Introduction
This study seeks to understand why and how Islamisation in a multireligious society such as Malaysia1 has flourished successfully to the point of distressing multicultural cohesion, though without the outbreak of open, violent and prolonged conflicts. How can one understand why and how this has been so? While there have been bursts of ethnic contestations, no recurring and large-scale religious violence has erupted in the country,2 as compared to other Muslim-majority nations such as Indonesia and Turkey (Chernov-Hwang 2009). Nevertheless, surface incidents of inter-religious as well as intra-Islamic disputes and controversies have become a constant feature of everyday life. The early answer to the question posed is that there is a seeming paradoxâdespite the presence of a strong and overpowering Islamism, this overhang is also tempered by the mediation of tensions that remain below the surface.
These trends have produced a stable disquiet of multireligious conflict and coexistence. This study postulates that the reasons for this condition lie in understanding Islam as a process ensconced within the ambit of a bureaucracy, which is rules based and a rational system that brooks no disputation and disharmony of its subjects. Religion is entrusted to a bureaucracy that intends to be in the service of the Divine and does so through the means of a typically modern and rational organisation. This bureaucracy systematically and methodically subjects all manner of religious expressions to some determinate and secular standards as benchmarks for Islamic society. This bureaucracy, the Divine Bureaucracy, functions within and straddles the dual spheres of secularism and otherworldliness. It forms the subject of exploration and analysis of this book.
Some key concepts are useful and necessary to position this study as a new way of looking at the power of religion, while locating its significance within the wider study of religion and state. I find the concepts bureaucratisation, rationalisation and disenchantment; notions of bureaucratic power, secularism and modernity; and the oscillating nature of enchantment and disenchantment in religious expression particularly forceful for the purpose of this study. It does not merely detail the interrelationship between state and religion, but rather how and why, in certain instances, they fuse. Going beyond relationships of actors within the two domains of state and religion, the study uncovers their new amalgamated realm of state religion, and the religious state, through its Divine Bureaucracy.
The utility of Max Weberâs âbureaucratisationâ, ârationalisationâ and âdisenchantmentâ became clear when I was struck by the distinctive quality of Islamic development programmes undertaken by the Malaysian state during the early 2000s. That these activities were visible and palpable in everyday lives would sometimes be associated, mistakenly for the most part, with the rise of what was previously studied as religious fundamentalism (Marty and Appleby 1991; Mohaddessin 1993). However, this line of inquiry did not seem adequate or accurate for the deeper understanding of particular national variants of the Islamisation project. In one of my earliest articles on this phenomenon, I posited that the syariah-aspiring3 bureaucracyârather than political agents or pious subjectsâwas behind the ascendance of Islam in Malaysia (Maznah 2010, 506). The identification of the bureaucracy as having extraordinary powers was due to its oversight over syariah laws and public institutions, and its imbibement of a âroutinised charismaâ within the Weberian notion of a legal rational bureaucracy. This article focuses on developing arguments about the secularisation of syariah, as there was much denouncement then of âsecularismâ being an ideology that was the antithesis of Islam.4
As it turned out, there was much to be further investigated and learned about the workings of this syariah-aspiring bureaucracy, as well other concerns beyond secularism. This book can thus be considered the extension and hopefully a betterment of two of my previous works on this topic (Maznah 2010, 2013). Here, it is not only about deepening the knowledge on the workings of the syariah bureaucracy as drivers of change but, more crucially, it is about highlighting the ascendance of a particular form of Islamisationââbureaucratic Islamââled by a distinctive bureaucracy, which I have named the Divine Bureaucracy.
This study interrogates the complexity of religious life in the modern nation-state of Malaysia. Here, a bureaucracy on Islamic matters is being developed to control, regulate and organise religious life through a secularisation or, more precisely, a disenchantment process. In doing so, this bureaucracy also whittles away the enchantment of a religious life leading to more worldly concerns through the routes of politics or economics. More directly, this bureaucracy enforces the proscription of what it routinely labels the âdeviantâ departures from an Islam that is authorised by state officials. While the dominant perception is of religious piety or political Islam on the rise, another reading of this phenomenon is of a bureaucratic Islam in ascendance through its creation of a disenchanted religiosity. Family, identity and money, the main empirical focus of this study, are but some of the many social realms that this bureaucracy subjugates and shapes through its laws, its methods and its rationality, thus explaining the overwhelming role of religion in everyday, this-worldly affairs.
The legal narratives of correctness, compliance, injunctions and sanctions are expected to lead Muslims to a perfect religious life. This Divine Bureaucracy does not necessarily lend itself to a peaceful mediation of inter-religious and even intra-religious conflict. However, it does provide its own impact to societal transformation by intensifying discourse, dissent and negotiations in the public sphere over its actions. Although divisive and contentious, these processes can be put on hold to prevent open skirmishes on the streets.5 In this manner, the Divine Bureaucracy perpetuates itself as a distinct power baseâjust like most bureaucracies with intrinsic qualitiesâthus enabling it to be the symbol as well as the basis of modernity.
Bureaucratisation and the Rationalisation of Religion
Making sense of Islam and how it is used as a source of governance, if not domination, in Malaysia today would require stepping back to re-evaluate the meaning of religion in its broadest context. Is religion a form of superstition? At first impression, it may be considered a form of irrational belief system, aspiring towards an other-worldly fulfilment, but in the course of history this changed. What Weber observed in his The Religions of Asia, first published in 1917, was that Asian religions (including Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam) were unlike Christianity of the West in the Middle Ages and largely lacked having a âsingle dominant churchâ (Weber 1978a, 192). He suggested that these religions placed more emphasis on life after death, showed indifference towards earthly concerns and largely saw the world as an âenchanted gardenâ, providing little basis for the development of a ârational, inner-worldly ethics of actionâ, such as that achieved by Protestantism in the West (Weber 1978a, 198â199). Mystical Asian religionsâ aim of âemptying of worldly relationships and concernsâ was praiseworthy from the point of view of the practitioners since it allowed them to reach a âpositive state of unutterable blessednessâ, akin to Nirvana (Weber 1978a, 201). Nevertheless, the outer-worldly aspirations held by the literati, sages and mystics caused a division of society between them, on the one hand, and the uneducated masses, on the other. The latter needed prophets to lead them on an ethical mission which could only be imposed through a rational narrative on their this-worldly everyday lives. This then was precisely what characterised the transformation of all world religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, from a ânon-rationalâ past dominated by mystics, sages, sorcerers and saints to the present time when faith is outlined by an authority structure legitimised by rationalisation.
Weber provides a tool for understanding the reification of religion in its absorption of a legal and administrative structure, and through its process of bureaucratisation. Essentially, âbureaucracyâ and its method of âbureaucratisationâ is another form of domination, based on knowledge and rules (Swedberg and Agevall 2016, 20â21), or a technical superiority over all other forms of organisations through the execution of functions based on âcalculable rulesâ (Weber 1978b, 351).
The ideal types of legitimate authority have been divided into at least three types: traditional, charismatic and legal rational. Traditional authority is based on the sanctity of beliefs and traditions, charismatic authority on exceptional and personal appeal of leaders, while legal rati...