Status and Stigma

Islam and the Politics of Counter-Terror in Malaysia

Nicholas Chan

October 2003— Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia with President George W. Bush, President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea, Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines, President Vicente Fox of Mexico and Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. Photograph by Paul Morse, White House photographer. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

When we speak about the ‘politics of something’, it often carries two pejorative meanings. Firstly, politics acts as a cover, a veneer that masks what political actors are actually up to. For example, the politics of good government papered over the imperatives of colonialism and empire. Secondly, politics is a distraction. It pulls a project away from its original goal and purposes. Politics are the detours, compromises, and buy-ins one must make to get things moving. For example, the politics of housing reform means dealing with a maze of interest groups, regulations, and stakeholders.

The politics of counter-terror, when used in reference to Muslim states, carries the same connotations. Counter-terrorism is either a cover, through which autocratic regimes secure the legitimacy to crack down on (often legitimate) dissent; or it is a distraction, where state ties with religious actors discourage them from doing what is necessary to deal with the problem of violent radicalism. Thus, analysis of counter-terrorism in Muslim states is left with a cynical view that treats it as a front for regime interests, if not a despondent picture, where Muslim governments are prevented from implementing effective counter-terror policies because of persistent institutional, political, and social obstacles.

These interpretations are not wrong. After all, many Muslim states are governed by authoritarian governments that also have to contend with influential religious, and often Islamist, stakeholders. But they are also incomplete. They bring forth this cunning Orientalist archetype of the Muslim ruler who is characterized, first and foremost, by their shrewdness and two-faced game, as if those aren’t qualities that define most politicians. To add, what is left unaddressed is a more obvious question: how do Muslim state elites and security practitioners who had to ‘wage’ the Global War on Terror (GWOT) as Muslims relate to the enterprise that stigmatizes their religion, and what are the consequences that came from it? This reframing of the GWOT as having both identity and policy stakes is where my book, The Politics of Counter-Terror: Islam and Security in the Postcolonial Muslim State, begins.

Why Malaysia?

The book uses Malaysia as an intriguing case that complicates the two interpretations mentioned above. The cynical reading is not at all convincing, given that the Islamist opposition in Malaysia has not suffered from the kind of massive crackdown found in Egypt or Saudi Arabia post-9/11. In fact, it remains a thriving political actor, and, as of writing, holds the largest number of seats in parliament. A thriving Islamist opposition does not obstruct effective counter-terrorism in Malaysia either. Malaysia is considered highly successful in this domain, having suffered only one significant yet non-lethal terrorist attack in the 2010s, at a time when its regional neighbours, and even European states, were faring far worse during the Islamic State (IS)-inspired wave of attacks.

But how has the Malaysian state gone about doing counter-terrorism? Drawing extensively on primary materials, my book finds an ‘Islamized’ security logic that runs through Malaysia’s counter-terror regime, in which violent radicalization is almost treated as an outcome of religious misinterpretation or deviancy. The book does not treat this logic as natural, let alone ‘scientifically’ produced. Instead, it charts its making from decades-long processes that stemmed from how Malaysian Muslim elites thought about and responded to Islam’s perceived position in the international order. Calling it the most “misunderstood religion” (by Muslims and non-Muslims alike), modernist Muslim elites like Mahathir Mohamad, the long- and twice-ruling Prime Minister of Malaysia (1981–2003, 2018–2020), had sought to curate Islam for developmentalist goals to counter the stigma associated with it. What transpired instead was a project of statist Islamization that, on the one hand, sought to project an image of Islamic modernity, but, on the other hand, entrenched a governmentality where the governing of Muslim lives was equated with the governing of Islam. In other words, the securitization of Islam intensified with projects to make it ‘compatible’ with industrial modernity.

The book highlights this entanglement between Islam and security most prominently in its granular study of Malaysia’s counter-terrorism efforts when confronted with the IS wave of radicalism in the 2010s. It documents what I call the ‘Islamization of security’: how Islamic institutions were deferred to as the ideological bulwark against radicalism; how Islamic experts were treated interchangeably as terrorism experts; and how theological discussions and debates pervaded discourses meant for ‘counter-’ and ‘de-radicalization’ purposes.

A Relational and Contingent Account of Security-Making

What emerges from these insights is a relational and contingent account of security-making — one that reads security logic and formations as downstream from projects of recognition-seeking and state-building, as well as the practical needs of governance. I argue that the counter-terror regime in Malaysia has to be understood as contingent formations because it is not straightforwardly clear how one ‘governs’ terrorism if the goal is to identify the Muslim ‘radical’ within a broadly conservative Muslim-majority society. In the book, I call this problem the governing of ‘strangeness’, where largely Muslim security practitioners had to make legible “bodies that are at once like us yet not like us.” To demystify said strangeness, the state fell back on familiar assumptions like correcting misinterpretations of Islam is how you fight radicalism.

This relational and contingent reading of counter-terrorism has two benefits. First, it releases counter-terrorism from the confines of being a purely security domain, showing it instead to be a problem-space porous to perceptions of international hierarchies, considerations of identity and status, and governmental needs for narrative unambiguity. It sustains an inquiry that is plural in sites, as the book travels from bureaucracy to mosques and to prisons and courts to cover the array of practices we often call ‘counter-terrorism’ unproblematically. It also encourages an inquiry that is interdisciplinary, as interrogating the origins and workings of Malaysia’s ‘Islamized’ counter-terrorism will require insights from law, religious studies, anthropology, political science, and international relations.

Second, the book gently pushes back against theories about the securitization of Islam that are still largely based on Eurocentric understandings, which saw the phenomenon as undergirded by Islamophobia. In Malaysia’s case, however, the entanglement of Islam with counter-terrorism came from state efforts to seek recognition for Islam. Thus, unlike in the West, the securitization of Islam in Malaysia produced greater Islamization, not less, because Islamic institutions and actors were taken as most ‘qualified’ to handle the problem. As the book shows, this myopic understanding is consequential for what it left out, for example, the class dimension behind the IS phenomenon in Malaysia, as well as for what it normalized: a brand of mainstreamed religious exclusivism that shares the intolerance of militant Islam but not its radicalism.

The Politics of Counter-Terror Today

This book uses Malaysia to offer a snapshot of the GWOT as a global security agenda embedded within multiple spheres of politics. Structurally, the counter-terror agenda spread through a postcolonial international order that remained sceptical of the political possibilities of Islam. Institutionally, counter-terror operations unfolded within a domestic institutional framework in which Islam was integral to a modernist state-building project. Discursively, counter-terror practices required the modern state to demonstrate to the public that it understood the nature of a biopolitical threat. Counter-terrorism was, therefore, an enterprise with political-ideological stakes that also furnished states with a recognizable grammar of performance legitimacy, enabling them to fashion themselves as part of “global civil society”.

That question of what constitutes global civility and performance legitimacy is harder to parse in the post-liberal order today. The (however-flawed) common standards of ‘civilization’ that a state like Malaysia could look up to, even if reluctantly, have dissipated as the US increasingly behaves like an erratic and unapologetic revisionist power. To add, significant drift has happened to the GWOT, with the US now treating it as a War on Drugs with counter-terror methods. An agenda like climate that used to have a world-uniting edge, much like the GWOT pre-Iraq, is as divisive as it can be, fuelling insurgent movements across the West and Latin America.

That being said, good governance, however contested in meaning, will retain its currency in international and local politics. The double-edged nature of governance as an assemblage of problem-solving practices and as a performative realm through which concerns of status and legitimacy are filtered, just like how counter-terrorism was, will remain.