The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach

9. Revelation and Redemption: Colonial Precedents for the Politics of Islam in India and Malaysia

142 9 Revelation and Redemption Colonial Precedents for the Politics of Islam in India and Malaysia iZA huSSin In April 2001, a case came before the High Court of Malaysia on a matter of constitutional and Islamic law. The plaintiff, a Malaysian citizen who was born a Muslim, presented her case as such: She had converted to Christianity and been baptized in a church. She applied to the National Registration Department to have this change of religion displayed on her identity card, stating also that she wished to marry a Christian (which would not have been legally possible had her identity card stated her religion as “Islam”).1 The National Registration Department accepted the request for a change of name (to Lina Joy) but denied the request for a change of religious status, arguing that the plaintiff needed the Syariah Court to certify her conversion out of Islam. The judge dismissed Lina Joy’s case on the grounds that she was still considered to be Muslim and that the case was therefore within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Syariah Courts. However, in the judgment, the judge also commented on the multiple constitutional issues raised by the case, one of them the question of whether Lina Joy could actually convert out of Islam. Here, her ethnic identity—Malay—made that impossible, in the view of the judge: “A person as long as he/she is a Malay and by defini- 143 Revelation and Redemption tion under art. 160 cl. (2) is a Malay, the said person cannot renounce his/ her religion at all. A Malay under art. 160(2) remains in the Islamic faith until his or her dying days.”2 The case of Lina Joy has raised controversy on the role of the state in religious affairs and the rights of citizens to religious choice. It throws light on the strands of constitutional, religious, and administrative law woven through time that bind ethnicity, religion, citizenship, and family. In this matter, Lina Joy did not go to the Islamic courts because she did not identify as Muslim; in denying jurisdiction, the secular court argued that Lina Joy was indeed Muslim and in fact could not convert out of Islam because she was also Malay; Muslim authorities, instead of taking the interpretation of the High Court, raised the issue of apostasy, indicating that the possibility of leaving Islam was indeed an issue and had grave ramifications under Islamic law.3 By the time of her appeal in 2005, the judges in that case, too, were using the term apostasy to refer to conversion out of Islam and discussing matters of Islamic law in their opinion. A productive way of studying these complex dynamics is to take seriously Joel S. Migdal’s (2001a) charge to study matters of revelation and redemption in the politics of religion and to engage with Robert Cover’s (1983) work on nomos and narrative in law.4 Both scholars conceive of politics and power as two-edged processes in which both state and society play critical roles and where disputes serve multiple ends. Matters of revelation and redemption, the power of image and its susceptibility to problems in practice, certainly occupied both colonial and local elites, even as the meanings of these concepts and the manner of their achievement differed . As Migdal (2001a) and Cover (1983) argue, however, matters of faith and law—of revelation, nomos—cannot be separated from the contexts and politics that give them meaning or from the people who change their directions and who benefit and suffer from their application in everyday life—redemption, narrative. These propositions can be used to illustrate how the colonial encounter in British India and Malaya relates to contemporary struggles over Islamic law and state authority. The basic argument is that law is made, unmade, and remade. During the colonial period, local and colonial elites negotiated the scope, content , and application of laws pertaining to Muslims and Islam, to their mutual benefit. In the process of making laws that defined Muslim life, religion, and relations with the state, these elites participated in a fundamental remaking of Islamic law in the evolving state, centered on family, 144 Iza Hussin personal status, ethnic identity, and the “private” domain. The claims of religious law to stand apart from the law of the state have provided significant power to religious institutions and elites, even as state resources have become part of...