Muslims in Singapore

Piety, politics and policies

Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, Alexius Pereira, Bryan S. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135275952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines Muslims in Singapore, analysing their habits, practices and dispositions towards everyday life, and also their role within the broader framework of the secularist Singapore state and the cultural dominance of its Chinese elite, who are predominantly Buddhist and Christian. Singapore has a highly unusual approach to issues of religious diversity and multiculturalism, adopting a policy of deliberately 'managing religions' - including Islam - in an attempt to achieve orderly and harmonious relations between different racial and religious groups. This has encompassed implicit and explicit policies of containment and 'enclavement' of Muslims, and also the more positive policy of 'upgrading' Muslims through paternalist strategies of education, training and improvement, including the modernisation of madrassah education in both content and orientation. This book examines how this system has operated in practice, and evaluates its successes and failures. In particular, it explores the attitudes and reactions of Muslims themselves across all spheres of everyday life, including dining and maintaining halal-vigilance; education and dress code; and practices of courtship, sex and marriage. It also considers the impact of wider international developments, including 9/11, fear of terrorism and the associated stigmatization of Muslims; and developments within Southeast Asia such as the Jemaah Islamiah terrorist attacks and the Islamization of Malaysia and Indonesia. This study has more general implications for political strategies and public policies in multicultural societies that are deeply divided along ethno-religious lines.

1 Introduction

Muslims in multicultural Singapore

Introduction

There is much talk in the academic and popular press of ‘the crisis of liberalism’. While liberalism is associated with tolerance, especially religious tolerance, religious conflict appears to permeate modern politics in both Europe and Asia. In particular, there is the widely held view that the traditional separation of the church and the state (or sacred and profane) is no longer relevant or even workable in modern multicultural and multifaith societies. Liberal tolerance in the West in the late seventeenth century was a response to the religious wars that had so profoundly disturbed the peace in Europe. The famous Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 brought to an end the Thirty Years' War and promised to bring to a conclusion the dynastic competition of Europe and the conflicts between Protestant and Catholic communities. The Treaty recognized the right of princes to determine which faith would predominate in their lands; it sought to make religion a matter of private conscience rather than public identity; it confirmed the dominance of Protestantism in northern Germany and Catholicism in southern Germany; and finally Calvinism was given the same status as Lutheranism. Princes had the right to expel religious groups who did not accept the terms of the Treaty. However, since Europe's population was in decline, princes were looking to keep their subjects rather than to expel them. There was therefore a strong economic motive for religious tolerance.

What has this Treaty to do with Asia and in particular with Singapore? The answer is that Asian societies also need to discover and implement policies that will avoid religious conflict and the liberal separation of religion and politics has been one such policy option in the past, especially during British colonialism in the Malayan archipelago. While it is often thought that missionary activity and imperialism went hand in hand, in fact the violence surrounding the Indian Mutiny of 1857 demonstrated the importance of not openly associating British trade and colonial rule with missionary activity. Asia has experienced during the twentieth century terrible periods of religious and ethnic conflict in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand. Tragically the partition of India resulted in devastating communal violence and the tensions between Muslims and Hindus continues to undermine efforts by the governments of India and Pakistan to achieve a stable political accord. One simple lesson from these complex conflicts is that it is difficult to separate ethnicity from religious adherence since religion often defines ethnicity and vice versa.

Why has religious conflict become a prominent feature of modernity? One answer is that the modern global economy needs labour market flexibility in order to import and export labour depending on the local needs of the economy. Global migration makes modern societies more complex in terms of religion and ethnicity. Where governments appear to be biased in favour of one section of the population (for example a majority ethnic group), diasporic communities will often organize their political struggles around a common cultural denominator such as religion. As religions themselves become more global – consider for example the spread of modern Buddhism to France or Hinduism to the United States or Islam to the United Kingdom – it is clear that religious identities tend to be transnational rather than local; thus global religious issues tend to fuel local expressions of resentment or anger. The global protests against the Danish Cartoons (2005) would be a very good illustration of these conflicts. This study of Singapore attempts to look at these global changes in the relationship between religions and states by concentrating on a single case study, as it is our view these global issues are magnified in the Singaporean case. Here is a society that is very determined to be a secular state, but one that is deeply diverse in religion and ethnicity, and in order to achieve that seculargoal it must manage its religious hinterland. Although Singapore experienced ethnic tensions in the 1950s and 1960s, the island has been relatively free of bitter religious conflict. How has it managed this?

