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BUREAUCRATIC ISLAM COMPARED: CLASSIFICATORY POWER AND STATE-IFIED RELIGIOUS MEANING-MAKING IN BRUNEI AND SINGAPORE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

Dominik M. Müller
Dominik M. Müller*
Affiliation:
Head, Research Group, The Bureaucratization of Islam and Its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia, Department of Law and Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
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Abstract

This article presents a comparative anthropological approach to studying the bureaucratization of Islam in contemporary Southeast Asia. In line with this approach, the article understands the bureaucratization of Islam not simply as a formalization, expansion, and diversification of Islamic institutions and legal frameworks; rather, bureaucratization is investigated as a social phenomenon that transcends its organizational boundaries and informs dynamics of socio-legal change alongside transformations of the meaning(s) of Islam in state and society. The article centers the state's “classificatory power” and its societal coproduction and contestation, and it takes both functional and hermeneutic modes of analysis into consideration. While the bureaucratization of Islam is always embedded in and shaped by power-political constellations, it simultaneously produces social and doctrinal meanings that are unique to its locally specific discursive arenas. Therefore, more conventional functional perspectives on bureaucratic Islam can be beneficially enriched by a more hermeneutically oriented anthropological analysis, as the article illustrates, based on ethnographic data gathered in Brunei and Singapore.

The article first introduces the anthropology of bureaucracy and elaborates on the absence of such studies on state-Islam relations in Southeast Asia, as well as the potential of bringing these streams of scholarship into a fruitful dialogue. Second, it presents the Bruneian case study, focusing on postcolonial Islamization policies, the bureaucratization of a national ideology, legal reforms, and their workings on the microlevel. Third, it moves on to a regional comparison, by illustrating how Islamic knowledge and meaning-production inherent to the bureaucratization of Islam unfolds quite differently in Singapore, despite partly overlapping functional patterns. While anchored in Brunei and Singapore, the article offers a conceptual framework and analytic vocabulary for a wider study across and potentially beyond the region.

Keywords

Islambureaucracylaw and social changeclassificatory powerBruneiSingaporeSoutheast Asia
Type
Article Symposium
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , August 2018 , pp. 212 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2018 

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References

1 I am grateful to Kerstin Steiner for sharpening my awareness of this difference. See also Heyman's insistence on including private firms into our category of “bureaucracy” in Heyman, Josiah McC., “The Anthropology of Power-Wielding Bureaucracies,” Human Organization 63, no. 4 (2004): 487–500, at 489CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The underlying principle, although Heyman does not make that connection, reflects Bourdieu's warning in his theorizing of the “bureaucratic field” that “[t]o endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, i.e. of applying to the state categories of though produced and guaranteed by the state,” as “one of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose … categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world—including the state itself.” In other words, the state imposes “the very cognitive structures through which it is perceived.” Bourdieu, Pierre, Wacquant, Loic, and Farage, Samar, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12, no. 1 (1994): 1–18, at 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an exemplary study of a non-state Islamic bureaucracy, see Reetz, Dietrich, “The ‘Faith Bureaucracy’ of the Tabligh Jama'at: An Insight into their System of Self-Organization,” in Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, ed. Beckerlegge, Gwilym (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 89–124Google Scholar.

2 In October 2016, I began a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, studying the bureaucratization of Islam and its socio-legal dimensions in Southeast Asia. The current members are three PhD students working under my guidance with projects in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

3 Bourdieu, Compare Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 467–77Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 136–37Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre: Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 180–81Google Scholar. To be sure, the power of the state to impose its classifications has been well documented in literature on ethnicity and nationalism beyond and prior to Bourdieu's work.

