Some Southeast Asian Junk

Huckabama

No real news today, which is good, because I've spent the past 24 hours working very hard, which is what I came here to do.  Boss.  We will be defining "Islamic party" according to what the parties consider their basis, and according to what Indonesians think Islamic parties are.

US politics is interesting right now, so interesting that all the major news channels here are reporting on it.  I watched a good deal of BBC World this morning, and they had some great analyses.  I also watched a lot of the French channel.  There is nothing better than hearing a French news anchor pronounced the name Huckabee.  uhewck-uh-BEE.

I was speaking with some Indonesian social scientists yesterday and we discussed the similarities between Mormons in the US and Ahmadiyah (Ahmadiyya) in Indonesia (and the Muslim world).  The parallels are interesting.  Mormons/Ahmadiyah claim to be Christian/Muslim, but many Christians/Muslims consider them heretics.  They both envision a peculiar place for the second coming of the savior (Missouri/Pakistan).  They both are attempting to expand their geographic focus with missions to different countries.  They both also tend to be rather peaceful, and often suffer accordingly.

Political Islam

So.  Some more on why I'm here.  One of the things that political scientists do not really know is why people vote for Islamic political parties.  Part of the problem is that there's just not a lot to study: very few countries in the Muslim world have anything like free and fair elections.  But clearly the question is a big one, given that one of the big reasons why successive American administrations support awful dictatorships in the Middle East is that they believe that Islamic political parties would prevail in free and fair elections (and more importantly, that this would be a bad thing).  Indonesia is neat because it's one of the only Muslim countries that actually has free and fair elections.  The other ones right now would include Turkey, Bosnia, some West African countries, by some accounts Bangladesh and Albania, hopefully Iraq someday, and that's pretty much it.

I think that there's a more fundamental question here.  What is an Islamic party?  There are a number of possible answers, but I think that this question is a lot more difficult than some of us recognize.

1.    Clearly, it's not sufficient to just call any radical party with Muslims in it an Islamic party.  Because that would include groups like the Kurdish Worker's Party, which is a socialist party.  At a more fundamental level, though, it's inaccurate to just identify radicalism with Islam.  That's a stereotype, not a definition.

2.   Another view is that a party is Islamic if it wants to impose sharia.  It's a seductive idea, but when there are all sorts of problems.  How does a "party" want something?  Maybe this is a gloss for its leaders wanting something.  OK, then how do you know if the leaders want something?  We can err in a couple of directions.  The paranoiacs at Little Green Footballs, and Virgil Goode, think that everyone who's a Muslim wants to impose sharia.  This is clearly false, BUT the opposite is also silly, only asking people if they want to impose sharia.  There are good reasons to think that maybe some groups that don't openly espouse sharia actually do want to impose it.  This is a suspicion often leveled at some parties in Indonesia, which "everybody knows" would impose sharia if they were elected.  So even if this is a good definition in theory, it's difficult to operationalize it.

3.    Another possibility is that a party is Islamic if it calls itself Islamic.  I actually like this definition, but then it raises problems of comparability.  "Islamic" in Indonesia is likely to mean something very different than "Islamic" in Senegal or Tunisia or Turkey.  So then we're left with the problem of distinguishing what Islamic means in these contexts, which just recreates the problem again.  So you might be including parties that call themselves Islamic but are different than the others.  Then again, you might also be leaving some out.  I'm not actually sure if the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is commonly considered a conservative modernist Islamic party, actually identifies itself as Islamic.  This might be one of those "everybody knows" sorts of situations.

So we're left with a conundrum.  For our research, we are fortunate in studying Indonesia only, where parties openly state what their "basis" (asas) is.  The choices are basically Islam, Pancasila (the pluralist and nationalist ideology of Sukarno and Soeharto), Marhaenisme (a precursor of sorts of Pancasila, espoused by Sukarno, less religious in content and more socialist), and other forms of social democracy. In essence, it's either Islam or Pancasila, as Marhaenisme is only espoused by two parties that are led by two daughters of Sukarno, and I believe only one small party calls itself social democratic.  And parties will say "our basis is X."  So that's one definition, easy.  Since we're doing a survey, though, we can also look at what ordinary people think are Islamic parties, and that's nice because it's sort of what we're after anyway.  It's not really relevant for our purposes that the Justice and Development Party in Turkey is likely different from the Prosperous Justice Party here, although drawing lessons from Indonesia will require doing some sort of adjustment to take this into account.

