JIHAD IN PARADISE ISLAM AND POLITICS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA pdf

Jihad In Paradise Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia

JIHAD IN PARADISE ISLAM AND POLITICS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

To what extent have the rise of radical Islamism, terrorist actions in the immediate region, and more distant events like 9/11 or the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan led— or threatened to lead—

the Muslim communities of Singapore and Malaysia to shift their primary identity and loyalty from citizenship in their local multicultural states to membership in a transnational, religiously defined, pan-Islamic agenda?

To sort out the emotional, intellectual, and political responses to that question from Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors alike, Millard takes his readers into homes, offices, and coffee shops for a fast-paced, lapidary string of conversations with university pundits, fellow journalists, government officials,

lawyers for terrorist suspects, absconding dissidents, once-banned female authors, and political leaders at all levels, including Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and Kelantan chief minister Nik Aziz, who personify the two alternatives—multiethnic versus Islamist—now at hand. While drawing on recent scholarly expertise for context, this is not an academic text.

Nor is it one of those potboilers by roving journalists who swoop in for a quick kill after the event— a genre we shall see plenty of if and when regional terrorist outrages and radical Islamist ideological fervor pass the critical mark.

Millard, rather, is a resident, capable of weaving his story from the bottom up as well as top-down, who gives us a just- in-time warning before rather than after things get worse.

From his local sources, including the government’s white paper probing the psychology of its Jemaah Islamiyah detainees, arrested after their aborted plot against Western embassies, Millard concludes that, in Singapore at least, the attraction of the Muslim community to radical Islamism is