4 Eickelman, Dale F., “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,” American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (1992): 643–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eickelman, Dale F., “Transnational Religious Identities (Islam, Catholicism, Judaism): Cultural Concerns,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Wright, James, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 602–06, at 605CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Following this concept, Islam “has implicitly been systematized … in the popular imagination, making it self-contained and facilitating innovation. Questions such as ‘What is my religion?’, ‘Why is it important to my life?’, and ‘How do my beliefs guide my conduct?’ have become foregrounded in the lives of large numbers of believers … These transformations also mean that ‘authentic’ religious tradition and identity are foregrounded,” but also “questioned, and constructed rather than taken for granted,” with mass higher education and mass media facilitating that process. Eickelman, 605. The concept has been criticized, among other aspects, for not sufficiently acknowledging the “truth of change” and “disregarding the temporalities a tradition (of Islamic reasoning) might embody.” Agrama, Hussein Ali, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I would nevertheless insist that the conceptual properties of “objectification” that I foreground here are not only compatible with, but even vitally enabling various, future-oriented, and open-ended modes of Muslim reasoning and subsequent change in distinct tempo-spatial arrangements. See Agrama, Questioning Secularism.

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6 Here, I follow Pirie's critique of the power paradigm in The Anthropology of Law. Her plea to reconcile it with the hermeneutic tradition, with an emphasis on the latter, can also be applied to the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state. See Pirie, The Anthropology of Law. Notably, Clifford Geertz pointed out the weakness of “functional” approaches in the study of religion and social change as early as in 1957, albeit targeted at a different generation of opponents representing a very different type of “functionalist” anthropology. See Geertz, Clifford, “Ritual and Social Change: Javanese Example,” American Anthropologist 59, no. 1 (1957): 32–54, at 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 On Europe, see, for example, Ferrari, Silvio and Bottoni, Rossella, “The Institutionalization of Islam in Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of European Islam, ed. Cesari, Jocelyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 619–55Google Scholar. For a recently published study on Morocco, see Wainscott, Ann Marie, Bureaucratizing Islam, Morocco and the War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Several outstanding studies on Islam-related legal and institutional politics in the region must be credited. Among these are Buehler, Michael, The Politics of Shari'a Law: Islamist Activists and the State in Democratizing Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cammack, Mark E. and Feener, Michael, Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas and Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Feener, R. Michael, Shari'a and Social Engineering: The Implementation of Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Liow, Joseph Chinyong, Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially chapter 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hefner, Robert W., ed., Shari'a Politics: Law and Society in the Modern Muslim World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hefner's numerous other contextually relevant writings; Peletz, Michael G., Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Osman, Mohamed Nawab Mohamed, “The Religio-Political Activism of Ulama in Singapore,” Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 116 (2012): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rahim, Lily Zubaidah, “Governing Islam and Regulating Muslims in Singapore's Secular Authoritarian State,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 66, no. 2 (2012): 169–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saat, Norshahril, Faith, Authority and the Malays: The Ulama in Contemporary Singapore (Singapore: Select, 2015)Google Scholar. On the political role of bureaucracy in Southeast Asia beyond religious matters, see, for example, Emmerson, Donald K., “The Bureaucracy in Political Context: Weakness in Strength,” in Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, ed. Jackson, Karl and Pye, Lucian (Berkeley: University of California Press), 82–136Google Scholar; Evers, Hans-Dieter, “The Bureaucratization of Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 4 (1987): 666–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For partial exceptions where bureaucratizing Islam is explicitly addressed in single national contexts, see Sharifa Zaleha Syed Hassan, “From Saints to Bureaucrats: A Study of the Development of Islam in the State of Kedah, Malaysia” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1985); Mohamad, Maznah, “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization of the Shariah in Malaysia,” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 3 (2010): 505–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peletz, Michael G., “A Tale of Two Courts: Judicial Transformation and the Rise of a Corporate Islamic Governmentality in Malaysia,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 144–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sloane-White, Patricia, Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Two edited volumes that address this, albeit not vis-à-vis the theme of bureaucratization or the anthropology of bureaucracy, are Hefner, Robert W. and Horvatich, Patricia, eds., Islam in the Era of Nation States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Hefner, Robert W., ed., Shari'a Politics: Law and Society in the Modern Muslim World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 Hoag describes this practice of self-representation as “the erasure game,” which is another broad-brush feature of bureaucracies. Hoag, Colin, “Assembling Partial Perspectives: Thoughts on the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34, no. 1 (2011): 81–94, at 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Heyman, “Putting Power into the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” 265–66; Hoag, “Dereliction at the South African Department of Home Affairs,” 415. See also Eisenstadt, S. N., “Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization,” Current Sociology 7, no. 2 (1958): 99–124, at 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who similarly questioned the notion of impersonality, albeit on partly different grounds; and Kirsch, Thomas, Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008)Google Scholar.

