THE modern period saw the serial destruction of civilisations and empires throughout the world. In Europe alone, World War I destroyed at least three long-lived empires. All over the world, the colonialism that went before and after this event undermined empires and cultures that had configured human existence for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

In South-east Asia, the Portuguese shattered the Malaccan Empire in 1511 while Ferdinand Magellan claimed the Filipino islands for Spain 10 years later.

In time, the Dutch took control of South-east Asia, while the English settled for India. By mid-19th century, the empires farthest away from Western Europe - Manchurian China and Tokugawa Japan - were falling apart under the threat of European colonisation. The necessity to react to the multi-frontal hegemony of Western Europe often meant that advanced polities throughout the world had to reformulate their entire socio-political and epistemic heritage to accommodate European trespasses.

Whether the fall of empires involved colonisation or not, an abrupt interruption of internal dynamics in culture, knowledge construction, politics and economics took place. The subsequent resurrection of some of these civilisations and empires in the shape of reformed polities is the story of modern times. In some cases, profound changes were enforced, and nations survived even at the cost of what some would call cultural suicide. Japan was such a case. It dismantled its samurai culture to withstand Western hegemony, and succeeded in mounting a formidable challenge to the Western world order until its defeat in 1945. China's route was just as tortuous, and also involved the rejection of central aspects of its culture, such as its classical language and its Confucian philosophy. As part of the bargain, it experienced civil conflicts, cultural revolutions and cold wars.

Today, it is apparent that these countries - along with most of East and South-east Asia, and emergent India - have found a workable balance between Western science, culture on the one hand; and the preservation of parts of their traditional culture on the other. The Muslim world as a whole has not been as lucky, and not for lack of trying. Colonialism, as pointed out by researchers such as J.S. Furnivall and Bernard S. Cohn, was always an exercise in epistemic amputation and cultural dislodgement.

The histories of non-European lands were rewritten, leading to a shattering of the wholeness of these regions.

This temporal and spatial loss of orientation dismantled the interconnectedness of the civilisation's surviving parts, and its rationale.

Peoples were left with traditions practised but not connected in their minds as an experienced whole. These societies were left with the obsession of constructing a new rationale and a new integratedness that could help them survive in the global political economy.

New rationale

OVER the last 150 years, the achievement of political stability and economic strength became the criteria for successful civilisational reorientation. This is finally being achieved on a broad front across East and South-east Asia, and with it a promise of civilisational re-rationalisation and a regaining of pride of place in the world.

The chaos now visited on the Muslim world - be it the result of neo-colonialism or the failure of modernisation projects - may to no small extent be ascribed to a failure to end the confusion left by 'civilisational amputations', and the splitting of the Ottoman Empire. It is within such a perspective that the full potential of the newly coined term 'Islam Hadhari' may be realised - the 'civilisation' aspect is of greater importance than that of religion.

The term can be made to express the inescapable post-colonial project of constructing a new rationale to reconnect the segments of Muslim culture left after the period of colonialism.

In this context, forms of fundamentalism may be understood as quick-fix solutions adopted to remedy the condition of being civilisationally cut adrift. If any one of these were to have led to political peace and economic growth, a renewing rationale for the Muslim world would have been born.

This has not happened.

Malaysia, being probably the Muslim country most respected in line with these two criteria, has therefore often expressed the wish to be a living argument that development and the practice of Islam are not at odds with each other.

When Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad claimed in 2002 that Malaysia was already an Islamic state, he was more than merely declaring the opposition Islamic party - Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) - irrelevant and misguided. He was in fact indicating that his party, Umno, and the Barisan Nasional (National Front) regime that he had led for 20 years, had developed the right combination between modern statehood and traditional Islam. Immediately after taking over the premiership on Oct 30 last year, Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi launched the 'project' of 'Islam Hadhari'. It took a year before the 10 major principles of this understanding of Islam were made public.

As he claims, the issue does not involve sectarianism or a new understanding of Islam. We may perhaps be seeing an attempt to conceptualise Islam as a civilisation - and not merely a religion - engaged in regaining lost epistemic and cultural integratedness. The criteria for this are, again, political peace and economic growth. Indeed, the perception of Islam as merely religion can be seen as a major result of the civilisational fragmentation mentioned above. The call for Muslim cooperation in the economic and academic field that Datuk Seri Abdullah has made as chairman of the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement accords with such an agenda.

The worsening of relations between the United States and Muslim populations throughout the world, even before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, has given cause for more haste among Muslims to achieve a civilisational strategy that works.

Major areas of dynamic interplay between secularism and religion include Islamic banking. It may yet prove to be a beneficial device for Malaysia to bridge the gap between the economic agenda of the regime and the hopes of religious Malays. Since 1983, when Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad was established, Malaysia had slowly been establishing a framework for Islamic banking. In 1993, an interest-free banking system was implemented alongside the conventional banking system.

A second Islamic financial institution, Bank Bumi Mualamat Malaysia, was set up in 1998, in the middle of a controversial nationwide bank-merging exercise. Together with the setting up of special trust funds for the poor, Islamic banking became a social reality. In October this year, two Middle Eastern banks - Saudi Arabia's gigantic Al Rajhi Banking and Investment, a consortium led by the Qatar Islamic Bank - were granted licenses to operate in Malaysia together with Kuwait Finance House, which had received its nod in May. Three local banks have also been allowed to engage in Islamic banking, taking the number of Islamic banks in Malaysia to eight.

There is thus a continuous trend in Malaysia's development, where material and political imperatives are informed by the religion, the Muslimness, of its majority culture. No doubt, the fact that it straddles more than one civilisational sphere has been a great advantage. Resistance to global forces was a permanent theme under Tun Dr Mahathir, and Malaysia's economic success in tandem with its widespread Islamisation had a significance that was perhaps better understood by him than by his successor.

The Islam Hadhari initiative should therefore be analysed as an important spillover - if not a consciously constructed inheritance - of Tun Dr Mahathir's domestic and foreign policy strategies. The view of nation-building as the foundation stone for 'civilisational rebuilding' in the post-colonial period then gains a stark relevance. Malaysia's positioning of Islam within a successful formula built on ethnic bargains and state-driven capitalist development holds promise where a 'renaissance' of the Islamic world is concerned. One should perhaps understand the initiative, not so much as a new presentation of Islam, but as a cautious attempt to discourse a new Muslim - Orang Islam Baru - adapted to the needs of a developing multi-ethnic nation state; and in a larger context, it seeks to regain lost civilisation.

Revealingly, except for the first - piety and faith in Allah - all the goals of Islam Hadhari are matter-of-fact civilisational goals.