Views, Voices, and Practices
THE MALAYSIAN STATE, ULAMA, POLITICAL PARTIES, ISLAMIC NGOs, liberal Muslim reformers, and Malay rights organizations produce discourses about sharia family, criminal, and economic laws and ethics that circulate through society.
Sharia laws and ethics—institutionalized in sharia courts, fatwa councils, and government religious departments—have a powerful effect on Muslim lives. Reports and seminars on existing and proposed sharia laws, Friday sermons, Islamic religious classes, newspaper articles, and televised religious talks disseminate the UMNO-led Malaysian state’s normative Islamic views. However, these are complemented and/or contested by many social forces that create alternative discourses, models, and projects. These alternative views are circulated in mass media, seminars, kuliah masjid, political rallies, bulletins, and the activities of a variety of communities of practice. Many of these discourses, both hegemonic and alternative, constitute disciplinary practices that influence the cultivation of Muslim selves and their everyday practices (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). The anthropologist Talal Asad (1993, 2003), taking a cue from Mauss (1973), stresses the top-down influence of institutionalized social authorities on the practices of subordinates. However, it is also necessary to consider the effects of changes in individuals’ practices on the programs for cultivating body techniques and virtue promoted by social authorities. In addition, there is significant influence from various secular disciplinary practices, local and global, on individual behaviors of body comportment and expression of emotion. Most important, there is a theoretical need to oscillate from analysis of practices to embodied knowledge and relations of power and other aspects of context in order to provide more comprehensive analysis (see Daniels 2017).
More legal literature on Laws.Studio
More on the topic Views, Voices, and Practices:
-
Agricultural law -
Constitutional law -
Fundamentals of Advocacy -
History of state and law -
Muslim (Islamic) law -
Professional ethics of a lawyer -
Roman law -
Theory of state and law -
UK Bar -
US Bar -
-
Conflictology -
Ecology -
Economy -
Finance -
History -
Law -
Medicine -
Philosophy -
Religious studies -