The Malaysian State, Darul Arqam, and the Islamic Party of Malaysia
“DEVELOPMENT NEEDS TO PROCEED BECAUSE THIS WORLD WAS made by Allah for humans, not for angels or other creatures,” Nik Abdul Aziz (2010, 28), chief minister of Kelantan and spiritual leader of PAS, told an audience at the Kelantan Trade Center in Kota Bharu.
“However, development that is spiritually empty is like a large tree with hideous and rotten roots. Even the abundant leaves will not cover it for long; they will very easily fall flat.” The Malaysian state and other social forces have infused sharia law and ethics into a variety of economic activities in Malaysia. Traditional jurists of Sunni schools of jurisprudence developed laws for contracts, property, and ownership based on the Qur’an and hadith and several other sources and reasoning methods (Auda 2008; Hallaq 2009). Given the notion of Islam as a “way of life and polity” (Din wa Dawla) rooted in early Islamic history, these laws involved the diffuse implantation of religious principles and ethics into various domains of everyday life, including politics and economics. Wael B. Hallaq (2013, 148–49), a scholar of Islamic legal studies, estimates that around a quarter of the vast written records of sharia were devoted to contract, trade, and financial transactions. Since these laws pertaining to economic affairs concentrate on the moral qualities of exchange, trade agreements, and property ownership rather than specifying a particular kind of system, Islamic ethics have been applied in a wide range of economic systems. When the established legal opinions were in conflict with elite interests and/or the practical needs of life, jurists could adopt less strict positions within their school or from other schools, and political rulers appointed judicial officials to make rulings on economic matters (Coulson 1969, 66; Ibrahim 2015). During the British colonial period, secular commercial codes replaced the combination of sharia ethics and sultanate rulings in public commercial codes. Nevertheless, precolonial Malay Muslim ethical values continued to circulate in family and community circuits (Raymond Firth 1946; Rosemary Firth 1943; Scott 1979). In the postcolonial period, under the influence of resurgent Islamic movements and campaigns, Islamic ethics are playing an increasingly public role in distribution, consumption, and production activities. As in many other Muslim societies, social forces in Malaysia with different ideological orientations are combining Islamic ethical notions with a variety of other ideas to formulate and promote diverse approaches to economics (see Tripp 2006). Moreover, the Islamic economic discursive tradition entails a range of ethical notions from prohibitions on riba (usurious interest), excessive uncertainty, and gambling to an emphasis on social welfare based on mutual help, character building, riḍa (wholehearted consent), charitable giving, and care and dignity for the poor (Black, Esmaeili, and Hosen 2013, 181; Hallaq 2013, 146–52).Muslim social forces stress different aspects of this broad discursive tradition. In contrast to the skirmishes between liberal Muslim and secular human rights activists, on the one hand, with conservative Muslim forces, on the other, over sharia family and criminal laws, there is no entrenched opposition to sharia economics being implemented in contemporary Malaysia. In fact, many non-Muslims enthusiastically participate in several forms of sharia economics, although some activists have expressed concerns about halalization and sharia compliance being used to deepen ethnic and religious divisions.1 On the other hand, there are significant debates amongst pro-sharia Muslim social forces on how best to implement sharia economics and about whether certain forms of economic activities and investment vehicles are properly sharia-compliant. Four different sharia economic models are of concern here: those of the Malaysian state, leaders of some government-linked corporations, Darul Arqam and its successor Global Ikhwan, and the PAS-led state government of Kelantan. This broader perspective stands in contrast to overemphasis on the state in studies of Islamic economics in Malaysia.2 Explicating cultural models helps to delineate the diverse approaches to sharia economics. However, when taken together these four influential sharia models facilitate greater infusion and emplacement of sharia values and ethics in otherwise mundane dimensions of life and thereby serve to de-secularize the economic domain.