‘Hedonism and perversion’: Coldplay gets cold shoulder of Malaysia’s Muslim party

Penang: When Coldplay announced in May that it would be performing its first-ever concert in Malaysia, it was met with much hype and fans rushed to snap up tickets.

The news was greeted somewhat differently, however, by the country’s loudest torch-bearers for Islamism. “Does the government want to nurture a culture of hedonism and perversion in this country?” a senior figure in the Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) posted on Facebook alongside pictures of the band’s singer, Chris Martin, with a rainbow flag.

Homosexuality is illegal in Muslim-majority Malaysia and PAS wanted the show at the national stadium cancelled because of the Coldplay frontman’s promotion of LGBTQI+ rights.

The protest was brushed off by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s government, with one MP in his coalition quipping that if the Islamic party didn’t like the band, its members need not attend.

Six weeks later, however, authorities stepped in amid uproar over another visiting act, calling off a music festival in Kuala Lumpur after the singer of fellow British outfit the 1975 kissed a bandmate on stage at a show in the capital.

In between, officers from the Home Affairs Ministry raided almost a dozen Swatch stores around the country, seizing watches from the Swiss company’s Pride Collection.

“If you take the issue of concerts, we’ve had concerts in the past,” said Muhammad Fawwaz, a 40-year-old Muslim ustaz, or teacher, and newly elected federal MP for PAS in north-western Penang.

“There is not really an issue with concerts, but when performers raise topics, that’s when we object. Everyone knows that Coldplay supports LGBTQ, and then most lately [there was] the incident with [the] 1975. They have gone overboard, they have raised something inappropriate in our country.”

The music-related controversies and the watch furore coincide with religious and racial sentiment swirling in the lead-up to hotly contested state elections across almost half of Malaysia next weekend.

The polls have been cast as an unofficial referendum on Anwar’s multi-ethnic government in the face of a fierce challenge from the Malay nationalist Perikatan Nasional (National Alliance) opposition, of which PAS is a member.

After years waiting in the wings and being imprisoned twice, Anwar won the top job at the last federal election, in November, forming a post-vote alliance with his former foe Barisan Nasional (National Front), the Malay mainstay that ruled for six decades but was abandoned by voters over corruption.

While he scraped the numbers together, though, it was hardline PAS that shook the national electoral landscape, capturing the most seats of any single party.

Run by Islamic clerics, and having previously pressed for the introduction of hudud law, under which penalties such as stoning and cutting off people’s hands can be meted out, the party traditionally had its heartland in the country’s rural north and east.

But it has expanded its footprint significantly, leading to the term “green wave”, a reference to the colour of the party’s flag.

It was a shock result that indicated a lurch towards more extreme conservatism in a nation where 70 per cent of the population of 33 million is Malay Muslim and politics has been tethered to race.

Among the biggest upsets was one here in Penang, where Fawwaz defeated Anwar’s daughter Nurul Izzah Anwar to claim a seat the now prime minister and his family had held since 1982.

Fawwaz admits he didn’t expect to win the seat. But he takes issue with PAS’s ascendance being labelled a green wave, believing the term has been devised to frighten Malaysia’s mostly Chinese and Indian minorities, and religious moderates.

“The main intention is to scare our society, mainly non-Malays,” Fawwaz said in an interview in the unassuming local PAS office in the backblocks of the town of Permatang Pauh.

“The green wave, the PAS wave, the religiousness of PAS [...] this is how it is being politicised to non-Muslims. But now if we look at it, the wave that we are witnessing is the people’s wave.”

Founded in 1951, six years before the country’s independence, PAS espouses fundamentalism.

In PAS-controlled Kelantan state, there are separate queues for men and women in supermarkets, and cinemas are banned, while in Terengganu, which the party also governs, a new law was passed in December making pregnancy and childbirth out of wedlock a criminal offence. The party also operates Islamic schools for children.

Riding high on support, it has upped the ante on imposing its world view since the election, from proposing a ban on alcohol on the resort island of Langkawi to objecting to the tightness of nurses’ uniforms.

PAS insists it would lead for all Malaysians if it came to power nationally. It was a junior partner in Muhyiddin Yassin’s shortlived Perikatan Nasional government in 2020 and 2021.

“PAS acknowledges that Malaysia is a multiracial country with different races,” Fawwaz said. “We will govern Malaysia within the framework of a multiracial society.”

At a campaign event in Penang last week, its leader Abdul Hadi Awang added: “Non-Malays, don’t be afraid. Don’t worry, Islam promotes justice and fairness ... in Kelantan [and] Terengganu, Chinese and Indians live happily in the Malay villages.”

The party has been accused, however, of stoking division with its battle cry for the implementation of strict Islamic criminal law.

Mujahid Yusof Rawa represented PAS for two terms in federal parliament before breaking away and helping to form the more progressive Amanah, the National Trust Party. He argues that his former group’s popularity has ballooned on the back of race-based hate speech promoted on social media platforms, particularly TikTok.

“Malaysia is a fragile society, multiracial. These racial issues are still in high demand. People buy it,” he said. “And that contributed to the rise of PAS because they were leading that campaign.”

A former religious affairs minister, whose party is part of Anwar’s ruling Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) coalition, Rawa added: “You should be wary of PAS. I always say this to the public: you should be judging political parties through what ideas they have, not through what sentiments they can stir. That could lead to more problems such as the rise of the radicalisation of religion, which is negative for the country.”

Anwar’s government, in which the Chinese-driven Democratic Action Party holds the most seats, attempted in March to ban political sermons being delivered in mosques. The 75-year-old has also tried to attract interest onto his ambitious economic agenda and was able to proclaim a deal a fortnight ago with Tesla to open a regional office in Malaysia, trumping Indonesia for the attention of billionaire Elon Musk.

However, in a febrile political atmosphere his government has also appeared to try to demonstrate its Islamic credentials. Along with the 1975 and Swatch crackdowns, the prime minister has pushed for a larger role for the Malaysian Islamic Development Department, which manages mosques and other religious issues. There were also eyebrows raised last week when it emerged that Anwar had played host to an Indonesian preacher known for his radical views about non-Muslims.

The long-time proponent of reform can’t necessarily count on Malaysia’s youth for an endorsement of his leadership. November’s election was the first ever in which Malaysians as young as 18 could vote, making more than half the electorate under 40 years of age.

First-time voters were active participants, with a 79 per cent turnout, according to research by Bridget Welsh, a research associate with the Asian Research Institute at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. But younger voters were among those to embrace PAS and Malay-centric ally Bersatu, an outcome that surprised many although not Tharma Pillai, whose organisation Undi18 led the campaign to lower the voting age from 21.

“Our pre-election surveys showed that young people were not necessarily progressive,” he said. “Young people have very similar biases, perspectives, ideologies as the previous generation. Of course, in Malaysia it is centred around religion.”

He says the strength of the Islamic party has been overplayed, though, and it’s the decline of Barisan Nasional, for so long the de facto party for Malays, that has given rise to the PAS phenomenon.

Pillai also believes Malaysia is not more conservative, though he acknowledges there has been a change to its nature.

“I just think that conservatism has sort of transformed slightly, whereby previously it was just pure Malay supremacy,” he said. “Now it’s Malay Islamic supremacy.”

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.