CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE : APOSTASY AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AMONGST THE MALAYS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

The field of religion and ethnicity in Singapore, particularly the interests of the Malays, have been extensively documented. However, little has been done, by way of a comprehensive and sensitive exploratory study on the issue of apostasy in Singapore. The issue is not about sin and salvation for the phenomena instead highlights social schisms (in the subsequent attempts for a re-working of a new identity) and stigmatization. What is fascinating is that apostasy raises issues of ethnicity here in Singapore where the traditional conception of a Malay is often intimately and exclusively tied to Islam. If this dyad is willfully broken, the transgressor would be mentally conceived as being outside the confines of entitlement of being a “Malay” and no longer one of their own. Which is particularly interesting because there exists no such legal provision for a revocation of one's ethnicity and yet it occurs within the minds of the community. The Malay community here is often described in the media as the "Malay-Muslim" community. Where such a conception is voiced in the larger society (inclusive of other ethnic groups in Singapore) and is further buttressed by statements issued by Malay organizations and Malay political leaders, this notion is given the finality of truth and an objective reality. What then happens to the individuals who have given up Islam but are still "ethnically" Malay? When I first attempted this thesis, I was motivated that “space” be made available to such individuals. With the data that has been collected, I am now presented with the reality that the aforementioned individuals are indeed intent on reclaiming their rights to being "Malay". What then began as an intellectual and idealized theorizing has actually found its physical and tangible actualization. The shift is indeed now on the "politics of identity construction" as these individuals have aggregated themselves into an interested body for the radical reworking of the term Malays, to not only include Malay-Muslims, but Malav-Christians as well. “Politics’’ as used in this thesis, is to not only mean, battles in political field for actual and visible rights that difference be recognized, but of personal machinations employed by the apostates in reclaiming the "Malay" when the "Muslim" has been expunged. Such strategies of identity construction are what will invoke the "political" as the power to represent and the representations themselves shall collide. Religion and ethnicity are potent and volatile elements and are often deployed as exclusionary tactics or tools of segregation. This thesis shall follow and analyze the effects and significance when a head-on collision results, thereby resulting in a most potent and often bitter brew.