RSIS Monograph No. 18

The author believes that there is inadequate literature on Islamic education in Malaysia written in the English language for international consumption, thus resulting in overblown accounts that are skewed towards security considerations. Unfortunately, these exaggerated accounts do carry weight within international policymaking circles, whose decisions may then impact on the national arena. Hence, when the Malaysian government in late 2002 announced the drastic withdrawal of automatic per capita grants to independent sekolah agama rakyat (SARs, or community religious schools), not a few from among PAS leaders and scholars related it to pressure exerted by the United States, Malaysia’s largest trading partner. The pretext given was the persistent failure of SARs to translate financial assistance into good examination results, which were in turn related to low-quality teachers, infrastructure and teachers. SARs were accused of benefiting from public coffers while steadfastly refusing to cede authority to the state. More important, however, were allegations that SARs had become a breeding ground for terrorism, as portrayed by the disproportionate numbers of SAR graduates among the leadership of recently unravelled militant cells. SAR teachers were accused of encouraging hatred of the government and inculcating militant political tendencies among their students. The abrupt draining of funds severely affected SARs’ already unstable finances, leading to closures and dwindling numbers of staff and students. As most SARs were believed to come under PAS’s patronage, albeit unofficially through individual affiliation of SARs’ headmasters and members of SARs’ governing boards to PAS, the government clearly had a political motive in attempting to absorb them into the official Islamic education system or have them registered as full-blown sekolah agama swasta (SASs, or private religious schools) under the 1996 Education Act. This study is a modest attempt to redress the imbalance found in writings that deal with Islamic education in Malaysia in the GWOT era. It aims to shed light on the variety of forms, patterns and evolutionary trends of Islamic education since Islam set foot on Malaysian soil. As a measure of difference, it utilizes paradigms considered autochthonous to the Islamic intellectual tradition and vernacular sources that appeared to have eluded foreign-based studies of Islamic education in Southeast Asia. It seeks to provide an overview of Islamic education in Malaysia by dissecting the phenomenon into constituent parts without neglecting the existence since bygone days of threads that justify looking at it from an approach that emphasizes historical continuity. A more nuanced picture of Islamic education in Malaysia will hopefully emerge from the present research.