23 Eisenstadt, “Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization.”

24 Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie [Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology] 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2002, first published 1922), 290Google Scholar.

25 For an exception in a Jewish context, see Seeman, Don, “Agency, Bureaucracy and Religious Conversion: The Case of the Ethiopian Felashmura in Israel,” in The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, ed. Buckser, Andrew and Glazer, Stephen D. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 29–42Google Scholar. See also Thomas Kirsch's pioneering writing on “bureaucratic charisma” in Christian Pentecostal churches in Zambia and their tactical mimicking of state-bureaucratic structures: Kirsch, “Church, Bureaucracy, and State,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 28, no. 2 (2003): 213–231Google Scholar; and Kirsch, Spirits and Letters.

26 Heyman, “Putting Power into the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” 262. For overviews of early sociological literature on bureaucracy, see Eisenstadt, “Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization”; Eisenstadt, S. N., “Bureaucracy, Bureaucratization, and Debureaucratization,” Administrative Science Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1959): 302–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28 Heyman, Josiah McC., “Deepening the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1269–77, at 1269CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, for example, Bierschenk, Thomas and de Sardan, Jean-Pierre O., eds., States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gupta, Akhil, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Graeber, David, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (New York: Melville House, 2015)Google Scholar; Heyman, “The Anthropology of Power-Wielding Bureaucracies”; Hoag, “Assembling Partial Perspectives”; Kirsch, Spirits and Letters.

29 Fallers, Lloyd A., Bantu Bureaucracy: A Century of Political Evolution among the Basoga of Uganda (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. See also his pioneering later work on the nation-state, Fallers, The Social Anthropology of the Nation-State (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1974)Google Scholar.

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31 Reprinted in Cohn, Bernard S., “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 224–54Google Scholar.

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33 On bureaucratic taxonomies, see also Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Brenneis, Donald, “Discourse and Discipline at the National Research Council: A Bureaucratic Bildungsroman,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 1 (1996): 23–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Herzfeld, Michael, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York: Berg, 1992), 38Google Scholar.

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35 Bernstein, Anya and Mertz, Elizabeth, “Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State and Everyday Life” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34, no. 1 (2011): 6–10, at 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Bernstein and Mertz, “Bureaucracy,” 6.

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40 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

41 Heyman, “The Anthropology of Power-Wielding Bureaucracies,” 490–94.

42 Heyman, 491.

43 Heyman, 491.

44 Heyman, “Deepening the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” 1270.

45 In his early work, Eisenstadt already underlined that any study of bureaucracy “cannot be confined to an analysis of the internal structure of various organizations,” but must refer “to the relations between the organization and its wider social setting.” Eisenstadt, “Bureaucracy and Bureaucratization,” 103.

46 Heyman, “Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” 262.

47 Graeber, “Dead Zones of Imagination,” 105; Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11.

48 Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage, “Rethinking the State,” 13 (emphasis in original).

49 Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage, 13.

50 Bourdieu, In Other Words, 136–37.

51 Bourdieu, Distinction, 476–77; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 180–81.

52 See Müller, Dominik M., “Sharia Law and the Politics of ‘Faith Control’ in Brunei Darussalam: Dynamics of Socio-Legal Change in a Southeast Asian Sultanate,” Internationales Asienforum 46, no. 3 (2015): 313–45Google Scholar; Müller, Dominik M., “Paradoxical Normativities in Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia: Islamic Law and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration,” Asian Survey 56, no. 3 (2016): 415–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Bourdieu, Pierre, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40Google Scholar.

54 Handelman, Don and Shamgar-Handelman, Lea, “Celebrations of Bureaucracy: Birthday Parties in Israeli Kindergartens,” Ethnology 30, no. 4 (1991): 293–312, at 294CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Heyman, “Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy,” 264.

