New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xii, 236 pp. (Figures.) US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-18432-9.
This is a gem of a book, meticulously researched and incisively analyzed by the author, of a social site not usually accessible to scholars and ethnographers of Islam. The sometimes mundane but most times powerful life-changing workplace is easily missed as a site which informs the turns and tides of potent religious movements. The over-reliance on politics in explaining religious dynamics has led to another crucial location of “religion making” being overlooked, a “third space” that is neither “fully ‘public’ nor in any way ‘private,’” according to the author (17). It is in addressing this gap that Corporate Islam makes its mark.
This seminal study of “an ethnography of ‘corporate Islam’” explores “modern corporations as sites of Islamic expression, expansion and uniformity in Muslim Malaysia where power, relationships, individual identities, and practices—and often financial resources—are mobilized on behalf of Islam” (2). As well as detailing the everyday dynamics of “Islamic” work culture within small businesses, Sloane-White’s ethnography is balanced by a big-picture perspective through her contacts with players at large state-linked corporations and government statutory bodies. The Central Bank, Tenaga Nasional (Malaysia’s privatized energy provider), Khazanah Nasional (corporatized think-tank of the Ministry of Finance), and the Zakat Collection Centre were among the numerous corporate bodies at which the author interviewed key managerial personnel. In its breadth and depth, this study of workplace and corporate institutions has strikingly captured the expansive permeability of Islam betwixt and between the fractal space of the public and the private.
All eight chapters are riveting, each bringing out the various dimensions of a flourishing Islamic corporate sphere. Chapter 2 identifies the sharia elites and sharia scholar-advisors influencing the direction of market Islam. Chapter 3 is a rich ethnographic account of how sharia corporate executives and business owners translate their sharia perspectives and visions into workplace practice. In chapter 4, Sloane-White provides another vivid description of how “personnel sharia,” or employees in sharia-ized corporations, function and make sense of their regulated sharia space. Chapter 5 is an intimate rendering of how gender relations within the sharia workspace are being reconstructed, especially how gendered hierarchies are being reinforced through the chastisement and control of women. Chapter 6 informs us as to how the system of zakat, or Islamic tithing, is helping to advance the objectives of corporate Islam. It comprehensively details how zakat has become a source of capital investment for corporations with an Islamic orientation, rather than solely functioning for the benefit of the poor. Chapter 7 explains how Muslim philanthropy has now been reconstituted through the mechanism of Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility (I-CSR) an adaptation of the neoliberal tool for wealth redistribution through profit-making. According to the author, in a somewhat innovative if not subtly disingenuous way, Muslim corporate elites are using this modality of profit devolution to advance more Islam rather than contribute directly to needy causes, regardless of race and religion.
The explication of how religion intersects with neoliberal capitalism and the rentier-cum- ethnocratic state is a particularly valuable contribution of the study. The author calls this current period and the current generation of Malay-Muslim corporate elites the sharia period and the sharia generation respectively, in contrast to the NEP period and its NEP generation. This is a useful identifier of Malaysia’s economic and religious landscape, which, though changing, is still being held by a state which explicitly uses racial dominance in policy justifications and rent-seeking in its economic accumulation. Herein lies the sustainability of “corporate Islam,” which depends on the continuation of such a state formation.
Another important contribution to the study of Islam in Malaysia is Sloane-White’s broadening of the sharia concept to include Islamization processes beyond the contexts of the law. Besides laws passed through state parliamentary institutions and adjudicated in state-based sharia jurisdictions, she includes the branch of Islamic finance regulation or muamalat as part of what her respondents see as the expansion of sharia (11).
In highlighting the “porosity” of sharia, where distinction between public and private domains, and between law bounded by state jurisdiction and those extended by federal authority is blurred, this study opens up a new understanding of how Islamization permeates state and society. The notion of sharia being transplanted to civil laws is a particularly penetrating observation. The porosity of Islam in certain sectors of the economy is highlighted by the existence and functioning of the Central Bank’s Syariah Advisory Council (SAC). The SAC has become a supra-body overseeing the domain of Islamic economics, finance, and banking. Its extra-parliamentary privilege, its ability to bypass certain legislative procedures, and its “license” to operate outside the statutory jurisdiction of Islamic law is a development that is only beginning to be understood by legal scholars today, and something which the book has carefully illuminated.
The study does not seek to present a broad, sweeping portrait of the progression of Islam in Malaysia. Sloane-White rightly points out that there is “no attempt here to argue that what I call corporate Islam is present in all Malay-Muslim corporations or represents the majority of them, nor do I suggest that all members of what I call the sharia generation wish, as many in this book did, to live in a Malaysian Islamic state” (20). Indeed, most of the sharia elites met were members of one or more of the three most forceful organizations calling for more Islam in society, namely, JIM (Jemaah Islah Malaysia), IKRAM (Pertubuhan IKRAM Malaysia), and MPF (Muslim Professionals Forum). It would be best to take this study as purveying one stream, though a vital stream of Islamization, out of the many to be found in Malaysia. The agenda of creating a “small Islamic state” (28) among Muslim corporate elites is bound to have its share of opponents and detractors within Malaysia’s multireligious and multicultural setting.
Maznah Mohamad
National University of Singapore, Singapore