In this study we try to recognize two major paradoxes of the modern liberal state and we explore the various ways in which Singapore has attempted to resolve these conundrums. The first deals with the problem of national identity. Most modern states are culturally and religiously diverse. For most states, this is due to the migrationof peoples, either historically or more recently. When the modern and open labour market society becomes more complex and diverse, it becomes more difficult to govern. Singapore is a case where migration in the nineteenth century created a multicultural society; however, today, it must deal with even more diversity. Like many other modern societies, Singapore has a declining fertility rate despite all government attempts to correct that trend. It therefore must constantly seek to import labour, especially talented labour. With its current population at just over four million and with little opportunity to recover more land, the state has nevertheless decided to increase its population to just over six million. While economic openness results in greater ethnic diversity unless there are very direct controls on the ethnic composition of migrants, the state has to assert its sovereignty over society and it does this by creating the myth of a morally coherent and integrated society. Benedict Anderson (1983) has famously written about how nation states create ‘imagined communities’, and this creation essentially involves a nationalist ideology. Singapore like other states must find ways of projecting a common purpose around the state and a unified national community. In particular, it must foster a vivid and meaningful sense of what it is to be a ‘Singaporean’ rather than for example a Chinese person living on the island of Singapore. It must achieve a delicate balancing act between nationalism, internal harmony and openness to foreign talent by not creating the impression that it favours one community over another. The first paradox therefore is that economic forces create multinational societies, but political forces must create national communities. Sociologists occasionally refer to this nation-building activity of the state in terms of building the cultural fabric – the great arch – of the society as the real foundation of political power (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985).

The second paradox is that, while secular societies like Singapore strive to separate religion (as a private matter of the individual) from the public domain (of politics and economics), governments must attempt to manage religions. Due to the first paradox, they cannot ignore the fact that religious diversity without management will in all probability end in communal tensions, if not in open social conflict. Our study shows that, other things being equal, the practice of religious piety will create a certain social distance between social groups and eventually these social divisions can harden into separate enclaves. The role of the state is to manage such social processes in the interests of creating a social unity and where possible it should seek to convince its citizens that such social harmony is not simply artificial.

Singapore has in the past experienced racial and religious tensions. There were riots in 1951 over the religious identity of Maria Hertogh – a European girl who had been raised by a Malay family (see Aljunied, 2009). The government has since responded to religious diversity by preventing religious labels playing any overt public role. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act of 1990 prevents the use of religion for political ends. The state has also been willing to respond forcefully to eliminate any seeds of religious opposition for example in its response to what it saw as a Marxist conspiracy among Catholic intellectuals in 1987. Twenty-two members of Catholic Church organizations who had promoted awareness of the plight of foreign workers were arrested on the grounds that they were plotting a Marxist revolt against the state. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act was designed to separate faith from social activism (Case, 2002: 91). However, the paradox is that, in order to keep religion and politics apart, the state must actively intervene in the ‘religious market’ to guarantee that religious services – preaching, teaching, healing, praying and so forth – are compatible with public security and nationalist goals.

In the Singapore case, we argue that this ‘management of religion’ has two dimensions, each of which is characterized by further ambiguities. The first dimension is the unintended consequence of creating religious enclaves. This is because the Singapore state categorically divides the population primarily into four distinct communities: Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other; this means that these ethnic identities do play an important role in public life. Furthermore, since these ethnic categories are also in practice religious categories, it means that religion is significant in defining public identities. To illustrate, Malays are typically Muslim, Indians are typically Hindus and the Chinese are typically Buddhist, although there are a sizable number of Chinese who are Christians. Thus, there is an official ethnic enclavement of groups despite the government's attempts to break these down by creating a national identity of being ‘Singaporean’. The second dimension is the management of Islam in Singapore; this is seen as necessary, in part, because of the long-standing ‘Malay problem’ but also, in part, because the Singapore government prides itself on its technological rationality, ranging from urban planning to its family policies. Thus, the state feels it has a role to play in what we call ‘upgrading’ its own population. These upgrading strategies include everything from health (implementing mosquito control and encouraging weight control for obesity) to automobile restrictions to education (including policies on ‘Religious Knowledge’). Singaporean authorities (and the Japanese, too, for that matter) have regarded individualism and ‘shapeless multiculturalism’ as aspects of western decadence, contrasted with the moral superiority of Confucian Asia (Harvey, 2006: 61). The upgrading therefore manifests itself in the state's self-assumed responsibility to intervene directly in the arena of religion, morals, reproduction and family life (ostensibly to make life better). In this book we focus on Singapore's strategies towards its Muslim population, as implemented through MUIS (Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura or the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore) and its related policies for improving Muslim education, modernizing the law (Shari'a in Arabic or Syariah in Malay) and its Courts, and seeking to regulate and improve Muslim family life. In this case, despite religion technically being situated in the private or personal sphere, it is heavily regulated by the state.