56 See Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

57 Hoag, “Dereliction,” 414; Hoag, “Assembling Partial Perspectives,” 82.

58 Hoag, “Assembling Partial Perspectives,” 82; Hoag, “Dereliction,” 414.

59 Hoag, “Assembling Partial Perspectives,” 88.

60 See Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference, 6, 36–37, and some of his newer writings, such as Herzfeld, “Secularity and Religiosity: Holy Spaces and the Battle for Administrative Control over Land in Bangkok,” in Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual, ed. Bubandt, Nils Ole and van Beek, Martijn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 231–49, at 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Antoun, Richard T., “Fundamentalism, Bureaucratization, and the State's Co-Optation of Religion: A Jordanian Case Study,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38, no. 3 (2006): 369–93Google Scholar.

62 Antoun, 371; see also Eickelman, “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,” 647, writing about states in the Middle East, including Morocco, trying to “co-opt fundamentalist discourse” in the 1960s and 1970s.

63 Antoun, “Fundamentalism, Bureaucratization,” 369.

64 This case study is based on a series of fieldwork stays in Brunei dating back to my master's-level research (2007–2008) and a postdoctoral project started in 2012, with one to two stays in Brunei per year until 2017, one of which was part of a fellowship at the University of Brunei Darussalam. The fieldwork included formal interviews and casual conversations with members of religious government agencies and educational institutions involved in the propagation of the state ideology, as well as various people beyond the state apparatus. With a small number of key interlocutors, relationships of trust leading to increasingly complex and open exchanges have been built over years. I also conducted (to some extent “participant”) observation and informal conversations in contexts of knowledge production and learning, namely in university classes in which the state ideology, and also an Islamic legal reform detailed below, were taught and explained. In addition, I gathered government-produced Islam- and state ideology-related literature, school books, fatwas, legal documents, and unpublished institutional statistics, I refer directly to some of these sources; others indirectly influence my analysis. As conceptually introduced above, my account thus combines a description of official policies and ideological discourse with ethnographic data.

65 Graeber, “Dead Zones of Imagination,” 120.

66 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 31. See also Greenhalgh, Susan, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng China (Berkeley: California University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referencing Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. To avoid misunderstanding: supernatural beliefs and practices can be perfectly rational, an insight dating back to Malinowski's reflections on how “magic is fundamentally akin to science,” and I do not imply that bureaucratic rationalization and objectification necessarily cause disenchantment. See Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), 86, 34Google Scholar. Multifold cultural meanings can be bureaucratized, including spirit beliefs and exorcism.

67 See Müller, Dominik M., “Hybrid Pathways to Orthodoxy in Brunei Darussalam: Bureaucratised Exorcism, Scientisation and the Mainstreaming of Deviant-Declared Practices,” in “The Bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia: Transdisciplinary Perspectives,” special issue, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 37, no. 1 (2018): 141–83Google Scholar.

68 Siddique, Sharon, “Brunei Darussalam 1991: The Non-secular Nation,” in Southeast Asian Affairs 1992, ed. Singh, Daljit (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), 91–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Black, Ann, “ADR in Brunei Darussalam: The Meeting of Three Traditions,” ADR Bulletin 4, no. 8 (2002): 107–09, at 108Google Scholar.

70 Black.

71 Department of Information, Prime Minister's Office, “Laws to Be Brought in Line with Islam,” Brunei Darussalam Newsletter, 60, September 1990, 1.

72 Steiner, Kerstin, “Brunei,” in Update on the Rule of Law for Human Rights in ASEAN: The Path to Integration, ed. Human Rights Resource Centre and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (Indonesia: Human Rights Resource Centre, Indonesia, 2016), 28nGoogle Scholar, http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_46345-1522-1-30.pdf?1609141539.

73 “Sharia Compliant Penal Code,” Brunei Times, October 14, 2011; see also a lecture given in Singapore by the Bruneian Islamic scholar Amin Abdul Aziz in which he uses the same phrase, of civil law being made “Sharia-compliant.” Amin Abdul Aziz, “Beyond the Media: Islam, State and Society in Brunei,” January 29, 2016, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsarIhnrfJc. Although the lecture is insightful in many aspects, his claim that Brunei's Syariah Penal Code Order applies “only to Muslims” is factually wrong, as detailed elsewhere in this article (each section specifies being applicable to “any person” or “any Muslim”).

