NOTES

Introduction

1.See el-Zein 1977; Gilsenan 1982; Asad 1986; Varisco 2005; Kreinath 2012.

2.Scott Leonard and Michael McClure ([2004] 2008), after reviewing various approaches to myths or “ancient narratives that attempt to answer the enduring and fundamental human questions,” conclude that each approach peels away a layer contributing to a multifaceted explanation of myth.

3.Shahab Ahmed (2016, 273) argues that Asad’s linking of “orthodoxy” to his conception of Islam as a “discursive tradition” is too easily read in a prescriptive fashion that projects the production of orthodoxy as “the definitive purpose of the discursive tradition/Islam.” To the contrary, Zareena Grewal (2014), using Asad’s concepts of “discursive tradition” and “orthodoxy” in a much more open-ended and dynamic fashion, produces an informative ethnographic study of American Muslim student-travelers’ debates and redefinitions of Islamic authenticity.

4.See Williams 1977; Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1994; Ong 1999, 2002; Daniels 2005, 2013a, 2013b.

5.See Dougherty and Fernandez 1981, 1982; Shore 1991; Boyer 1993; Keller and Keller 1996; Daniels 2009.

6.See Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Kessler 1978; Ong and Peletz 1995; Peletz 2002; Farish A. Noor 2003; Fischer 2008; Frisk 2009; Hoffstaedter 2011; Sloane-White 2011.

7.In the essay “The Politics of Meaning,” Clifford Geertz (1973, 311–41) argues for the use of his interpretative approach to meaning to render political life “intelligible” and thereby theorizing the connection between politics and culture and making the discovery of general cultural conceptions less imprecise. However, many contemporary researchers, following his semantic approach to meaning, have not been able to avoid what he calls “a sort of perfected impressionism” (312).

8.See Witherspoon 1977; Agar and Hobbs 1985; Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Quinn 1982; Strauss 1992.

9.Here, I use cultural models and schemas interchangeably as shared cognitive structures, often stored in long-term memory, that bundle interrelated elements and are used for reasoning about something (see Daniels 2005, 79–80; D’Andrade 2005, 83–84).

1. Sharia in Malaysia

1.For instance, Shaikh ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, a twelfth-century Sufi scholar prominent in the genealogies of many Sufi tarekat in Southeast Asia, stated, “Cast your lower self [nafs] into the Valley of Destiny [wadi’ l-qadar] until, when its time has come, the top rung of your ladder makes contact with the door of nearness [to the Lord]. You will be welcomed by a face more lovely than all the charming beauty of this world and the hereafter. The fond affection [mawadda] between the pair of you will be complete. All obstacles and intermediaries will disappear. Then you will hear its [the lower self’s] call for help from the Valley of His Destiny: ‘Take charge of the deposits held in trust for you, and make full use of the service I can offer you. I am imprisoned over here, to your detriment or for your benefit.’ Your nearness [to the Lord] will plead on its behalf, urging a positive response to its request. At this point the hand of knowledge [‘ilm] will be extended to it, and the hand of the law [hukm] will come to its aid” (‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī 1994, 59).

2.See Daniels 2009; Harnish and Rasmussen 2011; Hardwick 2013; and Laurie Ross 2013.

3.Kahwin paksa is still practiced by some and considered part of Malay adat. It appears prominently in some genres of popular culture (see Daniels 2013, 128–29).

4.Omer Awass (2017) considers the Al-Madjella to be part of the discursive changes in sharia that took place under European influence in which Muslim scholars began to produce rigidly codified legal works emulating European models of law.

5.I use the actual names of well-known public figures, except when requested to not identify them in all or part of an interview.

6.Interview with Rahim Thamby Chik, August 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

7.Interview with Yusof bin Jantan, August 2009, Melaka, Malaysia.

8.UNESCO bestowed World Heritage City status on Melaka and Georgetown (Penang) in 2008.

9.Interview with Mohamad Suhaimi (pseud.), May 2000, Melaka, Malaysia.

10.Interview with Rajan (pseud.), January 1999, Melaka, Malaysia.

