Malaysia

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION ASIA

Why are Indonesian clerics bent out of shape over yoga?

By SADANAND DHUME

For those who wonder what problems corruption-ridden and disaster-plagued Indonesia must tackle most urgently, the Indonesian Council of Ulema has the answer: yoga.

On Monday, the Council, a quasi-official grouping of 700 Islamic clerics, decreed that Muslims should shun the ancient Indian practice. The clerics worry that Hindu-influenced chants and invocations might weaken Muslim believers’ faith. The decree, though not legally binding, carries the force of moral authority, and, as is not uncommon in the Muslim world, the unspoken threat of enforcement by vigilantes.

The Council’s decision was not entirely unprecedented. Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council issued a similar ban last November. Nonetheless, it comes as a reminder of the challenges the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country faces as it struggles to nurture a fledgling democracy in the face of the increasingly undemocratic demands of fundamentalist Islam.

To be sure, Indonesia is no Saudi Arabia. The majority of the country’s Muslims — 88% of its 235 million people — practice a gentle folk Islam infused with elements of the archipelago’s long Animist-Hindu-Buddhist past. The country’s constitution is nonsectarian. Overt legal discrimination against non-Muslims, the cornerstone of government policy in neighboring Malaysia, is rare. Most people live in harmony.

But in recent years, Indonesian fundamentalists — including hardline clerics, politicians from the Prosperous Justice Party and vigilante groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front — have grown increasingly assertive. These groups don’t always agree with each other on tactics, but have broadly similar worldviews. They have spearheaded the persecution of the minority Ahmadiyya Muslim community, the passage of a so-called antipornography bill that encourages vigilantism and discriminates against non-Muslim cultures, and a regulation that forces Christian schools to offer religious instruction on Islam.

Put bluntly, Islamic fundamentalism puts a crimp on Indonesia’s otherwise impressive democratic flowering. It’s at odds with individual rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. In a mature democracy, you wouldn’t find a government body called the Coordinating Board for Monitoring Mystical Beliefs in Society outside the pages of a novel. In Indonesia, it helps the government determine which groups are labeled “heretical” or “deviant.”

After two successful national elections since the end of Suharto’s 32-year-reign in 1998 — and with another due this year — Indonesians are justifiably proud of having mastered the processes of democracy. But the gains may be chimerical unless they can defend their ability to publicly scrutinize, criticize — and, if necessary, mock — bad ideas that come from Islam as readily as those drawn from a political manifesto.

Since the 1970s, Indonesian Islam has been stripped of its legendary tolerance toward other faiths by a combination of rapid urbanization, compulsory religious education in government schools, and the efforts of Middle Eastern and homegrown purifiers of the faith. In recent years, this Arabization of Indonesian Islam has gathered pace as globalization has brought the religious and political discourse (often indistinguishable from each other) of Riyadh and Tehran to Jakarta. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims — perhaps between 10% and 15% — embrace the fundamentalist notion that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not full-blown fundamentalists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to these ideas.

Indonesia’s fundamentalists have shown themselves to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic politicians (including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono), courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square — by driving Playboy magazine out of Jakarta, or by attacking secular nationalists at a high-profile rally for religious freedom. Meanwhile cultural norms put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. Hardliners can be chided for distorting the faith, but an unspoken code of self-censorship ensures that no one ever questions the faith itself. The kind of robust debate between believers and unbelievers that marks most democracies is notable for its absence in Indonesia.

To put this in perspective, consider that Indians are free to debate the caste-centered and sexist aspects of Hindu scripture. The Spaniard who believes in contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. But an Indonesian who publicly expresses similar sentiments about the Quran or the prophet Muhammad immediately invites threats of violence.

This constrained national discourse cedes fundamentalists the moral high ground, a crucial advantage in this battle of ideas. Unless Indonesians can find a way to broaden the debate, to allow purely secular and even antireligious arguments to set up stall in the public square, they should not be surprised to find themselves in a land where clerics set the agenda, both in yoga class and outside it.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, May 2009).

The Wall Street Journal Asia

Coming of Age in Malaysia

Educated and wealthy, but of low social status.

