State use of public order and social cohesion concerns in the securitisation of non-mainstream Muslims in Malaysia

ABSTRACT This paper posits that certain Muslim minority and Muslim reformist groups that propagate non-mainstream viewpoints on Islam were securitised by the Malaysian state as societal threats when the state perceived its own interests to be potentially threatened. An examination of recent religious deviancy restrictions on two examples from these groups termed broadly in this paper as non-mainstream Muslims (NMM) shows that both arms of the Malaysian state—politicians in the UMNO-led government and the religious bureaucracy—used the same public order and social cohesion concerns to characterise the NMM as threats sufficiently dangerous that restrictive means were required to quell them. With the state’s use of the public order and social cohesion concerns, the paper argues that the way in which the NMM were labelled as deviant and securitised was dependent on the local political and social contexts and not solely tied to theological reasoning. Lastly, the paper puts forth a comprehensive argument that accounts for the different interests and motivations of both the politicians and the religious bureaucracy in the securitisation of the NMM, the roots of which lie in the processes of progressive Islamisation.