11.Interview with Abdul (pseud.), October 2010, Penang, Malaysia.

12.Interview with Mohideen (pseud.), November 1998, Melaka, Malaysia.

13.Interview with Robert Seet, February 1999, Melaka, Malaysia.

14.Interview with Haji Hassan (pseud.), August 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

15.Fernando (2012, 301) shows that between 1949 and 1951 the Communities Liaison Committee (CLC), consisting of Malay, Chinese, and Indian elites, held frank discussions addressing several “long-standing intercommunal issues such as Malay backwardness, citizenship and nationality, language and education.”

16.Hooker (1983, 180–82) notes that Malaysian Muslim scholars were in the process of Islamizing colonial “Muhammadan” laws in the postwar period. That is, non-Muslim, European, secular definitions of Islamic law were being replaced with substantive laws based on standard fiqh texts. However, he remarked that there were serious institutional restrictions to the full realization of these “Islamizing” trends—namely, the absence of an Islamic state, the overriding jurisdiction of secular over sharia courts, and the derivation of sharia court procedural rules and process from the secular model. This constitutional amendment raising the jurisdiction of sharia courts is one move in the direction of removing the roadblocks to a fuller politico-legal Islamization.

17.I did not witness any performances of these traditional arts in the Kota Bharu; however, Hardwick (2013), an anthropologist and folklorist, reports their continued existence and transformation in rural Kelantan, where they embody diverse senses of personal and normative piety.

18.Interview with Nik Abdul Aziz, July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

19.Interview with Halim (pseud.), December 1999, Melaka, Malaysia.

20.Malaysian states have enacted sharia family laws that restrict intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims. The non-Muslim party is required to convert before marriage.

21.Interview with Ching (pseud.), October 1999, Melaka, Malaysia.

2. Family Law

1.Interview with Zawati, Haryaty, and Aisha (pseud.), October 2010, Putrajaya, Malaysia.

2.In 2008, the Perlis Department of Islamic Religion and the Perlis Shariah High Court decided that Selimah Mat, a Malay woman born a Muslim, was no longer a Muslim at the time of her death and could be buried according to Buddhist rites. Her younger sister claimed Selimah Mat had traveled to Thailand and married a Buddhist and later continued to practice Buddhism up to the time of her death. Similarly, in the case of Nyonya Tahir, the Shariah High Court Negeri Sembilan decided that although she was born a Malay Muslim she was no longer a Muslim at the time of her death. Halimahton Shaari, Ngu Teck Hua, and V. Raman (2006) compared newspaper coverage of the Nyonya Tahir and Moorthy cases and found that vernacular newspapers in Malaysia tend to cater to the interests of their particular racial groupings.

3.The civil law would apply to the non-Muslim party regardless of gender, but many of the highly publicized cases of conversion within a civil law marriage involve husbands converting to Islam. The sharia law provision that provides for the dissolution of the marriage is discussed below.

4.On January 27, 2014, the Selangor Department of Islamic Religion (JAIS; Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor) intervened at a wedding in a Hindu temple and arrested the bride, the thirty-two-year-old Zarena Abdul Majid, who was registered as a Muslim and therefore not legally allowed to marry a Hindu man. She claimed that her father registered her and her siblings as Muslims but she was raised as a Hindu after he abandoned the family (SUARAM 2015).

5.In Iran, the minimum age for a girl to marry is thirteen and for a boy is fifteen; in Algeria it is twenty-one for men and eighteen for women; in Jordan it is sixteen for men and fifteen for women; in Libya it is twenty for both men and women; and in Pakistan the minimum ages are the same as in Malaysia, but there are penal sanctions for contracting child marriages. Brunei and many other Muslim societies have not specified any minimum age for marriage (Black, Esmaeili, and Hosen 2013, 117).

6.Zaleha Kamarudin (2007, 79) observes that one of the Malaysian government’s remaining reservations concerning CEDAW is that Article 16 (1)(a) conflicts with the sharia law and the laws of Malaysia in which the minimum age of marriage for women is sixteen and for men eighteen.

7.Interview with Hakim Suhaily, December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

8.See www.e-fatwa.gov.my.

