Malay-Muslim Identity in the Era of Globalization

Abstract

The findings of a study which I carried out together with a team of researchers suggests that the Malay-Muslim community in Malaysia is losing their religious identity within the wave of globalization, and there is fear that their grip on religious values will continue to loosen, and in today's moral climate, may no longer be salvageable. It is therefore adamantly suggested that all parties - be it the government, the community and the family - realign their focus on religious education, with particular emphasis on the Quran, creed and morality. Religious education needs to be embedded in a serious and systematic manner at all levels of society in a bid to provide them with spiritual ammunition to deal with negative factors that have come about as a result of continuous waves of globalization which bring with it values that are inconsistent with Islam (Zakaria et al. 2003: 58-59).The worries of the Malay-Muslim community in Malaysia are valid and sensible given various negative factors brought about by globalization, which, if left untended to, would result in an ummah that would lose, or at least be at risk of losing, their Islamic identity. This can be clearly proven through a careful analysis of the impact of globalization all over the world, which at the moment is progressing at a rapid pace. It would not be inaccurate to say that there is no longer a vacuum on the planet that has not been touched by this wave.However, in efforts to analyse the main factors behind the wave of globalization, it needs to be understood that globalization itself is a product and a factor of post-modernism (Abdul Rahman 2000a: 38; Hawke 2010: 1), developed especially as a tool to enable the spreading of postmodernist thought. Postmodernism itself can be seen as the ideology and culture behind the globalization movement (The Free Arab Voice 2000: 1). Therefore, in this context, the idea of postmodernism and postmodernist thought needs to first be elaborated upon in order to aid the understanding of the globalization phenomenon.PostmodernismThe world today is undergoing an era of postmodernism. In its most basic sense, the arrival of this era marks the end of the modern era. However, this new era cannot be viewed through merely chronological lenses as an extension of the modern era, but it also refers to a new philosophy - even though there are parties who prefer to view it as a narration of a Western mindset and as a specific mode rather than a philosophy (Wade 2002: 1) - which brings with it a world view, thought, values and a lifestyle that is named postmodernism or postmodernist thought (Hoffman 2008: 1-2).The English term postmodernism was conceptualized by the renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee in the late 1940s, but it was only widely used in the 1970s, especially by Charles Jencks, an American literary theorist and critic, in his efforts to explain the anti-modernist movement in literature. It first entered the philosophical glossary in 1979 with the publication of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard was one of the earliest thinkers who extensively wrote on postmodernism as a wider cultural phenomenon. Postmodernism began to emerge as an academic field in the mid-1980s (Ward 2011: 1; Klages 2003: 1; Aylesworth 2005: 1).The emergence, use and development of the term and the field of postmodernism in the West took a mere four decades, during which it has strengthened until it has become an academic discipline - despite contradictions and differences in the viewpoints of scholars. Therefore, from a historical perspective, even though there are still differing views as to when it actually began (Klages 2003: 1)-the postmodern era could be seen as emerging from the modern era in the late 1940s, or as suggested by Louis Hoffman (2008: 1-2) in his paper Premodernism, Modernism and Postmodernism: an Overview that postmodernism itself began in the 1950s until today, thereby suggesting that the 1950s was seen to be the transition period during where all that was modernist became dominated by postmodernism. …