74 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 321.

75 Ibrahim, Abdul Latif, Issues in Brunei Studies (Bandar Seri Begawan: Akademi Pengajian Brunei, 2003), 173Google Scholar.

76 Ibrahim, 208; see also de Vienne, Marie-Sybille, Brunei: From the Age of Commerce to the 21st Century (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 142–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Müller, “Sharia Law,” 322.

77 He had previously been a dissident since a short-lived rebellion in 1962, and was said to have been the envisioned “foreign minister” in the Parti Rakyat Brunei rebels’ planned government. He obtained prestigious degrees from Al Azhar University (up to PhD level) in the 1970s and made a distinguished academic career in Islamic Studies abroad, most notably at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. After the sultan invited him back to Brunei, he became a special advisor in Islamic legal matters as well as the University of Brunei's vice chancellor.

78 I further illustrate this ethnographically; see Müller, “Hybrid Pathways.”

79 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 323.

80 Othman, Mahmud Saedon, Perlaksanaan dan Pentadbiran Undang-Undang Islam di Negara Brunei Darussalam: Satu Tinjauan [Implementation and administration of Islamic laws in Brunei Darussalam: A review] (Bandar Seri Begawan: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1996)Google Scholar; see also Müller, “Sharia Law,” 323. The sultan first announced on his fiftieth birthday that Brunei needed an Islamic penal code (original wording, “Qanun Jina’-I Islam yakni Islamic Criminal Act”) and tasked a first working group to prepare a draft.

81 Black, Ann, “Informed by Ideology: A Review of the Court Reforms in Brunei Darussalam,” in New Courts in Asia, ed. Harding, Andrew and Nicholson, Penelope (London: Routledge), 327–49, at 340–41Google Scholar; Ibrahim, Issues in Brunei Studies, 192. In October 2011, the sultan gave a speech in which he very explicitly announced the plan to introduce an Islamic penal code that would coexist with sharia-compliant “civil law,” stressing that “waiting” or “saying no” would not be an option, as it was obligatory to implement God's laws “in a complete manner.” See A dam, “Hudud and Syariah Compliant Penal Code in Brunei,” video, October 14, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGNuI6H_b-M (author's translation); see also “Sharia Compliant Penal Code,” Brunei Times, October 14, 2011.

82 Othman, Mahmud Saedon, Perlaksanaan dan Pentadbiran Undang-Undang Islam [A review on the implementation and administration of Islamic law in Brunei Darussalam] (Bandar Seri Begawan: Islamic Da'wah Centre, 2008)Google Scholar. Notably, the model of a systematic review of non-sharia law to bring it in line with Islamic norms is a model that had previously been practiced in Pakistan.

83 Othman, A Review; also cited in Müller, “Sharia Law,” 323.

84 For examples of many interesting details in a US Embassy cable from 1994, see “Brunei Considers Constitutional Revisions,” Public Library of US Diplomacy, WikiLeaks, accessed October 28, 2016, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/94BANDARSERIBEGAWAN318_a.html.

85 Lindsey and Steiner, Islam, Law and the State; Müller, “Sharia Law,” 325; Human Rights Resource Centre, “Brunei Darussalam,” in Keeping the Faith: A Study of Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion in ASEAN, ed. Cohen, David and Tan, Kevin (Depok: Human Rights Resource Centre, 2015), 54–98Google Scholar.

86 Syariah Penal Code Order 2013 (hereafter SPCO), sections 68–81(Brunei).

87 SPCO, sections 82–84.

88 SPCO, sections 110, 221.

89 SPCO, sections 107–17.

90 SPCO, sections 107, 108, 109, 111, 113–17.

91 SPCO, sections 110, 221. On the option of repentance and lifting the punishment, see section 117.

92 SPCO section 110 applies to Muslims, and section 221 applies to non-Muslims.

93 Radio Television Brunei, October 4, 2017. This example is taken from the author's viewing of an interview with the state mufti and recorded in the author's field notes. Further details regarding the broadcast are not available.

