Islam's moderate middle path is found in southeast Asia
■"In Malaysia, 'Islamic civilization' is promoted: Tolerance one of the tenets," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 25A.
Interesting article on Malaysia's attempt to position itself as a model of moderate Islam. It has long been my sense that the positive future of Islam comes to Southwest Asia from Southeast Asia, whereas this radical Islamic stand against globalization is clearly heading southeast from Southwest Asia to sub-Saharan Africa over time.
Here's the key segment:
Abdullah's ruling coalition soundly defeated its Muslim opposition in national elections in March, turning back its vision of turning Malaysia into an Islamic state, but that doesn't mean Abdullah's government doesn't go out of its way to court its roughly 60% Islamic majority, which basically correlates to the ethnic Malays, the rest being Chinese Buddhists, Indian Hindus and Christians. Given the slight majority, you can imagine how race, religion, and just-whose-country-is-this? sentiment can all get mixed up in one nasty brew, like the 1969 race riots that targeted the ethnic, typically more well-to-do Chinese (leaving hundreds dead).This country of 23 million residents is offering itself as a progressive model to an Islamic world divided between Muslims who believe they can co-exist with the Western world and fundamentalists who say they can't and shouldn't try.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, an Islamic scholar by training, is trying to promote what he calls Islam Hadari. Roughly translated, it is Arabic for "Islamic civilization." Abdullah's somewhat vague version of Islam emphasizes economic and technological development, social justice and tolerance for other religions.
What's interesting to me about the article is how basically all the examples of where the government has gone out of its way to favor Muslim Malays over other ethnic-religious groups has to do with the definitions of family, marriage, and sex. So you get the feeling that the moderation has to do more with economic and politics, whereas the "gives" to the majority Malays tend to register in the social values sphere.
Interesting no? Makes you think about this election? The conservative majority okays the Bush team on their economics and national security in return for their efforts on upholding social values. Looking on it that way, you get a sense of what it means to be more Core-like than Gap-like: you push the connectivity of free trade, free markets, collective security and transparency, but you do let yourself engage in some content control and some behavioral modification when it comes to the truly touchy stuff like family, marriage, and sex.
The "truly sophisticated" might find such a quid pro quo simply too crude for words, but I believe it’s a fundamentally (dare I use that modifier?) sound approach to trading up on connectivity while not feeling like you're trading down on social content.