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Few symbols in today’s world are as laden and fraught as sharia—an Arabic-origin term referring to the straight path, the path God revealed for humans, the norms and rules guiding Muslims on that path, and Islamic law and normativity as enshrined in sacred texts or formal statute. Yet the ways in which Muslim men and women experience the myriad dimensions of sharia often go unnoticed and unpublicized. So too do recent historical changes in sharia judiciaries and contemporary strategies on the part of political and religious elites, social engineers, and brand stewards to shape, solidify, and rebrand these institutions.
Sharia Transformations is an ethnographic, historical, and theoretical study of the practice and lived entailments of sharia in Malaysia, arguably the most economically successful Muslim-majority nation in the world. The book focuses on the routine everyday practices of Malaysia’s sharia courts and the changes that have occurred in the court discourses and practices in recent decades. Michael G. Peletz approaches Malaysia’s sharia judiciary as a global assemblage and addresses important issues in the humanistic and social-scientific literature concerning how Malays and other Muslims engage ethical norms and deal with law, social justice, and governance in a rapidly globalizing world.
“A work of rare and exceptional importance, this book provides the finest historical study of the changing organization and social context of Islamic courts anywhere in the world.”—Robert W. Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies, Pardee School of Global Affairs, Boston University
“A landmark text. This is a book that could only have been written by someone of Michael Peletz’s stature and experience four decades into a brilliant career as a field-defining scholar. By bringing together so many different threads of deep knowledge about Malaysia and Islamic law and theology, this book both creates a new historiography for Islamic law in the twenty-first century and a state of the art for engaging in the anthropology of Islam and gender in an intersectional age.”—Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam
“Michael Peletz gives us a nuanced and insightful analysis of changes and continuities in women’s and men’s experiences in Malaysia’s Islamic courts, and the entanglement of sharia and a secular constitution within a juridical field dominated by common law. Sharia Transformations is an outstanding contribution to the study of law in practice.”—Ziba Mir-Hosseini, author of Marriage on Trial
“Too often Islamic law is demonized as brutal and discriminatory. Peletz demonstrates that it is a thoughtful and complex system which, in its local variations, partakes deeply of its surrounding culture. Much more than a parochial example, this book goes far to show the vitality and dynamism of the sharia.”—Lawrence Rosen, Cromwell Professor Emeritus, Princeton University