Turning conservative Muslims into ‘good citizens’: New allies in the management of Islam in Singapore after 9/11

Singapore’s population of 5.4 million residents and citizens contains a substantial Muslim (mainly Malay) minority that has lived harmoniously with the nonMuslim (mainly Chinese) population since long before the country achieved independence in 1965. Yet the People’s Action Party (PAP) government that has governed Singapore for more than half a century has never trusted its Muslim citizens. This mistrust is partly derived from prejudice and misunderstandings about Islam per se, but it is more complex than this. It reflects deeper negative stereotyping of Malays - who make up 90 per cent of Singapore’s Muslim population and 13.4 per cent of Singapore’s resident population (Department of Statistics 2010) and an unsubstantiated assumption that the ethnic ‘pull’ of Malaysia on Singaporean Malays is stronger than their loyalty to Singapore (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 90). The basis and validity of the mistrust may be debated, but its reality is indisputable, officially acknowledged at the highest levels and demonstrated graphically in the historical treatment of Malays in the military. Since the mid-1960s Singapore has had compulsory, universal National Service for young adult males, and yet it excluded Malays completely (and illegally) from the Singapore Armed Forces until the late 1970s, which made them almost unemployable because they continued to be technically vulnerable to being called up at short notice (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 118-19; Rahim 1998: 39, 90, 106). This practice was followed in the 1980s by a policy of restricting Malays’ access to promotion and fighting roles, precisely because they could not be trusted (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 119; Huxley 2000: 102-4). Thus even an ardent admirer of the government such as Yang Razali Kassim must acknowledge that the Malay community was ‘on the fringe of mainstream Singapore’ during the decades of Lee Kuan Yew’s premiership (Kassim 2009: 367). The mistrust has ameliorated to the point where it is now possible for Malays to become officers, and one has even become a fighter pilot, but we have Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s word that such trust is assessed on a case-by-case basis, and that Malay candidates face particular scrutiny precisely because of their race and religion (The Straits Times, 11 March 2002). These policies continue to this day and are inflicted upon the broader Muslim community (not just Malays), 1 although the Malays remain the main victims.2 In politics, too, mistrust has prompted the government to marginalize the MalayMuslim community. From the 1970s onwards the government used its control of public housing to redistribute Malays relatively evenly throughout the island in order to prevent them from forming a majority in any electorate. This was despite the fact that Malays had provided the key to the PAP’s earlier political victories (Rahim 2008). It is also surely not a coincidence that Malays and Muslims have always been drastically under-represented in Cabinet (judged against their share of the national population), and that no Malay or Muslim has ever held a senior ministry. Despite the mistrust, the government has avoided overt confiict with the Malay and the broader Muslim community by a mixture of policies that until 2001 were judged to have been satisfactory. These policies operated basically through the prism of Malayness rather than Islam. The government set out both to co-opt existing Malay leaders into its networks and also to generate a new, ‘modern’ elite to lead the Malay community and then relied upon these elites to bring Malays into the mainstream of society. Islam played only a marginal role in this process, and the government used its control of the peak institution of Islam, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS - Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura), more as a safeguard against discontent than as a proactive policy instrument. There was also a parallel process of marginalizing Muslims (not just Malays), but this, too, was directed primarily through the prism of race and ethnicity, rather than religion. These outcomes have been the result of an unhealthy combination of unthinking prejudice and calculated discrimination, directed both deliberately against Malays and incidentally as an unintended consequence of favoritism shown to the dominant Chinese majority. This discrimination extends to systematic marginalization in the education system, in the centrally important government scholarship system, and in the workforce (Rahim 1998: especially Chapters 7-11; Barr and Skrbiš 2008: especially Chapters 6-10).