CONCLUSION
In Malaysia, as in many other Muslim societies, the “modern” concepts of nation-state, nationalism, citizens, and state-enforced “criminal” law articulate with traditional Islamic notions of an omniscient and powerful God, public morality, and Muslim community (umma).
The Federal Constitution gives state-level sharia officials the authority to enforce Islamic ethical norms and public morality among Muslim citizens of the Malaysian nation-state. Sharia “criminal” laws are codified into acts, enactments, or ordinances passed by legislative bodies like sharia family codes, but they are not as standardized across the states. Thus, Muslim citizens are subject to civil and sharia law criminal codes; their individual sins and violations against Allah are also crimes punishable by state authorities. Non-Muslim citizens are also subject to federal and state restrictions on propagating their religions to Muslims. In addition, when non-Muslims are mistakenly registered or conventionally considered Muslims, they must apply to sharia authorities that have the jurisdiction to determine their religious status. From the perspective of state authorities, the Muslim umma is properly contained, together with other religious communities of citizens, within the boundaries of the nation-state and under the regulation of the bureaucratic state apparatus. Clearly, many social forces contest the hegemonic manner of combining these “modern” and Islamic notions.However, Malaysian political and religious elites have had a more difficult time combining the concepts of international human rights, liberal rights of citizens, and secular-pluralism within a traditional Islamic framework. As a rule, they accept the elements of international human rights that do not contradict Islamic principles and law. Similarly, they accept the liberal rights of citizens but limit them when it comes to upholding divine directives and preserving the Islamic faith. They also have trouble with secular-pluralist conceptions of the nation-state that would seek to rearrange official racial and religious hierarchies and remove the special status of Malays and Muslims.
Thus, while they adopt the general notion of a “modern” nation-state, Malaysian political elites hold at bay the secular-pluralist paradigm often promoted by the United States and many European countries (cf. Hallaq 2013). The fact that Malay government officials and religious leaders do not wholeheartedly embrace these contemporary Western concepts is evident from the discursive skirmishes they engage in with liberal Muslim and non-Muslim opponents of state enforcement of sharia criminal laws.In the context of increasingly intense public confrontations with liberal activists, government ulama have moved in the direction of strengthening sharia implementation and pushing against the secular format inherited from the British colonial period. They have been working on plans to institutionalize another increase in the level of discretionary punishments and the status of the sharia court system, and some PAS ulama are striving to finally implement a version of their 1993 Hukum Hudud. They are finding some public rhetorical support from UMNO-affiliated ulama, but it is not likely they will find sufficient political approval in the Parliament from UMNO politicians under the sway of prime minister Najib Razak’s Cabinet. Government ulama are also working to unify the laws across the states and Federal Territories through gaining support for legal provisions that would not allow apostasy for Muslims while providing a clear method to determine the religious status of individuals, mistakenly considered Muslims or murtad, as non-Muslims. Both government and PAS ulama continue to struggle with combining notions of the nation and its plural citizens in their traditional Islamic worldviews.
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