The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

ological objections. Second, we suggest that it can be traced to Australia’s  

longstanding embrace of political over legal forms of constitutionalism in 

respect of the protection of individual rights or resistance to both express and 

implied forms of rights-based judicial review.

What does this tell us more generally about the drawing, scope and oper-

ation of ‘the invisible constitution’ in the form of constitutional implica-

tions from a comparative perspective? It suggests that, in each country, the 

acceptance and scope of implications will be shaped by a number of factors, 

135 

Ely, Supra note 130, on footnote 4 in United States v. Carolene Products Co, 304 U.S. 144 

(1938).

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Constitutional Implications in Australia 

375

including formal features of the written or visible constitution, such as its lan-

guage and structure and more informal aspects of local constitutional culture, 

including a constitution’s history and relationship to contemporary legal and 

political understandings. Ultimately these factors intersect and interact in 

complex ways, and cannot be analysed independently. But they are important 

factors to consider if we are to try to understand the invisible constitution in 

comparative perspective.

In Australia, we suggest, the current dualism in the High Court’s role in 

protecting constitutional structure versus individual rights is sustained by a 

combination of a legal interpretive orthodoxy that emphasises the importance 

of ‘text and structure’ in the interpretation of the Constitution, prior textual 

and structural choices by the drafters of the Australian Constitution, which 

give limited express support to individual rights and political-cultural obsta-

cles to achieving change to this position via either formal or informal means.

136

 

If any one of these three dimensions explaining Australian constitutional prac-

tice were to change, we believe, it might be enough to create a more robust 

rights-based invisible constitution in Australia. But without such a change, 

it seems likely that the trajectory of ‘the invisible constitution’ in the form of 

constitutional implications in Australia will remain firmly bifurcated.

136 

Compare Roux, Supra note 91.

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376

13.1. Introduction

Religion has become the great fault line of the Malaysian constitutional order. 

Contemporary Malaysian politics and adjudication are divided by competing 

views over the constitutional identity of the modern Malaysian state as secular 

or Islamic. At the heart of this debate is Article 3(1) of the Federal Constitution 

of Malaysia, which declares ‘Islam is the religion of the Federation; but other 

religions may be practised in peace and harmony’. Over the last two decades, 

the clause constitutionalising Islam as the state religion has increasingly been 

pitted as being in tension with the right of religious freedom guaranteed under 

Article 11(1).

1

 This chapter considers the invisible constitution in connection 

with the Malaysian Constitution’s religion clauses. It explores the conceptual 

aspect of the unwritten, extra-textual influences surrounding the interpreta-

tion of the religion clauses, and also examines the deeper foundations of the 

constitutional framework underlying the visible text of Article 3(1).

Malaysia’s religion clauses provide a focal point for examining the invisible 

constitution in two main ways. The first aspect of invisibility is connected to 

the expansion of Islam’s position in the constitutional order by political and 

judicial actors through means outside textual constitutional change. Although 

the text of Article 3(1) has remained unchanged since the nation’s found-

ing, Islam’s role in the Malaysian Constitution has been expanded through 

unwritten, extra-textual means in contemporary constitutional discourse. The 

invisible elevation of Islam’s supremacy in recent decades has taken place 

through expansive judicial interpretations of Article 3(1) by prioritising Islam’s 

place over other constitutional norms. This approach, in effect, amounts 

to a claim that Article 3(1) gives rise to an implication of Islam’s primacy in 

Malaysia’s constitutional order. The invisible Islamisation of judicial discourse  

1 

Fed. Const. (Malay.), Article 11(1) (‘[e]very person has the right to profess and practice his 

religion  . . .’).

13

Malaysia’s Invisible Constitution

Yvonne Tew

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