9.Tariq Ramadan (2009) and Jasser Auda (2008), two prominent Muslim philosophers, contend that contemporary jurists should draw on scientific studies before issuing rulings concerning the many areas in which law and science overlap in our contemporary world.

10.Companions or Sahabat were pious supporters of Prophet Muhammad who helped him to establish the Islamic way of life and polity from 610, when he began having divine revelations, to 632, when he died. Many of his Companions led and expanded the Islamic community after his passing.

11.Interview with Dato’ Wira Syeikh Yahaya, December 2010, Alor Setar, Kedah.

12.Mas kahwin, the equivalent of Mahr in Arabic, is one of the basic Sunni marriage requirements. Pemberian are additional marriage gifts that vary across Muslim societies.

13.Interview with Zaleha Kamarudin, November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

14.Interview with Zainah Anwar, January 2011, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

15.In the Sisters in Islam booklet Islam and Polygamy (2002), Zaitun Mohamed Kasim, entertaining the question of whether polygamy was part of the Sunna of Prophet Muhammad, writes that he had a monogamous marriage with Siti Khadijah binti Khuwailid for twenty-eight years until her death—only then did he practice polygamy, which was a custom for Arabian society.

16.Interview with Norani Othman, October 2010, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

17.Nik Noriani and Norhayati (2004) of SIS argue that many of the hadiths traditional scholars selectively draw on to structure marriage and marital relations, which demean and degrade women, are weak and of dubious authenticity.

18.Interview with Norani Othman, October 2010, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

19.Ibrahim (2015, 213–14) describes Egyptian legislators, in passing Law 25 of 1929, as performing a form of “vertical pragmatic eclecticism” within the Ḥanafī school when they gave judges the authority to extend female custodianship to nine for boys and eleven for girls, shifting from the dominant view of the Ḥanafī school, which was seven for boys and nine for girls. The Law 100 of 1985 increased the ages to ten for boys and twelve for girls, and Law 4 of 2005 amended this law, fixing the age at fifteen for both boys and girls.

20.See www.e-fatwa.gov.my.

3. Criminal Law

1.Akikah (Ar. ‘aqiqa) is a ceremony performed shortly after the birth of a child in which prayers are made for the benefit of the newborn child and often one or two sheep are sacrificed to express gratitude to Allah and for a collective meal.

2.Interview with Hakim Shukri, January 2011, Melaka, Malaysia.

3.See www.e-fatwa.gov.my.

4.Hodgson (1974, 125) notes that Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Jacobite (Syrian), Coptic Christian, and Jewish communities were organized as dhimmi millets and given great authority over their own group members under the Ottoman Empire. However, Shi‘i groups that were not assimilated into the official Ḥanafī-dominated Muslim umma were overlooked and kept under careful control; but, in some cases Shi‘i judges “were given the same semi-official recognition” as Shāfi‘īs or Mālikīs.

5.Interview with Hakim Suhaily, December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

6.The Malay category pondan, and this judge’s translation of it as “transsexual,” potentially lumps together a broad range of gender and sexual diversity, including male cross-dressers, homosexuals, bisexuals, and men that identify as women.

7.Anwar Ibrahim was sacked from his position as deputy prime minister of Malaysia in 1998 and subsequently found guilty of fraud and sodomy. He served six years in prison on these charges and was convicted of sodomy again in 2015. Both of his sodomy cases were contentious and highly publicized.

8.Interview with Zawati, Haryaty, and Aisha (pseud.), October 2010, Putrajaya, Malaysia.

9.Interview with Norani Othman, October 2010, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

10.Holland et al. (2007, 14) defined “dramas of contention” as “conflicts and differences of opinion that captured public attention.” Their team of researchers focused on several public political events to highlight critical dilemmas facing American democracy.

11.Interview with Hajjah Haznita, January 2011, Melaka, Malaysia.

