PAS and the Islamisation of Malaysian politics

In a commentary, NTU CoHASS dean and Tan Kah Kee chair in comparative and international politics Prof Joseph Liow wrote about the rising fortunes of Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), the opposition Islamist party that commands the largest bloc of seats in Parliament today, and how this is symptomatic of deeper underlying currents in Malaysian society today, where narrow ethno-religious nationalist narratives predicated on the primacy of one ethnicity, Malay, and one religion, Islam, at the expense of others have become not just mainstream but increasingly dominant. What this portends for Malaysia will be a decided push by the major Malay-Muslim political parties to agitate for the introduction of more and more Islamic legislation, in the process placing an immense strain on the country’s once celebrated tradition of multiculturalism, he wrote.

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