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Posted on 01/14/2003 4:49:18 PM PST by knighthawk
KUALA LUMPUR - The radicalisation of former Malaysian army officer Yazid Sufaat, suspected of abetting two Sept 11 hijackers and of being a Jemaah Islamiah bomb-maker, shows that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's ambitious effort to use Islam as a vehicle for economic progress and social change has backfired, The Asian Wall Street Journal said in a report yesterday.
It said that Yazid - the son of a poor rubber tapper and the winner of a government scholarship to study biochemistry in the US - was an 'ideal candidate for transformation into the progressive Muslim professional', a type of citizen that Dr Mahathir had hoped to nurture by melding 'market economics with Islamic precepts'.
But Yazid, 38, became influenced by foreign, hard-line Muslim clerics who took refuge in Malaysia in the 90s.
He became a member of the JI's inner circle and later hosted two Saudi Arabians who hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, as well as another terrorist suspected of complicity in the Sept 11 attacks.
'The radicalisation of Yazid reveals the dark side of Dr Mahathir's ambitious effort to harness Islam as a vehicle for the promotion of rapid economic and social change,' the business daily said in a front-page article.
'In practice, policies intended to encourage the country's ethnic-Malay Muslims to compete in a global market and shun religious extremism backfired, with some Malays alienated by the all-out pursuit of material gain, intolerance of political dissent and the government's promotion of too moderate a strain of Islam.'
Malaysia's 'official championing' of Islam also made the country 'an attractive refuge' for militants persecuted by Indonesia, the paper said.
'Some Malaysians - put off by Dr Mahathir's increasingly autocratic rule and the intermingling of business and politics that accompanied the economic boom of the 90s - were ready to listen to these militants.'
Local Muslim scholar Farish Noor told the paper: 'Yazid is really a symptom of a society in crisis.
'People are opting out of the development ideology and are turning to religion because they have no space in the political debate.'
Dr Mahathir's creation of an 'unusual hybrid of theocracy, foreign investment and free-market thought' was meant to make his development policies 'palatable to the culturally conservative Malays', the newspaper said.
And for a while, the experiment seemed to work as 'a generation of Malays moved from rubber plantations to factories and boardrooms'.
At the same time, 'symbols of Islam's increasing pre-eminence also spread rapidly' with the setting up of an Islamic banking system and an international university, the promotion of religion via state media and the proliferation of Islamic schools.
Meanwhile, Malaysia's pro-Islamic foreign policy - like support for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation - made it a haven for militants from the Philippines and Indonesia.
Some of the Indonesian exiles - including JI leaders Abu Bakar Bashir and Riduan Isamuddin - later became Yazid's mentors.
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