Malaysia's Syariah Judiciary as Global Assemblage: Islamization, Corporatization, and Other Transformations in Context

This essay concerns transformations in the judicial apparatus involved in implementing Islamic law ( syariah / shari ‘ a ) in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation in Southeast Asia. Three of my goals are to delineate some of the empirical complexities of the syariah judiciary's day-to-day operations and the mutually contradictory directions in which it is moving; to problematize the widely invoked trope of Islamization as a gloss for these phenomena; and to illustrate that this judiciary is profitably viewed as a global assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Ong and Collier 2005). Another, more general, objective is to elucidate some of the ways that religion, law, and attendant phenomena are being bureaucratized, rationalized, corporatized, and otherwise transformed in an increasingly globalized world.