I hadn’t anticipated my e-book tour in Malaysia to finish with a confrontation with males who recognized themselves as police in a Kuala Lumpur airport.
I arrived within the Muslim-majority nation in early January 2024 to advertise the Malay translation of my e-book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, an educational evaluation of the political and socioeconomic crises going through many Muslim societies at the moment.
However my go to attracted unwarranted consideration. Some conservatives and Islamists labeled me in social media a “liberal” – a time period utilized by Malaysia’s federal company administering Islamic affairs to indicate these towards the official faith, Sunni Islam. This was adopted by the cancellation of my e-book launch occasion.
Nonetheless, I continued my programme of different talks. Two males who recognized themselves as cops got here to my final occasion and questioned my writer.
The next day, the identical males interrogated me and tried to grab my passport in Kuala Lumpur Worldwide Airport as I used to be on account of embark on a flight to Pakistan. Involved over my security, I canceled a collection of talks deliberate for Lahore and Islamabad and returned house to the US.
When the incident grew to become nationwide information, Malaysia’s police inspector-general denied that officers have been despatched to confront me. But, a human rights group has referred to as for a extra thorough investigation into my case.
As a scholar of faith and politics in comparative perspective, I don’t see my ordeal as an remoted instance of non secular intolerance in Muslim-majority international locations. As an alternative, it faucets into one thing wider.
My analysis exhibits that there’s a rising world development towards dissenting and minority spiritual views. Analysing this development is essential to know why right-wing populist leaders are actually ruling various international locations, akin to Turkey, Russia, Israel and India, and the way they could come to energy elsewhere, together with the US.
All these international locations have not too long ago skilled the mixture of three actions: spiritual conservatism, nationalism and populism.
Faith and nationalism
In each Christian and Muslim historical past, nationalism emerged in response to the spiritual institution. Students of nationalism akin to Benedict Anderson clarify its origins in Europe after the sixteenth century by the enlargement of vernacular languages, nationwide church buildings and nation-states on the expense of Latin, the Vatican and divinely ordained dynasties.
Equally, in lots of Muslim-majority international locations, there was a stress between Islamists and nationalists. The Islamists pushed for conventional spiritual schooling and Islamic regulation, and emphasised world Islamic identification. Nationalists, nevertheless, modernised colleges, established secular legal guidelines and pressured nationwide identification.
This stress continued all through the twentieth century in Turkey, the place nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk based a secular republic within the Twenties. There was the same battle in Egypt between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the nationalist navy officers who constructed the republic below the management of secularist Gamal Abdel Nasser within the Nineteen Fifties.
Right now, nevertheless, spiritual and nationalist forces are sometimes political allies. For a decade, such an alliance has existed in Russia between the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and President Vladimir Putin. Legal guidelines punishing insults to non secular emotions have been expanded, and Orthodox Christian values returned to highschool curricula.
Analysts outline Kirill’s sturdy help for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a mirrored image of the nationalist ideology they share.
In Turkey, the primary spiritual authority is Diyanet, a authorities company that controls mosques and pays the salaries of their imams. Though the Diyanet was established by Ataturk to serve secular nationalist insurance policies, it has grow to be an necessary pillar of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authorities, which mixes Islamism with nationalism. Whereas Erdogan’s Justice and Improvement Occasion represents Islamism, its coalition accomplice for a decade, Nationalist Motion Occasion, has an explicitly nationalist agenda.
Within the Arab world, there was a wrangling between Nasser’s secular nationalist Egypt and the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia within the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties. Not. Egypt, which has moved to Islamism with a structure referring to sharia because the supply of regulation since 1980, and Saudi Arabia, which has not too long ago grow to be much less Islamist and extra nationalist by way of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms, are actually regional allies.
Age of populist leaders
What explains this transformation within the relationship between faith and nationalism? I consider that populism is the glue that brings them collectively.
Populists usually declare that they’re defending “the folks” towards each elites and minorities, particularly immigrants.
Just lately, populist nationalist leaders have used spiritual symbols to mobilize their followers. For instance, in 2016, Putin established an Orthodox Cathedral in Paris on the banks of the Seine River, close to the Eiffel Tower. And in 2020, Erdogan declared the Hagia Sophia a mosque once more – it had been a church for over a millennium till the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453 and a mosque for about 500 years till Ataturk made it a museum.
Most not too long ago, on January 22, 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple in Ayodhya on the location of a mosque that had been inbuilt 1528 however violently destroyed in 1992 by Hindu radicals, after a century of controversies over the land.
And whereas former US President Donald Trump didn’t set up a cathedral, he did give a photo-op holding up a Bible at an important second – throughout the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 – as an indication of his spiritual politics towards the protesters.
In such acts, populist leaders intention to include faith and nationalism to serve their political agenda. But, for spiritual minorities, this symbolism might suggest that they’re secondary residents.
Future of non secular minorities
In a number of international locations, the alliances between spiritual forces and populist nationalists have threatened minority rights.
One such case is Malaysia, an ethnically and religiously various nation, the place Muslim Malays are the bulk, whereas Buddhist, Christian and Hindu communities represent a 3rd of society.
As I discovered throughout my latest go to, Islam is on the heart of political debates about nationalism in Malaysia. For instance, on January 13, 2024, Mahathir Mohamad, the as soon as highly effective former prime minister, stated ethnically Chinese language and Indian residents of Malaysia are usually not totally “loyal to the nation” and provided assimilation as a resolution.
Assimilation of ethnic minorities into the bulk will not be restricted by language and tradition, as a result of the nation’s structure connects Islam and the Malay identification, stating: “Malay means an individual who professes the faith of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, conforms to Malay customized.”
For Malays and converts, leaving Islam formally is just not an choice – each civil courts and sharia courts have rejected that in numerous circumstances.
The sturdy connection between faith and Malay nationalism has helped Islamic authorities, akin to sharia courts and sharia police, develop their affect. Growing Islamisation of Malaysian authorities, nevertheless, is a fear for non-Muslim minorities.
In the meantime, Muslim minorities are nervous about their rights in a number of non-Muslim international locations dominated by populist nationalists.
In response to democracy watchdog Freedom Home, in India, Modi’s authorities has pursued discriminatory insurance policies towards the Muslim minority of about 200 million folks. These insurance policies have included the destruction of Muslim properties to the extent that bulldozers grew to become “Hindu-nationalist” and “anti-Muslim” symbols in India.
In the US, Trump’s anti-immigrant insurance policies included the so-called “Muslim ban” – an govt order that barred nationals of sure Muslim-majority international locations from getting into the US. Whereas campaigning for the upcoming 2024 elections, Trump vowed to convey again the ban in an expanded method.
Because the expertise of many international locations all over the world exhibits, the development of advancing a religious-nationalist agenda restricts minority voices. This development constitutes a serious problem to the beliefs of democracy and equality of residents worldwide.
These considerations are additionally private for me: As a Muslim American, I need to each preserve having fun with equal citizenship in the US and provides talks about Islam in Muslim-majority international locations with out being harassed by the police.
Ahmet T Kuru is Professor of Political Science, San Diego State College.
This text was first revealed on The Dialog.