Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State, Tamir Moustafa

We read Moustafa's article on legal consciousness (Chapter 4), which is an earlier publication based on the same project as his book. In the article and the book, Moustafa studied court decisions, but his research went far beyond the verdicts of Malaysia's apex courts.

Fieldwork for the project was conducted in the summer and fall of 2009, in the fall of 2010, and over several subsequent stretches between 2012 and 2015. A total of 170 semi-structured interviews were conducted, seventy with lawyers, judges, activists, politicians, and journalists, and an additional 100 with “everyday Malaysians.” Findings also rest on an extensive textual analysis of court decisions and press coverage of prominent cases. I examined the full universe of cases where there was a question of jurisdiction between the civil courts and the shariah courts. A context-rich, process-tracing method was adopted to map the development of legal institutions over time, as well as the flow of individual cases through the courts. This two-level (institutional and case-specific) process-tracing approach facilitated careful consideration of the continuities and critical junctures where legal/institutional change pro­duced new patterns of contention inside and outside the courts. I examined the full life cycle of each case, from its first appearance in court through to the public spectacle that emerged around certain of those cases. I considered the origin of each case and the legal logics invoked, as civil court judges navigated complex entanglements and contending claims concerning shariah court jurisdiction. Next, I noted whether cases became subjects of popular debate. For those cases that did gain political salience, I examined how they came into the public spotlight.

Elite-level interviews enabled a deeper understanding of the various pos­itions and strategies of civil society organizations, which had mobilized around controversial cases, both inside and outside formal legal intuitions. I was mindful of the need to seek out views from across the political and ideological spectrum to consider the full range of thinking about the cases and the controversies they produced. I therefore interviewed lawyers litigating on opposite sides of the same cases, as well as activists from the most prominent liberal rights and conservative NGOs who had staked out opposite sides of public lobbying efforts. (The absence of a middle ground was striking, and it speaks to the ways that judicial institutions frame a binary logic that is hard to escape.) I found it relatively easy to empathize with the views and positions of liberal rights lawyers and activists, as their frames of understanding aligned closely with my own.

To assess the radiating effect of courts on popular legal consciousness, I organized a multiethnic research team to conduct semi-structured interviews with “everyday Malaysians.” The aim of these informal interviews was to study popular understandings of court cases and legal controversies. I was interested in assessing whether popular understandings of prominent cases matched the legal logics that are deployed in court, or if they matched the frames that political activists constructed for media consumption. I supplemented these semi-structured interviews with several structured focus groups and a nationwide, stratified survey of popular understandings of the Islamic legal tradition. [...]

The national telephone survey was nationwide in scope. It used appropriate sampling techniques to ensure that respondents represented the composition of the Muslim community in Malaysia across relevant demographic variables including region, sex, and urban-rural cleavages. Execution of the telephone survey, including the sampling of respondents, was conducted by the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, the leading public survey research group in Malaysia. The sampling population was drawn from the national telephone directory, which comprises all households with fixed-line telephones. In stage one of the sampling, a random number generator was used to produce a sample of three million fixed-line phone numbers from the national directory.

Four focus group sessions were organized on July 14, 20, and 21, 2013 in Petaling Jaya. Each focus group lasted approximately 1.5 hours and drew participants from across metropolitan Kuala Lumpur. The first focus group was composed of Malay participants with a Malay facilitator; the second group was made up of ethnic Indian Malaysians with an ethnic Indian facilitator; the third group had ethnic Chinese Malaysians with an ethnic Chinese moder­ator; the final focus group was ethnically mixed, with both ethnic Malay and ethnic Chinese facilitators. The focus group questions were designed by the author and executed with the assistance of the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, which provided organization and assistance.

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