Description: "Examines the sociopolitical roles that sharia plays in Malaysia today. Drawing on fieldwork and textual research, it probes the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics, and delineates cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims. These include the views of Malay secular nationalists, political Islamic activists, Muslim feminists, Islamic NGOs, Sufi revivalists, liberal Muslim reformers, opposition party leaders, a non-Muslim social democratic political party, and liberal rights organizations. This thoughtful ethnography demonstrates that the way people think about sharia is often entangled with notions about race, gender equality, nation, liberal pluralism, citizenship, and universal human rights. Close investigation of the way diverse members of Malaysian society speak, write, and think about sharia reveals that ideas about sharia are not isolated from or always opposed to liberal pluralism and secularism. Intra-Muslim contests as well as Muslim and non-Muslim skirmishes chronicle revealing faultlines and suggest areas of potential compromise"--
Brief description: Timothy P. Daniels is associate professor in anthropology at Hofstra University. He is the author of Performance, Popular Culture, and Piety in Muslim Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Islamic Spectrum in Java (Ashgate, 2009), and Building Cultural Nationalism in Malaysia: Identity, Representation, and Citizenship (Routledge, 2005).
Review Quotes:
"Living Sharia is one of the most theoretically sophisticated, rigorously empirical, and ethnographically engaging works in the anthropology of Islam in years. At a moment when 'discourses about sharia are integral to sociopolitical dynamics in American society' (5), this is a book that deserves to be read by anthropologists and everyone concernedwith the challenge of religious ethics and citizenship in our late modern world."
-- "American Ethnologist (AE)"