Evening Is the Whole Day
By Preeta Samarasan
(Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $24)

By SADANAND DHUME

As bizarre tourism slogans go, few achieve the precise balance of concision and confusion of “Malaysia, Truly Asia.” Leaving aside the notion that other lands — say Japan or Vietnam or Indonesia — are somehow deficient in their Asianness, the central premise of Malaysia’s hard sell to the world is the notion that it hosts, in effortless harmony, three of the continent’s great cultures: Malay, Chinese and Indian.

The reality, as readers of Preeta Samarasan’s exquisitely crafted debut novel will discover, could not be more different. “Evening is the Whole Day” tells the story of a prosperous Tamil family, the Rajasekharans, who live in Ipoh, about 200 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur. The choice of an Indian family is telling. The father is a “topshot lawyer.” The family occupies the big house on their lane, and inhabits a world of Oxford-inflected accents, gleaming Volvos and single malt Scotch. But they also belong to the community that, not to put too fine a point on it, is at the bottom of Malaysia’s racially divided totem pole.

On top, of course, are the Malay Muslims, who, though they make up only about 60% of the population, have jerry-built an elaborate system of preferences that ensures their dominance of national life. This system — which, depending on your point of view, is either a clever piece of social engineering or a kind of ethnoreligious apartheid — makes race as important a determinant of a person’s life chances as talent, ambition or hard work.

Armed with family wealth and an English education, the topshot lawyer Mr. Rajasekharan dreams of a political career in a country newly freed from British rule. But the Malay-Chinese race riots of 1969 scotch those ambitions by decisively turning Malaysia away from merit and pluralism. By 1980, when the bulk of the story unfolds, the Rajasekharan children are growing up in a land where a person’s odds of getting into university, securing a promotion in a government job, or acquiring an apartment with a reasonable down payment depend, in no small measure, on the right to check a box that says bumiputera, or “son of the soil.” The Chinese, entrepreneurial and hardworking as the stereotype goes, find a way to prosper despite the odds. The Indians, many of whom are descendants of rubber plantation workers imported by the British, tend to languish.

Much of the drama unfolds through the divergent trajectories of two teenage girls living under the same roof. Uma, the family’s brilliant eldest daughter, has snagged a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, and with it the promise of escape from her dysfunctional family. A less hopeful future awaits the servant girl Chellam, whose meager dreams are matched by the meanness of her circumstances.

Ms. Samarasan’s prose is always self-assured and frequently dazzling. She likens petty cruelty to “forcing a cat to walk through a puddle.” The pain of infidelity comes not from the mere knowledge of it, but from the indelible image of a husband buying a big white bawal fish for his mistress to steam with ginger and spring onions. The impact of an awful truth can shoot through a child “like an eel in black water.” Ms. Samarasan is also slyly humorous: It’s hard not to laugh out loud at her portrayals of an Elvis-impersonating Hindu shaman and a gossipy fantasist of a neighbor known as Kooky Rooky.

The novel, at the end, illuminates a fascinating country whose representation in literature remains scant. It expands our understanding of the sprawling Indian diaspora. Most of all, though, it leaves you with something achieved by only the best fiction — a sense that your world has somehow, almost imperceptibly, been permanently enlarged.

Mr. Dhume is a Washington-based writer and the author of “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist” (Text Publishing, 2008).

YaleGlobal

Islamists, even when not in power, wield fear and faith to pressure their societies in conservative directions

	Power and faith: Indonesian Muslims pray at a mosque. Outside Islamists wage war on liberalism

Sadanand Dhume

WASHINGTON: In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called War on Terror. On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism – the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic sharia law – with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a “foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world’s next bane.” The left, not surprisingly, sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on “political situations and injustice in various parts of the world.”

Both views are flawed. Conservatives rightly emphasize the power of Islamism as an idea and the global ambitions of its adherents, but fail to acknowledge the movement’s lack of military and intellectual heft, or its limited global appeal compared to communism in its heyday. Liberals correctly point out that talk of a Muslim takeover of Europe is delusional, or at the very least premature. But they fail to see that in the Muslim-majority societies of Asia and the Middle East Islamism remains a powerful and growing force. Better organized, better motivated, backed by the threat of violence and protected by cultural norms that prohibit any criticism of Islam, Islamists are able to alter the nature of society even where they don’t hold formal power. Unless beleaguered moderates from Iraq to Indonesia can find a way to stand down the mob and broaden the war of ideas they’ll continue to lose ground to a tenacious movement that believes it has both God and history on its side.