And to answer your questions, yes, this is what social scientists do all day.

The Best Kenyan Politics Coverage

Is by my buddy Ryan Sheely, who did his field research there only recently and knows the country back to front. He got the idea to do a research/travel blog from me, or at least, I like to think he did.  He is also from Central PA, which gives him extra social scientific credibility.

More on Parliament and Politics

People who study Malaysian politics often lament that the political system here is authoritarian.  The basis of this assessment is the simplest definition of authoritarianism that we have--the fact that the government never loses elections.  Since independence, the ruling coalition has always retained well over a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament, allowing it to amend the Constitution at will.  The only exception to this rule is the 1969 elections, when the coalition only won a simple majority.  When this happened, the government used the excuse of ethnic riots to suspend Parliament for two years and reform the country's political institutions to ensure the ascendancy of the ruling coalition.  Combine this with many of the odious anti-democratic laws that the regime could exercise if it felt like it, you get the picture that the government doesn't win elections simply because it is so popular, but because it ensures that it wins elections.  People normally term this "rule by law," in contrast to "rule of law."

What's really interesting is that despite the fact that foreign observers classify the regime as authoritarian, all of the institutions of democracy exist.  I saw this first hand at Parliament the other day.  MPs make speeches and have arguments; they vote on and pass bills; and Opposition MPs criticize the dominant coalition, have caucuses, and hold press conferences.  The big opposition parties here don't mount coups or foment revolutions or sponsor terrorism, and they never have, and it seems impossible that they ever would. I knew that this was all true, but like anything, your perceptions change when you see politics working first hand.  Part of me wondered before if it's all just a show, like people often allege that it is when the regime is being particularly repressive (i.e. 1969-1971, 1987-1990, 1998-2000).  I'm convinced more than ever now that it's not always just a show.

Political scientists often wonder what to make of "competitive authoritarian" or "electoral authoritarian" or "soft authoritarian" or "pseudo-democratic" regimes.  From the 1970s to the late 1990s, they were particularly common in places like Latin America (i.e. Mexico under the PRI, Brazil) and East Asia (i.e. Malaysia, Taiwan, etc).  In Latin America, one scholar liked to talk about democraduras and dictablandas as inhabiting the middle ground between liberal democracy and dictatorship.  There's a whole cottage industry that tries to figure out how to classify regimes.  There are more classificatory schemes than there are countries, and people have made their careers out of figuring out this particular issue in places like Mexico and Malaysia.  And it's not (always) just academic navel gazing: many argue (and their evidence is compelling) that countries like Malaysia and Mexico are systematically more able, because of their quasi-democratic procedures and institutions, to withstand pressures for real democratization than their more dictatorial counterparts.  In the past 10 years, this line of inquiry has become increasingly common in the field.

At any rate, it's fascinating stuff, and it gets more fascinating when you see it first hand.

For Future Reference

The Malaysian Parliament has free wireless.  It is also very luxurious inside, with a very modern Islamic architectural style, plush rugs, and delicious air conditioning (especially since I walked about a mile to get here in my wool pants and with my tweed jacket and computer bag).  Outside, the building is a bit more institutional-looking, displaying a style that my college friends and I used to refer to as "1950s institutional"; i.e. poured cement and weird window-facings with metal-rimmed windows.  It looks a lot like what your college library probably looks like.

Seeing as I'll be here for awhile, you may get additional updates.

UPDATE: They know how to do it up right here.  Tuxedo'd waiters in the canteen, along with tasty coffee.  I'm probably the only one here who brought my own lunch, but then again, I'm the only Mat Salleh here too and the only guy in a tweed jacket, so it's nothing new.

