Infusion, not Legislation

I will pay attention if someone says Malaysia is not Islamic by legislation. A nation becomes Islamic not by decree but when the infusion of the Islamic doctrine is achieved.

On one hand, infusion began in 1969 when Tunku Abdul Rahman was appointed the first Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Conference. It then progressed to the Cairo Declaration, a pact ratified by the OIC in 1990 and two years later, the 'Shar'iah' amendment to the Federal Constitution was introduced. A decade later, the then Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, assumed the OIC Chair; at that point, he arbitrarily declared Malaysia ‘Islamic’.

On the other hand, at any one time, 20,000 Malaysians are being schooled in the Middle East in the nuances of Wahhabism. A sneak preview was offered during the Arab Spring when statistics unwittingly spilled out. 11,000 students were stranded in Egypt and 5000 in Libya. In our midst is a generation of Malaysians who subscribe to Wahhabism, with Salafism at the periphery. They are entrenched in our public and private sectors and are part of a pincer movement from that part of the world.

This movement is replacing the benign Sufism, as quoted by former Grand Mufti of Egypt Nasr Farid Wasel, who said that education, finance, and media ensure that Wahhabism envelops this (the Asian) part of the world. Incidentally, Wasel heads the Reform Rights Authority, an NGO comprising scholars of Egypt's Al-Azhar University. He added that "the objective of the Reform Rights Authority is to support the right candidates in the upcoming (November 2011) elections and that those who are against the Islamists rising to power in Egypt are infidels who do not believe in God" and to underscore the Wahhabi influence, Malaysia hosted the 3rd World Al-Azhar Alumni Conference in 2008 where a sizeable and proud alumnus was in attendance.

Installation of Shariah in Muslim-majority nations is inevitable despite the outcome of the impending general elections in Malaysia, where its citizens would discover that electing the ruling secularist Alliance only serves to delay the process just as Egyptians and Tunisians would discover that electing the Islamist hastens it.

The Egyptian Parliament will install the Muslim Brotherhood in the impending elections. It will then attract Muslim parliamentarians from the secularist bloc to constitute a majority, necessary to replace the current secular constitution with a Shariah-centric one. Egypt will become Islamic when it adopts the latter, but the crux of this narrative is that the driver behind the impending Islamisation of Egypt is cleric Sheikh al-Qaradawi, the Sunni ‘Pope’ who is, incidentally, venerated by Muslim leaders of the opposition Peoples Pact in Malaysia.

Words - Tommy Peters

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