The 2011 Egyptian Revolution and Islamists in Egypt and Malaysia

Abstract

The opposition Islamist PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or Pan
 Malaysian Islamic Party) is one of the oldest political parties in
 Malaysia. Inspired by Egypt’s Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim
 Brotherhood [MB]), PAS is also influenced by occurrences in the
 Middle East; following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, its leaders
 revamped their organizational structure to entrust key decisions
 to religious scholars. The ramifications of the 2011 Egyptian revolution,
 arguably one of the most significant Middle Eastern political
 events in recent times, thus deserves a closer look.
 This short article attempts to look at this revolution’s possible impact
 on Islamists in Malaysia. I argue that Malaysia had already
 undergone its own version of a revolution in the 1998 reformasi
 (reformation) due to the shared characteristics between the two
 events: both (1) shared the same premise of alleged political injustice;
 (2) provided opportunities for Islamists to influence the
 political discourse, with the difference that in Egypt there was a
 political vacuum; and (3) utilized the Internet heavily to rally the
 masses. However, due to Malaysia’s freer democratic and electoral
 processes, political changes there will not be as abrupt as in
 Egypt. Furthermore, both Egypt’s revolution and Malaysia’s reformasi
 have hardly ended; the former is a tumultuous ongoing
 process of battling for the legitimacy of rule by appealing to the
 masses, while the latter is an ongoing process of appealing to voters
 in order to come to rule.