The 2011 Egyptian Revolution and Islamists in Egypt and Malaysia Similar Goals, Different Circumstances

Abstract

The opposition Islamist PAS (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or Pan

Malaysian Islamic Party) is one of the oldest political parties in

Malaysia. Inspired by Egypt’s Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim

Brotherhood [MB]), PAS is also influenced by occurrences in the

Middle East; following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, its leaders

revamped their organizational structure to entrust key decisions

to religious scholars. The ramifications of the 2011 Egyptian revolution,

arguably one of the most significant Middle Eastern political

events in recent times, thus deserves a closer look.

This short article attempts to look at this revolution’s possible impact

on Islamists in Malaysia. I argue that Malaysia had already

undergone its own version of a revolution in the 1998 reformasi

(reformation) due to the shared characteristics between the two

events: both (1) shared the same premise of alleged political injustice;

(2) provided opportunities for Islamists to influence the

political discourse, with the difference that in Egypt there was a

political vacuum; and (3) utilized the Internet heavily to rally the

masses. However, due to Malaysia’s freer democratic and electoral

processes, political changes there will not be as abrupt as in

Egypt. Furthermore, both Egypt’s revolution and Malaysia’s reformasi

have hardly ended; the former is a tumultuous ongoing

process of battling for the legitimacy of rule by appealing to the

masses, while the latter is an ongoing process of appealing to voters

in order to come to rule.