Description

Based on anthropological fieldwork and archival research spanning the period 1987-2012, this paper describes and analyzes continuities, transformations, and cultural politics in Malaysia’s syariah judiciary during the past few decades and in the new millennium in particular. My comments are organized into three sections. The first focuses on historical continuities, with special reference to dynamics of gender, marriage, divorce, and “lawfare”. The second involves transformations. Of chief concern here are seemingly contradictory changes entailing both Islamization and the modeling of the syariah judiciary on its more powerful and prestigious civil-law counterpart; processes of bureaucratization and corporatization; and the expansion of the syariah judiciary with respect to criminal offenses (“creeping criminalization”). The third and final section of the paper addresses some of the comparative and other implications of my findings, including questions bearing on the relative uniqueness and generalizability of the Malaysian experience with state-sponsored Islamization.

Michael G. Peletz is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, with research interests in social and cultural theory, gender, sexuality, law, religion (especially Islam), and modernity, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. His books include Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times (Routledge, 2009), Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton University Press, 2002), Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (University of California Press, 1996), and (with Aihwa Ong) Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 1995).