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Islam and Its Racial Dynamics in Malaysia’s 14th General Election 155

institutions. e JAKIM-linked Institut Kajian Strategik Islam Malaysia
(IKSIM, Islamic Strategic Studies of Malaysia), which Najib had launched
to champion Islam’s stature, was especially central. For instance, mainstream
media gave anti-DAP statements by Dr Kamarul Zaman Yuso of Universiti
Utara Malaysia (Northern University of Malaysia) and IKSIM wide coverage,
5
even though he was openly sympathetic to PAS (Kamarul Zaman 2017).
Via mainstream-media articles by other IKSIM fellows, too, IKSIM openly
declared war on ideologies such as secularism, liberalism, and pluralism, which
it perceived as deviant, a threat against Islam in Malaysia, and associated
with PH (cf. Rehan Ahmad 2016; Mahamad Naser 2017). IKSIM senior
fellow Abdul Karim Omar even accused PH of being a covert vector of
Christian symbolism, claiming the term Harapan (Hope) carried evangelical
connotations (Abdul Karim 2018b). PH supporters, in turn, attacked both
IKSIM and JAKIM online for their anti-pluralist agendas, framing these as
potentially threatening Malaysia’s fragile ethno-religious equilibrium.
In November 2017, IKSIM lodged a police report against constitutional
expert Professor Shad Saleem Faruqi for accusing IKSIM in a column in e
Star daily of expounding a radical message that disparaged religious diversity
(Shad 2017; Athirah Huda 2017). Muslim women’s rights group Sisters in
Islam (SIS) and the Group of 25 (G25), a group of retired civil servants who
had been thrown into the limelight for expressing reservations against the
allegedly unconstitutional intrusion of sharia into civil space, praised him
for his courage in exposing IKSIM (SIS 2017; Malay Mail 2017). SIS, G25,
and the NGO Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF), whose founding chairman,
Dr Ahmad Farouk Musa, was a former vice-chairman of the electoral reform
group, Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih, Gabungan Pilihan Raya
Bersih dan Adil) and who enjoyed a close relationship with Anwar Ibrahim,
6
made up the major ‘liberal’ Muslim groups that JAKIM frowned upon for
compromising the integrity of Malaysia’s Sunni-based Islam (Aina 2017). Dr
Ahmad Farouk, for instance, chastised PAS for tabling RUU355 in Parliament,
for which he earned IKSIM’s rebuke (Rehan Ahmad 2017).
A few months prior to GE14, IKSIM’s Engku Ahmad Fadzil and his
compatriot Zamihan Mat Zin, a JAKIM o cial on secondment to the Prisons
Department and President of the Pertubuhan Ahli Sunnah Wal Jamaah
Malaysia (ASWAJA, Malaysian Association of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamaah),
crossed the political line by espousing the view that voting DAP—and by
default, for its PH allies—was haram, i.e., religiously illegal (Engku Ahmad
Fadzil 2018a). While both Engku Ahmad Fadzil and Zamihan were o cially
apolitical, their conservative viewpoints jived with UMNO’s racial-religious

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