FROM PLURALISM TO CENTRALIZED ISLAM

Malaysian society was from the outset depicted as a “plural society” (Furnivall 1948) with the connotation that such a society, with its diverse ethnicities, was held together by dint of colonial power. The corollary was that such a social formation was neither socially cohesive nor politically integrated. Since achieving its independence from the British, the Malaysian political class has fashioned a degree of power-sharing and political accommodation to keep peace among Malaysia's different ethnic communities in most areas of political and social life. Ethnic peace has endured except for an episode that saw the eruption of race riots on 13 May 1969 and almost two hundred people killed. No major riots of this sort has occurred for over some four decades, except the Kampung Medan incident of 2001, when Malays clashed with Indians and some six persons of the latter community died. While no serious upheavals have occurred since then, ethnic and religious conflicts continue to afflict Malaysian society, and in more recent years, religious divisions have become particularly prominent. Such conflicts have occurred even as a more universal notion of citizenship has found expression among Malaysia's multicultural populace through the agency of a vibrant civil society.

Paradoxically, the emergence of social activism and an expressive civil society has also given rise to a backlash of religious atavism and religious intolerance in society, evidenced by incidents of Hindu temple desecration and demolitions and church burnings, hitherto absent in the country. By and large, such incidents have been the work of fringe groups, but the worry is that state authorities or the ruling group have condoned these acts. It is clearly evident that mitigating these developments of religious extremism is now integral to the rise of a more tolerant Malaysian middle-class society. Related to the rise of an educated middle class is the emergence of a new participatory politics, which now challenges an old authoritarian politics, based on a model of power-sharing dominated by ethnic elites, which over-privileged the Malay-Muslim community. New politics in Malaysia has given sustenance to a path of social relations and political engagement of citizens cutting across, and to some extent, transcending ethnic boundaries. This by no means suggests that the old path of politics has been eliminated, but rather that the contestation has arguably entered a more progressive phase.