MODERNITY, STATE-LED ISLAMISATION AND THE NON-MUSLIM RESPONSE: A CASE STUDY OF CHRISTIANS IN PENINSULAR MALAYSIA
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Date
2010-12
Authors
CHONG, EU CHOONG
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Abstract
For a better part of the 20th century, scholars who studied religion held the
opinion that religion would gradually lose its public significance in the face of
modernisation. However, events in the past few decades have proved otherwise.
From the Iranian Revolution to the role of Catholicism in political conflicts
throughout Latin America in the 1980 have patently demonstrated religion still plays
an important role in the public sphere. This thesis takes the position that religion still
remains an important precinct in the public life and politics of contemporary
Southeast Asian societies. Using the case of Malaysia, I argued that not only did the
country experienced religious revivalism across the various faith communities
despite the rapid modernisation that was taking place here but also it did not retreat
to the private sphere. Indeed, it facilitated the entry of religion into the public sphere.
Islamic revivalism in the late 1970s among the Malay-Muslim community witnessed
the call by certain quarters of the community for the Islamisation of the state and
society. This in turn has egged the UMNO-Ied Barisan Nasional government to
implement its own Islamisation policy in order to maintain its hegemony over this
critical group in society. The resultant policy has brought about an increasing
intrusion of the government not only into the Muslim religious field but also into the
non-Muslim religious field. As a result, non-Muslims began to experience a growing
restriction not only of their religious spheres but also of their everyday lives. Not
surprisingly, they began to turn to religion as a political resource in an attempt to find
some sort of political footing to negotiate this increasing restriction. Focusing on the
Christian community in Peninsular Malaysia, this thesis seeks to study the ways in
which this community used religion to create space that enable them to manoeuvre
the increasing intrusion by the government into their religious sphere and everyday
lives. This thesis takes the position that religion provides a focal point in mobilising
people to respond to the social and political circumstances which they find
themselves in. Indeed, the central theoretical position forwarded by this thesis is that
religious based contestations/conflicts in the public sphere are due to the tensions
that arise out of the pursuit ofmodemity.
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Keywords
MODERNITY , STATE-LED ISLAMISATION