At first glance the familiar comparison of the War on Terror with the Cold War appears reasonable enough. Like communists, Islamists value the group over the individual, justify the use of violence for political ends and nurture an almost visceral antipathy to a world order dominated by wealthy liberal democracies. Moreover, in this new Cold War Moscow and Beijing can easily be swapped with Riyadh and Tehran, Karl Marx with Al Jazeera’s equally hirsute Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Soviet’s World Federation of Democratic Youth with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The threat within – once symbolized by Western communist parties and their sympathizers – is now represented by such Islamist-friendly groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain. Moreover, the argument goes, whereas communist and capitalist proxies skirmished in such remote corners as Angola and Afghanistan, Islamists have brought their battle to the heart of the West. Suddenly New York, London and Madrid are as much battlegrounds as Beirut and Baghdad.

Plausible though it appears, this formulation exaggerates Islamist strength and underestimates the effectiveness of the West’s institutions and the resilience of its societies. True, Islamist intimidation has curbed free speech in some places: the Dutch and the Danes must tread lightly when criticizing Islam or contemplate a life of bodyguards and safe houses. But it has also spawned a generation of bold Muslim thinkers in the West – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani to name just three – who are willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that tend not to be asked in their countries of origin. Terrorism has been contained; only foiled plots make the front pages these days. Moreover, Islamism, steeped in a joyless literal reading of Islam, cannot hope to extend its appeal in the West beyond a minority of a minority – those Muslims drawn to its stark utopian vision. Osama bin Laden’s visage will never grace nearly as many T-Shirts as Che Guevara’s.

The weakness of Islamists in the West is matched by the backwardness of the Muslim world. In its prime the Soviet Union could reasonably claim to match the United States in such varied fields as chess, ballet, mathematics, Olympic sports, aviation technology and space exploration. Strip away the accident of oil wealth from Muslim lands and we’re left with societies that cumulatively boast fewer achievements than a single mid-sized Asian power, albeit an exceptional one, such as Korea.

This reality makes it easy to dismiss the Islamist threat, as do most Western liberals, or to shrink its dimensions to the activities of a handful of terrorist groups – al Qaeda or Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. Yet, paradoxically, it’s precisely the sorry state of Muslim societies that makes Islamism such a formidable force. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims – perhaps between 10 and 15 percent – embrace the Islamist idea that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not Islamists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to a worldview that’s steeped in conspiracy theories and compulsively blames Muslim failures on outsiders. Jews, Americans and Freemasons are favorite bogeymen.

Of course, neither religious obscurantism nor a lack of self-criticism is a Muslim monopoly. India has its Hindu fundamentalists who riot against Muslims and attack painters and scholars, America its Christians waging war against Darwin in the classroom. Nonetheless the danger to liberal democracy that Islamists pose in Muslim countries is of an entirely different order.

Islamists – although almost always a minority – tend to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square – whether by driving the local edition of Playboy out of Jakarta or by capturing the road to the airport in Beirut. Cultural norms – even in relatively open countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia – put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. The Spaniard who supports contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. An Indonesian or Pakistani who says the same about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed invites charges of “Islamophobia” and threats of violence.

The influence Islamists exert on the streets and on public discourse has had consequences. Even where they have not claimed formal power – as in Egypt or Pakistan or Indonesia – Islamists have led their societies in an illiberal direction. In Egypt, female university students come under greater pressure to wear the headscarf today than they did a generation ago. In parts of Pakistan, Islamists have declared war on music and soap operas. In Indonesia Christians and heterodox Muslims such as the Ahmadiyya often find their churches and mosques under siege.

In each of these countries those who reject the Islamist message – who believe that gender equity, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are universal values and not merely Western ones – must do so with one hand tied behind their backs.

So while talk of Islam’s inroads in Washington, London and Paris may indeed be overblown, the special conditions in the Muslim world ensure that the threat to liberal democracy in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Islamabad is not about to disappear any time soon.

dhumeakbarahmed

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Akbar Ahmed, Brookings Institution Press, 323 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

At a time when a British teacher in Sudan barely escaped a prison term for allowing seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear Muhammad; a Saudi Arabian rape victim needed a royal pardon to evade the prospect of 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with an unrelated man; and Islamists from Gaza to Waziristan step up their war against video stores and barber shops, a book that seeks to explain what exactly is roiling the Muslim world is more than welcome. On the face of it, few people are better qualified to write it than Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and, since 9/11, a familiar face on television.

