What’s driving Malaysian support for Islamic penal code?

As Malaysia considers the introduction of a strict sharia punishment code known as hudud, minorities have been left to consider their place in a country once lauded for diversity and moderation – and to ponder the wisdom of experts who warn creeping Islamisation could breed extremism.

Scenes of the tens of thousands who gathered in Kuala Lumpur in February to show their support for hudud are fresh in the minds of lawmakers who are being urged to debate the implementation of aspects of the code before the current parliamentary session ends on April 6.

Also at the forefront of their minds – and not least that of embattled Prime Minister Najib Razak – is the looming general election widely expected to be held this year. For the first time since the country’s independence from Britain in the 1950s, there appears a real possibility that the ruling coalition known as the Barisan Nasional (or National Front) could lose power (it clung on at the last election, in 2013, despite losing the popular vote).

How one Islamist party could sway Malaysia’s election

Given the tightness of the margins, an issue that for decades has been too divisive for lawmakers to entertain has emerged as an unlikely kingmaker.

Under Malaysia’s parallel legal system, secular federal laws operate in tandem with sharia courts that have jurisdiction only over Muslims and only in some aspects of (mostly civil) law that are not covered by the federal law. However, at present, those sharia courts are restricted from implementing the harshest punishments, for those crimes said to violate God’s boundaries (or hudud). In its purest, strictest interpretation, the hudud code prescribes amputations, stonings and even crucifixion for certain offences.

But there is sizeable support for implementing hudud – witnessed most recently at the rally in the capital to support a private member’s bill by Abdul Hadi Awang, the leader of the country’s influential Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS). His bill’s scope is limited: it seeks only to ease some of the restrictions imposed on the sharia courts and – the more archaic punishments, such as crucifixion, would remain off limits.

Still, the limited scope of the bill has done little to dispel the doubts of those who fear that in playing to the rural Muslim voters the politicians are embarking on a slippery slope.

Abdul Hadi’s bill alarms many of the country’s non-Malay minorities who see such efforts as part of a creeping Islamisation of the multi-ethnic country and claim it would dissuade investors and strain social harmony. About 23 per cent of Malaysians are ethnic Chinese and seven per cent Indian. The direst warnings see it as contributing to a climate of religious conservatism that could leave the country a fertile ground for the Islamic State terrorist group.