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Malaysia's Syariah Judiciary as Global Assemblage: Islamization, Corporatization, and Other Transformations in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2013

Michael G. Peletz
Michael G. Peletz*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, Emory University
*
mpeletz@emory.edu
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Abstract

This essay concerns transformations in the judicial apparatus involved in implementing Islamic law (syariah/shari‘a) in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation in Southeast Asia. Three of my goals are to delineate some of the empirical complexities of the syariah judiciary's day-to-day operations and the mutually contradictory directions in which it is moving; to problematize the widely invoked trope of Islamization as a gloss for these phenomena; and to illustrate that this judiciary is profitably viewed as a global assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Ong and Collier 2005). Another, more general, objective is to elucidate some of the ways that religion, law, and attendant phenomena are being bureaucratized, rationalized, corporatized, and otherwise transformed in an increasingly globalized world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 603 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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