Although Singapore is a small island city-state in Southeast Asia where it is surrounded by societies that have much larger populations and resources, it is a society that is instructive from a sociological point of view. Singapore illustrates in stark and clear terms the paradoxes of liberal capitalism. While the dominant form of global capitalism has been neo-liberal, few Asian societies have fully embraced deregulation in economics and liberalism in social life. The idea of a harmonious society based on a strong state and Confucian values has been more attractive.Asian societies have by contrast sought to regulate family and religion in the interest of social stability. The Singaporean experience shows that any society that wants to separate religion and politics (in order to guarantee freedom of religious belief and practice) must interfere systematically in society to manage religions.The success or failure of these policies will have profound implications for the wealth and well-being of its citizens, and in the regions that surround the island.

Multiracial and multifaith Singapore

It is crucial at this juncture briefly to provide some basic information about multicultural Singapore. Singapore is a city-state consisting of a main island and 63 offshore islands with a total land area of 682.3 square kilometres. It is generally an urban space with a negligible rural sector of 9.8 square kilometres. A total population of around 4.5 million persons and a resident population of over 3.6 million were recorded in 2006 which makes Singapore the third most densely populated city in the world after Macau and Hong Kong. In many tourism marketing campaigns around the world, Singapore is described as a ‘multiracial paradise’, made up of mainly Chinese, Malays, Indians and peoples of other races (see Table 1.1).

The origins of Singapore's multiracialism can be traced to the economic policy of the British colonial administration. Upon deciding that the largely uninhabited

Table 1.1 Ethnicity in Singapore of Singapore citizens and permanent residents ('000) (2006)

Ethnic Group	Population ('000)	Per cent
Chinese	2,713.2	75.2
Malays	490.5	13.6
Indians	319.1	8.8
Others	85.5	2.4
Total	3,608.3	100.0

Source: Adapted from Department of Statistics (2007: 32)

island at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula would be a suitable base to establish a trading port in 1819, the British recruited Chinese coolies who had previously worked in Hong Kong. At the same time, the British also recruited many Indian construction and plantation workers from the southern states of India (Tamil Nadu and Kerala) to develop Singapore. Finally, the British also hired indigenous Malays from the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago to work in the civil service; for example, many Malays were recruited to the local police force (Lian, 1999). Soon after, Singapore became a thriving economy, which saw the arrival of additional economic migrants from China, India, Malaya and other parts of Asia, Europe and Arabia coming in search of their fortune. However, since the trading port was the heart of Singapore's economy, the Chinese eventually became the largest ethnic community on the island. In this fashion, colonial Singapore became a classic ‘plural society’, in J. S. Furnivall's sense, as it was a

Medley of people, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the marketplace. There is a plural society, with different sections of the community living side by side, but separately within the same political unit.

(Furnivall, 1956: 304)

In terms of contemporary religious affiliation, as mentioned earlier, most Chinese in Singapore are Buddhists, Christians and Taoists, and most Indians are Hindus, with a smaller number being Christians. However, nearly all Malays are Muslims (see Chapter three). This is because Islam spread across Southeast Asia between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, mainly from Arabia via the Indian subcontinent (Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Muslims in multicultural Singapore
• 2 Understanding social enclaves
• 3 The Malay-Muslim community: A background
• 4 Social distancing: Halal consciousness and public dining
• 5 Religious or public education? The madrasah dilemma
• 6 The body and piety: The hijab and marriage
• 7 Conclusion: State, enclaves and religion
• Bibliography
• Index