In Journey Into Islam, Mr. Ahmed, accompanied by a clutch of students, travels across much of the Muslim world. In Damascus he dines with mystic sheikhs. In Lahore he rubs shoulders with politicians beneath portraits of Mughal emperors. In Kuala Lumpur he chats with female professionals. In Jakarta he consorts with besieged moderates and militant students. Everywhere he and his students hand out questionnaires to gauge the attitudes and aspirations of the proverbial street. But, unusually for a book of this kind, it is in India that the narrative dwells the longest, and India that provides the analytical prism through which Mr. Ahmed views present-day Islam.

For Mr. Ahmed, three towns in north India—Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Deoband and Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh—capture the range of Muslim responses to globalization and the West. Ajmer, which houses a shrine to the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti, represents a retreat toward a mystical union with the divine. Deoband, birthplace of an ultra orthodox brand of Islam that is the subcontinent’s version of Wahhabism, symbolizes an attempt to defend the faith by adhering strictly to Islam’s core texts. Aligarh, home since 1875 to the famous Mohammedan Anglo-Indian College (now Aligarh Muslim University), stands for the attempt to engage Western ideas while preserving Islamic belief and practice.

Each of these models can claim its share of famous adherents. For the Sufis, there’s the Persian poet Rumi and the female Arab saint Rabia. The modernizers dominate the first half of the 20th century, among them the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and former Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. In the literalist Deoband tradition, Mr. Ahmed includes not just the Wahhabis but also such founders of modern Islamism—the drive to impose Shariah law on peoples and governments—as Abul Ala Maududi of the subcontinent’s Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmed finds the Sufis on the defensive, the modernizers in disarray and the Islamists, though he prefers not to use the term, on the ascendant. A popular Deoband writer in India announces that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the true champions of Islam. In Indonesia, one in four people surveyed calls bin Laden a role model. In Malaysia the majority profess admiration for such Islamist icons as Qutb and Maududi.

This book makes several important points. It stresses that the Islamic world is not monolithic, and that most Muslims are not on some kind of crazed jihad against the West. It explains that many Muslim women—including many of an Islamist bent—hold responsible jobs and are animated by ideas. It elegantly collapses the crux of Muslim anger into the so-called Taj Syndrome—the Islamic world’s glittering past juxtaposed against its wretched present. It identifi es the inherent tension between the American emphasis on individualism and traditional Muslim attitudes that place greater emphasis on family and community. Mr. Ahmed also deserves to be commended for wearing his erudition lightly; you don’t need to be an expert on Islam or Islamism to grasp his arguments.

And yet, on the whole this is a disappointing book. Nobody expects Mr. Ahmed to be unsympathetic to his faith, but his habit of simply dismissing any Muslim actions he disagrees with as “un-Islamic” is puzzling.

Thus attacks on (Christian and Buddhist) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are “quite alien to the Islamic values of justice and compassion.” The death sentence (by stoning) handed down by a Shariah court to a Nigerian woman who had a child out of wedlock has “more to do with tribal honor codes and response to globalization than with Islam itself.” The doctrine of armed jihad is defined away as merely “defense of one’s family and community in the face of attack.”

Unwilling or unable to take a hard look at Islam, Mr. Ahmed, predictably enough, turns to America and the West. The usual parade of villains soon surfaces: vengeful American foreign-policy hawks, insensitive Danish cartoonists, chief executive officers of multinational corporations, Christian creators of violent video games and a media “always on the lookout for some controversial issues surrounding Islam.” Globalization, we are informed with lofty certainty, lacks a moral core. Muslims hope to redeem their “honor and dignity” by turning to Mr. bin Laden. Of course, Mr. Ahmed quickly reassures us that this is not quite as alarming as it appears. He has somehow deduced that “many Muslims who sympathize with bin Laden in a broad and general sense would by no means support his more murderous or violent activity.”