94 Elias Saba, “The Art of Not Punishing,” Books and Ideas (blog), January 11, 2016, http://www.booksandideas.net/The-Art-of-Not-Punishing.html. Saba's post is about Rabb, Intisar A., Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Notably, Rabb personally handed over a copy of her book to the sultan during a 2015 visit to Brunei organized by the US Embassy.

95 Peletz, Michael G., “A Tale of Two Courts: Judicial Transformation and the Rise of a Corporate Islamic Governmentality in Malaysia,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 144–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; personal communication with Peletz, September 2017.

96 Feener, Shari'a and Social Engineering.

97 Human Rights Resource Centre, “Brunei Darussalam,” 57, 97.

98 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 322.

99 “Penggubalan Akta Kanun Hukuman Jenayah Syar'iah: Kerana Allah, Bukan Untuk Glamor—Titah” [Drafting the Syari'ah Penal Code Order: For Allah, not for glamor], al-Hadaf 20, no. 1 (2016): 1, 3Google Scholar.

100 For a detailed analysis, including a pre- and post-code comparison, see Human Rights Resource Centre, “Brunei Darussalam”; see also Lindsey and Steiner, Islam, Law and the State, particularly the chapters on Brunei, on provisions with similar purposes in Brunei's pre-code Sharia legislation.

101 Graeber, “Dead Zones of Imagination,” 120.

102 SPCO, sections 229, 230.

103 Fatwas (Arabic plural: f atāw ā, Malay plural: fatwa or fatwa-fatwa) are binding on Shafi'i Muslims in Brunei (which all Brunei Malays are expected to be), once the sultan or Majlis Ugama Islam Brunei order their publication in the Gazette. Religious Council and Kadis Courts Act, section 43.

104 SPCO, section 220.

105 SPCO, sections 207, 209, 213, 215, 229.

106 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 325–36.

107 SPCO, sections 229, 230.

108 See Müller, “Sharia Law,” 327, 331.

109 Abdul Rahman, editorial, “Should We Resort to Stoning or Flogging,” Borneo Bulletin, March 13, 2013.

110 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 326; Müller, “Paradoxical Normativities,” 429.

111 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 326.

112 Rasidah Hab and Rachel Thien, “HM Questions Delay in Syariah Enforcement,” Brunei Times, February 28, 2016.

113 Hab and Thien.

114 Quoted in Müller, Dominik M., “Brunei Darussalam in 2016: The Sultan is Not Amused,” Asian Survey 57, no. 1 (2017): 199–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Hab and Thien, “HM Questions Delay in Syariah Enforcement.”

116 Human Rights Resource Centre, “Brunei Darussalam,” 85; Müller, “Sharia Law,” 327.

117 Kai Zem and Mat Sani, “Cooperation Essential for Success,” Brunei Times, January 17, 2016.

118 Rafidah Hamit, “MoRA Proposes Budget of $249 Million,” Brunei Times, March 15, 2016.

119 Müller, “Brunei Darussalam in 2016,” 204.

120 Müller, 204.

121 Quoted in “Paint Accurate Picture of Islam,” Brunei Times, October 23, 2016.

122 Hajah Zabaidah and Haji Salat, “Jangan kata ‘Tidak’ atau ‘Tunggu Dulu’” [Don't say “no” or “wait first”], Pelita Brunei, October 15, 2011, accessed August 30, 2018, http://www.pelitabrunei.gov.bn/ArkibDokumen/2011/Oktober/PB151011.pdf; “Who Are We to Say ‘Wait’,” Brunei Times, October 13, 2011.

123 Wan Mohamad Sahran Wan Ahmadi, “Perintah Kanun Hukuman Jenayah Syari'ah Berjalan Pada Landasan” [Sharia penal code order on track], Pelita Brunei, March 12, 2018, 9; see also Müller “Hybrid Pathways,” 163.

124 “UNISSA Law Students Present ‘Moot Court’ Cases at ICC,” Borneo Bulletin, October 16, 2017.

125 Fatwas are binding in Shafi'I Muslims in Brunei (which all Brunei Malays are expected to be), once the sultan or the Majlis Ugama Islam Brunei orders their publication in the Gazette. Religious Council and Kadis Courts Act, section 43.

