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Policing Illicit Intimacy in British Malaya, 1915-1940

Fri, April 1, 3:00 to 5:00pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 3rd Floor, Room 306

Abstract

The connected sphere of morality, sexuality, and vice, particularly the boundaries between permissible and forbidden behaviours, became central to the practice of Islamic law in British Malaya during the early twentieth century. British reforms codified Shari’a into a body of Muslim personal law, empowering a new, formal Islamic bureaucracy which asserted its power aggressively over the intimate lives of its Muslim subjects. Islamic conceptions of personal morality and the proper practice of Islam were reshaped to Malaya’s diverse ethnic and religious landscape. Illicit intimacy increasingly came to be defined by Malay elites and Islamic scholars as a crime of interethnic intimacy, between Muslims and non-Muslims. By the interwar period, defining, apprehending and punishing illicit intimacy had become an obsession. Many hundreds of men and women were arrested, fined and jailed for violating the doctrinally approved limits of a lawful sexual relationship, some for participating in casual anonymous encounters, others for living seperti laki bini, like husband and wife. While the guarantee of Malay autonomy in issues of religion and custom lay at the heart of British rule in the Malay States, divisions between religious and secular jurisdictions were both artificial and imprecise. Tensions between Malay elites and colonial officials over the punishment of non-Muslim perpetrators of Islamic crimes posed a profound challenge to the jurisdictional boundaries of Islamic law. As the Islamic bureaucracy became a powerful counterbalance to colonial authority, the regulation of illicit intimacy became the contested terrain on which battles for sovereignty were fought.

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