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Introduction: Islamism in a Mottled Nation: The Story of PAS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2021

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Summary

A story never dies, even when the breath is no longer ours. It stays trapped under a century, or on the floor of a dark sea, waiting for a new teller.

Omar Musa, A Trance (Parang)

Without a convenient epiphany, historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. Of course, they make do with other work: the business of formulating problems, of supplying explanations about cause and effect. But the certainty of such answers always remains contingent on their unavoidable remoteness from their subjects. We are doomed forever, hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Simon Schama, Dead Certainties

Where and When We Are: Locating PAS in Today's Overdetermined and Highly Contested Malaysia

In July 2013, barely two months after Malaysia's thirteenth general elections, the country found itself at yet another one of the many crossroads of its history. A cursory overview of the headlines in the mainstream press would suggest that the Federation of Malaysia was being assailed by a host of internal and external threats; ranging from the revival of Communism (long since banned) to the scourge of Western-sponsored liberal advocacy groups that were championing the cause of women's rights, ethnic and religious minorities as well as marginalised gender groupings; from foreign insurgents to clandestine Shia Muslim cells operating on the campuses of the country. The nation, it seemed, was more vulnerable than ever to radical contingency and unpredictability.

Yet in the midst of this apparent chaos, analysts could discern hints of normality and predictability in the nation's discourse and political behaviour. Being one of the most ethnically and religiously complex nations in the world, Malaysia had long since grown familiar with the phenomenon of race-based and religion-based politics in the country. And though the phenomenon of race-based parties may seem alien, or even anathema, to some foreign observers, this has in fact been the norm in Malaysia even before the nation's independence, and it points to the long shadow cast by a century of divisive plural politics that sustained what was in effect a form of racialised capitalism that was the engine of Empire.

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Chapter
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The Malaysian Islamic Party 1951-2013
Islamism in a Mottled Nation
, pp. 9 - 16
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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