Malaysiakini : However, liberal Muslims should be worried too. As the state Islamic Religious Affairs Committee chairperson Mohd Fared Mohd Khalid said: “The rehabilitation centre will not only tackle those who have veered from the right path, but it will also help those convicted of committing same-sex relations or LGBTQ+ by the Syariah Court.”

“Those who have veered from the right path” is the key here. I understand how threatened LGBTQ+ people feel but the real targets of such centres will eventually be people whom the religious state has deemed to have “veered from the right path”.

I would argue that this would start with LGBTQ+ activists and end with Muslims who oppose religious law. Keep in mind that when it comes to the Madani government and Perikatan Nasional, there is very little sunlight between the two when it comes to such issues.

We have to remember that what is considered “deviant” is not written in stone. Different states have different definitions of what they consider “deviant” when it comes to religion.

Consider the fatwa by the Selangor religious department against Sisters of Islam (SIS) that claimed that the group was “deviant”.

After having lost at the Court of Appeal, SIS is appealing to the Federal Court. Keep in mind how the fatwa defined deviancy when it came to SIS – “SIS Forum, individuals, organisations and institutions adopting ideologies of liberalism and pluralism are deviant and against the teaching of Islam.”

But what exactly is deviant about SIS? It might be something with their free Telenisa legal clinic, which is part of a hidden Islamic narrative that could be used as a counterpoint to the kind of establishment religious narratives that progressive political operatives claim they want to move away from.

Can you imagine the potential if something like Telenisa was given national coverage on state-owned media?

‘Deviant’ figures

Then there are independent preachers like Wan Ji Wan Hussin who gained infamy for being sentenced for insulting the Selangor sultan, but was always considered a “deviant” especially when he criticised how the religious bureaucracy in this country operated.

He triggered extremists when he said something like: “I don't agree that only Islam can be propagated. The Federal Constitution states that, but I don't agree with it from the viewpoint of religion. Let the law practitioners debate if it’s from the law’s point of view.

“But as someone who studied religion, that statement is wrong. Non-Muslims should be given the right to give their views, as opposed to only the Muslims being able can do so. Maybe that's why people have accused me of being ‘liberal’.”  

Then of course there was the always-interesting late Kassim Ahmad.

To his admirers, the persecution of this public intellectual demonstrated the fear the state had of what he wrote and said, and this made him the poster child for the kind of Islam they believed was “acceptable” in a multiracial and multi-religious country like Malaysia.

To his detractors, he was a purveyor of falsity that threatened Muslim solidarity and he was a puppet of the liberal West whose writings and speeches would cause the collapse of Malay/Muslim political and religious hegemony.

Indeed, some progressive supporters would be perplexed by some of the things he said about certain progressive politicians and the religious state, to which after they had branded him a deviant and an “enemy” of Islam.

The truth was that Kassim was a devout Muslim who believed that his faith was hijacked by interpreters who had agendas of their own that were not compatible with his interpretation of what would lead to a liberated world.

Us vs them

What religious extremism does - and it does this everywhere - is to make a clear distinction between “us” and “them”. What they want the Muslim community to understand is that there will always be deviants who threaten the foundational aspects of the religion.

For decades, the Islamic bureaucracy through its various tributaries - has moulded a young voting polity to despise democratic traditions and norms, with the belief that doing so makes you a better Muslim.

The demonisation of Muslims who do not follow this groupthink is the underlying cause of tension within the Malay community, even more so than the cultural war with the non-Muslim communities.

What centres like these will eventually demonstrate is that any form of dissent against totalitarian or fascist religious ideas will be defined as deviant.