126 See, for example, Eickelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W., eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Mandaville, Peter, “Globalization and the Politics of Religious Knowledge: Pluralizing Authority in the Muslim World,” Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 2 (2007): 101–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

127 Religious Council and Kadis Courts Act, section 43; SPCO, section 228.

128 See Müller, “Hybrid Pathways.”

129 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 328.

130 Müller, 327. For an original source from the bureaucracy, see Zainal, Noorafan, Perkembangan Ajaran Sesat di Negara Brunei Darussalam: Satu Analisis Mengenai Punca, Implikasi dan Cadangan Mengatasinya [The development of deviant teachings in Brunei Darussalam: An analysis of their origins, implications, and suggestions for overcoming them] (Bandar Seri Begawan: Pusat Da'wah Islamiah, Kementerian Hal Ehwal Ugama Brunei Darussalam, 2017)Google Scholar. Notably, a small number of members of some of these groups still exist and continue to resist the state-authorities’ attempts of “re-education.”

131 Bourdieu, In Other Words, 136–37.

132 Graeber, “Dead Zones of Imagination,” 120.

133 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 328–29.

134 Müller, 329.

135 Fieldwork data gathered in September and October 2014. Most recently, in 2017, persons involved in a covert investigation against a bomoh shared dramatic details with me. These discussions with the author were conducted in confidentiality and the names of the interviewees are withheld by mutual consent, as are the dates and locations. The two mentioned exhibitions are organized by sub-institutions of the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

136 Interview with the author was conducted in confidentiality and the name of the interviewee is withheld by mutual consent, as are date and location.

137 I did recently come across the case of a person who had already received two warnings, and was again under investigation (with my interlocutor being centrally involved in that process), which may point to the possibility that such cases will become the subject of court proceedings in the future.

138 See Müller, “Sharia Law,” for further details and illustrations.

139 Skeat, Walter W., Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula (London: Macmillan, 1900)Google Scholar; Winstedt, Richard O., “Keramat: Sacred Places and Persons in Malaya,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 2, no. 3 (1924): 264–79Google Scholar.

140 This coincided with similar discursive shifts in the wider Malay world in the course of Islamic revivalism and its desires for “purification.” On pressure from Islamic bureaucracies against keramat traditions and related cultural changes in Malaysia, see Goh, Ben-Lan, “Spirit Cults and Construction Sites: Trans-ethnic Popular Religion and Keramat Symbolism in Contemporary Malaysia,” in Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia, ed. Endres, Kirsten and Lauser, Andrea (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 144–62, 154Google Scholar; Daniels, Timothy P., Building Cultural Nationalism in Malaysia: Identity, Representation and Citizenship (New York: Routledge, 2005), 135–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

141 “Mysteries of Paranormal, Superstition,” Brunei Direct, July 27, 2009.

142 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 333.

143 Human Rights Resource Centre, “Brunei Darussalam,” 67.

144 Group interview with Bahagian Kawalan Aqidah members, Bandar Seri Begawan, October 18, 2014.

145 Interview with the author was conducted in confidentiality and the name of the interviewee is withheld by mutual consent, as are date and location.

146 For numbers of tip-offs in 2004–2005, see Müller, “Sharia Law,” 333.

147 Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman, “Celebrations of Bureaucracy,” 294.

148 Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage, “Rethinking the State.”

149 Müller, “Hybrid Pathways,” 152, 158.

150 Skeat, “Malay Magic.”

151 Bahagian Kawalan Aqidah members, in discussion with the author, Bandar Seri Begawan, October 18, 2014.

152 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 325.

153 “Kubur Sharif,” Fotorafi (blog), last modified June 26, 2009, https://fotorafi.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/kubur-sharif/.

154 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 331.

155 See Beránek, Ondřej and Tupek, Pavel, From Visiting Graves to Their Destruction: The Question of Ziyara through the Eyes of Salafis, Crown Paper 2 (Waltham: Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, 2009)Google Scholar, http://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/cp/CP2.pdf.

