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Islam and Its Racial Dynamics in Malaysia’s 14th General Election 151

situation by welcoming scholar-activists from the conservative Wahhabi-
Sala school into UMNO (Mohamed Nawab 2014; Ahmad Fauzi 2016).
2
In February 2015, the Islamist trajectory of UMNO and its Barisan Nasional
(BN, National Front) coalition reached an apogee when the government,
in self-congratulatory mode, launched a sharia index that would reputedly
function as a scienti c measure of the extent of Malaysia’s adherence to Islamic
law (Mohd Azizuddin 2015). Developed jointly by the Jabatan Kemajuan
Islam Malaysia (JAKIM, Malaysian Department for the Advancement of
Islam, the hub of Malaysia’s federal Islamic bureaucracy), IIUM, and YADIM,
the index claimed to assess Malaysia’s compliance with Islamic principles
within the broad framework of maqasid sharia (higher objectives of the sharia)
in such diverse elds as education, the economy, politics, health, legal a airs,
infrastructure, environment, culture, and society (Razak 2017).
As Najib Razak’s era progressed, it became increasingly clear that an
Islamist conservatism that peculiarly combined Wahhabi-Sala literalism
with traditional Malay-Muslim religious ethnocentrism was fast overtaking
Malaysia’s earlier wasatiyyah (moderation) agenda (Ahmad Fauzi and Che
Hamdan 2015). Rigid Islamization proceeded apace even as Najib continued
to gloat over Malaysia’s accomplishments as a supposedly moderate Muslim
nation-state that renounced all forms and manifestations of extremism,
as showcased, for example, in its hosting the Kuala Lumpur-based Global
Movement of Moderates initiative (El-Muhammady 2015). Evincing
Malaysia’s mainstreaming of Islamist conservatism has been even previously
secular-minded UMNO politicians’ widespread acceptance of hudud as an
3
indispensable measure of a true Islamic polity.
e mainstreaming of Islamism has had a signi cant e ect on how Malay-
Muslims view race and religion, providing cues for electoral blocs’ strategies as
GE14 neared. A September–October 2016 attitudinal survey of a sample of
1,504 adult citizens in peninsular Malaysia discovered that Malays and non-
Malays did not share a common conception of, let alone aspiration toward,
what it meant to be Malaysian (Al Ramiah et al. 2017). Worryingly, while
Malaysians generally—but especially Malay-Muslims—valued their religious
identities highly, the way those identities were nurtured devalued religious
‘others’. Comparing di erent cohorts of religious groups in Southeast Asia,
Mikami (2015) similarly found that Malaysian Muslims identi ed most
strongly with their religion, to the extent of prioritizing their religious over
national identity. Re ecting these priorities, an Islamic state had arguably
become a shared goal of both UMNO-based Malay-nationalists and PAS-
based Islamists (Norshahril 2014).

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