The pondok or madrasa has for centuries been a core institution of Malay society, as the centre where the indigenous elite were trained. The pondok school takes its name from the dormitories in which the students (predominantly male) live, often simple huts clustered around the home of the teacher or teachers. In the past, states like Kelantan, Trengganu and Patani (which today is a province in Southern Thailand) were known for their pondoks that produced successive generations of Muslim scholars who in turn contributed to the Malay world of letters. Pondok schools also played an important role in the development of early Muslim political consciousness and were instrumental in the early stages of the anti-colonial struggle in Malaya, much in the same way that madrasas did in many other colonised Muslim societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter looks at the phenomenon of the pondok schools of Malaysia with reference to the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), that was formed in 1951. It will consider the development of both the Malaysian Islamic party and the network of pondok schools from which it emerged, and which it later nurtured and developed as its political power base. It has to be noted from the outset that the pondok schools of Malaysia have been the subject of intense debate since the beginning of the twentieth century, and that until today there are those in Malaysia – notably the leaders of the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party – who regard these institutions with some degree of suspicion, branding them as schools that teach a conservative interpretation of Islam. The Malaysian government has been particularly critical of those pondoks and madrasas that are known to have links with PAS, and the criticism of PAS's madrasas and pondoks as training centres for potential radical militants and as institutions that preach hate against the state has remained a constant leitmotif in Malaysian politics until the present day while the country is under the leadership of Mahathir's successor, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Since the events of 11 September 2001, many Muslim countries have redoubled their efforts to control, monitor and even shut down these institutions that have been cast in a negative light, as bastions of conservative Muslim thinking and training centres for violent Islamist groups.