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Friday, August 18, 2017

Malaysian politicians manufacture moral panics to hold power

Research analyst says Malaysian politicians use events to manufacture moral panics by characterising them as threats to the country’s moral and religious fabric, especially Islam, and present themselves as the saviour.
Prashant Waikar
Prashant Waikar
KUALA LUMPUR: Everyone knows that Malaysia has a vibrant manufacturing industry and that the country produces various goods for export.
But, according to Prashant Waikar, research analyst at the Malaysia Programme in the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, there is another area of manufacturing that Malaysia, or rather the Malaysian political elite, is good at.
Waikar says, in a commentary in Singapore’s Today Online, that Malaysian politicians are good at producing moral panics, and that is how they stay in power or accrue power.
And he gives plenty of examples to prove his point about the politicisation of Islam and morality, and the manufacturing of moral panics.
Among these are: the decision to install infrared cameras in the halls of a Kuala Terengganu cinema to monitor and deter couples from engaging in “bad behaviour”, the banning of the Spanish song Despacito on government-owned radio stations because it contains sexualised lyrics, the debate on whether the alleged “gay scene” in Beauty and the Beast should be censored, and the recent debate over the use of bin/binte Abdullah for children born out of wedlock.
Waikar says these and similar events “present a template for how political actors in Malaysia manufacture ludicrous moral panics, characterise them as piercing threats to the country’s moral and religious fabric, and present themselves as messiahs sent to purge the country of debauchery”.
He quotes the definition of moral panic by sociologists Eric Goode and Nachman Ben-Yahuda: The belief that certain groups, individuals and behaviours pose a threat to society’s dominant culture — that is, the presiding norms, values and beliefs of society.
“Usually, these threats are either entirely fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Some media organisations and governments produce and circulate narratives that catalyse issues to morph into problems people ‘need’ to be anxious about.”
He says these threats tend to centre on the issues of poverty, drug use, immigration and, as is currently the case in Malaysia, sexuality.
In most cases, he says, these threats are deemed to be morally repugnant precisely because they are framed as antithetical to society’s dominant culture.
“The common thread tying the issues discussed earlier is the belief that, somehow, each of these ‘aberrations’ will twist and turn Malaysia into a sexually promiscuous country.
“Such positions are logically fallacious. The argument that the mere existence of a cinema will drive people to have sex in it, or the belief that unmarried Muslims will have sex since they know that children born out of wedlock will be legitimised, is highly problematic.
“Yet this is precisely how moral panics come to be manufactured — by coating a particular issue with melodrama, and driving it to its logical extreme.”
Noting that Islam is Malaysia’s official religion, Waikar says that since moral panics are threats to dominant culture, sexual promiscuity becomes framed as a threat to Islam.
“In Malaysia, the notion of Islam and Muslims being under siege — whether from outside or within — becomes a fault line political actors use in their attempt to mobilise and rally mass support. Political actors compete with one another to portray themselves as messianic.”
Waikar gives as example the recent ban on the song Despacito. He notes that the opposition Islamist party Amanah got the ball rolling by describing the song as pornographic. The party argued that society would be infected by the song’s “immorality”.
Swiftly, Communications and Multimedia Minister Salleh Said Keruak banned the song from government-owned radio stations. In arguing for the ban, he postulated that the song’s mostly Spanish lyrics “are not suitable to be heard”.
“Both parties competed to frame the song as a manifestation of sexual encroachment into Islam in Malaysia that needed to be expunged,” Waikar says.
Amidst all this noise from politicians, he says, little is known about the views of the Malaysian public on such issues.
This, he adds, “allows religio-political actors to monopolise the narrative, insist their opinions reflect public opinion, and thus present them as the naturalistic position of the larger population”.
One of the consequences of this excessive focus on issues that appeal to hyper-conservative Muslims is that it distorts the religious preoccupations of lay Muslims.
“This could obscure how non-Muslims view their Muslim counterparts, particularly with reference to how ‘tolerant’ they are. The dramatisation of hyper-conservatism could augment divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims, in turn possibly fomenting distrust between the groups.”
Waikar says dominating the public discourse on Islam with the “fight” against relatively trivial issues could catalyse the mainstreaming of hyper-conservative beliefs at the expense of the diverse perspectives held by Muslims.
“Finally, hogging public debates with these issues allows political actors to skirt around far more morally reprehensible problems — such as issues of corruption, economic mismanagement and administrative failures.” - FMT

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