A note on the socio-economic classes here:  All of the speech in the actual Parliament sessions is extremely formal, textbook Malay that I can understand very well.  Then you see people here in the lobby chatting, and it's always in their home language: Chinese in Cantonese or Hokkienese or something, Indians in Tamil, and Malays in...English.  I wonder what percentage of the Malays MPs here were students at Malay College Kuala Kangsar, know as the Eton of the East.

Cap Naga

Hmm, funny words, only two of them, must be a recipe, right?  It's not.  I (TP) have come across this term a couple times over the past couple of months when reading about the reformasi (reform) movement in Malaysia after the sacking of then-Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim.  Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, ended up heading the National JUSTice Party (KeADILan) after Anwar was arrested and jailed for sodomy and corruption.

So what about this term.  It's funny because it's one of those terms that you think that you are misunderstanding when you first read or hear it.  It translates as "dragon brand" or "dragon stamp".  Now, when you're in this part of the world you learn pretty quickly that "dragon" is a codeword for Chinese.  So I was sure that I was misunderstanding when I encountered this term being used to describe Wan Azizah.  As the elections right after Anwar's sacking approached, a number of Malay politicians remarked that Wan Azizah was not a suitable leader for Malays because she is cap naga.  What could they be talking about?

Well, it turns out that Wan Azizah has some Chinese ancestry.  OK, but that's weird: in Malaysia, by law, the definition of a Malay is someone who follows Malay customs and is a Muslim.  Wan Azizah certainly falls into that category, and there is precisely no legal provision for genetic requirements for Malayness.  Once I met a guy, Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee, who was certainly Malay but very openly was proud that he had very little Malay ancestry (here's a picture).  No one disputes that he's a Malay.  In fact, this accusation against Wan Azizah is quite shocking; JM and I have never heard or read about anyone seriously disputing whether or not anyone was a Malay based on appearance or ancestry.  In fact, the newspapers here occasionally run stories of saudara baru (literally, "new siblings"), usually Chinese Malaysians who have converted to Islam and "become Malay".  This accusation against Wan Azizah is the lowest of the low blows that we can think of in Malaysian politics (and anyway, check out her picture).

I looked up cap naga on Google, and the only hits I found were articles about these accusations against Wan Azizah and products by a company named Cap Naga that sells Chinese herbal concoctions in Malaysia and Indonesia.  This suggests that either the term was created for Wan Azizah, or (more likely) that it's a term that you rarely hear out in the open.

At any rate, this is a nice additional commentary on politics and ethnicity in Malaysia.  Everybody knows that everyone is supposed to fall neatly into one of the ethnic categories that the government perpetuates, and everybody also knows that these categories are sort of fake, but everyone has to act as if these categories have objective bases in reality.  And the government can try to marginalize you by taking away your ethnic affiliation.

The New Economic Polic

In the news these days is Malaysia's New Economic Policy, the name for a political project that set to (1) reduce poverty across Malaysia and (2) eliminate the identification of race with economic status in Malaysia.  Originally, the NEP was supposed to run from 1971 to 1990.  Technically, the program did lapse in 1990, only to be replaced by the National Development Policy and then PM Mahathir Mohamad's Vision 2020, which sought to make Malaysia a fully developed country by 2020.  But everybody knows that the spirit of the NEP lives on, if not in name, then in the myriad laws and institutions still on the books that stem from the NEP period.  Indeed, the very way that government and society works reflects the NEP.  It is telling that politicians still say NEP when they mean NDP, as the NEP has fundamentally transformed the country.

If you are a regular reader of our blog, you'll be familiar with the main aspects of the NEP.  Bumiputras (basically, non-Indian and non-Chinese Malaysians) get favorable treatment in most matters that have any economic or political connection.  The government invests heavily in rural development schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Malays.  Malays can invest in special government-run unit trusts that always give high dividends.  When the government privatizes public services via the stock market, it reserves discounted shares for Malays.  It's easier to get into the universities here if you are a Malay, it's easier to get a government scholarship if you are a Malay, it is far easier to move up the ladder in the public service if you are a Malay; the list is endless.

