Introduction

With a continuous stream of news about various barbaric actions committed by the “Islamic State", and the recent wave of jihadist attacks in our own back­yard all across Europe, Islam and Islamic law, and its potential tensions with basic human rights norms, are once more at the forefront of public conscious­ness.

syariah is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy as set forth in the echr (...) It is difficult to declare one’s respect for democ­racy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on Syariah, which clearly diverges from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervenes in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts.^{[765] [766]}

Answering questions and assertions about the compatibility of Islamic law with liberal democracies with a plain ‘no’ misses out on a vital part of the real issue, overlooking the complexity and diversity of Islamic religion and Islamic legal practices.

In this chapter we will discuss the issue of the accommodation, application and reform of Islamic law in Malaysia. This country provides an important op­portunity to rethink and discuss the relationship between the state and reli­gious practices, including the accommodation of Islamic Law, in multi-faith democratic constitutional states. Malaysia already long serves as a major point of reference in international and academic research and in literature on multi­culturalism, plural states and modern Islamic societies.^[767] Malaysia is famously known for its vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim-majority soci­ety.

the conventional areal foci of Islamic studies - that is the Middle East and North Africa, as Malaysia, a religiously and ethnically diverse Muslim- majority country, in recent decades, has experienced stunning economic transformation and patterns of sustained growth that are probably sec­ond to none in the Muslim world.^[769]

Peletz even refers to Shamsul’s description of the Malaysian case as “the shin­ing light of moderate Islam”.^[770] Its political leaders of the dominant party umno are also eager to underscore this and even label Malaysia as a model for other Islamic countries. In 1994,^[771] Horowitz extensively described the Malaysian Islamic family law reforms of the 1980s. He perceived the resulting system of Islamic courts and legislation in Malaysia as very “Western”, “modern”, “rational” and - at the same time - “Islamic”.^[772] Horowitz’s analysis drew our attention to Malaysia being an interesting and relevant case, which could eventually also relativise the widely shared perception that Syariah is funda­mentally incompatible with the principles of a democratic constitutional state and human rights. The Malaysian approach we explored showed, at least in its initial phase, that accommodation and a strong form of legal pluralism does not per se defeat [and annihilate] or erode the democratic constitutional state or fundamental notions of liberal democracy.^[773] On the contrary, as Horowitz observed, in the eighties of the previous century, academics, lawyers and other parties involved in the abovementioned Islamic family law reforms in Malaysia, argued that ‘Islamic law, properly understood, is a regime of rights’.