On Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace by Patricia Sloane-White (review)

Review Essay I: Bryan S. Turner

Much of the social science literature on Islam, especially since 9/11, has focused on accounts of prejudice, victimhood, and Islamophobia. These victim narratives about Middle East refugees in Germany, North Africans in France, Rohingya in Myanmar or Malay-Muslims in Singapore are well known and much rehearsed. Much of the research is in fact about advocacy rather than about science. Patricia Sloane-White has produced something different, original and refreshing—a qualitative ethnographic study of the rise to power of the Muslim elite in corporate Malaysia. In fact this is her second book on entrepreneurship in Malaysia. She published Islam Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays in 1999. In this recent publication, she contrasts her ethnographic approach to individual processes of pious self-augmentation with macro studies of Islamization as "a fractious struggle engaging state-makers and state-seekers" (p. 1). Against the background of Malaysian independence in 1957 and rapid economic growth fuelled by petrodollars, rent and multinational investment, she explores the rise of sharia advisors who provide sharia business knowledge to corporate executives, capitalists and senior managers. They are thus distinguished from the more traditional arbiters of Islam, namely the ulama. These sharia advisers are at the forefront of the growth of Islamic economics, which defines the norms and ethical practices that determine the relationships connecting finance, business and people to provide desirable social and economic outcomes for citizens. Thus, the corporate Islamic workplace is more than a moneymaking engine; it is a space of moral production where various practices produce value for the public good. Here, then, is the new Muslim elite—self-confident, successful and, above all, pious.

Sloane-White divides this sharia narrative in the context of Malay development into two stages or phases. The pro-Malay government policy after 1957 classified Malay Muslims into bumiputera, the indigenous legitimate owners of the national wealth, and the "immigrant" minority of ethnic Malaysian Chinese who had dominated the higher echelons of the economy. In the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was in place between 1970 and 1990, a generation of bumiputera had been socialized into capitalist values and practices. The NEP was designed to provide poor and rural Malays with an education and thereby to reduce inequality between Malays and other ethnic groups. Chinese, Indians and aboriginals did not figure in the government's growth policies. The NEP was in reality a mechanism for redistributing capital, and in the long run it was immersed in favouritism and patronage. By 2009, none of the top companies were under bumiputera ownership.

Corporate Islam documents the rise of the post-NEP generation of entrepreneurs and managers who have embraced sharia as the only trustworthy guide to ethical business; they have also shaped their personal lives by overt commitment to Islam and now guide their everyday world through the Qur'an and the teachings of the Prophet. They have rejected the intoxicated secular world of consumption and credit that they see as corrupting and undermining Malay society. In fact, Malay Islamism is part of the legacy of Islam and created the Malaysian Department of Islamic Development, which, through coordinating Islamic laws and procedures, set about defining what it is to be a Sunni Muslim in Malaysia. The process of Islamization was intensified in 1988 when the Federal Constitution was amended to establish the principle that civil courts had no jurisdiction over sharia courts. Sloane-White's important argument here is that, while in much of the Muslim world Islamization grew in opposition to states that were thought to be secular and Westernized, the Malaysian state orchestrated Islamization to secure its base in the electorate.

Sloane-White recognizes in chapter 4 (Islam at Work: Personnel of the Sharia Generation) a valuable comparison with similar research undertaken by Daromir Rudnyckyj...