What Is Al Arqam?

On September 11, Malaysian police launched raids on 20 welfare homes in the states of Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, from which they rescued more than 400 children. According to police officials, the children, aged from 1 to 17, had been exploited by their caregivers and subjected to various forms of physical and sexual abuse.

According to the Malaysian police, sick children were not allowed to receive medical treatment until they were in a critical condition; others were reportedly sodomized by their caregivers. As Inspector General of Police Razarudin Husin told local media, “The victims were allegedly punished with heated metal objects and touched inappropriately under the guise of religious medical treatment.”

Subsequent raids on September 23 led to the rescue of 187 more children, including a boy who was seen being caned and another child who was seen being stepped on in online videos, police said.

The care homes were run by Global Ikhwan Services and Business Holdings (GISBH), a self-described “Islamic” business conglomerate with links to Al Arqam, a long-banned Islamic sect. While the police initially believed the children were orphans, it later became known that they were the children of GISBH members who had been placed in the organization’s care for the purposes of religious indoctrination. According to a report in the South China Morning Post, which cited former GISBH members, the victims “were allegedly separated from their families, who were not allowed to care for their children for fear of undermining their loyalty to the group.”

As part of the investigation, Malaysian authorities have arrested scores of people across the country and frozen bank accounts belonging to GISBH, which controls a broad business portfolio including schools, supermarkets, bread and noodle factories, pharmacies, cafes, laundromats, and other businesses. According to local media reports, the company owns assets in at least seven countries worth an estimated 325 million ringgit ($76.6 million).

GISBH is no ordinary business group. It has close links to sect called Al Arqam, or Darul Arqam, which was banned by Malaysia’s religious authorities in 1994 for “deviant” practices. The group was founded by – and operates in the long shadow of – Ashaari Muhammad, a Sufi-trained preacher who attracted a strong following in both Malaysia and abroad.

Ashaari conceived the group in 1968, when the former government religious teacher set up a halaqah (study group circle) to discuss how believers could streamline and purify their Islamic practice. As the political scientist Gordon P. Means wrote in 2009, the group began as “a relatively small movement that withdrew into its own fairly remote peasant-style, self-contained community that practiced strict adherence to an Islamic code and developed a home-based economy to produce food products that were certified as halal.”

By 1975, Ashaari had gained enough of a following to build the group’s first community center, based on a five-hectare site in Sungai Penchala, around about 20 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur. This would evolve in time into a “model” Malay village, with a mosque, a lecture hall, dormitories, homes, offices, shops, and a school.

As the group grew, Ashaari’s followers began to advance more grandiose claims about their leader. They claimed that Ashaari had supernatural powers and could communicate directly with the Prophet Muhammad. They said that he had the power to forgive the sins of Muslims, an act most Muslims believe can be done only by God, and to punish enemies. Polygamy was also common within the ranks of the Al Arqam faithful; prior to his death in 2010, Ashaari had four wives and reportedly as many as 40 children.

Despite transgressing numerous Islamic orthodoxies, Ashaari found a receptive audience among educated and mostly urban Malays. Al Arqam also gained prominence abroad. By 1994, the group claimed to have established branches in 16 countries outside of Malaysia, with a total membership of about 12,000, and with “sympathizers” numbering around 200,000. It also placed a strong emphasis on developing businesses run along strictly Islamic lines: in 1994, Al Arqam’s had acquired assets that were estimated to be worth $120 million.

The group’s growth was such that it began to attract the concern of the country’s Islamic authorities. In 1988, these authorities banned a book by Ashaari that was believed to violate core Islamic precepts. In August 1994, Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council then issued a fatwa against the sect, describing it as “deviant and deviationist.” The government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, ever sensitive to stirrings of Islamic radicalism, alleged that the group posed a security threat, making claims – never proven – that the group was training a group of 300 “holy warriors” in Thailand. At one point, Mahathir compared Ashaari to David Koresh, the head of the Branch Davidians, whose apocalyptic group was involved in a bloody siege with the FBI in Waco, Texas, during February-April 1993.

These security fears were seemingly confirmed when it was discovered that senior members of Mahathir’s United Malays National Organization were adherents of the sect. However, as Means wrote, within the Muslim community, “opinions differed over whether government authorities were more worried about the rapid recruitment of followers or the religious doctrines that were being propagated by Darul Arqam.”

After the group was banned, Ashaari fled to Thailand. There on September 2, 1994, he was arrested by the Thai authorities, at Malaysia’s request, and extradited. Another 17 leading members of Al Arqam were also detained under the Emergency-era Internal Security Act. Ashaari was not formally arrested, but was banished from his base in Kuala Lumpur to the small island of Labuan, off the coast of Borneo, where he lived under virtual house arrest until 2004. He died in Ipoh in 2010, at the age of 72.

However, Al Arqam has evolved and persisted. In 1997, one of Ashaari’s wives established GISBH, initially known as the Rufaqa Corporation, to administer the sect’s considerable business portfolio – and, some alleged, to revive its religious teachings. According to a report by the Rakyat Post, GISBH admitted on its website to being founded by “Ustaz Ashaari Muhammad” and said that its goal was “to develop the Islamic way of life in all aspects of life such as education, arts and culture, animal farming, etc.”

During the 2000s and 2010s, GISBH attracted considerable media attention after founding the Ikhwan Polygamy Club, which promoted the “benefits” for men of marrying multiple women. It later set up a similar group called the Obedient Wives Club  that counseled women to please their men sexually, to prevent them from “straying.” As one adherent of the latter told Reuters news agency in 2011, “When men cannot get satisfaction at home, they will seek it elsewhere.”

The international media coverage of these stories was not uncritical, but it did treat them as something of a curiosity – a cultural novelty from the fringes of Malaysian religious practice. With last month’s raids, the story of GISBH has taken a decidedly darker turn. Among those arrested in their aftermath were Nasiruddin Mohd Ali, the head of GISBH, and several members of the group’s advisory board. Also detained were two of Nasiruddin’s four wives and two of his children, as well as several of Ashaari’s children.

The full scale of the current sex abuse scandal remains to be seen, but with the country’s king and major politicians calling for a thorough investigation of the group, this could well mark the end of the road for Ashaari Mohammad’s empire of the devout.