METHODS

I returned to a society where I have been working on field projects as an anthropologist for the last seventeen years to study how Malaysians think and talk about, and practice, sharia.

This is a multisited and reflexive ethnographic study. I lived among and participated in some social activities and observed many others during this period of fieldwork in several states of Malaysia, including Penang, Kedah, Kelantan, Selangor, Melaka, and Negeri Sembilan. I observed, interacted with, and engaged in discussions with Malaysian Muslims and non-Muslims from various “racial” backgrounds in restaurants, food stalls, homes, offices, mosques (masjids), sharia courts, and venues of public transportation. During the six months of research funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, spanning from August 2010 to January 2011, I was based in Penang, Kedah, Kelantan, and Kuala Lumpur; whereas during the summers of 2011 and 2012 I traveled to Melaka and Negeri Sembilan and other places in Selangor from a base in Greater Kuala Lumpur. At the time, as a result of the landmark twelfth Malaysian general election, Penang, Kedah, Kelantan, and Selangor were under the administration of opposition parties, and Melaka and Negeri Sembilan remained under the control of the UMNO/BN, the ruling federal coalition.

In order to begin to ascertain how various conceptions of sharia are distributed among Muslims and non-Muslims in Malaysian society and how they articulate with other forms of cultural knowledge, I visited several organizations and institutions and interviewed members and officials. I conducted these open-ended, semi-structured interviews, in Malay and English, with representatives of Islamic and secular, nongovernmental organizations; members and supporters of the Islamic Party of Malaysia and the United Malays National Organization; students and teachers at Sufi brotherhoods (tarekat); and mosque officials. Since I have high proficiency in Malay, I gave my interlocutors the choice or followed their leads in speaking in Malay or English. Many of my Malay contacts felt more confident responding to questions in Malay or otherwise preferred communicating in Malay. Some Indian and Chinese contacts also preferred speaking with me in Malay while others gravitated toward English. I present direct quotes from spoken and written discourse in English and my translations of discourse in Malay. Through these interviews I became aware of the range of pro- and contra-sharia positions pertaining to the implementation of sharia in Malaysian society.

I also interviewed and engaged in discussions with sharia court officials—chief justices, judges, lawyers, and administrators—and government civil servants in the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (JAKIM; Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia) and scholars in the Institute of Islamic Understanding Malaysia (IKIM; Institut Kefahaman Islam Malaysia), a government think tank in the Prime Minister’s Department. These dialogues provided me with important information about the government’s pro-sharia posture and the logic of court officials overseeing the implementation of sharia in Malaysia. I also collected copies of the sharia enactments, banking acts, family and criminal law cases, law journals, and scholarly articles as sources of information on the details of sharia regulations and as additional evidence of the reasoning styles of sharia court judges as they implement sharia.

There are potentially contrasting ideas about sharia distributed across the axes of gender, age, and rural/urban locality. In order to gauge this dimension of cultural diversity, I conducted a structured survey, in Malay and English, with Malaysian Muslims that elicited their ideas about the implementation of sharia—for instance, whether they thought the current laws needed to strengthened or weakened. Some of these short surveys later turned into longer, semi-structured interviews and life histories focusing on the shifting role of sharia in participants’ everyday lives.

Throughout the main period of research for this fieldwork project, I collected “naturally occurring” language data—that is, discourse I did not elicit but which occurred over the course of speech and literacy events within various social contexts. I recorded Friday prayer sermons (khutbah), religious talks in mosques (kuliah masjid), and political speeches. In addition, I gathered written discourse in bulletins, newsletters, newspapers, human rights reports, books, and magazines. Unlike the interview data—in which I tried to prompt my interlocutors to express their views and frameworks for interpretation, thereby utilizing their models (D’Andrade 2005, 90)—these spoken and written discourses are integral to ongoing sociopolitical processes in which the speakers and authors have different aims and audiences.

I subject these forms of data—interviews, speech events, literacy events, and observations—to discourse and context analysis. I adopt the approach of many cognitive and linguistic anthropologists who use various linguistic cues to infer underlying cultural knowledge.⁸ Examining interview data and other discourse events, I construct representations of cultural models or schemas that embed, and are combined with, other knowledge and shared, negotiated, and contested across and within social groups (cf. D’Andrade 1989, 809).⁹ Similarly, I build representations of the reasoning style of sharia court officials from subjecting interview data and written court records to discourse analysis, inferring patterns of cultural logic from these forms of data. As noted above, in this redrawn anthropology of knowledge it is important to not only produce rigorous descriptions and analysis of conceptual phenomena, but also to build insightful and well-founded interpretations of the immediate and broader contexts. While the contextual component of analysis has recently been recognized and emphasized by cognitive anthropologists (Keller and Keller 1996), concentrating on contextual phenomena has in the past been stronger among symbolic/interpretative anthropologists. Moving to produce a more unified and potent anthropology of knowledge, I pay careful attention to the particular social contexts as well as the broader national and global contexts pertinent to discourses and practices of sharia in Malaysia.