This book describes the Islamisation process that has unfolded in Malaysia over the last fifty years and provides feedback from in-depth interviews with 100 individuals from Malaysia’s “educated classes”, or the “elite”, regarding their reactions to the changes that have accompanied Islamisation and how they feel it has impacted them. It includes a brief overview of Islamisation globally and a brief history of Malaysia, focusing especially on those aspects relevant to the book’s subject. The book gives a comprehensive explanation of how and why Islamisation occurred in Malaysia and illustrates the extent of change that has accompanied it. The feedback from the research participants includes special analysis of reactions from Muslim women and non-Muslims. The reasons behind there being so little public debate about Islamisation and the concerns that this group of people have about what is happening is also explained. Finally, the author gives his opinion on the impact the change in government in May 2019 is likely to have.

Islamization and Activism in Malaysia examines aspects of the increasing political and social profile of Islam in Malaysia and describes how different kinds of activists in Malaysia have sought to protect fundamental liberties and to improve the state of democracy in Malaysia. In particular, focus is paid to activists who engage with electoral process, the law and the public sphere, and in particular, to movements that cut across or combine these realms of action. Spanning the period of the Prime Ministership of Abdullah Badawi, Julian C. H. Lee's grounded analysis examines the most important issues of that period including the freedom of religion case of Lina Joy, the Islamic state debate, and events surrounding the 8 March 2008 general elections.

Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethink

This book explores the festival of Thaipusam in terms of its own inner dynamics - the traditions and belief structures which ensure the festival's continuing relevance to Malaysian Hindus. It argues that Thaipusam reflects a growing sense of Hindu identity in Malaysia and an as yet inchoate unity. It contends that while the kavadi ritual provides profound meaning at the individual and group level, Thaipusam furnishes a public arena for and gives expression to a powerful Hindu resurgence, largely, though not exclusively, fuelled by Dravidian assertiveness. In situating the festival within the context of a Malaysia dominated by Malay and Islamic power brokers, a society in which both the Indian community and Hinduism are relegated to the margins, the book explores the festival of Thaipusam as a vehicle for mobilization of religious symbols and values which not only simultaneously articulate ethnicity and thus resist the forces which threaten cultural and religious integrity, but which also ultimately signal wider allegiances to the broader politico-cultural world of an imagined, immeasurably rich, and enduring Indo-Hindu civilization.

Malaysia, home to some twenty million Muslims, is often held up as a model of a pro-Western Islamic nation. The government of Malaysia, in search of Western investment, does its best to perpetuate this view. But this isn't the whole story. Over the last several decades, Joseph Liow shows, Malaysian politics has taken a strong turn toward Islamism. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the growing role of Islam in the last quarter century of Malaysian politics. Conventional wisdom suggest that the ruling UMNO party has moved toward Islamism to fend off challenges from the more heavily Islamist opposition party, PAS. Liow argues, however, that UMNO has often taken the lead in moving toward Islamism, and that in fact PAS has often been forced to react. The result, Liow argues, is a game of "piety-trumping" that will be very difficult to reverse, and that has dire consequences not only for the ethnic and religious minorities of Malaysia, but for their democratic system as a whole.

A case study of a multi-ethnic Muslim state and a contribution to the study of the domestic functions of foreign policy. The book also addresses the real and imagined significance of Islam as a force in contemporary global politics.

Akbarzadeh and Saeed explore one of the most challenging issues facing the Muslim world: the Islamisation of political power. They present a comparative analysis of Muslim societies in West, South, Central and South East Asia and highlight the immediacy of the challenge for the political leadership in those societies. Islam and Political Legitimacy contends that the growing reliance on Islamic symbolism across the Muslim world, even in states that have had a strained relationship with Islam, has contributed to the evolution of Islam as a social and cultural factor to an entrenched political force. The geographic breadth of this book offers readers a nuanced appraisal of political Islam that transcends parochial eccentricities. Contributors to this volume examine the evolving relationship between Islam and political power in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan. Researchers and students of political Islam and radicalism in the Muslim world will find Islam and Political Legitimacy of special interest. This is a welcome addition to the rich literature on the politics of the contemporary Muslim world.

The Iranian Revolution has catalysed the preconceptions holding sway in the Western World about the character of Islam and its politics, based as they are on a mixture of imagined cultural superiority and a latent fear of a resurgence similar to the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries of the long Ottoman domination of Eastern Europe. This book constitutes a counterweight to such monolithic perceptions of Islam. It surveys the nature of opinion and of government in the larger Muslim regions of the world, and the position of Muslims in states where they are not the dominant population. Each contributor expresses his own assessment of the regional data, and the editor’s concluding chapter draws together the threads of a work which will form an important contribution to international understanding and a first breach in the ‘Green Curtain’ dividing East and West. First published in 1981.