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A secular state recruiting Islam to its nation-building project
Since the foundation of Singapore as an independent state in 1965, the People's Action Party government has not trusted the 15 per cent of its population who are Muslims. Until the mid-1980s they were routinely excluded from National Service for fear of which way they might point their guns in the event of a confrontation with Singapore's larger Muslim-majority neighbours, and even today they are still subjected to open and public discrimination in the armed forces. These claims are not contentious in themselves since they are matters of public knowledge and are defended by the government at the highest levels. Less public but even more damaging to the welfare of the Muslim community has been discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and in the workplace - and in particular against the Malay-Muslim community, which makes up more than 90 per cent of Singapore's Muslim population.
It is all the more extraordinary, therefore, that this secular state not only runs the institutions of Islam in its domain, but has of late tried to use those institutions as a tool of nation building - seeking to use the network of mosques to enhance the integration of Muslims into a nation-state that has at all times treated them with attitudes that range from mistrust to outright hostility.
The following passage from my recently released book Constructing Singapore. Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project (written with Zlatko Skrbis) explores some of the issues associated with this nationbuilding exercise, focusing particularly on the enormity of the task that the government has set itself.
The regime itself is convinced beyond doubt that Malays and Muslims feel very little affinity with the regime, despite the apparently contradictory evidence of Malay voting patterns (which have generally been proPAP for several decades)1 and positive Malay responses to surveys on patriotism.2 Ironically, some of the government's own responses to this perception seem to have fed the very dissonance that it fears. This has been expressed in several ways. The first is the continuing refusal to trust Malays in the SAF. The mistrust has ameliorated to the point where it is now possible for Malays to become officers, and one has even become a...