When it comes to those who approach Islam and Islamism differently from him, Mr. Ahmed chooses to veil his attacks. Thus it is “scholars of Islam” who consider the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis to be “the quintessential ‘Orientalist.’” And it falls on unnamed critics to make the somewhat inflammatory allegation that the attacks of 9/11 “would almost be welcome” to Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld because they “would give a new momentum to their neocon worldview.” In a similar vein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, three of the most outspoken critics of Islam’s treatment of women, are dismissed as appearing “deliberately provocative” to ordinary Muslims.

This failure to grapple with uncomfortable ideas precludes a deeper analysis of what has gone so profoundly wrong. After all, Muslims, as any Vietnamese or Korean can tell you, can hardly claim a monopoly on recent suffering. Nor are they the only people whose past appears superior to their present. Many Indians and Chinese share similar sentiments. And all societies are struggling in their own way with the rapid change, for good and for ill, wrought by the closer integration of peoples and markets.

The trouble, then, is not globalization as such, but that an organized and tenacious minority of Muslims (the Islamists), believes that the cure for economic and political backwardness lies in embracing barbarism. To these true believers, the palpable failure of their project in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan offers little discouragement.

To suggest, as Mr. Ahmed does, that Islamists must be engaged, rather than unflinchingly opposed, reveals a curious blindness to this fact. For proof he need not look further than his native Pakistan where, as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto shows, an unchecked Islamist movement now threatens the state itself.

Mr. Ahmed believes that reform—though he prefers the term renaissance—must come from within an Islamic framework, and that it must be introduced by those considered credible by fellow Muslims. This appears plausible enough on the face of it. In practice, however, those calling for meaningful change—for the Islamic world to embrace minority rights, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry—seem to immediately lose credibility, and those who have credibility appear more interested in obfuscation and apologetics than in change. Unfortunately, unless Muslims can find a way to solve this conundrum, the odds of any kind of renaissance will remain exceedingly slim.

YaleGlobal

Growing assertiveness of Islamic courts intrudes on the rights of non-Muslims threatening social harmony in the prosperous nation

Sadanand Dhume

	Rise in religious supremacism? Cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims in the country raise disquieting questions about the Malaysian model

WASHINGTON: Those seeking a glimmer of optimism amidst the barrage of bad news from the Muslim world often point to Malaysia. It boasts a functioning democracy, a robust economy and a record of peace among its three major ethnic groups: Malays, Chinese and Indians.

Malaysia has done much to deserve its reputation for economic dynamism and social harmony, but a flurry of actions by the country’s hard-line Islamic authorities illustrates the contradictions within the Malaysian model, and raises doubts about the country’s effort to rise to the ranks of developed nations by 2020. In a globalized and increasingly competitive world, Malaysia cannot expect to modernize its economy without modernizing its society. In practical terms, this means choosing the universal values of freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry over the narrow dictates of Islamic orthodoxy.

The most recent example of this ongoing clash between the modern and the medieval involves Revathi Masoosai, a 29-year-old ethnic Indian woman born to Muslim parents but raised by a Hindu grandmother. Last month, Malaysian religious authorities forcibly separated Revathi from her Hindu husband, Suresh Veerappan, and handed their 15-month-old daughter to Revathi’s mother. Under Malaysian law, anyone born to Muslim parents is automatically considered Muslim, and converting to another religion is illegal. (No such injunction bars non-Muslims from embracing Islam.) Since Muslims come under the purview of sharia, non-Muslims cannot seek redress from secular courts.

Revathi’s case is only the most recent of a string of similar incidents. In 2005 Islamic authorities deemed that M. Moorthy, a celebrated mountaineer and a practicing Hindu according to his wife, had secretly converted to Islam before his death. Over his wife’s protests, Moorthy’s body was taken from his family and given a Muslim burial. In another infamous case, Lina Joy, a computer saleswoman in her 40s, has spent nearly 10 years unsuccessfully seeking official recognition of her conversion from Islam to Christianity.

Two years ago, followers of an offbeat spiritual movement called Sky Kingdom – best known for revering a giant cream-colored teapot – saw their commune razed by authorities who declared their beliefs “heretical.” In recent months, Hindus have taken to the streets to protest a spate of temple bulldozings, including the demolition of at least two that date to the 19th century. In each of these cases, the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, who publicly champions a tolerant approach to faith called Islam hadhari, has stood by for fear of angering religious hotheads.