12.Hoffstaedter (2011, 179–81) states that religious authorities patrolling for khalwat and consumption of alcohol focus on mid-range and cheap hotels and student hangout spots in recreational and parking lots rather than top hotels, bars, and clubs. After a raid on a high-class nightclub in Kuala Lumpur in 2005 in which the children of some of Malaysia’s elite were arrested, the government decreed that religious authorities stay away from five-star establishments, arguing that enforcement of sharia laws in these entertainment venues would disrupt tourism and give Malaysia a bad image.

13.Interview with Dato Hj. Hussin, October 2010, Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia.

14.Interview with Abu Bakar, November 2010, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia.

15.Interview with Datuk Haji Mohamad, November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

16.The government of Brunei Darussalam issued its Syariah Penal Code Order in 2013 and began the gradual rollout of its implementation in May 2014. It includes hudud, qisas, and diya and in some cases applies to both Muslims and non-Muslims (see Daniels 2014b).

17.Interview with Zaleha Kamarudin, November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

18.In his critique of Kelantan’s hudud bill, Kamali (1998, 208–10) observes that although the penal code states that it will just be applied to Muslims, it also allows non-Muslims the choice to have hudud penalties applied to them. He also notes that the provisions on abetment and conspiracy can be applied to any persons, including non-Muslims, who aid and abet a Muslim to commit any of the offenses in the code. Kamali argues that both of these aspects of the bill violate the Federal Constitution, which declares that sharia laws can only be applied to Muslims. Overall, he criticizes the bill for its legal conformism (taqlid) and imitative orientation, and calls for contemporary jurists to engage in ijtihad in devising Islamic penal policies that seek to realize the overriding values and objectives of sharia and that fit contemporary social and cultural conditions.

19.In the case of Siti Fatimah Tan binti Abdullah v. Majlis Agama Islam Pulau Pinang in 2006, the Shariah High Court reached a different decision after reviewing the plaintiff’s life after her conversion for marriage. She grew up in a Buddhist family and was named Tan Ean Hung. Her conversion to Islam was filed in 1998 and she was registered under the name of Siti Fatimah Tan binti Abdullah. The following year she married Ferdoun Aslanian, an Iranian citizen, and after four months of marriage he left her. According to the evidence presented in court, he did not practice Islam and never taught Siti Fatimah anything about the religion. She continued to practice Buddhism and eat pork, and one witness stated that he never saw Siti Fatimah’s husband pray in an Islamic fashion although he did see him praying in Buddhist fashion with Fatimah before an image of a Buddhist deity. From this evidence, it was apparent that she did not embrace or practice Islam after formally converting for marriage. The Shariah High Court decided in favor of Siti Fatimah, ruling that she was no longer a Muslim and ordering the Islamic Religious Council to annul the documents of her conversion to Islam.

20.Interview with Zaleha Kamarudin, November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

21.The words listed as not to be used in reference to non-Islamic religion are Allah, Firman Allah, ulama, hadith, ibadah, Kaabah, kadi, Illahi, wahyu, mubaligh, syariah, qiblat, haji, mufti, rasul, iman, dakwah, Injil, salat, khalifah, wali, fatwa, imam, nabi, and sheikh. The expressions listed as not to be used in reference to non-Islamic religion are Subhanallah, Alhamdulillah, Lailahaillallah, Walillahilham, Allahu Akbar, Insyaallah, Astaghfirullahal ‘Azim, Tabaraka Allah, Masyaallah, and Lahaula Walaquata Illabillahilaliyil Azim.

4. Economics

1.Wong Chin Huat (2016), a political and social analyst at the Penang Institute, a PKR think tank, writes about halal trolleys at hypermarts, a recently launched sharia-compliant airline, and plans for a halal-certified train as instances of “communal segregation” that sharpen ethnic and religious divisions as Malay political elites turn toward constructing a more authoritarian state.

2.See Fischer 2008; Sloane-White 2011, 2017; Rudnyckyj 2013; and Elder 2017.

3.Omer Awass (2017) notes that Islamic scholars in the International Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) use the term ṣukūk to refer to Islamic stocks rather than bonds because they don’t consider the latter to be sharia-compliant.

4.See www.e-fatwa.gov.my.