So why is the NEP still in the news today?  Well, simply, its project has not worked.  The targets for bumiputra participation in the economy through equity ownership have not been met, even 15 years after the project was supposed to be finished.  There is a well-known, and oft-lamented, "subsidy mentality" among some Malays.  Rather than eliminating the identification of race with economic function, the NEP seems to have strengthened it.  In all, we have all of the problems that you'd expect to find with a coarse tool like race-based affirmative action.  The demands from some sections of the ruling party, though, are for more "positive discrimination", and a strengthening or re-establishment of the NEP.

JM and I, living in KL with its large population of Chinese and Indian Malaysians, have seen first hand evidence that, contrary to the government's claims, poor non-Malays do indeed lose out under this system.  We also see the Melayu Baru--New Malays--who have grown rich on government favoritism, and yet still get first crack at discounted shares because they are Malays.  We think it's time for Malaysia to scrap the NEP and "positive discrimination" based on race.  The government could still help poor Malays and intervene in the economy while doing so without the blatant racial favoritism that it shows.  (Let's bracket the question of whether or not government intervention to ensure equality of opportunity is a good idea for now.)  A non-racial policy would still overwhelmingly benefit Malays, but it would also pick up the large poor Indian Malaysian community, the true losers under the NEP, and the non-negligible numbers of Chinese Malaysians.  We also believe, by the way, that affirmative action in the US should be based on income, not race or ethnicity.

Just FYI: If we were Malaysians, what we just said would be seditious.  We are not kidding, even in the slightest, and the government's record of arresting people for criticizing the NEP is proof.  It is a violation of the Sedition Act of 1972 to criticize or even question the rights and privileges of Malays.  By extension, that includes the NEP.

What Islam Teaches

After the recent terrorist attacks in London, and since we've been living in Muslim countries for 10 months, perhaps now is an appropriate time to discuss what Muslims believe.

I (TP) will start with an anecdote.  This morning I hopped in my cab to the library.  My driver was Mohd Idris, a guy whom I've ridden with before.  He's a devout Muslim, he's been on the hajj and everything, and he remembered me as the white guy who learned Malay in Indonesia.  We got to chatting about politics, and he told me that it's very important to realize that when it comes to politics, it is imperative to keep politics separate from religion, and the other way around.  Politics is for development and justice for the entire country, and religion is personal.  He says that people must always treat each other with respect, no matter what their religion is.

This is not the first time that I've heard a Muslim say this in this part of the world.  I always react the same way: gee, didn't someone inform the Taliban?  How about American talking heads to tell us that Islam teaches us that politics and Islam are inseparable for Muslims?

Here are the fundamentals. All Muslims believe that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his last and greatest prophet.  This is the first of the five pillars of Islam; the other four are giving alms to the poor, praying five times a day, fasting during the month of Ramadhan, and going on the hajj at least once, if possible.  Another belief considered fundamental to Islam is that the Qur'an is the literal word of God, divinely revealed to Muhammad.

Beyond these big six beliefs, there is little real consensus.  Take the example of sharia law--Islamic law.  Sharia has been implemented in many parts of the world, but its implementation has varied strikingly, from Nigeria to Afghanistan to northern Malaysia.  There is no one view of sharia law that all Muslims can agree on.  In Malaysia, for example, there are groups that claim that sharia law cannot include punishments for the consumption of alcohol by Muslims, for the Qur'an does not make it clear what this should be.  When developing punishments for alcohol consumption and other "Islamic crimes", Islamic legal scholars have looked to hadith, reports of the life of Muhammad made by his contemporaries.  There is loads of controversy among different Muslim groups across the world as to whether or not all hadith are equally valid, or whether or not they should even be a source of sharia.  The argument is naturally that hadith are not divine, but created by humans, and should not hold the same weight at the Qur'an.

