Two decades ago, I was sent to Malaysia as a reporter to answer a question that hovered over Turkey’s political imagination. Would it become like Malaysia?

At the time, the comparison carried a very specific anxiety. Not Iran, too distant and too abrupt, but something slower and more incremental. A form of Islamisation that would settle into institutions and everyday life without fully announcing itself.

We find ourselves asking similar questions again about Turkey under the AKP. And in a curious twist of timing, I was back in Kuala Lumpur last week, this time not as a reporter but for a conference on Islamism.

The comparison looks different now. Turkey did not become Malaysia. It became authoritarian, a trajectory that cannot be reduced to its Islamist background but is better understood as part of a broader right-wing ideological turn. Nor did Malaysia or Indonesia follow Turkey’s path. But all three have moved along a market-driven trajectory that has, in turn, reshaped Islamist praxis.

What has shifted is Islamism itself. Its encounter with power and the market has altered its priorities, its language, and its social presence in ways that are only now becoming clearer.

I try to unpack that shift here.