Responding to Extremist Islam in Southeast Asia—The 4M Way

Abstract

This concluding chapter argues that the overall regional whole-of-society response must be to gradually steer vulnerable Muslim constituencies away from “rigid and fixed” Salafabist extremism toward “flexible and tolerant” Islamic values and beliefs that are both theologically authentic and compatible with the lived realities of the multicultural, globalized societies of Southeast Asia. To this end, the chapter sketches out one potentially useful grand strategy for operationalizing such a response: the 4M Way, which refers to message content, message framing, message dissemination, and message receptivity. The 4M Way seeks to attain two strategic objectives: minimally, to ensure that powerful, culturally authentic alternative narratives gain information dominance over competing Salafabist extremist storylines within each national context, while maximally, fostering among target audiences an essential “independence of mind,” the ultimate antidote to the shared Salafabist fundamentalism that renders both soft Salafabist Islamists and their hard Salafabist Salafi Jihadi cousins, equally concerning.