CONCLUSION

These different understandings of Islamic ethical imperatives within Malaysia can be compared with those in many countries throughout the Muslim world. For instance, the Middle Eastern Gulf States, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and Sudan have all moved to establish a sharia-compliant financial system.

The concept of religious ethical models elucidates how core religious beliefs and higher-level goals articulate with other notions and ideological formulations giving rise to various subgoals and motives. It provides us with a powerful analytical framework for examining prosperity and liberation theologies, spiritual economies, and alternative moral economies within and across belief systems. While the ESQ and PAS cultural models share core beliefs and higher-level goals of accruing good deeds for the afterlife, their subgoals and motives vary in accordance with their ideological formulations—those of a mystical, market-oriented new religious movement, or a normative, sharia-oriented Islamic political party. Moreover, these contrasting ideological formulations were forged in different sociopolitical contexts. ESQ emerged in late New Order secular nationalist Indonesia where Islam, playing an increasingly important role in the public sphere, still had no formal relationship with the state. PAS emerged from within UMNO during the transition to political independence and grew to adulthood in a Malaysia, with Islam constitutionally recognized as the religion of the federation, which was becoming increasingly Islamized.

Furthermore, this conceptualization of Islamic ethical models allows us to illuminate convergences between a variety of Islamic revival movements and economic globalization within Malaysia. First, UMNO-BN revival projects embody combinations of Islamic ethics with capitalist industrialization, consumerism, and corporate development. These projects largely instill Islamic ethics on a broad structural and bureaucratic level. Second, diverse pro-sharia Islamic NGO members and supporters participating in the “Islamic economy” embody combinations of Islamic ethics with ideas of individual and collective responsibility, and corporations as “miniature Islamic states” implementing sharia within personnel relations (Sloane-White 2011, 2017).

Although capitalist economic values remain dominant in Malaysian society, these diverse social forces infusing sharia economic models into consumption, distribution, and production serve to de-secularize these aspects of life in Malaysia. The Malaysian state has developed and organized a highly regulated system of Islamic banks and finance as an alternative to conventional banking services. Pushed by Darul Arqam and some other dakwah movements, the Malaysian state has promoted consumption of halal products as part of its nationalist and international strategies of development within the global capitalist system. It has also centralized state control over certification of halal goods industries. Kelantan state officials have initiated plans to turn Kelantan into a regional hub for the circulation of goods made in China, especially halal products, which bodes well for the interests of local traders. The PAS-led Kelantan state government has broadly instilled the ethical cultural model—notions of ubudiah, ma’suliah, and itqan and the pious worldly consciousness they constitute—into consumption and distribution processes. They have contributed to the explosion of interest-free banking and provided people with financial avenues to aid the general welfare while ridding themselves of haram money. Gold and silver coins (sharia currency) have been minted and put into partial circulation for barter trade and the storing of wealth. Darul Arqam’s ma-ash system and the Kelantan government’s innovative funds and “compassionate” state budgets have managed to construct modes of redistribution of resources to the needy segments of the population.

Darul Arqam and the Kelantan state government’s mode of redistribution offers a significant and viable alternative to neoliberal capitalist policies that are dominant in the United States and influential in many other parts of the world.²⁷ For instance, in the United States after the government bailed out banks in 2007–8 and prolonged tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in 2010, workers’ collective bargaining rights came under assault and national budgets were proposed that threatened to eliminate many programs for needy segments of the population. The wealthiest echelon of US society, the “super citizens” of neoliberal capitalism, would do well to be reminded of what Tuan Guru Nik Aziz said to the highly paid in Kelantan—that is, that some of the wealth they have accumulated is not for them, but for others.

In addition, corporate sharia elites and Darul Arqam / Global Ikhwan leaders implant Islamic ethics into economic production processes. Despite sharia advisors’ directions of adjusting their moral concerns to the dictates of conducting profitable business in the broader environment, corporate sharia elites instill Islamic ethics into both the workplace and personnel rules and responsibilities. Darul Arqam’s model entails the emplacement of pious ethics on macro and micro levels within a wholly Islamic economic system directed toward fulfilling religious aims and achieving movement goals. However, for the Kelantan state government, in stark contrast to distribution, economic production processes reflect a relatively limited infusion of UMI and the need for greater economic ijtihad—the interpretation and application of divine directives. PAS ulama appear theoretically unprepared and politically and economically constrained by the hegemony of federal monopolies and their dependence on the Malay peasant base. Rather than motivating industrial development, pious Islamic ethics, deflected by PAS scholars’ fears of the deleterious effects of capital accumulation, tends to slow it down.