Muslim Movements

Malaysia’s 3Rs Originate on the Siam-Malaya Frontier

- Amrita Leave a comment
The Muslim World

The Muslim World Special Issue on Muslim Modernities: Interdisciplinary Insights Across Time and Space

Today, I had an article come out in The Muslim World, in a special issue edited by Daren E. Ray and Joshua Gedacht called “Muslim Modernities: Interdisciplinary Insights across Time and Space”.

My article is a history of the politically potent conflation between race, religion and royalty – the well-known 3Rs that have become emblems of Malay Muslim nationalism – in Malaysian public life. These are precisely the 3Rs that groups like the new Malaysian redshirts refer to in their rhetoric. This rhetoric reflects the present and historical influence of a form of statist Islamism that views nations like Malaysia as racial-religious constructions.

In the article, I argue that this conflation (at least partly) originates in negotiations between Britain and Siam as they carved up the Malay Peninsula between them, sealing off Siamese and Malayan geo-bodies on either side of the boundary they first produced in 1902. I show how arguments made by Malay Muslim rulers who wanted to be included on the “Malaya” side of the border were early examples of this conflation. These arguments were so powerful that they contributed to establishing Malaya/Malaysia as a state that remains seemingly permanently-structured by these 3Rs.

My abstract is here:

Since 1957, Malaysian public life has been organized around a historic conflation of three important political themes: “race, religion and royalty”, or “3R”, all of which are purportedly championed and defended by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). This article explores how this conflation of themes became so important to this postcolonial nation-state, specifically by investigating its influence in shaping Malaya’s territorial limits. The 3R conflation has deep historical roots which stretch much further back than the moment of decolonization, as shown by a series of approaches to Britain made by Malay Muslim rulers between 1895 and 1902—the period in which a boundary between Malaya and Siam was first negotiated. During these years, these rulers—all of whom ruled over Siamese tributaries—appealed to Britain to colonize their polities to prevent their incorporation into Siam. Their appeals were framed in terms of 3R, giving momentum to the idea of a “Malay Muslim” geo-body in Malaya, in which a transformed monarchy should preside over a modernized sacral sphere of racial and religious identity.

  • If you can access it, the full text of the article is available from Taylor & Francis.

Seminar on the Caliphate in Southeast Asian History

- Amrita Leave a comment

I gave a talk on territorial enclosures and the Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula for the History Seminar Series at Flinders University today. Why? Because they invited me!

My talk focused on the allure the Ottoman Caliphate held for anti-colonial rebels during the British period of forward movement—and the ways in which seemingly-localised uprisings were really aimed at the world system as a whole, as well as at local tactics for privatising land and forests.

The Allure of the Caliphate in Southeast Asia

- Amrita Leave a comment

 

My chapter appears in this edited volume on interconnections between Ottoman Turkey and Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew Peacock and Annabel Gallop.

Institutions like Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies are beginning to call attention to the likelihood that the Islamic State is consolidating its Southeast Asian networks with terror attacks in mind.

Today, I had a book chapter published which seeks to move beyond the threat-and-response rhythm created by groups like the Islamic State and national governments in our region and around the world. Instead, I’ve worked to show that the allure of the Caliphate in Southeast Asia has a history, indeed one that can be reconstructed from fragments of evidence left behind by the British in Malaya, for example. My chapter analyses when and why Malay Muslims invoked the Ottoman Caliphate in resistance movements against British colonisation on the Malay Peninsula.

The chapter is called ‘We Hope to Raise the “Bendera Stambul”: British Forward Movement and the Ottoman Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula’.

  • As the book is acquired by Australian libraries, holdings should begin to appear in Trove, the online catalogue of the National Library of Australia.

Malay Mail Online Coverage

- Amrita Leave a comment

Muslims praying before breaking their Ramadan fast. Stock image selected by the Malay Mail Online. Picture: REUTERS.

My recent op-ed piece in The Conversation was reported in Malaysia today by the Malay Mail Online. In keeping with the Malay Mail‘s interest in Malaysian national affairs, including international assessments of the nation’s political life, it focused on examples I gave to illustrate my point that Muslims themselves debate their own texts. This is an important point in the context of a broader debate around how we should understand Muslim politics, both in Australia and elsewhere, including our close neighbour and important trading partner, Malaysia.

For this reason, I chose examples which demonstrate that there are considerable differences in how Malay Muslims interpret Qur’anic quotes, the way in which these quotes are deployed is shaped by intense political competition in Malaysia. The full text is below, with a link at the end.

