Malaysia sliding into a Najib Caliphate?

In speech on Islamisation, Zaid sounds a warning that syariah courts could one day have the final say.

LONDON: Former law minister Zaid Ibrahim, speaking on the Islamisation of Malaysia, has questioned whether the country was sliding into some kind of Najib Caliphate.

Malaysia, under the present Prime Minister, had changed completely, he said: it was now “a place where dissidents are arrested for sedition and charged with alarming regularity; where newspapers and books are banned; and where the whistleblowers are hounded and arrested but the crooks continue to rule”.

Malaysians now lived in fear of prosecution for views on even the most elementary subject, he said, with a journalist investigated for sedition for an article considering whether a certain provision in the Federal Constitution ought to be amended, and associate professor of law Azmi Sharom charged with sedition for arguing in favour of transparency in the context of politicians attempting to force a vote of confidence in a legislative assembly.

Zaid, who was speaking at an event at the Senate House of the University of London, also mentioned his son Ezra, charged in the Syariah Court for acting contrary to the precepts of Islam by publishing a Malay translation of the book Allah, Love and Liberty by Irshad Manji when the English version was freely available.

These actions were a result of the Islamisation of the Malaysian political life since the 1980s, Zaid said.

Before then, judges were equally sensitive to finding the right balance between the needs of the state and the needs of the people.

Judges today, however, were no longer willing to be honest arbiters between the powerful and the powerless, Zaid said, but were more excited about supporting a government that already has more powers than it has ever needed and was “happy to let the Prime Minister decide if society needs more control”.

Islamisation further restricted Muslims’ rights to fundamental liberties. He said the framers of the constitution had set limits on the power of states to create religious laws but judges were now freely expressing support for the widening of state government powers to legislate on Islamic matters.

“The phrase ‘precepts of Islam’ is completely unclear in Malaysian law at least to those of us who see Malaysia as a democracy and not a fascist theocracy,” Zaid said.

An increasing number of Malay judges favoured Islamic law and used the lack of clarity surrounding the definition of “precepts of Islam” to declare as constitutional the creation of more religious offences, for fear of sinning if they did not support “Islamic” demands.

He said judges also used the excuse that Islam was the country’s “official” religion, but had not explained “the apparently new meaning of the word ‘official’ in this context”, he said, although Malaysia’s first three Prime Ministers made it clear that Malaysia was a secular democracy and that “official religion” meant only that Islam was to be used for ceremonial purposes.

However, top judges seemed happy to widen the operation of Islamic law and the Syariah Court, even though this effectively reduced the civil court system and their own powers.

“The judges now say that ‘precepts’ are everything declared as such by the state religious departments,” how liberty is dying a slow death in Malaysia.

He said a recent Federal Court ruling had allowed state Islamic laws to limit fundamental constitutional liberties in ways never before seen in our jurisprudence.

“Malaysian Muslims have no way of knowing if what they say or do is an offence until it is too late,” he said.

Non-Muslims had been lulled into thinking that they were safe from the clutches of the religious laws, but this was not longer true, as shown by several custody cases, he said. The syariah court had achieved parity with the civil court, “and soon will probably become the final determinant of laws in our country”.

Anyone might land in trouble for saying something like “The fundamental liberties of Muslims must be protected by the Federal Constitution” as the authorities might construe that statement to be an insult to the supremacy of Islam.

Malaysians must mount more legal challenges and “not abandon the fight against the crooks to restore the character of our country and its people”

He blamed Umno for the change in Malaysia from a moderate western democracy to its present state.

Umno’s ideology eschews equality and the concept of fairness. Umno Malays have more benefits than non-Umno Malays.

Right-wing Umno Malays are more acceptable than the liberal Malays. Then we have the concept of bumiputera, the sons of the soil, having more rights and privileges than the non-Malays. Adherents of Sunni and Saudi Wahhabi Islam had more rights than Shi’ites.

“The whole society operates on an unethical foundation of inequality; and when one is comfortable being discriminatory with one group; it will extend to others just as easily. When leaders have absolute power; they confer benefits to the people by their grace,” Zaid said.

Umno had massive influence over Malay-Muslim civil servants, teachers, politicians, academicians and some within the judiciary, who all stood a better chance of promotion if they were acceptable to Umno. Personal interests take a strong hold, professionalism suffers and objectivity is jettisoned in favour of the interest of the leaders, he said.

“These civil servants no longer can tell the difference between national and individual interests,” Zaid said.

“I used to wonder what the North Koreans were thinking when they said they love the Kim family and no one else; now I understand what can happen with 50 years of indoctrination.”

He said Umno leaders seemed annoyed that Malaysia had a constitution crafted by Britain and not by Saudi Arabia, and a Westminster democracy, that allowed for basic freedoms.

“Malaya was born a democracy — they now want Malaysia to change into something else. That something else is some kind of Najib Caliphate perhaps,” he said.

Malaysia was regressing economically, theologically confused and socially insecure because of this “new” thinking, which has destroyed democracy and the rule of law in Malaysia.

Many members of the government had been reduced to being supporters of the beleaguered PM and not loyal servants of the state.

Malaysia could become a great country one day – if the elite placed more trust in the institutions of democratic government and not succumb to the greed of the leaders, if they were Islamic enough to embrace honesty and integrity in their lives as demanded by Islam, and not just enforce Islamisation for public consumption. “It’s a big if,” Zaid concluded.