ABSTRACT
Singapore’s Muslim populace is managed through a two-pronged approach of institutionalization and racialization/ethnicization. Since independence, the state has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the Muslim demography with popular protests and overt dissent surfacing, especially since the turn of the new millennium. The state’s top-down institutionalization of Islam, through the enactment and bureaucratization of a battery of laws and offices, is an anomaly within the local landscape given its official secular stand. Almost all Malays in Singapore are Muslims. The unique racial and religious entanglement of the local term ‘Malay/Muslims,’ which has its roots in Singapore and Malaysia’s shared history before their separation, continues to serve a political function in the city-state. The term presupposes and institutionalizes religion as the overriding category over race when it comes to the political life of Muslims in Singapore. Of late, this management includes engaging in identity politics through the conceptualization of the Singapore Muslim identity.