We might continue with our politics example.  We've often talked about the system of positive discrimination in Malaysia that gives preferential treatment to Malays, who are by definition Muslims.  It turns out that the mainstream Islamic opposition party here, PAS, has campaigned in the past that this
system of preferential treatment for a Muslim group runs counter to Islam, for Islam teaches Muslims that they must treat all citizens of a country equally, justly, and fairly.  Huh, that's not the type of view that you often hear about Islam from Western commentators.  And of course, not all Muslims seem to agree with it. But it is worth noting that a group that prides itself on its rigorous interpretation of Islam has made such claims.  This, of course, is the same party that once issued a fatwa that all Malays who ran under the ruling party were apostates, but still.  I have often seen talking heads on CNN or FoxNews make grand statements that the Qur'an teaches that active resistance to infidels is necessary.  Yet just the other day, in the Islamic Arts Museum bookstore in KL, we read a book that said that the Qur'an forbids Muslims from confrontation on religious matters.  According to this book, the Qur'an stipulates that in a discussion about religion, a Muslim may only respectfully describe his adherence to the teachings of Muhammad.

So here's a bit of homework for our readers.  Next time you hear someone on TV, in a bar, at a family reunion, whatever, say something that begins with "Islam teaches that...", you need to intervene.  The odds are almost 100% that unless that person is referring to the five pillars plus Qur'anic divinity, that person is making a statement that is empirically untrue.  Spread the word: religion is complex.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows any comparative doctrinal history of Christianity, Judaism, etc.  Do Christians believe in transubstantiation or consubstantiation?  Do Christians take an eye for an eye or turn the other cheek?  Does Judaism require segregation of men and women for worship?  When it comes to most things, it is impossible to pin down what any particular religion teaches.  More specifically, religion X may seem to teach Y, but large portions of those who practice religion X may view such a teaching as wrong or even contradictory to their understanding of their religion.  In the West, we have an easy time understanding that about Christianity and Judaism, but a much tougher time remembering that Islam is the same way.

Across Muslim Southeast Asia, the governments of Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia have strongly condemned the terror attacks in London.  More than that, throughout local civil society Islamist  groups--such as the Islamic Youth Movement of Malaysia, PAS (the stringent Malaysian Islamic opposition party), all Islam-oriented Indonesian political parties, and Muslim Indonesian social organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, have issued statements deploring these acts of terrorism.  Maybe some people will find this surprising, but we don't.

"Elections" in Iran

From a CNN.com article about Rumsfeld's condemnation of the Iranian elections as a sham.

"So the fact that they had a mock election and elected a hard-liner ought not come to any surprise to anybody because all the other people were told they couldn't run."

Rumsfeld's comments are pretty much absolutely right here.  The election in Iran was not anywhere close to the type of election that a real democracy would have.  There ruling Guardian Council, a bunch of theocrats who decide the limits under which democracy will function in Iran, has completely emasculated any functioning opposition in within the country.  Given a restricted set of candidates and restrictions on the types of things that could be debated, Iranian voters did not have the full range of choice that they should have had.

It strikes me (TP) as sadly predictable, though, that the current administration has made such a fuss about this sham election while claiming success in other sham elections.  Are we really supposed to believe that Egypt deserves credit for "opening up" its electoral process to some more dissent and a bit more opposition activity?  Are we supposed to congratulate Saudi Arabia for having municipal elections even though it's a monarchy?  This, after all, is the much lauded new awakening of the Arab people to democracy and liberalism.

Here's another option.  The current administration believes that when dictatorships have fake elections that return US allies, it's a "step towards democracy".  Conversely, when dictatorships have fake elections that return irrascible conservative Islamists, it's an "illegitimate election".  We should note that despite the restrictions on candidacy, the conduct of Iran's elections is probably more fair in procedural terms than elections any where else in that part of the world, starting at the Turkish border and ending in India.

A subject that attracts scholarly interest every decade or so is the question of what, exactly, makes a democracy.  Like, how do you know a democracy when you see one?  It's a surprisingly difficult thing to answer with any degree of precision, but everyone believes that if nothing else, free and fair elections are the gold standard of democracy.  But then you have the question of what, exactly, is a free and fair election?  If can two elections be on the whole unfair, but one is "more fair" than the other?  If so, is that country "more democratic"?  It's hard, but one thing is for sure, Iran--like Egypt--doesn't have free elections, and that's too bad.

