outdated traditional practices that are illogical, irrational and possibly even Bid’ah from a theological point of view. In this respect, the modernists of today are no different from the modernists of the Kaum Muda generation, who likewise condemned the practices of the Muslims of Malaya as outdated and superstitious: The belief in bomohs, witches, witch-doctors, shamans, practices such as saint-worship and praying at graveyards were all regarded as un-Islamic then and now.

Such a standpoint may not sit comfortably with some of the more traditionalist-conservative Muslims who may not take kindly to being told that their traditional practices are outdated and un-Islamic, and perhaps the charge of ‘Wahabism’ lies in the apparently puritanical approach and stand taken by some of the reformers. But to conflate all attempts at rational reform with Wahabism, and to claim that Wahabism is a ‘threat’ may be stretching the point a little.

All in all, it remains unclear as to how or why the former Mufti has been targeted like this. But if Asri Zainul Abidin is disliked by some on the grounds that he has spoken up against traditional practices that he regards as Bid’ah and shirk, then all that can be said is that the man is more of a modernist and rationalist than anything else. In this respect at least, he is another figure of a long line of ‘Kaum Muda’ progressives whose struggle to liberate Muslims from the shackles of traditionalism is going on, still.