The Bureaucratization of Islam and Its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia: Outlines of a Collaborative Research Project

• In Event: 296. (Mis-)Leading Religion and Politics: Islamization(s) in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Following transnational trends of Islamic resurgence, state-sponsored Islamic bureaucracies have become increasingly influential in Southeast Asia, particularly in countries where Muslim populations play a significant political role. The governments of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have in diverse ways empowered “administrative” religious bodies to guide and regulate Islamic discourse. Although their approaches, motivations, and spheres of influence differ widely, they share the objective of formalizing classificatory schemes of Islam, institutionalize hierarchies, and create rules for Islam-related public communication.
This paper presents the conceptual framework of a newly established Junior Research Group studying the “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia”. It investigates Islamic governance with an analytic focus on the state’s exercise of classificatory power and its workings at the micro-level and it views the bureaucratization of Islam not just as an empirical fact but as a phenomenon to be theorized beyond singular case studies. The paper claims that the bureaucratization of Islam far transcends its institutional boundaries: focusing on diverse empirical contexts, the project scrutinizes how the imposition of formalized schemes of Islam – a translation into the “language” of bureaucracy – has socio-legal consequences that deeply penetrate into public discourse and everyday social life. Functional and hermeneutic dimensions of bureaucratization must be studied in relation to each other, as changing forms evoke new meanings. Depending on the contents of bureaucratized Islam and its wider discursive substrate, these meanings differ significantly, as the paper illustrates with reference to Brunei and Singapore.

Author

• Dominik M. Müller, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology