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Asian Studies Review

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The Pillars of Mahathir's Islam:

Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in
the Modern World
Sven Alexander Schottmann

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
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Asian Studies Review

September 2011, Vol. 35, pp. 355372

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The Pillars of Mahathirs Islam:

Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim
in the Modern World
SVEN ALEXANDER SCHOTTMANN*
La Trobe University

Abstract: Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on

behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamads encounter with Islam
remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981
2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on
Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in
the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a
signicant component of the former Malaysian prime ministers political
repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as Mahathirs
Islam can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous
premiership. It argues that while Mahathirs engagement with Islam was fraught
with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that
aect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients
of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion.
Mahathirs public representations of Islam in particular, his championing of the
individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet
Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active theology of progress can thus
provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped
underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.
Keywords: Malaysia, Islam, politics, modernity, secularism, democracy, Muslim
leadership, Mahathir Bin Mohamad

Malaysias former prime minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is seldom

considered a luminary of late twentieth-century Muslim thought. Few students of
Islamic politics have included him in their lists of progressive, modernist or
liberal Muslims engaged in the thoroughgoing reform processes currently under
*Correspondence Address: Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, Kingsbury Drive, Bundoora, VIC
3086. Email: s.schottmann@latrobe.edu.au
ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/11/030355-18 2011 Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/10357823.2011.602663

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Sven Alexander Schottmann

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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Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

357

precepts of his faith. It does so through a textual analysis of a wide range of

previously largely unexamined primary data, including many of the speeches
Mahathir made during his two decades as prime minister, as well as his considerable
track record of publications.2 I am also able to rely on information I gathered in
two interviews that I conducted with Mahathir in 2008: one in Putrajaya in May
and one in Melbourne in October. I use this range of sources to develop a clearer
picture of the religious discourse that Mahathir sought to present to his listeners,
viewers and readers throughout the 1980s, the 1990s and the rst decade of the new
millennium.
I believe it is vital to take seriously, and on its own terms, what the man who was
the centre of Malaysian politics for more than two decades said about Islam. The
objective is not to revisit essentialist debates on Islam or to suggest that Mahathirs
ideas on the relationship between Islam and society were understood in a somehow
isomorphic fashion by the 25 million or so Malaysians (nearly half of whom, of
course, were non-Muslims). I am also certainly not under the illusion that his public
discourse was not carefully calibrated for impact: he was clearly driven by the need
to respond to the electoral inroads made by Malaysias Islamist opposition and in
doing so demonstrate his own credentials as a Muslim leader. Rather, I aim to
provide a survey of the role that Mahathir had assigned to religion within the overarching framework of his political project. I seek to examine at greater depth
Mahathirs argument that Islam was not an obstacle to progress, and his argument
that when properly understood Islam even compelled its adherents to work hard
and seek Gods pleasure by advancing materially the Muslim umma (community,
nation).
A Theology of Progress
Mahathirs public discourse on religion fell into four broad elds, in the following
descending order of importance: 1) the teachings of the prophet Muhammad as a
this-worldly manual encouraging material success; 2) the inapplicability of the
secular principle to Islam; 3) the range of virtues and behaviours Muslims should
adopt; and 4) a depiction of a suitably contemporary practice and observance of
Islam. All four themes can be found in basic form even in some of his writings from
the mid-1960s. It is only after the late 1970s, however, that Mahathirs Islam
became a major component of his political discourse. The presence accorded to
Islam in Mahathirs speeches and writings grew over time and culminated in his 2001
declaration that Malaysia was an Islamic not a secular state. By the early 1980s,
however, most of Mahathirs arguments on the complementariness of Islam and
modern society were already clearly developed (e.g. Mahathir, 1983a; Mahathir,
1984b). Even if the increasing prominence of religion was driven by strategic
considerations, its long-term presence means that it is not unreasonable to suppose
that Mahathir was earnest in his assertion that Islam should have a role to play
in the modern world, and that it therefore makes sense to take seriously his
pronouncements on the subject.
Mahathirs public engagement with Islam was dominated by the representations
he made of the essential compatibility between Islam and material progress. What
he called the jihad of the Muslims leading the Malaysian government (Mahathir,

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Sven Alexander Schottmann

2000) may have become more emphatic as his premiership progressed

commensurate with the rise of his Islamist opposition. But even though Mahathir
was clearly driven by the need to contain the opposition, long before the late 1990s
when the Islamist PAS (Parti Islam Semalaysia/All-Malaysian Islamic Party) was
able to regularly gain a majority of the ethnic Malay vote at the federal level (see
Funston, 2006, p. 138), Mahathir had insisted that the jihad of development was
not only meritorious, but a divine duty for Muslims, something wajib or
mandatory under Islamic law (Mahathir, 1983b). Development was thus not only a
noble struggle, but the exemplication of faith in action. My argument is that
Mahathirs condensation of the message of the Prophet Muhammad into a
theology of progress3 went beyond adding a religious veneer to an ostensibly
secular development policy. What one is able to observe instead is distinctive: the
positing of Islam as a divinely-inspired injunction for the advancement of society
through development.
Mahathirs engagement with Islam revolved around one simple question: what
went wrong? How could one explain the dramatic and seemingly nal decline of
Islamic civilisation over the past two to three centuries, especially when Muslims
liked to think of the brilliant successes of the rst 500 years of Islamic history as
manifestations of Gods favour to the People of Muhammad? What conclusions
should Muslims thus draw from the far from satisfactory conditions of the present,
marked by fratricidal wars between Muslims (Mahathir, 1986a), the suppression
of Muslims at the hands of their enemies (Mahathir, 1994a), and perhaps for
Mahathir most importantly of all, the embarrassing poverty of Muslims which, as he
suggested, many non-Muslims had begun to attribute to Islam itself? (Mahathir,
1987a). What had Muslims done, or not done, to warrant such a drastic fall from
grace? What could help account for the loss of military and political power that saw
the establishment, formally or informally, of European control over virtually all
Muslim lands? What factors had led to the destruction of once vibrant commerce
and networks of trade, the loss of artisanal skills and the atrophy of intellectual
inquiry?
Our rightful share of the bounties of Allah
In Mahathirs analysis, present-day backwardness4 made it incumbent upon
Muslims to seek ways out of this misery. They were duty-bound to live up to the
expectations of their faith by seeking their rightful share of the bounties of Allah
(Mahathir, 1994b), and to work hard to reconnect to the golden ages of Muslim
commerce, arts and science. In doing so, they would return to what he described as a
correct understanding of Islam (Mahathir, 1996a). The primary audience for his
development discourse was the new Malay-Muslim middle class sprouting on the
urban peripheries of Kuala Lumpur and other larger Malaysian towns since the
mid-1970s.5 These New Economic Policy (NEP)-induced New Malays would
nally realise the century-old vision of Malay nationalists for kemajuan (progress)
and pembangunan (development), able to ll the vast lacuna between the traditional
Malay agriculturalists and the educated elite in which Malays are not to be found
(Mahathir, 1970, pp. 5859). At the core of Mahathirs theology of progress lay
the almost messianic instruction to the Melayu Baru or New Malays to equip

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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

Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

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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:

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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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for immorality or lack of religious observance), Mahathir countered that it was

actually un-Islamic to dierentiate between religious and secular endeavours, for
example in the eld of education, because Islamic studies and secular subjects
such as science or medicine were inseparably intertwined:7
Some are inuenced by PAS that Malay Muslim children should only pursue
Islamic studies . . . When it is explained that other forms of knowledge are just
as important in Islam and in fact compulsory to acquire . . . and demanded by
Islam as stated in Surah al-Ghaasyiyah [sic], Verses 1720, which mean And
the Sky, how is it raised high? And at the Mountains, how they are xed rm?
And at the earth, how it is spread out?, . . . PAS and its supporters still accuse
those who refer to these verses as secularists who place importance of the
aairs of this world and not of the hereafter (Mahathir, 2001a).
Divisions between the sacred and the profane were not recognised by Islam,
Mahathir insisted. Islam encompassed all aspects of life: work, contemplation, and
even leisure would thus all be part of the unceasing act of worship that is the
existence of Gods creation. Islam, he argued, even demanded from its adherents
a certain amount of worldliness. As a complete way of life, Islam does not only
decide on matters of belief, creed or faith (aqida). It also decides on and
systematically orders all aspects of a believers life and death. Everything a Muslim
does is subject to the rules of his religion (Mahathir, 1986b, p. 28).
Mahathir claimed to be in agreement with those voices in Malaysian Muslim
society that asserted that a thorough application of Islams rejection of the
individuation of life-spheres into the sacred and the profane could not but lead to
the establishment of some kind of Islamic order. It is worth noting, however, that
almost every reference to an Islamic state in his speeches and interviews is followed
by statements to the eect that the rights of non-Muslims in a Muslim-majority state
are inviolable8 and that they must be safeguarded:
Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus and Buddhists were included in the
Islamic state as ummahs on par with the ummah of the Muslims. The Islamic
system was their guarantor and protector, whose duty, as dened by its own
constitution, was to enable each group to live in accordance with its own
religion, society and culture, and to perpetuate itself through generations in
perfect freedom. The Islamic state thus enables those of dierent religions and
cultures to live harmoniously and in peace with one another. This is a unique
phenomenon on earth and history knows no parallel (Mahathir, 1983c).
Foreshadowing the observations to be made in the following section, Mahathirs
Islamic state was, at the conceptual level at least, the religiously argued embrace of
pluralism and tolerance.9 Most importantly, however, this argument was presented
through Islamic dogma and Islamic history, and not by reference to the principles of
secular humanism, or the structures and institutions of the postwar international
security architecture that many Malaysian Muslims had begun to link with a failure
to safeguard Muslim interests, some even with an outright antagonism to their
religion and cultures.

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Mahathirs Islam as Civil Religion?

The link between Mahathirs religious discourse and the possible emergence of Islam
in Malaysia as a cultural and socio-political force facilitating democratisation and
liberalisation is tenuous. Nonetheless, his emphasis on the religions individually
liberating and transformative properties may have helped to strengthen arguments
for civility in the public sphere qua Islam. At a conceptual level at least, Mahathirs
correctly understood Islam is able to provide an Islamically argued underwriting
for a Malaysian convivencia.10 As this and the following section seek to show,
even the particular type of Muslim consciousness that Mahathir advocated may
plausibly pave the way for the embrace of pluralism and democracy qua Islam. That
neither this, nor a true convivencia, has thus far eventuated in Malaysia is the result
primarily of the governments authoritarianism rather than its religious policies
and/or its Islamic discourse.
Mahathirs Islam was not an enthusiastic embrace of an open society and a free
press, of lifestyle pluralism, or even a thorough application of the principles of
liberal democracy and all that it would entail. His insistence that every Muslim, and
not just the religiously trained, had the right to speak for their religion was politically
astute: it undermined the traditional bearers of authority in Malay Islam and
concentrated power in the hands of the secular states executive (Weiss, 2004; Liow,
2009). Nonetheless, and perhaps even inadvertently, Mahathir appears to have
facilitated a certain democratisation and social levelling of Islam even as many other
civic spaces were closing or clamped down. This opening, in turn, has enhanced the
capacity of Malaysian Muslims to formulate critiques of the prevailing authoritarianism qua Islam. There is a strong Islamic current in Malaysias Reformasi movement;
young Malaysians for whom the Mahathir governments representations of the ideal
Muslim as proactive, communally focused, this-worldly, courageous and caring
individuals have turned Islam into the primary medium through which to express their
aspirations for a more inclusive, more democratic and more just Malaysia. There were
serious democratic decits and shortcomings to Mahathirs representations of Islam
at least from the perspective of the liberal-minded Western observer in such
problematic aspects as declaring members of the Ahmadiyya movement apostates
from Islam or proscribing the practice of Shii Islam among local Muslims.
Nonetheless, even if inadvertently, Mahathir may have helped prepare the ground
for the emergence of Islam as a civil religion in Malaysia.
Bellah and Hammond (1980) describe civil religion as endowing the individual
with the moeurs of dignity, individual responsibility and autonomy that de
Tocqueville, more than a century earlier, had famously identied as the factors
that made communal and democratic life possible in North America. Mahathirs
depiction and perhaps even idealisation of the Prophetic community of Medina as
an egalitarian and meritocratic proto-democracy (Mahathir, 1998) stressed the
very notions of involvement and participation that are central to democratic
consolidation. He also, for example, regularly underscored the religious duty of
Malay-Muslims to deal with one another and with their non-Muslim compatriots in
justice and fairness (Mahathir, 1993c).
It is in these small but signicant ways that Mahathirs religious discourse may
help to support the eventual emergence of Islam as civil religion in Malaysia. His

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Sven Alexander Schottmann

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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will help to complete our understanding of Mahathirs Islam. His articulations of

devotion, piety and religious observance have in fact remained under-studied facets
of his political discourse as a whole, and few students of Malaysian politics have
pursued this lead. Yet, as this section seeks to demonstrate, identifying the
cornerstones of the practice and observance of Islam he preached to the Melayu
Baru or New Malays can provide additional nuances to our understanding of
Mahathirs engagement with Islam.
Putting forward the argument of many modernist11 Muslims that a large number
of fellow-believers had mistaken form for function in their interpretation of religion,
the faith-type and spirituality Mahathir was prescribing to the Melayu Baru seemed
to reect in large part what I describe elsewhere as his modernist-inuenced AngloMohamedan sobriety (Schottmann, 2010). The actual practice of Islam that
Mahathir was advocating was thus as impatient with pemikiran kolot (oldfashioned thinking: read, traditionalist Islamic piety) (Mahathir, 1984b) as it was
with indolence. Although comparisons with Protestantism are automatically
problematised by the theological gulf between Islam and Christianity, the actual
Islam of Mahathirs Islam indeed paralleled the emphasis of reformist
Christianity on industriousness, honesty, self-denial, discipline, thrift, diligence,
and, above all, individual piety.
Practical religion
A case can be made for the intellectual inuence of the early twentieth-century
Muslim modernist movement that Mahathir had encountered during his youth on
his public discourse as Malaysian prime minister (see Schottmann, 2010). This
inuence is particularly evident in the representations he made of religious
observance. Like the modernists half a century before him, Mahathir emphasised
the direct and autonomous link between every Muslim and God (free from human
intercession), and the wide-ranging interpretative freedoms that came with this
autonomy. The path of the modernists to God, using aql or ratiocination, seemed to
hold greater appeal for him than either the Sus intuitive or esoteric path towards
gnosis or the traditionalists loyalty and obedience to the scholars:
The Islamic religion taught by our esteemed Prophet Muhammad, peace be
upon Him, greatly emphasises the human intellect (akal kiran manusia) which
Allah has bestowed upon mankind. The Quran time and again reiterates the
favour that is intellect: Dont you think?, Why dont you use your
intellect? All of this conrms the value and worth of the human mind
(Mahathir, 1985b).
In a characteristically modernist mould, Mahathir argued that the teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad were not a straightjacket that should constrain the twentiethcentury Muslim through literalist readings, but a moral-ethical guide whose dynamic
spirit meant it could be applied to the changing exigencies of time and space. With
their God-given intellect the one thing that sets us apart from animals
(Mahathir, 1993b) believers could thus determine, Mahathir argued, the correct
ruling on whatever novel situation they faced, navigating the challenges of modern

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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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liberal qh represented, for example, by Indonesias so-called neo-modernist

scholars (see Barton, 1997), stemmed from the fact that he was a modernist in the
conventional Western sense that is, he embraced reason, science, positivism and
empiricism. But he would remain a lifelong opponent of post-modernism and even
neo-modernism, being opposed to their multiplicities of narratives and relativisation
of absolutes (e.g. Mahathir, 2008). Revealing the chasm between modernists and
neo-modernists in contemporary Islamic thought, Mahathir often suggested that
there were some aspects of religion that must remain closed to reinterpretation: The
collapse of religion in the West should serve as a warning to us. If we are too liberal
in our interpretation of Islam, it too can collapse (Mahathir, 1993a).
Taking Stock
This essay has sought to examine at greater depth the representations Malaysias
former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has made of Islam. Although extant
scholarship has generally focused on Mahathirs economic policies and his vision for
Malaysias transformation into an advanced, industrialised society, I have sought to
show that his articulation of being-Muslim in the modern world comes together in a
relatively coherent discourse that might be termed Mahathirs Islam. These
representations of Islam must, in turn, be taken seriously and on their own terms as
a vital political component of his 22-year rule. Elaborated in a large number of
speeches as well as many publications and interviews, Mahathirs Islam contained
not only the prime ministers assessment of the grim situation facing the Muslim
umma, but also a range of solutions and corrective measures that Muslims should
adopt. What emerges from my analysis of his speeches, interviews and writings is
that our understanding of the Mahathir legacy would be poorer if it failed to factor
in Islam. This becomes particularly pertinent in light of my observation that
Mahathir even if inadvertently helped to create the preconditions for Malaysian
Islam to emerge as a force for democracy, pluralism and a more open society.
Clearly not all was well with Mahathirs Islam. Some of the most signicant
shortcomings of his discourse as well as his governments actual policies arose from
the inability or unwillingness to distinguish more carefully Islam from Malayness.12
Similarly, while his conception of religion as the highest ethical standard could result
in the emergence of Islam as Malaysias civil religion, such liberal attitudes clearly
did not extend to other areas of his politics. Mahathirs representations of Islam as
an egalitarian and individually liberating religion did not prevent him from
implementing some very repressive legislation and coming down hard on detractors.
The eventual democratisation of Malaysian politics may be a possible outcome of
his curiously democratic religious discourse, but Mahathir himself never suggested
that liberal readings of Islam should translate into political openings or a more
vigorous oppositional politics. While he was adamant that religion should be
democratic and individually liberating, there was no commensurate willingness to
subject politics to a similarly democratic reading probably the most disappointing
implication of Mahathirs engagement with the faith.
Despite its manifest political objectives, I would argue that Mahathirs Islam
should be seen as something more substantial and original than the mere
appeasement of Islamist opponents. Although Mahathirs engagement with Islam

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was at a basic level driven by political objectives, the representations he made of

Islam as a theology of progress predated the emergence of PAS as a real
competitor for the Malay vote at the federal level. By the early 1980s, Mahathir had
begun regularly stating that Islam was uniquely suited to fullling the requirements
of modern man and modernising societies: only Islam and its universal values can
give hope to human society (Mahathir, 1983c). Mahathir would seldom afterwards
be as adamant about the Islamic solution as he was in this 1983 speech, but his
message stayed on course for the next 20 years. He thus stated in 2003, near the end
of his premiership, that in whatever age and environment, Islam is always the
same. It is always able to become a religion that is suitable [for the changing
conditions] and that is capable of constructing a glorious civilisation (Mahathir,
2003c).
Consistently since the early 1980s, but in scattered references even as early as the
mid-1970s, Mahathir has argued that Islam, while not the only solution to the many
problems of the Muslim world as his Islamist opponents were arguing, should be
part of the multi-layered response to these problems. Islam itself, Mahathir argued,
was certainly not the problem. The problem, if anything, was to be found in the
faulty interpretations of the divine message among other Muslims, and their failure
to correctly understand the precepts of their religion.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude for the suggestions and comments made by
David Templeman and Dennis Walker at the Monash Asia Institute, Monash
University, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the Asian Studies Review.
None of them can, however, be saddled with responsibility for the content of this
essay.
Notes
1. When I described his representations of Islam as Mahathirs Islam, Mahathir rejected this on
the grounds of tokok-tambah, a Malay term that translates as adding unnecessarily. Mahathir
clearly believed that his representations of Islam conformed to Sunni orthodoxy. I observed a
similar concern for maintaining the outward appearance of the dogmatic unity of the umma or
community of the faithful among many other Malaysian Muslims, a result, perhaps, of the social
cohesion that Islam has been able to engender among the otherwise ethnically, geographically
and socioeconomically highly dierentiated Malays of modern-day Malaysia. It may also be the
result of their numerically small majority status ocially Malays make up less than 55 per cent
of the population. On the other hand, while Malaysian Islam is of course not a singular,
monolithic phenomenon, it is not marked by the deep ssures of Islam in neighbouring
Indonesia, or among South Asian Muslims.
2. Except where an ocial English-language translation has been provided (for example, M.
Mahathir (2001a), Melayu mudah lupa, Presidential Address to the Annual General Assembly of
the United Malays National Organisation, Kuala Lumpur, 21 June, translated as Malays forget
easily by the Prime Ministers Department), all English-language translations of Mahathirs
Malay-language speeches are my own.
3. Theology is a problematic term, as there is properly no such thing as Islamic theology in a
Christian sense. Islam begins and ends with tawhid (the absolute unicity of God), and there is no
cognate term to theology in Muslim languages such as Arabic or Malay. Fiqh, meaning
jurisprudence, is often used as the equivalent of theology in Muslim contexts (e.g. Djohan,

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4.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.
12.

369

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.

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