CONCLUSION

Sharia and legalistic varieties of Islam entered the Malayo-Indonesian world in the thirteenth century, and various forces directed it along a curving path through the precolonial period to the present.

British forces gradually extended their control over different portions of the Malay Peninsula and some territories in northwest Borneo. They infused English law and their notions about secular/religious and public/private dichotomies into the directly and indirectly ruled components of British Malaya. Sharia laws were not eliminated from legal venues under British colonialism. Instead, they were limited in scope to personal and private matters beneath English law, which was institutionalized as the general and governing public law. Moreover, sharia laws were considered part of the overall court system until 1948, near the end of British colonial rule, when they were excluded from the federal system. The secular format of relegating state-level sharia courts and religious authorities to subordinate positions under the authority of civil forces was carried into the postcolonial period.

With political independence and modern constitutionalism, sharia came into close contact with notions of the nation-state, citizenship, and civil rights such as equality and religious freedom.

Malaysians interpret the history of sharia from various contrasting and competing perspectives. Malay secular nationalist elites imagine a linear continuity from the precolonial Islamic kingdom of Melaka to the postcolonial nation-state. In their vision, the polity has been and should be led by sovereign Malays and Muslims utilizing a “moderate” approach. While PAS supporters and some other Malaysian Muslims appreciate this elite model’s emphasis on Muslim rule, they contest the “moderate” approach, stressing that all of Allah’s directives must be implemented, including the controversial hudud penal code. Members of the Muslim feminist organization Sisters in Islam contest the conservatism they perceive in both of these pro-sharia perspectives and argue that this religious orientation is based on the rupture in Muslim identity caused by colonial domination and the influence of Islamic movements from abroad. Moreover, from some subaltern perspectives, Hindu, Buddhist, and non-Muslim origins are found for Malaysia rather the Malay Muslim origins of the dominant imaginary. Many non-Muslims interpret the Islamic resurgence as an “extremist” movement that has led to less mixing and more distance between non-Muslims and Muslims. Subalterns also appropriate the “tolerant” and “cosmopolitan” elements of elite Malay representations calling for a “return” to more friendly intergroup relations. These contrasting perspectives have increasingly challenged the hegemony of the elite Malay viewpoint over the last two decades. Nevertheless, the influential framework of the Malay political elites remains widely distributed and institutionalized in society.