Cont Islam (2016) 10:181–183 DOI 10.1007/s11562-015-0339-x

Adam Possamai, James T. Richardson, and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), The Sociology of Shari’a: Case Studies from around the World New York: Springer Publications, 2015, 328 pp., ISBN 978–3319096049, $112 Lawrence Rosen 1

Published online: 28 June 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Within any country there are always multiple ways to have a dispute addressed. Local and national courts may have overlapping jurisdictions in which each applies quite different rules, parties may simply avoid the state (through arbitration, mediation, or negotiation), and different religious or ethnic groups may seek recourse in their own forums. The usual scholarly way of referring to such choices is through the notion of ‘legal pluralism’ as opposed to ‘legal centralism,’ a concept that undoubtedly has some descriptive utility even though it has never yielded great theoretical insight. That the editors and authors of the present volume should commence their work by reliance on this idea is understandable, but, perhaps fortunately, it is not the only conceptual tool encountered as one enters the substantive essays. Indeed, readers are alerted in the introduction to two other boundaries that have been placed on the book. First, the contributors focus on those societies Bwhere typically secular law [as opposed to shari’a] is the dominant tradition,^ and second, in the overwhelming majority of instances custom is left out of consideration as a source of Islamic law. Together with an emphasis on statutes, rather than unreported case law, these limitations have a distinct effect on the scope of a number of the proffered analyses. The first group of essays focuses on societies in which Islam is the majority religion. Thus Shamsul notes that in Malaysia, common law, shari’a, and local custom (adat) are all at work, albeit in different proportions depending on the region and issue involved. He is thus more willing to recognize the vital role adat plays in decentralizing Islam, whereas Khondker, describing Bangladesh, says Bthe protagonists of Shari’a often involve some kind of localized and twisted interpretation of Shari’a^ to legitimize the handling of criminal matters, to the consternation of the state high court which appears * Lawrence Rosen [email protected] 1

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

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hostile to local practice. Thus one axis of concern is clearly signaled: whether a state will use the shari’a as a vehicle of political centralization or whether local custom has always been regarded not as separate from the shari’a but as its local variant, thus gaining legitimacy as the communal manifestation of sacred law rather than as a competitor with it. Even majority Muslim states recognize shari’a to different degrees. Yilmaz notes that in Turkey 5–20 % of couples do not get civil marriages – the only legally recognizable form - while 2–10 % engage in illegal polygamous unions. Whether those who resist do so because they regard their marital forms as Islamic or as none of the state’s business is unclear. Turner and Arslan are quick to note that Turkey is theoretically secular, whereas Greece, unique among European nations, formally recognizes Islamic law for certain familial and civic issues. They applaud An-Naim’s thoughtprovoking argument that secularization is actually a prerequisite to the enjoyment of each group’s own religion. Where Islam is in the minority other issues arise. Turner shows that in Singapore, with a Muslim population of only 15 % (mostly ethnic Malays), Bsoft authoritarianism^ manifests itself as a hyper-judicial state in which some religions (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses) are banned and inciting disaffection to the president or government in the name of religion are crimes. As in Solano-Antonio’s account of the Philippines, shari’a is given limited range, though perhaps because of her involvement in a center that aids women the author notes that there is a reasonable degree of deference to Islam, mainly in the nation’s fractious south. By contrast, Wang’s account of China’s 23 million Muslims suggests that respect for Muslim business development and relations is superior to the accommodations made in most Western countries. He seems to suggest, by contrast with Domingo’s assessment of South Africa, that the Chinese will continue to permit greater local action by Muslims whereas South Africa has failed to pass a law recognizing Muslim marriage and may, like its colonial predecessor, wind up having its constitutional court decide what is and what is not acceptably Islamic. Western nations, operating from a different history, have come to approach their Muslim residents and citizens with increased wariness since 9/11. Breda shows that courts in Italy have accommodated shari’a when it does not offend public order, thus allowing practical effects without validating Islamic law as such. Aries and Richardson’s comprehensive overview of the German situation emphasizes the model of using mediation as a way of invoking Islam, even though the government recognition of official Islamic bodies has not fully solved the problem of each organization’s claims to representativeness. Even in the Australian sports realm, as McCue and Kragem note, Muslims may seem to be accommodated only for many of the non-Muslims to have turned on them, sometimes violently. AntiMuslim sentiment shows up in the newspapers of Sydney and New York differentially: The content study by Possamai and others suggests that Muslims (who account for 4.7 % of Sydney’s residents and 7.5 % of New York’s) are portrayed negatively about 36 % of the time in the Australian city and 15 % of the time in New York. Whereas, according to Farrar, Islamic banking (which worldwide accounts for US$ 2.8 trillion) is being accommodated to some extent in Australia, Western countries continue to regard the forms of contract involved with a skeptical eye and have yet to fashion regulations that bespeak as much tolerance as is allowed, say, non-Islamic charities.

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In Muslim majority countries the relation of shari’a to state law is often at the heart of constitutional reform. As Salim shows, Egypt under Morsi moved towards a fully Islamic state, a position from which the military has backpedaled since taking back control. Indonesia, the author asserts, has never quite clarified the role of Islam in its constitutional structure, whereas Tunisia’s new constitution avoids explicit mention of shari’a and clearly denies it as a source for legislation. The result, at least in these countries, is a kind of approach to vagueness, the ultimate consequences for local implementation and national self-regard remaining to be determined. Multiculturalism and legal pluralism thus come in many flavors. Richardson and Turner may claim that sociological accounts of pluralism’s various forms constitute theories that help explain the shape and perhaps even the future course of such accommodations. But simply arguing that any legal system may provoke contested approaches or yield internal disagreement hardly rises to the level of genuine theory. Rather, what we have in this volume is not so much the application of a set of new ways of thinking about the simultaneous existence of alternative legal regimes within a single nation as a clear and highly useful set of country studies, each of which forms an excellent point of entry for any student of contemporary Islamic law and a helpful corrective for any who think that the way Islamic law has been working out in a country with which they are familiar is the way it must develop everywhere.