Importance of Islam in Foreign Policies - Part I

sifatullah (50)in #politics • 6 years ago

The importance of Islam in Malaysian and Indonesian foreign policies

This research will be covered only Malaysian and Indonesian foreign policies.

Many analysts argue that religion is one of the most influential components of conflicts in the post Cold-World War era and in Europe and America, confrontation of Islam and West arose much tension. It is due to the reason that September 11 event took place and there have been violent conflicts among the Muslim and non-Muslim governments of the various countries. But behavioral pattern of states affect the international foreign policies and Religion is a major player that shapes the policies in a specific way or another. As Malaysia and Indonesia are Islamic countries having 60% and 86% Muslim population respectively, it is significant to analyze the impact of religion over the largest Muslim societies in the world. This report tends to explore the impact of Islam on the foreign policies and their bilateral relationship (Chin, 1998).

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Basically, Malaysia and Indonesia do not consider Quran, hadith and shariah while formulating the foreign policies but Islam plays great role in conducting foreign polices as size of Muslim population, political influence of Muslim leaders and reaction of the Muslim communities play vital role. In an Islamic state, Islam directly affects the foreign policies as a justifier and also legitimator. On the other hand, in a secular state Islam would affect a little, but such categorization does not always work as simply as described due to the majority of Muslim citizen as a result a broad analysis is required on this topic.

Before independence, there was rivalry between the youth group and the elder group. The youth group wanted to reform the movement by adoption of reformed interpretation of Quran and Sunnah while the elder group opposed. They think modernization would threaten social foundation and sanctity of Islam (Yegar, 2006). During the party politics, UMNO has been created in 1946 after that in 1951 the PAS was created with a motive to create Malaya an Islamic state. In 1957, the Malayan Constitution had been created that and Article 3(1) described Islam as the religion of the federation and other religion can also be practices at any part of the federation with peace (Dawisha, 1983). By guaranteeing the practice of non-Islamic religion this constitution represented Malay as a secular state. There arise political manipulation as Malay’s are subject to both shariah and civil law and Federal government has no right to impose shariah.

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For the salience of Islam PAS and UMNO struggled with each other for creating a place of true Islam that preserves interest of Muslim Community. For this reason, PAS accused UMNO as an unauthentic Islamic Government and called Malay-Muslim voters to use their votes as jihad. While the UMNO accused PAS as an extremist and non-cooperative with other parties, thus there is inception of Razak Government in 1969 as to keep Islam at the middle of national government. The Iranian Revolution in 1970’s affected the Malays and gradually in 1982, Mahathir assured that there would be struggle of change in line with the teachings of Islam and truly, Islam affected the domestic policies as well as the international policies. In this period, Israel-Palestine conflict was markable and also a barrier of trade between Israel and Malay. 1959 Tunku government responded that leaders of Malay know Israel very well but they cannot create diplomatic relation with them as the people of Malay oppose them and also the Arab countries also don’t want relationship with Israel as they occupied territories that is considered as holy place and also burnt Al Aqsa Mosque which is religiously a holy place for Malay-Muslims. In 1978, PAS called for unity among the Muslim community, ensuring regional security and resolution of Palestinian issues which reflects clear interest of PAS on foreign policies ). In this situation, Malaysia played an important role for improving relation with Arab countries and Tunku suggested in British Commonwealth meeting in 1961 that an Islamic Commonwealth is important for cooperation and engagement of Muslim countries all over the world. On the contrary, in 1969 Muslim world founded OIC and IDB and International Islamic News Agency which improved business collaboration and sharp improve in trade among the Muslim countries, and infrastructural development also reinforced.

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Mahathir argued for modern understanding of Islam and clashed with the Ulama over the fact that maintaining economic growth, improvement of women and reducing poverty is much more important than that of debating over the nature of true Islamic state. He responded that narrow interpretation of Islam jeopardizes the economic growth so that Islamic laws should be centralized rather than being an individual state. But it creates dissatisfaction among the Malay community. On the other hand, PAS and UMNO became intense rival and Mahathir wanted to regain the confidence so he more publicly embraces the values of Islam and openly declared Malaysia as an Islamic country. But such declaration created mixed feeling among Chinese and Indian partners and they called this unconstitutional and suddenly created diplomatic challenges. One of the challenges was Malaysia’s approach to gulf war. On the other side, due to Malaysia’s concern about the Bosnian Muslims, it was pushed to accept Bosnian refugees in a large number. In 1997, the financial crisis was high and Islamic factor took another turn in the foreign policies, later on, to protect and strengthen the cooperation between Muslim countries, Malaysia proposed to use the gold dinar as a stable currency and assistant in fostering unity. Mahathir government also answered the debate on terrorism that Muslims were angry and disillusioned as West supported Israel and didn’t assist Palestine. As a result, Pro-Islamic foreign policies are affected by both extremist groups of home and abroad. Government took action to arrest prominent terrorists and thus capitalized on the issue that religious extremism is not acceptable. But at the same time, transnational terrorism twisted the government relationship between Malaysia and Indonesia causing blames and inevitability of organizations to cooperate with each other. Such criminal activities reflect that Malaysia is a favorite ground for transnational militant group and spiritual militants and activists’ to plot their activities. #Continue

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