CONCLUSION

From my excursions to JAKIM, IKIM, and sharia courts, I was able to glean several important points about discourses of sharia in Malaysian society. First, civil servants educated under the ongoing Islamic resurgence fill the ranks of the religious bureaucracy.

Their efforts to rationalize, modernize, and standardize the administration of Islamic law are intertwined with processes of raising the prominence and influence of Islam. Second, while many of these children of the Islamic resurgence express commitment to the Federal Constitution as the supreme law of the country, they also consider the secular format inherited from the colonial era as increasingly problematic. Third, their cultural models of sharia appear to differ both from those of the Sisters in Islam that entail ideas of gender equality familiar to many from Western societies and from those of the Malay Muslim political authorities that involve a stronger commitment to positioning sharia within an overarching secular format. While working within the common law and civil law structures inherited from the British colonial period, their legal provisions and reasoning style indicate a basis in a traditional Islamic worldview. Fourth, these civil servants of the religious bureaucracy combine their traditional Islamic ideas with notions of making Malaysia a well-organized, modern nation. Their perspectives represent a merging of ideas of the paradigmatic modern nation-state with those of the paradigmatic Islamic moral-legal system (cf. Hallaq 2013). In some ways they converge and diverge from perspectives of the Islamic Party of Malaysia and UMNO government officials. Fifth, there appears to be a tug-of-war over the shape of sharia family laws between Muslim conservative forces, liberal rights activists, and Muslim feminist reformers. The Malaysian state has sought to navigate a middle position between these forces in the dynamic context of the ongoing Islamic revival and an upsurge of opposition electoral politics. Finally, the current sharia family laws indicate reform within a traditional jurisprudential framework that has been more responsive to discourses from Muslim feminists than from liberal rights activists.

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Source: Daniels Timothy P.. Living Sharia: Law and Practice in Malaysia. University of Washington Press,2017. — 280 p.. 2017

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