September 10, 2024
JAKARTA – The mere mention of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim will conjure up images of an “Islamicist”. While there is validity in this optic, not unlike all things in life, there has to be a certain degree of moderation that goes into pigeon-holing a leader of a trading nation such as Malaysia.
Getting Anwar right, especially when he has met with president-elect of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto, twice over the last few months in Putrajaya, is also of critical importance to Indonesia’s foreign policy community. Indeed, Anwar will be attending the inauguration of Prabowo as president on Oct. 20 in Jakarta.
Just as Prabowo was once described as a “green general”—green representing Islam—of the Indonesian Military, unpacking the worldview of Anwar would help Malaysia and Indonesia build a stronger relationship with or without any Islamic element in the background.
One of the best ways to have a sense of the intellectual make-up of Anwar is to delve into the views of his closest confidants, or those whom Anwar respects immensely for their scholarship. One of them is Osman Bakar, the chair of Al-Ghazali in Epistemology and Comparative Civilizational Studies at the Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC) in Malaysia.
As Osman affirmed, “Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was not merely a youth leader of the World Muslim Assembly of Youth [WAMY], which is an entity based in Saudi Arabia, but one who was a key member of the Belgium-based World Assembly of Youth [WAY] too.”
In the eyes of Osman, Anwar has always attempted to be relevant in the Islamic world and the conventional mold of the Westphalian nation states. Indonesia can assess him not only as a pivotal figure in the Islamic world, but in the world writ large.
One of the very first attempts to paint Anwar as an Islamic leader was the literary license exercised by the writer VS Naipaul. In his book, Among The Believers, Naipaul interviewed Muslim leaders and thinkers around the world, including Anwar.
While Naipaul remembered Anwar coming to the interview in Kuala Lumpur in 1980 on a motorbike as a pillion rider drenched with sweat, there was nothing explicitly Islamic in Anwar’s interaction with Naipaul.
The interview was a normal conversation between a young Anwar, then in his early 30s, and an ambitious Naipaul who was adamant that all Muslim countries would take an Islamic turn.
Since Naipaul’s book became a bestseller, and later winning a Nobel Prize in Literature, Anwar was captivated by its description. However, if one were to read the book more carefully, other than affirming his faith, and his belief in revivalist Islam, there was nothing religiously alarmist in the world view of Anwar then, as it is now.
If anything, Anwar detests political violence, suicide terrorism and extremism. In this sense, Indonesia and other countries in the world would find it proper to continue to work with Malaysia on countering extremist political and religious views.
Nevertheless, due to Anwar’s extensive support of the cause of Palestine, a name that should connote a demography filled with Christians, Jews, Muslims and even people of other derivatives of the Abrahamic creeds, the land has also been rendered into a hot button issue of sheer divisions.
Anwar is deemed to have been overzealous as an exponent of Palestinian rights. In more ways than one, he is not someone who believes in preaching any form of Islamic revivalism that harbors the goal of toppling regimes.
His support of the Palestinian issue is strictly within the provision of the United Nations framework of a two-state solution. As and when the Malaysian and global media have intuited that Anwar does not know how to pull himself out and away from the convulsions of the Middle East and Iran, such a view is gross oversimplification.
The foreign policy outlook of Anwar, not unlike that of billions of others, is simply to urge for a permanent ceasefire. Literally, just stop the war. This is the same standard applied to Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere.
For what it is worth, no nations, nor indeed, any leaders can completely cast a blind eye to events in what the World Bank has called the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for two strategic reasons.
First and foremost, the MENA is indeed endowed with a tremendous amount of fossil fuel. Notwithstanding the compulsory transition to a green economy—without which the whole planet would be staring at the disastrous prospect of a climate emergency sooner than 2050—the fact remains that 90 percent of the world economy is still carbon driven.
With the increase in the prices of fuel comes the twin effects of inflation and potentially stagnation, which the world had witnessed in the 1970s.
Second, the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago, once led by Scott Appleby, has long demonstrated, since the 1980s, the imminent return of “religious fundamentalism”. This phenomenon is not confined to Islam alone, but to all religions. The MENA’s struggle to explain the complexity of its religious mosaic has often put Islam in this region of the world in bad light.
Inadvertently, deploying the framework of Islamic international relations to understand Anwar is valid in three substantive forms.
First, the founding prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, was himself the first secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Time and again, the names of some Malaysians have been floated to be the secretary-general of the OIC, such as Syed Hamid Syed Albar, the former board member of the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) in 2010.
Second, if Islamic international relations is are an archetype that does not gel accordingly with the current system of international diplomacy, one must remember that this is an academic field that is not entirely without its merits.
The PhD thesis of the late Abuhamid AbuSulayman at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States was rooted firmly in this subject. Anwar is a close friend of Abuhamid and his family.
The International Islamic University of Malaysia, of which Anwar was once the president, continues to expound the importance of Islamic solidarity among the 57 OIC member states. Anwar, with or without the office of the Malaysian prime minister, has been unable to disavow himself of the academic and nonacademic manifestations of the term “Islamic international relations”.
Finally, Islam is not an ecumenical religion in its entirety. Thus, some semblance of responsibility will always be placed on the shoulders of the believers.
Anwar once had this to say prior to the electoral victory at the 15th General Election: “My hope is to prove to the world that Malaysia can get rid of all its corruptive practices [to rise to the fore].”
Indonesia would find it helpful to work with Malaysia based on democratization, deregulation and digitalization to clip the talons of corruption and rent seekers.
When push comes to shove, Anwar would put his foot down on any egregious acts of aggression, irrespective of whether the issue is happening in the South China Sea or the Malaysian sovereign ownership of its exclusive economic zone.