For his earlier monograph Islamic modern (2002), the anthropologist Michael G. Peletz had conducted extensive fieldwork in a Malaysian Islamic court, mostly in the late 1980s. His later work explored various other directions, especially related to gender pluralism and sexuality, but for his new book, Sharia transformations, Peletz has returned to the theme of Islamic courts, three decades after his initial fieldwork. Since that time, Malaysia and the world have changed and so have the Islamic courts. Sharia transformations offers deep empirical insights into these changes and analytically elucidates dynamics of bureaucratisation, rationalisation, corporatisation, and sociopolitical Islamisation that have transformed Malaysia and its judiciary dramatically. The book also, albeit briefly, comparatively addresses developments in Indonesia and Egypt.
Sharia transformations comprises five main chapters. The first discusses the Malaysian Sharia judiciaries’ culturally heterogeneous and multidirectional day-to-day operations, as Peletz has re-observed them in the 2010s, through the lens of a ‘global assemblage’. This assemblage incorporates many influences, including high-tech and e-governance, marketing language, Japanese auditing approaches, British common law, globalising surveillance techniques and more that make Sharia courts appear even more culturally ‘modern’ than when Peletz had studied them for Islamic modern, notwithstanding simultaneous efforts of instrumentalising them for upholding national sovereignty and a self-declared Islamic state's social engineering.
The second chapter, ‘A tale of two courts’, is particularly strong: the ‘two courts’ are one and the same, located in Rembau in the state of Negeri Sembilan, where Peletz conducted fieldwork in the 1980s, and which he has now re-observed. He barely recognised the courthouse now and illustrates the changes that puzzled him in striking ethnographic detail, masterfully composed to substantiate his theoretical arguments. In addition to symbolic and performative aspects, the empirical material also includes transcripts of court cases. Among other analytic streams, the chapter demonstrates the salience of increasingly punitive aspects in Malaysia's Sharia judiciary and Islam-related discursive arena, which in his reading intersect with neoliberal modes of corporate governmentality and with sociopolitical competition for control over the Malay Muslim population.
The third chapter turns from punitive to pastoral (‘care’-related) aspects of Malaysia's Sharia judiciary and centres on sulh (mediation) sessions that, albeit stemming from a traditional Islamic legal concept, have been institutionally introduced in Malaysian Islamic courts only in the 2000s—in ways that are anything but ancient. These sulh proceedings provide Muslims, and especially women, with a new space to express their positions and demands, often in a ‘no-holds-barred’ manner that became impossible in the once informal but nowadays (in their spatial arrangements and atmosphere) hyper-formalistic regular Sharia court proceedings.
Beyond a Foucauldian duality of pastoral care of punitive control, Peletz's interest in sulh mediations is also driven by debates about whether they form a distinctly ‘Islamic’ legal practice. Peletz disagrees and sees hybrid global assemblages at play, with influences stemming from worldwide trends of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and a global circulation of models of handling disputes in semi-formal ways. In addition, Peletz stresses mimetic overlaps and competition over power in the juridical field, between Malaysia's Sharia judiciary and its counterpart, the ‘civil’ judiciary (historically rooted in British common law, comprising the entire legal landscape beyond the Islamic judiciary). Peletz argues that the Sharia judiciary tries to ‘beat’ its civil competitor by appropriating its powerful symbolic and procedural registers (the ‘gold-standard’)—a battle embedded in wider struggles over (un-)desirable directions of sociopolitical ‘Islamisation’.
The fourth chapter addresses outsourcing, privatisation and rebranding promoted by consultants, and related aesthetic, socio-spatial and cultural implications, especially pertaining to a new Sharia courthouse serving Kuala Lumpur. An interesting observation here is the rise of the lawyer with specialised knowledge as a new figure in Sharia courts, resulting in the sidelining of litigants. The ‘rebranding’ (originally an emic term, one that I myself have also documented among the Malaysian Islamist party PAS in the 2010s) operates at many levels, manifested, for example, in business-style dressing and ‘global management speech’ among Sharia court actors contrasting their earlier ‘traditional Malay’ appearance. Their speech styles incorporate multi-directional global influences, from Arabic terms replacing Malay ones to business English and catchy formulas of Japanese managerialism. There is furthermore a striking contrast between former and new Sharia judges, with the new ones enjoying unprecedented power vis-à-vis Malaysia's civil judiciary, while increasingly resembling the civil judges’ appearance. The rebranded Sharia judiciary is in some sense cosmopolitan, contrasting any narrow ethnic Malay or Islamic identification, and aspires for universal standards such as due process, productivity and professionalism in which its quest for ‘shariatisation’ is framed and marketed.
The fifth chapter discusses how the protection of Muslim women's rights is affected by the Sharia judiciary's transformation. Peletz complicates dominant perceptions according to which Islamic Law necessarily has disadvantaging consequences for women. He portrays the new Islamic courts as ‘relatively “female-friendly”’, without denying punitive components and structural inequalities. In family law, women form the majority of Muslims requesting the courts’ services to support them in resolving domestic problems. The issue at stake is not equality before the law, but that in ‘law in action’ (as opposed to law in the books) women may be getting ‘more justice’ than before. The concluding chapter connects the various streams again and adds insights from Indonesia and Egypt.
Peletz convincingly delivers his book's main declared objectives, namely to describe multi-directional, sometimes contradictory complexities in the micro-politics and discourses of Malaysia's ‘rebranded’ Sharia judiciary, to problematise reductionist explanations of ‘Islamisation’ and de-exoticise Sharia courts, and to illustrate why Malaysia's Sharia judiciary is beneficially theorised as a global assemblage, notwithstanding emic essentialisations. The courts he portrays are dialectically informed by the pastoral and punitive, the national and the cosmopolitan, the Islamic and the secular, and the ‘exceedingly high-tech’ and the down-to-earth human. They de-stabilise some legal-cultural distinctions between Islamic judiciaries and their counterparts, both within Malaysia's dual legal system and in the broader global picture.
Sharia transformations is a groundbreaking study. It should for many years to come be essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural politics of Islamic courts, in and beyond Malaysia. The book is more than a convincingly theorised empirical study of courts, it also elucidates the contemporary global condition, where cultural forms of the market, the magnetism of standardisation, formalisation and bureaucratisation are omnipresent forces in the remaking of social institutions—notwithstanding the ambivalences, critiques and resistances they characteristically bring with them. The book is destined to become another foundational classic, like several of Peletz's earlier writings. Its potential impact far transcends Southeast Asian Studies, and unsurprisingly, scholars interested in Islamic courts elsewhere are already enthusiastically engaging with its findings.