5.Interview with Zainul and Hamidah (pseud.), October 2010, Putrajaya, Malaysia.

6.Interview with Cik Firdaus Koh (pseud.), August 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

7.Interview with Cik Tariq (pseud.), July 2012, Gombak, Selangor, Malaysia.

8.Interview with Dr. Burhan (pseud.), August 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

9.Hallaq (2013, 147) argues that the sharia and its moral economic system are incompatible with modern capitalism. Similar to many of my Malaysian Muslim interlocutors, Hallaq contends that modern Islamic banking and finance “are Islamic merely in name, reflecting nearly nothing of what Islam as a moral system is all about” (151).

10.Interview with Abdul Latif (pseud.), July 2009, Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia.

11.Interview with Ustaz Othman (pseud.), July 2009, Alor Setar, Kedah, Malaysia.

12.Global Ikhwan organized a Polygamy Club and Obedient Wives Club to disseminate its teaching of returning wholeheartedly to the Qur’an and Sunna for modeling domestic relations. The Obedient Wives Club published a controversial book titled Islamic Sex: Fighting Jews to Return Islamic Sex to the World in 2011, which was banned in Malaysia.

13.In some of Imam Ashaari’s controversial teachings that led to bans on many of his publications, and to the eventually banning of Darul Arqam, he taught that As-Suhaimi, the founder of Aurad Muhammadiah, received his instruction directly from Prophet Muhammad and would return as the Imam Mahdi and save the Muslim umma on the eve of doomsday (Jomo and Ahmad 1992, 84–85; Kamarulnizam 2003, 111). I think Darul Arqam / Global Ikhwan members believed that Imam Ashaari was one of the Mujaddid that a hadith states will be sent at the beginning of every century to revive and restore Islam.

14.After a successful reelection in 2013, Nik Abdul Aziz retired and passed on the chief minister post to his deputy, Ahmad Yaakob. Following a prolonged illness, he died on February 12, 2015, after which Haron Din became the spiritual leader of PAS.

15.See Gomez 2006; Ramanathan and Ahmad Fauzi 2006; and Daniels 2013a.

16.See Muhammad Syukri Salleh (1999, 244–45) for a discussion of PAS efforts to achieve several preliminary subgoals, including promotion of these three concepts, to prepare for the full execution of sharia laws under the administration of an Islamic state.

17.Douglas Raybeck (1996, 108–41), an ethnographer of Kelantan in the late 1960s, reports the presence of prostitution, nightclubs, and other “shady activities.”

18.In 2010, following an extensive investigation into two high-profile cases, the federal anticorruption agency declared that they found no evidence that chief minister Nik Aziz has committed any acts of corruption (Sinarharian 2010d).

19.Interview with Cik Wan Azhar (pseud.), December 2010, Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia.

20.Personal communication with Patricia A. Hardwick, 2011.

21.PAS leaders named this exposition after the Chinese Muslim admiral Cheng Ho, who led a large fleet of ships for the Ming emperor from China to Southeast Asia and other regions during the early fifteenth century.

22.Interviews with Dato’ Zainuddin, November 2010, and Wan Nik, December 2010, in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia.

23.Interview with Cik Hong (pseud.), December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

24.In the post–World War II context, socialist ideas had considerable influence on movements in Muslim-majority societies, including those in Southeast Asia. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the Islamic resurgence channeled these movements along more normative Islamic lines, which tended to emphasize Islamic proscriptions against riba and haram consumption rather than the application of sharia to economic production or the capitalist economic system in general (see S. M. Yusuf 1988).

25.The concept “communities of practice” has been used within a practice-based approach to speak of aggregates of people who engage in some joint activities (Lave and Wenger 1991; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Wenger 1998). I attempt to demonstrate how the concept can be used within an “anthropology of knowledge” approach that accounts for the dynamic relationships between knowledge and practice (see Keller and Keller 1996).

26.In Malaysia, where the government is more repressive of new Islamic movements, the mufti of the Federal Territories issued a fatwa banning ESQ, asserting that it promotes free interpretation of the Qur’an and a conception of pluralism suggesting that all religions are the same (Antara 2010).

