Sharia Cultural Models and Sociopolitical Projects

SHAPING THE DISCOURSES ABOUT SHARIA ARE THREE MAJOR aspects of the broader context—all occurring in Malaysia and, in some ways, spanning the globe—that are symptomatic of the transformations of our contemporary era.

Third, for over two decades, overlapping with the processes of nation building and Islamic resurgence, there has been a development and organization of cross-communal, multiethnic, multireligious political coalitions to contest the domination of the UMNO-led National Front, which has ruled the Federation of Malaysia since the advent of political independence in 1957. These cross-communal coalitions have served the ruling front its first major electoral losses in the general elections of 2008 and 2013. They have also brought intensified conceptions of liberalism, pluralism, and democracy into close contact with ideas of the nation-state and Islamic resurgence. As a political movement for transformation of the authoritarian Malaysian state, these cross-communal coalitions may be viewed as comparable to a wave of movements around the world striving to replace longstanding postcolonial political elites with new political forces. Grounded in a notion of cultural knowledge as lying behind spoken and written discourse and embodied in practice, this study has offered a multisited ethnographic exploration of both various conceptions of sharia distributed among Muslims and non-Muslims and the way they articulate with other ideas circulating in Malaysian society.

Much contemporary research on politics and culture in Muslim societies continues to adopt the interpretative approach that inappropriately utilizes a semantic theory designed for the lexical meanings of words to provide “intelligible” interpretations of cultural understandings. In recent years, this interpretative approach has been combined with social theories of power, producing interesting, but often flawed, interpretations due to their basis on faulty representations of cultural knowledge. The anthropology of knowledge approach employed in this study is useful for describing and analyzing conceptual structures, practice, and context, and thereby for discerning the links between politics and culture.

Social forces across Malaysian society, comprising Muslims and non-Muslims alike, combine notions of sharia with other forms of cultural knowledge. Among Malay political elites, government religious officials, civil servants and ulama, Malay rights organizations, Islamic NGOs and PAS, and Muslim leaders of PKR, conceptions of sharia articulate with a range of other ideas to constitute cultural models. In addition, the leaders and members of DAP, liberal rights activists, and secular human rights organizations use cultural models to reason about the role of sharia and to direct their social and political activities. However, in the bulk of research about sharia, studies focus on only one of these social forces—for instance, only the state or piety movements, or Islamic or secular NGOs. While these studies provide important insights into the ideas and practices of these particular groups and, at times, their attendant sociopolitical orientations and projects, they generally fail to examine the interactions between a broad field of social forces and therefore are unable to illuminate the sociopolitical processes these interactions produce. We have observed in this study the diverse cultural models and sociopolitical projects of a wide range of social forces, and the form of interactions and social dynamics between them. Debates over implementation of sharia laws and ethics and surrounding public dramas of contention have illustrated the dynamic processes involving these diverse social forces. Many of these interactions and sharia dynamics pertain to civil liberties, international human rights, liberal pluralism, gender, secularism, modernity, political Islam, and Malay and Islamic sovereignty.