Muslim Politics Can’t Be Explained With Texts Alone

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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

How does Malaysian Federalism Influence How Land is Managed?

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Federalism workshop flyer, issued by the Penang Institute.

I’ve just participated in a workshop convened to consider whether it might be possible to innovate the way Malaysian federalism functions, both in theory and in practice. As the present system is a highly centralised federation, it seems this question is increasingly important to state governments wishing to test their position in relation to federal power since the “political tsunami” elections of 2008 and 2013. Read more

ASAA Conference, Perth

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ASAA 2014 Conference Brochure Cover

The 20th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia just wound up today in Perth. It was a great experience, and featured keynote presentations by South Korean Ambassador for National Security Affairs and Professor of International Relations Prof. Chung Min Lee, and Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane.

My own talk was on how much Malaysia’s 2013 election highlighted the tensions present in Malaysian society over what sort of nation it should be, and whether or not it needs its “National Front” to hold itself together firmly enough to prevent this tension from undoing it completely. This kind of analysis needs a bit of distance from the election, however.

Political Competition and a Missing Plane

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Stock image of a MAS plane selected by Asian Currents

Today, Asian Currents published an op-ed I wrote on the Malaysian authorities’ behaviour in relation to MH370, and the relationship between this behaviour and the wider issue of public trust in the authorities after the contested 2013 election result. The full text is below.

Missing aircraft flies into the turbulence of Malaysian politics

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The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, writes AMRITA Malhi,  has become enmired in Malaysian politics.

On Saturday 8 March, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared.

The same weekend that the aircraft was reported missing, MP and opposition leader for the People’s Alliance coalition, Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to a second prison term for sodomy by the Court of Appeal. Anwar’s defence lawyer, fellow People’s Alliance MP Karpal Singh, was handed down a fine for sedition.

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Anwar Ibrahim Back in Prison

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Stock image of Anwar Ibrahim selected by 2SER.

Today, I did an interview with Sydney community radio station, 2SER, outlining why Malaysian Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, is back in prison today.

Anwar Ibrahim Jailed

A Malaysian court over the weekend has sentenced opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim to five years’ jail, overturning his previous acquittal on sodomy charges of having sex with a male aide in 2008.

Read more

The Nation and its National Front

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Today, I had an article published in Berita, the Newsletter of the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group in the US Association for Asian Studies. I’m not a current affairs reporter, nor do I focus on seat counts and swings. What I am interested in is the contest of narratives that has developed since 2008, and that takes a longer-term perspective.

Malaysia’s 2013 Election: The Nation and the National Front

Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. (Naim 2013)

If ever an election victory could be interpreted as a humiliation by the winning side, then the Malaysian federal election, held in May this year, was profoundly humiliating for the National Front (Barisan Nasional, or BN).

BN won government for the thirteenth time, and extended its uninterrupted hold on federal government in Malaysia. It also continues to hold a majority of states in the federation. In this sense, BN’s political primacy—as the sole government Malaysia has ever known—remains in place, in the nation it argues its predecessors brought in to being in 1957 (Cheah Boon Kheng 2002; Hooker 2003). Read more

New Frontiers of Land Control

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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.

Migrant Workers Also Have Politics

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A group of people thought to be migrant workers, holding up Barisan Nasional flags. Stock image selected by New Mandala.

The 2013 Malaysian election was characterised by repeated claims that tens of thousands of migrant workers would be mobilised to vote in support of the government coalition. As truth claims, such statements did not hold up. Yet my view is that they should be evaluated not as truth claims, but as a highly effective ‘get out the vote’ campaign. As these statements circulated, they drove up voter attendance at polling places, because they connected two important issues that many Malaysians hold grave doubts about, and harnessed those doubts to mobilise voters. These issues are the conduct of elections and the use of migrant workers. Anyway, I decided to talk to a migrant worker about the election, and New Mandala published the interview.

How would a foreign worker vote, anyway?

AMRITA MALHI, GUEST CONTRIBUTOR – 4 MAY 2013

In Taman Desa, in Teresa Kok’s (Democratic Action Party/DAP) electorate of Seputeh, I asked a Bangladeshi worker about Malaysian politics. Why not, after all? These workers have invested their labour, their lives, and their aspirations in Malaysia, just as much as past generations of foreign workers have. Unlike the foreign workers of today, those of the past are familiar. They became Malayans. Their descendants are now Malaysians.

Rumours and leaks are circulating like wildfire that legions of foreign workers are being mobilised and transported by air to vote for BN in tomorrow’s election. Organisations like Anyone/Anything But UMNO (ABU) are preparing to monitor polling stations tomorrow, and one of their aims is to identify these workers and discourage them from voting. Read more

Imagining a Nation After its National Front

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A supporter holds an opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia flag on election nomination day in Pekan, Pahang state. Photo: Lai Seng Sin/ AP

I was in Malaysia during its 2013 election, a historic event that has since unleashed a major restructure of Malaysian politics. I’m putting up a series of posts from 2013 to provide a bit of depth to what’s going on now in 2016, beginning with this one from Inside Story, where I tried to imagine what a post-racial Malaysia might look like, while also attending a funeral and watching an election campaign. The full text is below, and the link to the original article is at the bottom.

CORRESPONDENTS

Can Malaysia find life after the National Front?

4 MAY 2013

A historic election campaign reopened old questions about what kind of nation Malaysia should be, writes Amrita Malhi in Kuala Lumpur

When Balbir Kaur arrived in Malaya, the country’s ethnic groups – Malays, Chinese, Indians and “Others” – were already said to be living racially bounded lives. The educated Malay elite was part of a broader Malay nationalist group, the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO, which had emerged from the struggle over competing visions of a postcolonial Malaya in the heady days of the 1940s. One option, Britain’s Malayan Union proposal, saw Malaya as a nation-state in which citizens would have the same status, regardless of their racial origin. But this proposal was abandoned the late 1940s as UMNO rose above the various organisations jockeying for leadership of the national struggle. All pro-independence groupings to the left of UMNO were banned, and the colonial authorities had set about eradicating the Malayan Communist Party, whose politics were Malay nationalism’s strongest competitor. Read more

Resources, Conflict and Religious Identity in Malaya

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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.

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