The Malaysian model

[Zafir]

Malaysia wants to be a beacon to the Muslim world. It wants to show that a marriage of Islamic piety and liberal modernity—and in particular economic growth—is possible. To hear how it plans to lead Islam out of economic sloth (Islamic countries account for almost 20 per cent of the world's population but only 6 per cent of income) I flew to Kuala Lumpur a couple of weeks ago to attend a conference with the unpromising title of "Implementing the economic agenda of the Muslim world."

 

Can there be a specifically Muslim economic agenda? Surely the problems of Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, of Pakistan and of Indonesia are all so different as to make a nonsense of the idea of a specifically Muslim economic agenda?

 

Listening to Muslim grandees quoting the Koran at each other on the platform at Hotel Nikko did little to ease my scepticism. But a leading French academic, a veteran of these events, explained to me that at a conference dominated by Muslim norms and concerns it is harder for officials and politicians to spend the whole time blaming the west instead of facing up to their own failings. He also said that between the lines, some very important things were being said from the platform. There was certainly a robust discussion of Islamic patriarchy and women's rights led by some indignant Muslim women. And our self-effacing host, Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, coined the no-nonsense epithet: "A lazy Muslim cannot be a good Muslim."

 

So is a new Islamic Calvinism possible? Surely the tradition-bound Koranic literalism of so much of the Muslim world is a powerful restraint on both science/technology and on entrepreneurialism, two of the key drivers of development. And yet a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the Bible did not prevent the Calvinists acting as the European capitalist avant-garde four centuries ago. And if authoritarianism itself were an obstacle to growth, neither China nor most of the Asian tigers would ever have taken off.

 

Islam, I discovered, may have stumbled upon a new economic motor in the shape of Islamic finance. I used to think that Islamic finance was a slightly absurd game—a means to respect the Koranic prohibition on usury by dressing up interest payments as something else, usually fees. It turns it out that it is rather more than that; in fact, it has spawned a big and sophisticated financial sector of its own (Malaysia is a centre of the Islamic bond market). But Islamic finance has a wider symbolic role for Muslim reformers, like Badawi—it shows that you can hold to the underlying principles and values of the religion but adapt those principles to the modern capitalist world so that Muslims need not lose out on prosperity and economic growth.

 

Venturing outside the conference hotel, Malaysia itself certainly seemed to be flourishing as it celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence from Britain. It is growing at nearly 7 per cent a year, and by 2020 intends to join the ranks of the developed world (it will almost certainly be the first majority Muslim country to do so). It is what one might politely describe as a "managed democracy," or a liberal one-party state—the ruling Umno party is not going to lose power in the foreseeable future, but there is an opposition and a half-free press. Relationships between the main ethnic groups (60 per cent Malay, who are mostly Muslim, and 25 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indian, who are mostly not Muslims) are also closely managed following the anti-Chinese race riots of the late 1960s.

 

Compared with the last time I was here, about 15 years ago, the country felt more overtly Muslim, with many more headscarves on display. That, according to a Malaysian-born Cambridge-educated writer, is a function of democratisation: "Twenty years ago, the country was still run by a westernised, secular elite. That is not so much the case now. And Malaysia looks much more to India and China for inspiration than to the west."

 

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