The nub of the problem lies in Malaysia’s inconsistent approach to modernization. Unlike neighboring Singapore, which stands for equality before the law and a strict meritocracy, Malaysia has sought prosperity against a backdrop of deepening Islamization and handouts for ethnic Malays, deemed by law to be Muslim. Until recently the Malaysia of vice squads and apostasy laws did not intrude upon the Malaysia of glittering skyscrapers and high-speed airport trains. But the rise of China, India and Vietnam, and the demands of a shift from low-cost manufacturing to more knowledge-intensive work, raise serious doubts about the viability of the Malaysian model. The country needs freedom of inquiry to unleash the creativity of its people. It needs to foster an atmosphere of tolerance to staunch the outflow of the country’s brightest non-Malays and to attract overseas talent and investment. Neither is likely without rethinking the twinned and contentious issues of ethnic preferences and religious supremacism.

Of course, it’s too early to write off Malaysia just yet. Its success over the past four decades depended on shrewdly balancing ethnic politics and pragmatic economics. After riots in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 between the prosperous Chinese minority and ethnic Malays, Malaysia instituted a program to raise the Malay share of national income. The government aggressively favored Malay businessmen with government contracts, and Malays gained a virtual monopoly on generous government scholarships for overseas study. At the same time – in order to grow the pie rather than to merely carve out a larger slice for Malays – Malaysia followed outward-looking economic policies that encouraged foreign investment and export-led growth.

As with other parts of the Muslim world, the rupture with the past brought by prosperity rose in tandem with Islamic consciousness. The OPEC oil boom of 1973 allowed Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to bankroll efforts to Arabize the Muslims of South and Southeast Asia. The ripples of the 1979 Iranian Revolution were felt directly on Malaysian college campuses. During the 1980s the headscarf became ubiquitous among Malay women. Meanwhile, in a bid to outdo the Islamist opposition in terms of piety, the ruling party UMNO, United Malays National Organization, went on a mosque-building spree. Religious students made a beeline for the Middle East and Pakistan, and in a show of pan-Islamic solidarity, visa rules were eased for visitors from many Muslim countries.

In the wake of Malaysia’s troubles during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, long-serving Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad became something of a global cheerleader for anti-Semitism – publicly peddling conspiracy theories about attacks on the Malaysian ringgit and accusing Jews of “rule[ing] the world by proxy.” Meanwhile, disregard for non-Malays – for the most part Buddhist and Christian Chinese and Hindu Indians, who together make up a third of the country’s 25 million people – expressed itself most clearly in the architecture of the new administrative capital Putrajaya. Gaudy domes and soaring minarets dominate the skyline, and an Isfahan-inspired bridge spans a massive artificial lake. Acknowledgment of other cultures is conspicuous by its absence.

By some measures, Malaysian affirmative-action policies have worked. The Malay share of corporate equity rose from less than 4 percent in 1971 to – estimates vary and those on the higher end are politically explosive – between 20 and 45 percent in 2006. Over the same period per capita income – in purchasing power parity terms – quadrupled, from about $3000 to about $12,000. Malaysia is the world’s 19th largest exporter.

At the same time, rather than enable the Malays to compete effectively as equals, Malaysia has ended up creating a class of crony capitalists dependent on government largesse and a Malay population that sees special privileges as a birthright. Often this supremacism is expressed in terms of religious intolerance. The one silver lining: Liberal-minded Muslims such as the lawyer Malik Imtiaz Sarwar and the academic Farish Noor have joined non-Muslims and a plethora of blogs in criticizing this trend.

These troubles could not come at a worse time. Malaysia’s traditional strength in low-cost electronics manufacturing is being challenged by the rise of China and Vietnam. The government has invested heavily in technology infrastructure in the form of the Multimedia Supercorridor, ambitiously hailed as the Silicon Valley of the East. But amid white-hot competition for scientific talent and despite relaxing some of the usual race laws, Malaysia finds it hard to attract and retain Indian and Chinese engineers. Meanwhile, many of the country’s brightest students – especially non-Malays – migrate to Australia, the US and Singapore, where everyone enjoys freedom of conscience and equality before the law.

For Malaysia then, the fate of Revathi Masoosai has wider implications. Its resolution will signal whether Malaysia seeks a future as a prosperous and pluralistic trading nation in the global mainstream, or a country whose inconsistent efforts to modernize ultimately doom them to failure.