The Challenge to Malaysia's Malay Supremacy Narrative

Has the Establishment created its own nemesis?

While moderate Malaysia looks uneasily at the problem of so-called Ketuanan Melayu ideology, a kind of I-got-mine and you-can’t-have-it philosophy fostered by leaders like Mahathir Mohamad and Muhyiddin Yassin, another problem is approaching that from another direction threatens Ketuanan Melayu itself. That is radical Islam, which is alarming the country’s intelligence services, which are less worried about ideology than tactics.

The objective of the Islamic State, which grew out of the Middle East in the wake of the misguided second Gulf War perpetrated by the United States, is to create an Islamic Caliphate led by a murderous theocracy stretching across the Muslim world. It appeals to some Malays. A 2015 Pew Research Center Global Attitudes study found that 12 percent of Muslim Malaysians hold favorable views of ISIS.

According to a chilling analysis in February 2021 by the Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute, “at the peak of the ISIS-led government in Iraq and Syria, more than 100 Malaysian jihadists participated in the so-called “holy war” to establish a true Islamic Caliphate. Most of them were between the ages of 20 and 40 years old.”

The Royal Malaysian Police, according to the study, “recorded that at least 90 Malaysian jihadists were involved in the ISIS movement between 2013 till 2019. All of them had resided in Aleppo and Raqqa but later moved to Barghuz and elsewhere in Iraq and Syria.”

The demise of ISIS left Malaysian jihadists uncertain about their future. Most were relocated to different regions within Iraq and Syria, with some localized as Iraqis and Syrians. A small number of Malaysian women were brought to the home countries of their husbands, such as Britain, France, and the United States.

Malaysia’s Special Branch intelligence unit has allocated massive resources to detect and conduct surveillance on these groups. Domestic terrorism is now perhaps the agency’s major concern, as in the long term it directly threatens the authority of Malaysia’s royal families, who had a major say in the formulation of the constitution, creating a modified Westminster democracy with special powers given to the Sultans.

There have been many reports of Malaysians fighting alongside ISIS militants in Afghanistan, where ISIS is locked in combat with the Taliban. Malaysia has not been immune from ISIS attacks, with a bombing of the Movida Restaurant and Bar in Puchong, 20 km southwest of Kuala Lumpur in 2016, which injured eight people. In 2019, Malaysian counterterrorism operatives arrested nine people, among them six Egyptians and a Tunisian aged 20 to 50 in who confessed they were involved in plans to launch large-scale attacks in several countries.

In 2019, then-Inspector General of Police Abdul Hamid Bador, in an interview with the South China Morning Post, warned that Malaysian returnees from Syria and Iraq, frustrated with their failure to achieve martyrdom with the collapse of the Caliphate under the weight of combined military action, could attempt to continue their holy mission in their homeland by staging suicide attacks. At the time, according to the report, more than two dozen Malaysians were holed up in refugee camps in northern Syria.

If they and their comrades are still on the loose, or if they have been proselytizing, there is fertile ground. With a youth unemployment rate of 12 percent and unemployed graduates running at 22.5 percent, the environment to recruit activists is productive. Malay society is not living up to the expectations that state-promoted Islam has created. Its authoritarian, feudalistic, corrupt, gangsterist establishment hypocrisy has disenchanted Malay youth who have been grounded in Islam and are looking for other alternatives.

ISIS messages through social media are powerful. They show starving children as victims of war, and as the results of US drone strikes, images designed to create outrage and anger with impressionable young people. Last year an e-hailing driver Mohamed Ayub Musa was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing videos related to ISIS.

The bigger problem is that Islam in Malaysia no longer carries the moderation and tolerance it once was known for, for centuries until the rise of radical Islam in the middle east in the 1970s. A tweet by the PAS information director congratulating the Taliban on retaking Kabul, and the government’s support for the fundamentalist Hamas rather than the Palestinian government is virtue-signaling to the youth tacit approval of jihad methodology.

To many Malays, supporting the Taliban and Hamas is no different from supporting ISIS despite the continuing confrontation between the two ideologies in Afghanistan.

The promotion of stricter interpretations of Islam is not helping. The push towards Arabism and the Salafi doctrines behind this has been putting Malays into an identity crisis. Should they emulate a Malay or Muslim identity? Ketuanan Melayu has encouraged Malays to exclude other non-Muslim communities, which have been portrayed as enemies. Democracy and party politics are described by leaders as a way for certain groups carrying an agenda to destroy an Islamic lifestyle.

ISIS has both a utopian appeal to Muslims and a deranged Jihadist attraction to those who want martyrdom in holy war. This creates a fertile recruiting ground. ISIS messaging is extremely powerful for the vulnerable.

The Ketuanan Melayu ideology influences everything in Malaysia. It defines the position in society, has dispensed with the concept of meritocracy in government, education and the armed forces. It has redefined the nature of the Malaysian economy, a highly regulated market-scape, with rules that favor the privileged. It has defined the Malay identity, creating a powerful elite, a trapped middle-class, and a dispossessed poor. 

There is widespread disgust among the rakyat, or wider populace, especially given the past year of political infighting during a public health crisis that had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with power.

Ketuanan Melayu is under threat, but staunchly protected by vested interests who use it as a method of keeping an alienated Malay population in conflict with ethnic minorities, especially the Chinese, whom they fear as robbing them economically. An election win by a coalition committed to multi-culturalism will have to navigate through the ideology rather than dispense with it. However, looking at the recent electoral performance of the Pakatan Harapan coalition, which lost two-thirds of its seats in state elections in Melaka, the electoral landscape is more likely to be dominated by the Malay-centric parties in the future.

Radical Islam is a long-term threat. That is why the Special Branch takes its infiltration and influence very seriously. ISIS operatives have on a few occasions been detected within the armed forces. Social media and Islamic organizations are all on the watchlist. The biggest threat to Ketuanan Melayu may not be multiculturalism but the ideology of an Islamic Caliphate. Their leaders can blame themselves.

Originally published in the Asia Sentinel 7th December 2021

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