Revisiting the ‘Wahabi Scare’ of the Past and Present
By Farish A. Noor
It would appear that there are some in Malaysia who are fearful of the influence of Wahabis in the country, and what this might entail in the future.
But before I continue this writer would like to congratulate Abdar Rahman Koya for his article ‘Asri’s Arrest Born of Ignorance and Fear‘, where he correctly notes that the term ‘Wahabi’ is often taken out of context and sometimes incorrectly or indiscriminately applied.
From that premise, allow me to write about the use (and abuse) of the term Wahabi in the history of Malaysia and the Southeast Asian region, which ultimately has brought us to the present state of affairs in Malaysia where the former Mufti of the state of Perlis, Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, was recently taken to task for preaching in public without a permit issued by the religious authorities of Selangor.
The former Mufti has become the target of much speculation and slander, and among the accusations leveled at him is the claim that he is a Wahabi, or has allowed himself to be influenced by the school of Wahabi thought.
That such a charge can be made today in Malaysia is interesting for the precedent has been set from the turn of the century at precisely the moment when modernist-reformist Islam was in the ascendant in the former colony of British Malaya. During the early 1900s, a number of progressive Ulama and Islamist educational activists gathered in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore and came to be known as the ‘Kaum Muda’ generation. They were made up of prominent Ulama like Syed Sheikh Al-Hady, Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin and others. Many of them were deeply influenced by the writings of the Egyptian reformist thinkers like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, and were themselves persuaded that the time had come for Muslims to free themselves from the shackles of superstition, chauvinism, bigotry and outdated traditional practices that were neither Islamic nor rational.
To this end men like Syed Sheikh Al-Hady and Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin formed the nucleus of what would become the nascent modernist Muslim movement in Malaya. The launched journals, magazines and set up modern madrasahs that were different from the pondok schools of the past that were still teaching a mode of traditionalist Islam based on the kitab kuning texts. Syed Sheikh Al-Hady was himself responsible for the launching of many educational initiatives in order to teach Muslims to think and act rationally, as he was convinced that Islam was a religion of reason and the intellect. His fear was that the state of Muslim thinking among many traditionalist Ulama had crippled the Muslims of Malaya to such an extent that they were reduced to the status of slave-subjects to the colonial order, and unable to improve their economic and political condition themselves. Reason, he argued, was at the heart of Islam and rational agency was the universal quality that equalizes all human beings. To this end he even wrote the first feminist novel in Malay literature – the Hikayat Faridah Hanum – where the heroine was a woman who rationally chooses to determine her own future and place in society.
