Malaysia and the Developing World: The Asian Tiger on the Cinnamon Road by Jan Stark (review)

Jan Stark’s Malaysia and the Developing World: The Asian Tiger on the Cinnamon Road is intriguing for presenting readers with the multifaceted aspects of trade and development networks incorporating Islam. The author suggests that these constitute alternative modernities. Stark’s generally unflattering depiction of these networks focuses on states’ and other actors’ contemporary transformations of age-old Islamic networks anchored in religion, trade and politics that spanned the Malay World, Central Asia, East Africa and the Middle East from pre- to post-colonial times. His analytical focus falls on the intersections between Islamic values as interpreted by actors, ethnic norms and other translocal identities in shaping agents’ economic behaviour. Stark argues that the contemporary networks reflect alternative modernities because they embody non-Western governance styles and cultural underpinnings. This book is situated within the wider debate on the relationship between cultural values and economic behaviour. It is an important contribution to current debates on Islam’s relationship with modernity at a time when Asia, which is home to substantial Muslim populations, is gaining economic prominence on the world stage.

Stark presents other arguments in the book too: that the nation-state is retreating and that global power is shifting from an allegedly hegemonic West to the East. Additionally, he asks if an Islamic ummah, or a community of the faithful, held together by common interpretations of Islam, is feasible. The book covers a wide range of geographical locations — Chapters 5 to 9 immerse readers in rich retails about networks linkages between Malaysia and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries, with one chapter focusing on the OIC member, Guyana; and the ties between Southeast Asia and Central Asia, one of the network players here being Kazakhstan. Theoretically, Stark holds together the different network actors strewn across these widespread geographical regions through a framework centred on “meaning”. “Meaning” and its production are the book’s leitmotif and they are conceptualized broadly: “cultures and its intertwinings with politics, questions of power and control, popular appeals to history and a shared past or through authoritarianism and development and its appeals to modernity, progress and change”. The meaning framework is crucial for Stark as he anchors his argument for the presence of alternative modernities as being built upon meaning production. In contrast, his argument is that Western modernities are state-centric and govern their societies through different styles and power structures.

Stark’s theoretical application of “meaning” is most effective in Chapter 5. He anchors “meaning” — reading it as power-based imagined communities linked via spaces — with detailed discussions on how Islamic knowledge and norms now flow less from the Middle East to a recipient Southeast Asia; rather, the flow has reversed in directionality. Malaysia is an important modern Islamic country that is shaping the international Islamic banking and halal food markets. I found this chapter the most convincing for providing a well-developed argument and narrative anchored in supporting data; it was effective in what the chapter aimed to do.

A stronger case for differentiating Western, state-centred forms of modernity from meaning-centred alternative modernities would have contributed to a cogent analysis overall. Distracting from this central task is a meaning-based theoretical framework that is too broad and too diffuse. Stark has treated “meaning” as a substitute for “culture”, itself a notoriously difficult concept to define, as anthropologists have shown. The author operationalizes “meaning” in a variety of ways at different junctures in his book. Each of these applications itself is diffuse. The result: a theoretical basis that has yet to show clearly how these modern Islamic networks are different from and alternatives to Western modernities. Using different and broad applications of “meaning”, the author misses opportunities to flesh out his arguments sufficiently. The different theoretical operationalizations of “meaning” include, but are not limited to, the following: “meaning” as “entangled history”, a cross-disciplinary approach that shows the multidirectional intersections between “cultures, history and...