Under authoritarian governments, bureaucrats or civil servants are generally perceived as those lacking independent judgement and practising group-think. Their primary role is to legitimise the ideology of ruling elites, deviating from their original mandate to be politically impartial. This book focuses on Islamic institutions in Indonesia and Malaysia that were formed or expanded under authoritarian settings of President Suharto and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, respectively. How do the official ulama – Islamic religious scholars who serve in state-sponsored institutions – in the two countries behave when they function in state bureaucracies? In Indonesia, the main official ulama institution is the MUI (Ulama Council of Indonesia); but for Malaysia, official ulama function in at least one of the following institutions: the JKF-MKI (National Fatwa Committee); JAKIM (Department of Islamic Development Malaysia); and IKIM (Malaysian Institute for Islamic Understanding). This book looks at the state-ulama power dynamic, in particular, two processes. The first is “co-optation,” which refers to states’ attempts to neutralise ulama's influence. States invite ulama to participate in the religious bureaucracy and support their ideology and policies in return for rewards, status, and recognition. The second is “capture,” which refers to ulama capitalising on their position in state institutions to strengthen their authority, to gain access to important political and economic networks, to lobby their personal or groups’ agenda, and to push through agendas that are not necessarily those of the state which co-opted them.

There are two central questions in this book. First, as the Indonesian and Malaysia states strive to co-opt official ulama, in what ways have official ulama managed to capture parts of their respective states? Second, has the increase in political competition since the 1997 Asian financial crisis led to stronger or weaker capture by official ulama in both countries? In answering these questions, I engage with existing writings on Indonesian and Malaysian official ulama. These works have made two broad generalisations. First, official ulama are becoming more conservative and Islamist compared to their behaviour in the past. Second, they had been co-opted by the state during the authoritarian rules of Suharto and Mahathir, but MUI has been more assertive and powerful vis-à-vis their respective states in the competitive political environments after 1997.