Rise in Islamic fundamentalism seen as result of administration unsure of majority support

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 30 — Growing Islamic fundamentalism in Malaysia reflects an attempt by the ruling administration to reassert moral and political control after a divisive general elections, a political observer from the University of South Australia (UniSA) noted today.

According to an article in independent Australia-based news site The Conversation, the recent spate of enforcement by Islamic authorities may seem “comical”, but it points to an administration unsure of majority support.

“Yet political liberals may not understand that they reflect the Malaysian state’s overriding purpose now: to regenerate Malay Muslim majoritarianism, against strong counter-currents,” wrote Amrita Malhi, a research fellow with UniSA’s International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding. Read more

On The News with Muslim Texts

- Amrita Leave a comment

Today, I was interviewed by Stan Grant in the Sky News Studios in Melbourne for the evening current affairs program, Reporting LIVE with Stan Grant. This interview mostly focused on how we should understand Muslim movements and Islamist politics: my argument was that texts alone are not enough, we have to also pay close attention to political and social contexts. Picture: Sky News.

Muslim Politics Can’t Be Explained With Texts Alone

- Amrita Leave a comment

Malaysian Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim speaks in front of his supporters, during a gathering in Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, late 27 October 2014.   EPA/AZHAR RAHIM

Today, in response to an article in Quadrant by Australian anthropologist Prof. Clive Kessler, I published an op-ed onThe Conversation in which I argue against a textual approach to understanding “Muslim” politics. The full text is below.

Malaysia reaches a critical crossroad over state Islamisation

Fuelled by the rise of Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, debate about Islam and violence has flared again in Australia. In a predictable cycle of provocation and reaction, governments launch a wide-ranging security response while denying claims that Muslims are scapegoats. At the same time, they must reassure non-Muslims that the suburbs are safe.

The result is government statements that aim to placate everyone: Muslims are not targets and non-Muslims should stay calm because, as they argue, Islam is foremost a “religion of peace”.

Interpreting texts is problematic

In recent weeks, Australian Attorney-General George Brandis has utteredprecisely these words. A battery of spokespeople for the Muslim community has chimed in. This is not rocket science: this gesture of reassurance is aimed at maintaining relationships, calming the angry and managing constituencies. Read more

New Frontiers of Land Control

- Amrita Leave a comment

The Routledge edited volume, New Frontiers of Land Control.

The Journal of Peasant Studies special issue, New Frontiers of Land Control, has now been published by Routledge as an edited volume. Like the original journal special issue, this volume contains my piece, ‘Making Spaces, Making Subjects: Land, Enclosure and Islam in Colonial Malaya’.

A preview is available on Google Books.

Resources, Conflict and Religious Identity in Malaya

- Amrita Leave a comment

A poster issued by the Journal of Peasant Studies.

In my article in the Journal of Peasant Studies, I look at how struggles related to land control fed in to an Islamist uprising in Malaya in 1928. I examine how the colonial enclosure of territory was related to projects for producing colonial subjects, and how these projects were opposed in the language of jihad, caliphate and holy war. The article is in a special issue of the journal titled New Frontiers of Land Control, edited by Nancy Lee Peluso and Christian Lund.

My abstract is here:

Land control struggles were central to multiple projects of enclosure in colonial Malaya. Indeed, enclosures created Malaya, a discrete geo-body constructed by bounding the Malay polities of the Malay Peninsula. It also underpinned technocratic regimes for managing land, forest and property, including in Terengganu, the last peninsular state to be colonised. Enclosure, however, was directed not only at territorialising landscapes; it was also a biopolitical project for bounding subjects and subjectivities, producing both Malayans and racially-constructed Malay peasants. One response by Terengganu cultivators, a holy war,was grounded in an audacious globalism, through which they rejected the enclosures which bound them in ever-tightening webs of discipline and control.

If you can access it, the full text is available from Taylor and Francis.

Barisan Nasional and PAS in the 1990s

- Amrita Leave a comment

The edited volume, Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics.

In 2003, I published a book chapter based on my Honours thesis in a festschrift for Clive Kessler, edited by Virginia Hooker and Norani Othman, called Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics. In it, I argued that the contest between the Barisan Nasional government and PAS throughout the 1990s was based in two competing discourses around how Islam should be understood. On one side was the critique of development and unfettered market capitalism espoused by PAS, usually described as a ‘traditionalist’ Muslim party. On the other stood the pro-market and strongly developmentalist Barisan Nasional, led at the time by Mahathir Mohamad, who was often characterised as a ‘modernist’ or ‘moderniser’.

A preview is available on Google Books.

Scroll To Top