27.See Holland et al. 2007; Gregory 2007; Song 2009; and Zhang 2010.

5. Pro-Sharia Discourses

1.See Kamarulnizam 2003; Liow 2009; Daniels 2013b; and Hardwick 2013.

2.See Singh (2009) and Daniels (2013a) for analysis of Malaysia’s twelfth general election of 2008, and Weiss (2013) and Case (2014) on Malaysia’s thirteenth general election of 2013.

3.Md. Asham bin Ahmad (2011), a senior IKIM fellow, argues that Muslims should derive the meaning for “moderation” or wasaṭiyya from an understanding of the Qur’anic phrase ummat wasaṭ, which clearly describes the “middle position” of the Muslim community. Burhani (2012) describes the Nahdlatul Ulama usage of this concept in contemporary Indonesia, which is more theological than the political usage in the post-9/11 United States, where some Muslim groups use it to distinguish themselves from extremists.

4.Keller and Lehman (1991) argue that local people embed two Polynesian metaphysical concepts, hkano (material essence) and ata (efficacious image), in a larger theory of a domain of knowledge that includes premises about the existence of material and immaterial things.

5.Interview with Nik Abdul Aziz, July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

6.Hallaq (2013) argues that the properties of the paradigmatic Euro-American nation-state are incompatible with those of the paradigmatic Islamic moral-legal system of governance. He recommends that Muslims avoid adopting the modern nation, with all its immoral baggage, and rather that they organize institutions of Islamic governance and engage their Western counterparts in language they can understand in the process of positioning the moral as the central domain (168). In the ethnographic case of PAS in Malaysia, it is clear they intend to transform many aspects of the modern nation-state to suit their goals.

7.See Sinarharian 2010e, 2010a.

8.See Utusan 2010b; The Star 2010.

9.IKRAM, the popular name for this organization, is not an acronym. In Arabic, ikrām means “honor,” “glory,” and “generosity.”

10.Interview with Zaid Kamaruddin, December 2010, Melawati, Selangor, Malaysia.

11.Interview with Ustaz Zakaria (pseud.), November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

12.Hallaq (2013, 71) notes that jurists (representing “legislative” power) in premodern forms of Islamic governance were generally private unpaid scholars closer to the common social ranks rather than the higher levels of “executive” power. Describing the position of ulama in contemporary Malaysia, Azza Basarudin (2016, 138) states that “they participate in reproducing the religious monopoly and, in that process, are vulnerable to co-optation by regimes of power dependent on their knowledge.”

13.Federal Constitution Article 11(1) states “Every person has the right to profess and practice his religion and, subject to Clause (4), to propagate it.” Article 11(4), the caveat to this provision, clarifies that “[s]tate law and in respect to the Federal Territories of Kuala Lumpur, Labuan and Putrajaya, federal law may control or restrict the propagation of any religious doctrine or belief among persons professing the religion of Islam.” Several states have issued such enactments specifying restrictions on the propagation of non-Islamic religions to Muslims.

14.In June 2015, the PAS congress approved a motion to sever ties with DAP after it distanced itself from PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang over the push to implement hudud in Kelantan (Today 2015).

6. Contra-Sharia Discourses

1.Aihwa Ong (1989, 1990) argued that Malay women enjoyed relatively high status vis-à-vis men due to a customary emphasis on gender complementarity and bilateral kinship principles. Describing the context when the UMNO-led secular state launched its own “Islamization campaign” amid rising dakwah movements in the 1980s, Ong (1990, 272) contends that “the consequence of this struggle of capitalist state versus Islamic umma has been an intensification of gender inequality in Malay society.” Nevertheless, several kinship studies conducted prior to the Islamic resurgence indicate that the cultural model of asymmetrical gender relations embraced by the UMNO-led state and Islamic NGOs was long rooted in Malay society (Djamour 1959; Firth 1943; Banks 1983). Based primarily on fieldwork conducted in the late 1960s, Banks (1983, 67) explains the presence of both a male-slanted gender hierarchy and the “great freedom of Malay women” by noting that “Malays simply do not see religious law as a coercive instrument, but as a tool for the understanding of the social and natural world and as a guide to the creation of a viable social order. Freedom in certain spheres does not imply equality before the law in all others, nor do unequal laws imply coercive interpretations.”

