Rethinking the causes of Islamisation: Ontological (in)security, postcoloniality, and Islam in Malaysia

Theories about state-led Islamisation tend to attribute the phenomenon to domestic dynamics, such as political competition, institutional co-optation, and changing social norms. When exogenous factors are considered, they usually refer to imported ideologies. Moreover, Islamisation is often depicted as a firm rejection of the West. This article seeks to complicate those explanations. Using insights from the ontological security literature in International Relations, I argue that Malaysia’s state-led Islamisation cannot be understood comprehensively without looking at macro-historical factors, particularly Malaysia’s postcoloniality and its elites’ perception of the global order. Instead of being a manifestation of anti-West sentiments, I argue that the initial receptivity towards Islamisation by Malaysia’s largely secular ethnonationalist elites constitutes a quest for recognition within an international order within which the Muslim identity is racialised and stigmatised. This is most obvious in Mahathir Mohamad’s ideas on Islam, in that his calling for a developmentalist Islam has as its (imagined) respondent the stigmatising ‘West’. I argue that the forms of Islamisation undertaken during the Mahathir administration reflected this drive to catch up with the West while simultaneously securing recognition for Islam; and that such a leitmotif persisted even into the post-September 11, post-Barisan Nasional world.