This paper assesses the patterns of financing of political parties and elections in Malaysia. The poor regulation of the activities of parties and of all forms of political elections has contributed to allegations of covert funding of politicians, from both Malaysian and foreign sources. Since parties have grossly unequal access to funds, this has led to unfairness in federal and state elections. This paper also deals with two fundamental issues in the financing of politics. First, Malaysia is one of very few countries where parties own corporate enterprises, a trend known as ‘political business’. Second, money-based factionalism, known as ‘money politics’, is threatening the existence of parties and undermining public confidence in government leaders. Party factionalism is based not on ideological differences but on which political leader has the greatest capacity to distribute funds to capture grassroots-level support. Two core issues contribute to the extensive monetization of politics. First, existing disclosure requirements do not adequately restrict the covert funding of politics or ensure electoral fair play. Second, public institutions that oversee electoral competition are not sufficiently autonomous to act without favour. Finally, this paper reviews the levels of transparency built into current legislation, the pattern of financing of parties and electoral campaigns, and the relevant regulatory bodies’ institutional capacity to ensure fairness and accountability during elections. The paper proposes legislative and institutional reforms to ensure electoral fairness, within and between parties.

This paper looks at Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's political involvement in the Kashmir crisis of the 1930s under its second and most influential khalīfat al-masīh, Mirza Bashir al-Din Mahmud Ahmad, who took over the movement in 1914, six years after the death of his father, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Communal tensions springing from the Kashmir riots of 1931 provided Mirza Mahmud Ahmad with an opportunity to display the ability of his Jama'at to manage an international crisis and to lead the Muslim mainstream towards independence from Britain. Mahmud Ahmad's relations with influential Muslim community leaders, such as Iqbal, Fazl-i Husain, Zafrulla Khan, and Sheikh Abdullah (Sher-i Kashmīr), enabled him to further both his religious and political objectives in the subcontinent. This paper examines Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's role in establishing a major political lobby, the All-India Kashmir Committee. It also shows how the political involvement of Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya in Kashmir during the 1930s left Ahmadis susceptible to criticism from opposition groups, like the Majlis-i Ahrar, amongst others, in later years. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how Mahmud Ahmad's skilful use of religion, publicity, and political activism during the Kashmir crisis instantly legitimized a political platform for Jama'at-i Ahmadiyya's entrance into the mainstream political framework of modern South Asia, which thereby has facilitated the development of the Ahmadi controversy since India's partition.

This paper reflects on the apparent ‘paradox’ of a contemporary Bangladesh that appears both ‘more modern’ and ‘more Islamic’, focusing on changes in the family (and the gender and generational orders that it embodies) as a central locus of anxiety and contestation. The paper begins with theory, how the paradox is framed by classical social science expectations of religious decline and how this has been contested by contemporary writers who describe specifically modern forms of piety. It then turns to Bangladesh, where highly publicized symbolic oppositions between ‘religion’ and ‘development’ contrast sharply with people's pragmatic accommodation of development goods in everyday life. Analysis of religious references in interview data reveal the co-existence of very different understandings: a more traditional view of religion as embedded in the moral order; and a more modern deliberate cultivation of a religious life. They also reveal how many of the uses which people make of religion are not specifically religious: to conjure a moral universe, to mark what is important to them, to say things about themselves. The final section returns to theory, reflecting on how this is informed by the findings from Bangladesh, and suggesting that the importance of the private and personal as a site for governance offers a further dimension of why the supposed ‘paradox’ of a religious modernity may not be so paradoxical after all.