Mahathirs Islam

Mahathir Mohamads legacy as Malaysias longest serving prime minister (19812003) is deeply controversial. His engagement with Islam, the religion of just over half Malaysias population, was often dismissed as partisan maneuvering. Yet his willingness to countenance a more prominent place for Islam in government and society is what distinguished him from other modernist politicians, and his instinct to set Malaysian politics against the backdrop of the wider Muslim world was politically astute. Author Sven Schottmann argues that Mahathirs transformative effect on Malaysia can only be fully appreciated if we also take him seriously as one of the postcolonial Muslim worlds most significant political thought leaders. Schottmann sees Mahathirs representations of Islam as a relatively coherent discourse that can legitimately be described as Mahathirs Islam. This discourse contains Mahathirs assessment of the economic, political, and sociocultural problems facing the contemporary Muslim world and the range of solutions and corrective measures that he proposed Muslims should adopt. His ideas are fraught with flaws and contradictions. On the one hand, he emphasized the individualistic, egalitarian, pluralistic, democratic, and dynamic qualities of Islam. On the other, his government enacted legislation and acquiesced in the activities of religious bodies that curtailed religious freedoms of both Muslims and non-Muslims. His ideas contributed to Malaysias worsening state of interethnic relations, yet his insistence that every Muslim had the right to speak for Islam may have, paradoxically, prepared the ground for a future democratization of Malaysian politics. Mahathirs Islam is based on rigorous analysis of Mahathirs speeches, interviews, and writings, which the author is able to link to parallel processes elsewhere in the Muslim worldIndonesia, the Middle East, Pakistan, Turkey, and diaspora communities in the West. Mahathirs Islamic discourse, Schottmann suggests, must be read against the wider late twentieth-century resurgence of religion in general, and the post-1970s Islamic revival in particular. Balanced in approach and engagingly written, it will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, religious studies, Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, and international and global studies.