Internally, it has to be noted that from the late 1970s onwards the
struggle to win popular support and to capture the state in Malaysia was
reduced to a hotly divisive contest between two main Malay-Muslim political
parties, where both stood to gain from utilising Islam, and Islamic symbols
and markers, in their attempts to shore up the popular Malay-Muslim vote:
The two biggest parties of the country, the United Malays National Organi-
sation (UMNO) and the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malay-
sia, PAS), were cognisant of the shifting demographics of the country where
the Malay-Muslim vote bank would become the biggest vote bank in the
country, and as such no attempt at state capture – via democratic and consti-
tutional means – would ever succeed unless the Malay-Muslim support base
had been accounted for (Noor 2004). The fact that UMNO and PAS pre-
sented themselves as defenders of both Malay ethno-nationalist and Muslim
communitarian interests meant that Islam would invariably be brought into
the political contestation between them as well, and that neither side would
be able to discard Islamic ideas or symbols in their attempt to present them-
selves as being ‘more Islamic than the other;’ a ‘contest’ that was dubbed by
Noor (2004) as the ‘islamisation race’ of Malaysia.