ARI Working Paper Series

This paper argues that there is a changing trend of Islamization in Malaysia, triggered by  a new form of Islam which is dependent on a bureaucratic authority.  This is quite different from the pre-1990s situation when contestation over the “right” Islam was fought among a plethora of contenders, ranging from Malay political parties to Islamic traditional authority to the new resurgent transnational Islamic civil society. However, instead of a pure Weberian “rational-legal bureaucracy” being put in place,  the Islamic  bureaucracy is featured by its charisma. This means that when formerly traditional ulama are absorbed into the bureaucracy,  and occupy sinecure positions, the  “routinization of charisma” takes effect, with these bureaucracies mutating from serving as the means to a bigger goal, to eventually becoming an end in themselves. There are four issues that will inform the basis of this postulation, namely, a revisit of the UMNO-PAS electoral contest, a documentation of the secularization process which accompanied the expansion of the Syariah and its legal-bureaucracy, a discussion of the containment of Islamic pluralism by the Islamic bureaucracy and an examination of the creeping gap between Islamicity and natural justice. A case is  made that Islamic institutions can encroach upon the state and in so doing take on the form of the secular, becoming more rationalized, differentiated and  worldly. The paper ends by posing the question as to whether secularization necessarily leads to the humanization of Islam.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization of the Sharia in Malaysia”, in Pacific Affairs, volume 83, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 505-524.