2.Interview with Zawati, Haryaty, and Aisha, October 2010, Putrajaya, Malaysia; and with Zaleha Kamarudin, November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

3.Sylva Frisk (2009) suggests that an increase in female religiosity has opened up spaces for women to create more authority for themselves in Malaysia. She argues “that women, through the Islamic discourse on piety, are able to negotiate and transform gender relations and actively shape their lives in correspondence to ideals found in orthodox Islam” (23).

4.Interview with Norani Othman, October 2010; and Zainah Anwar, January 2011, in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

5.SIS has filed for a judicial review of this religious edict, which was entered into a gazette on July 31, 2014 (Malay Mail Online 2014c). The fatwas Malaysian muftis issue are published and subsequently become law.

6.Interview with Doctor Ramasamy, August 2010, Penang, Malaysia.

7.Interview with P. Ramakrishnan, August 2010, Penang, Malaysia.

8.Interview with Tan Seng (pseud.), November 2010, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

7. Individuals: Views, Voices, and Practices

1.Lara Deeb (2006) provides examples of Shia women in Lebanon who performed public piety in other ways but did not currently wear the clothing style most in the community considered expressive of piety. In contrast, Shahram Khosravi (2008, 123) describes how unveiled female Iranian airline passengers on international flights line up for the lavatory to put on their veils and lighten their makeup before landing in Tehran.

2.In January 2015 a national scandal ensued after a video went viral on social media showing three Malay Muslim fans, wearing tudung, being physically embraced by members of the Korean idol group B1A4. Some of my Malaysian Muslim friends posted the video on Facebook. According to normative sharia proscriptions, unmarried members of the opposite sex are not supposed to be engaging in such body contact. For many, it was even more shameful for Muslim women wearing hijab to be flouting sharia norms in this manner.

3.In Brunei’s Syariah Penal Code, implemented in 2013, any non-Muslim committing zina with a Muslim is subject to hudud punishment if he or she is proved guilty of this hadd offense. Non-Muslim acts of theft, sodomy, and contempt of Prophet Muhammad or any of the prophets of Allah are also punishable.

4.In one narrated hadith of Prophet Muhammad, which appears in Ṣaḥiḥ Al-Bukhārī and Muslim, he stated, “By Him in Whose Hand is my life, when a man calls his wife to bed, and she does not respond, the One Who is above heaven becomes displeased with her until he (her husband) becomes pleased with her” (Al-Imam Abu Zakariya Yahya 1999, 274).

5.Interview with Lili Zohail (pseud.), December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

6.Interview with Aliza Abu Bakar (pseud.), November 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

7.Interview with Mohamad Zuhaidi (pseud.), July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

8.These are optional ritual prayers beyond the five daily obligatory prayers that entail prostrations and glorification of Allah and/or supplications. Hajat prayers focus on a particular intention or request for Allah’s blessings, and Istikhārah prayers ask for Allah’s guidance in making a decision. Tahajjud prayers are optional prayers of worship that may not involve any request of divine assistance.

9.Interview with Wan Hafizi (pseud.), December 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

10.PERKIM (Pertubuhan Kebajikan Islam Malaysia; Malaysian Muslim Welfare Organization) assists with the process of conversion and provides classes and seminars for new Muslims and those interested in converting.

11.Interview with Cik Firdaus Koh (pseud.), August 2012, Kelana Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

Conclusion

1.F. K. Lehman (2000) argues that cultural schemas are used to “ ‘govern’ behavior immediately without having to generate from scratch, from the axioms and first principles of our underlying knowledge, a ‘solution’ to a task at hand. As such, we can think of them... as output theorems of our underlying knowledge bases.” Indeed, the cultural models or schemas I infer from discourses and practices that are used to reason and partially govern behavior can be viewed as these sorts of heuristic mental models of a much broader corpus of knowledge and underlying cognitive system.