Sharia and the Anthropology of Knowledge
IN TRYING TO BE MUSLIM, NORHAFSAH (2012, 11), A THIRTY-NINE-year-old Malay Muslim woman, shares her ongoing journey searching for more knowledge about her religion, Islam:
Now I understand that...
being a Muslim is submitting totally to the Will of God. That includes [abiding] by the teachings of the Quran and our Prophet Muhammad (saw). A Muslim must also love his/her fellow Muslim brothers and sisters and wish for their success, happiness and a place in heaven. A Muslim must adhere to the five pillars of Islam. A Muslim must apply Islamic way of living in everyday life. A Muslim has to balance between this world and the thereafter. A Muslim must prevent evil and encourage good. A Muslim must not let his/her fellow Muslim suffer or go hungry whilst he lives in the ivory tower with plenty of food to last a lifetime. A Muslim should not be too attached to worldly material things. A Muslim must protect Islam and not betray fellow Muslims or their religion.Although she was born into a Muslim family in 1973, Norhafsah realized she had little understanding of Islam. She describes her personal quest and struggle to be a good person through “following the teachings of Quran and hadith” and wholeheartedly accepting God’s “Decrees” (132). The Holy Qur’an, originally an oral text that was later transcribed, is considered by Muslims to be revealed knowledge, which God sent to Prophet Muhammad. Hadith are records of Prophet Muhammad’s exemplary sayings and actions, his Sunna. These are the two main sources for sharia (Ar. sharī‘a) taken in its theological sense, as Islamic law, norms, and moral values.
Stories like Norhafsah’s, of personal growth and transformation through sharia, are often overshadowed by media reports and political rhetoric that paint it as a dangerous religious ideology, a savage penal code, and a threat to civilized secular and democratic life.
In September 2010, the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank, issued a report titled Shariah: The Threat to America, arguing that it is an “alien and barbaric legal code” and “supremacist and totalitarian” ideology that threatens American freedom and secularism enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. The report’s conclusion recommends legally proscribing any promotion of sharia, such as sharia-compliant finance; charging with sedition Islamic figures that support sharia; restricting the immigration of sharia supporters; treating those who espouse sharia as hate groups; and generally striving to make the United States sharia-free (141–44). In the context of the post-9/11 “war on terror,” discourses of getting tougher on Islam and Muslims held heightened political currency. Several right-wing preachers and politicians spoke of Islam as a threat, calling for hearings and discriminatory policies. Thirteen US states, embracing this conservative model of sharia as an extremist strategy, considered adopting legislation forbidding sharia (Ali and Duss 2011). Fears motivated by these representations of an ominous “religious ideology” were palpable for many Americans when “confronted” with Muslims praying or wearing modest, Islamic-style attire in airports.Liberal think tanks and Islamic organizations have responded to these representations. In March 2011, the Center for American Progress, a “progressive” educational institute, published Understanding Sharia Law, which criticized and debunked the conservative interpretations of sharia, especially those in the Center for Security Policy’s report. The authors described sharia as “personal religious law and moral guidance” and the “ideal law of God as interpreted by Muslim scholars over centuries aimed toward justice, fairness, and mercy” (Ali and Duss 2011, 3). They also contend that most Muslims, as well as academics studying Islam, adopt a broad definition conceiving of sharia as dynamic and multifaceted.
Contesting conservative ideas, they argue that it is important to properly target the extremist fringe in Muslim communities and not to cast too wide a net so as to alienate the more moderate majority. Besides, Muslims, like believers in other “faiths,” they remind us, are engaging in ongoing conversations about the place of religion in “modernity.” The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and other Islamic organizations initiated projects to educate the public about the “proper” understanding of sharia. In May 2011, ICNA mobilized an educational campaign, including seminars in several cities, special editions of its magazine the Message International, and distribution of various forms of information on websites and throughout society aiming to correct what they considered “Islamophobic” misrepresentations and intolerance. Saulat Pervez, author of an article in a special edition of the Message International, states that “while Shariah provides the legal framework for the foundation and functioning of a society, it also details moral, ethical, social and political codes of conduct for Muslims at an individual and collective level” (2011, 24). Overall, ICNA argued that calls for proscribing sharia violate principles of pluralism and religious freedom in the United States.Although these pro- and contra-sharia discourses are only a small part of the diverse ways we talk and think about sharia, they demonstrate that discourses about sharia are integral to sociopolitical dynamics in American society. Discourses of sharia are also enmeshed in diachronic processes in other societies with Muslim minorities, such as the United Kingdom, France, China, and the Philippines, as well as Muslim-majority societies such as Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Sharia dynamics—the roles that discourses and practices of sharia play in sociopolitical processes—is an important topic for anthropological investigation. Scholars of religion, sociology, media studies, and anthropology have often concentrated on deconstructing these discourses and demonstrating that they produce Muslim “others” or represent only a small portion of the multiple interpretations of sharia held by Muslims.
Such a task is not difficult in this case. However, it would be more illuminating to direct our anthropological description and analysis on the cultural creativity and knowledge these discourses entail and the ways they articulate with broader sociopolitical processes. Social actors’ cultural complexity is routinely elided, given contemporary theoretical conventions, in the haste to provide “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1973) and examine power relations (Foucault 1994). These are definitely important aspects of social and cultural life to explicate; however, a more rigorous description of the cultural knowledge embodied in these discourses will add greater clarity to the subsequent analyses of symbolic action, ideology, and hegemony. For instance, reviewing the discourses about sharia sketched above, we can recognize the need to further explore the conservative think tanks’ and ICNA’s conceptions of pluralism, secularism, and global politics. Moreover, the manner in which these notions are intertwined with divergent constructions of the “American nation” and “religious freedom” require further examination. Such contrasting perspectives are reflected in their divergent conceptions of sharia. A sustained description of cultural knowledge will shed greater light on symbolic meanings and power relations.This is the form of study I intend here in examining multiple spoken and written discourses and practices—data collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork—pertaining to sharia in Malaysian society and inferring cultural complexity and knowledge. My aim is twofold: first, to describe and analyze various conceptions of sharia distributed among Muslims and non-Muslims in Malaysian society and the manner in which these notions articulate with various other forms of cultural knowledge; and second, to discern the ways these discourses and related knowledge and practices are enmeshed in broader sociopolitical processes. This study advances a new approach to the anthropology of Islam.
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