Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. xxi, 283 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-33992-7.
Anthropologists have long examined the role of law in society. Studies on Islamic courts are plentiful. Some authors have looked at the way in which judges in Islamic courts examine cases and make decisions, while others have focused on the contending argumentation of different norms put forward by litigants. There are also works that put emphasis on the extent to which gender equality is being observed in legal processes. Some authors have addressed micro levels of adjudication in courtrooms, while others have discussed Islamic courts in the changing political contexts of a country.
Of particular relevance and importance to this field of study is a recent work by Michael G. Peletz, professor of anthropology at Emory University. His book Sharia Transformations: Cultural Politics and the Rebranding of an Islamic Judiciary focuses on the development of contemporary Malaysia’s sharia judiciary by looking at changes and continuities in women’s and men’s experiences in the courts, along with the complexities and heterogeneity of the sharia judiciary and the multiple directions in which it has moved over the last four decades. The book encompasses a lengthy period of ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia spanning different times and courts, including national civil courts.
Peletz views sharia courts in contemporary Malaysia as a global assemblage. Three aspects are highlighted to prove that the phenomenon of sharia courts in Malaysia is indeed a global assemblage, including 1) elements of British common law legacy in Malaysia’s sharia judiciary and its legal system in general; 2) electronic juridical procedures or e-governance applied by sharia courts; and 3) the strong influence of Japanese management and auditing systems on the authority of sharia courts. As he did in his previous book (Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia, Princeton University Press, 2002), Peletz strongly demonstrates his position as a constructionist, not an essentialist.
The book has five chapters excluding the introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 lays out the backbone for the book’s main argument. It illustrates how Malaysia’s Islamic judiciary is better viewed as a global assemblage, by which it is “forged in relationship with a multiplicity of global discourses, practices, incentives and constraints” (40). In chapter 2, Peletz presents two different court cases, and demonstrates the increase of the criminal jurisdiction and penal power of Malaysia’s sharia judiciary. As listed in table 1 (88), major types of criminal offenses handled by Malaysia’s sharia courts are evidence of Malaysia’s new punitiveness, especially involving Islamic sex crimes. Chapter 3 discusses mediation (sulh), which has become an alternative to formal adjudication, especially following the global dissemination of Euro-American legal models to streamline legal proceedings.
Chapter 4 concerns Malaysia’s nationwide development and legal dynamics that involved enactments and juridical experiments, including efforts to rebrand different aspects of the sharia court, such as judges’ uniforms. Chapter 5 deals with the extent to which female litigants could gain more justice given the new shape of Malaysia’s Islamic judiciary. The chapter examines how the state, through its sharia court, sought to define, codify, and normalize particular kinds of relations in the cultural politics of marriage and gender pluralism.
Through his arguments, Peletz shows that the phenomenon of an Islamic judiciary in Malaysia does not necessarily amount to “Islamization,” but rather a whole process of bureaucratization, rationalization, corporatization, and even neoliberal globalization. Peletz’s study is distinct in the way that it addresses the issue of Islamization from a different and novel point of view. The question is whether the changing shape of the current sharia court in Malaysia—or elsewhere—which now has greater jurisdiction and has been transformed into a sophisticated modern legal institution, remains essentially Islamic or otherwise.
While other scholars often describe the case in question as an example of a successful Islamization process, Peletz considers this reductionist. For him, these descriptions of Islamization are a “woefully incomplete and misleading gloss” (40). However, Peletz positing this as incomplete Islamization is also reductionist. The term “incomplete” refers to something that is quantitatively measurable—something Islamization cannot be from the perspective of constructionist like Peletz. Peletz warns his readers to recognize the complexity of the Islamization “phenomena to which it is purportedly relevant: social, cultural, and political change among contemporary Muslims” (44).
Peletz’s study is of great importance as it presents the case of sharia courts in a Muslim country from the perspective of a constructionist. This helps scholars of Islamic studies in general and Muslim legal scholars in particular understand that sharia courts remain alive by revitalizing themselves, their transformation and alignment tied to changing local and global contexts. This, on the one hand, rejects an essentialist view, which claims that sharia met its demise with the emergence of nation-states in the Muslim world. On the other hand, it also addresses an anxiety among some Muslim scholars that the sharia courts will lose their essential identity if they transform into modernized state courts. This is because, for non-essentialists, such transformations have in fact created new channels and means for sharia to be resuscitated and given a new life. After all, the transformation of sharia courts in Muslim countries to resemble modern civil courts in Western countries should be seen as a necessary and inevitable condition of global interaction.
Overall, Peletz’s study is a highly appreciated scholarly endeavour, especially considering that many available works on sharia courts in Muslim countries pay little heed to the contemporary portrait of the Islamic judicial system that brought theoretical debates of Islamization to the fore. This work addresses this gap not only by presenting ample data on the legal modernization of Malaysia’s Islamic judiciary, but also by providing rich analysis as well as criticisms of the Islamization theory. The book therefore is strongly recommended for students and researchers who aim to study the Malaysian legal system from an ethnographic perspective. More importantly, it is a very useful reference for explaining why the sharia courts of Malaysia have been amazingly rebranded in response to global challenges. Legal scholars, scholars of Islamic studies, and social scientists on Southeast Asia amongst others will certainly find this book very important for their studies.
Arskal Salim
Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta, Jakarta