156 “Makam Keramat Pulau Besar Diruntuhkan” [Keramat grave in Pulau Besar torn down], Malaysiakini, May 13, 2015.

157 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 328.

158 Hanifu Norhafizah binti Mohd Salleh, “Kepercayaan Kubur Keramat di Daerah Tutong: Dulu dan Sekarang” [Belief in keramat graves in the Tutong district: Past and present] (unpublished BA thesis, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, 2010).

159 Another grave shrine that worshippers would visit some decades ago, ascribed to Syed Mufaqih, who is mentioned in Brunei's mythical tale of origin, Syair Awang Semaun, as having brought Islam to the country, is now placed at the compound at the sultan's palace, Istana Nurul Iman, and thus beyond the reach of potential worshippers. I was made aware of this place by a high-ranking MIB representative who shared childhood memories of when neighbors regularly went to that grave to conduct prayers.

160 Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

161 Scott, “Weapons of the Weak.”

162 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 333.

163 Müller, “Sharia Law,” 337; Müller, “Hybrid Pathways.”

164 The interview with the author was conducted in confidentiality and the name of the interviewee is withheld by mutual consent, as are the date and location. For a more detailed account of the relationship between the Islamic bureaucracy and Darusysyifa, see Müller, “Hybrid Pathways.”

165 SPCO, section 208.

166 SPCO, section 153.

167 SPCO, section 206b.

168 On reactions among former bomoh in Brunei, who “purify” their work by becoming certified Islamic healers, see Müller, “Sharia Law,” 337–39; and Müller, “Hybrid Pathways.”

169 See Jaclyn Neo's excellent analysis of five different forms of understanding “secularism” in the context of Singapore in “Regulating Religion in Singapore: Shades of Regulation and Depoliticization,” in Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes, and Challenges, ed. Jaclyn L. Neo, Arif Jamal, and Daniel Goh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

170 Brian S. Turner, “Soft Authoritarianism, Social Diversity and Legal Pluralism: The Case of Singapore,” in Possamai, Richardson, and Turner, The Sociology of Shari'a, 66–82.

171 For a citation of the sultan condemning “religious pluralism” and its analysis, see Müller, “Paradoxical Normativities,” 423.

172 Described in invaluable depth, for example, in “Singapore's Keramats: Wonder-Working Shrines Sacred to Many Nationalities,” Straits Times, June 11, 1939, 16; Rivers, P. J., “Keramat in Singapore in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 76, no. 2 (2003): 93–119Google Scholar.

173 At the Old Malay Cemetery in Singapore, there is an elevated plateau with royal graves, marked with yellow cloth and signboards. On the stairs, a scripture asks the visitor to “give a greeting” (beri salam). In a more wahabi-style orthodox reading, communication with deceased persons is neither possible nor is its attempt permissible.

174 My observations and conversation with the Radin Mas Ayu shrine's caretaker, Singapore, October 2014.

175 Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura, “Risalah for Building a Singapore Muslim Community of Excellence,” 2nd ed. (2006), viii, accessed October 15, 2017, https://www.muis.gov.sg/-/media/Files/OOM/Resources/Risalah-eng-lr.pdf.

176 Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura, viii.

177 Lianne Chia, “Asatizah Recognition Scheme to Become Compulsory from January 2017: Yaacob,” Channel NewsAsia, September 13, 2016, http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/asatizah-recognition-scheme-to-become-compulsory-from-january-20-7799112.

178 Chia.

179 Compare Scott on the role of “legibility” in Scott, Seeing like a State.

180 Eisenstadt, “Bureaucracy, Bureaucratization, and Debureaucratization.”

181 Müller, Dominik M. and Steiner, Kerstin, “The Bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia: Transdisciplinary Perspectives,” in “The Bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia: Transdisciplinary Perspectives,” special issue, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 37, no. 1 (2018): 3–26, at 11Google Scholar.

182 Müller, Dominik M., “From Consultancy to Critique: The ‘Success Story’ of Globalized Zakat Management in Malaysia and its Normative Ambiguities,” Globalizations 14, no. 1 (2017): 81–98, at 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

183 Müller and Steiner, “The Bureaucratisation of Islam,” 9.