Academics and Politics

Malaysia is an interesting place.  As a middle-income country, it has left behind other countries in Southeast Asia (besides Singapore) in terms of economic and human development.  It has a higher GDP, longer life expectancies, a more educated populace, and just about everything that a benevolent social planner would want for a former colony in a relatively poor part of the world.  In the early 1990s, Mahathir Mohamad, then still the PM, began to implement the plan for what he called Wawasan 2020, or Vision 2020.  The goal of Vision 2020 is simple: by the year 2020, Malaysia should be a developed country, joining the ranks of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore and leaving behind the likes of Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

A big part of this "big push" comes from education, and a big part of that has to do with secondary education.  Malaysian leaders want to make the switch from export-oriented manufacturing to the "knowledge economy", focusing more on on-shore research and higher-value-added manufacturing.  To do that, you need an educated populace.  You can do that by sending your students to universities abroad and hoping that they come back, but it is better to have local universities capable of producing top-level students.  More than just creating smart students, great universities attract the type of research that a knowledge economy needs.  Everyone knows that the best universities here are quite good--these are places like University of Malaya and Universiti Sains Malaysia.  But everybody also knows that the best universities here are not to the level of places like Seoul National University, National Taiwan University, University of Hong Kong, or the National University of Singapore.  This is to say nothing of the universities in Japan, the leader in Asian education.

In every conversation that I (TP) have had with any sort of policy maker, this subject has come up.  And every policy maker knows that there is a problem here.  It is simple, although people don't say it. The problem is that academic life here is stifled.  Students are not free to do what we, as people who went to school in the West, took for granted.  By this, we mean things like join campus organizations, something which is heavily regulated by law here.  Professors here cannot express themselves freely.  The academic administration here is tightly linked to political considerations.  Again, everyone knows this.  These policy makers whom I have met, every single one of them went abroad for his or her education, and they are familiar with what needs to be done.  Yet no one believes that there will be any fundamental changes because national politicians have no desire to make these changes.  Indonesia, by contrast, has a vibrant academic community.  It's funny to see people like Carl Ernst, a Fulbrighter here with us, who visit Indonesia for the first time after having been here for months, and come back amazed at the difference.

It's not that allowing students to play around by going to Oxfam meetings or joining the Young Republicans makes them smarter.  The problem is that these restrictions affect the intellectual climates of universities here.  Because the intellectual climate is lacking, it is hard to attract the best professors here.  All of this keeps the quality of education down, creating an endless cycle.

We have seen a lot of this in the alternative press lately.  The big issues concern the career of Edmund Terence Gomez, a Malaysian success if ever there was one.  Professor Gomez is proof positive that Malaysia can produce top-rate scholars.  All of his education was done right here in Malaysia, and he has emerged as a foremost scholar of Southeast Asian political economy.  He published three standard texts on corporate-political relations in Malaysia by the time he had finished his PhD.  Since then, he has published several books on hot topics like Chinese business networks and East Asian corruption.  He quickly rose within the ranks of University of Malaya's Faculty of Economics and Administration.

It would be hard to argue that there is a more accomplished domestically educated scholar.  Yet Malaysia has almost lost Professor Gomez because he has been critical of the government, pointing out the extend of corporate involvement of Malaysian political parties, links between Chinese financiers and UMNO, and the personal fortunes of political figures like Tun Daim Zainuddin. Professor Gomez has been barred from advancing past Associate Professor by his department.  The university refused to grant him routine leave to take a sabbatical with UNRISD in Geneva, a decision that generated considerable public outrage until it was only recently repealed.  Tellingly, it took a personal intervention from the Prime Minister to accomplish this.  Until this reprieve, it looked as if Professor Gomez was going to be forced to resign his post.  Not only was Professor Gomez punished, but the university even refused to give his wife, another outstanding scholar at the university, routine unpaid leave to join her husband.

Professor Gomez's ongoing troubles (chronicled here) are an embarrassment to Malaysia.  If you ask me, the story is not yet over--I bet that Malaysia will lose Terence Gomez, just like it lost Wang Gungwu and Jomo K.S.  More important than simple embarrassment is what it means for higher education in Malaysia.  Put simply, the government is attempting to accomplish two contradictory objectives: firmly controlling the academic environment and creating international-class universities.  One of these has to give, and so far, it's clear which one has.