War & Peace Quote by Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

Badawi is doing the kind of political jujitsu that small and mid-sized Muslim-majority states have often had to master: speak to domestic pride while translating Islam into a vocabulary that global power centers will “accept.” The sentence is built as a contrastive bargain. “Militant Islam” is the foil, a compressed label that lets him acknowledge Western anxieties without validating their worst generalizations. Then he offers the preferred alternative in a tidy list - “progress,” “development,” “peace,” “moderate” - terms that travel well in diplomatic rooms and donor conferences, and that subtly recast Islam as a governance asset rather than a security risk.

The subtext is as much about audience management as belief. He’s signaling to external listeners (especially post-9/11) that Malaysia’s Islamic identity is compatible with modernity and capitalism, not an on-ramp to insurgency. At the same time, he’s telling Muslim constituents: we can be visibly Muslim and still lead a successful, forward-facing state. That “So that’s what we are doing here” is crucial - it turns a description into a claim of legitimacy, implying policy, institutions, and public messaging are already aligned with this “moderate” project.

Context matters: Badawi’s tenure was defined by positioning Malaysia as a model of “Islam Hadhari” (Civilizational Islam), a state-led branding exercise aimed at defusing both Western suspicion and Islamist opposition. The line’s power - and its vulnerability - comes from its pragmatic framing: moderation isn’t presented as theology, but as a deliverable. That’s persuasive in politics, but it also concedes that Muslims must constantly prove their acceptability on someone else’s terms.