Working in the Islamic Economy: Sharia-Ization and the Malaysian Workplace (Essay‪)‬

In the white-collar world of Malaysia's confident, globally oriented Islamic economy; sharia compliance has created vigorous new businesses and products. Sharia has also emerged as a novel form of corporate culture, reconfiguring workplace identities and relations in distinctly Islamic ways. Exploring the sharia premises and practices that have been institutionalized in some Malaysian work lives can provide some understanding of what could be called the sharia-ization of the Malaysian workplace. This article explores the experiences of differently placed people who work in Malaysia's Islamic economy, ranging from chief executive officers to managers, clerks, and messengers. (1) They work in Islamic banks and insurance companies and the companies that service them, such as human resources and training consultancies, and accountancies and auditing firms whose owners and directors have fully embraced the Islamic economic model. (2) Many Malaysian Muslims today are firmly placed within the urban middle classes (Welsh 2008) (3). Many live and work in and around the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, employed by private-sector corporations which comprise the commercial and economic foundation of the nation, a legacy of 1980s-era government-led privatization projects such as Look East and Malaysia Incorporated (Triantafillou 2002). But after decades of Western-style capitalist development, many Malaysian Muslims are questioning not just the culture that Western-style capitalism has brought to Malaysia, but its very economics. And many see the growing appeal of the Islamic economy in Malaysia not just as an ethical place to bank and borrow, but as a place to work. In the words of one young woman who captured this desire well: "We want to know that the money with which we feed our children was earned morally." The men and women whose experiences and points-of-view are recorded here share with many other Malaysian Muslims (4) a growing confidence that sharia, or Islamic or divine law, should guide all economic and social transactions in Malaysia. (5) To the people I studied in Malaysia's Islamic workplaces, (6) sharia is thus not merely a guide for financial operations. It is, as Muslim jurists understand it and in the fullest meaning of the word, a "path", a way of life. (7) The men and women I met in the Islamic workplace wanted work that followed that path.