Western states have securitized Islam, meaning that discussions of Muslim life and Islamic presence in Western societies are increasingly seen through the lens of national security. Additionally, Islam’s impact on the cohesion of Western society and the durability of its secular values, a cultural adjunct to national security, are viewed with deep suspicion. But in Muslim states Islam is increasingly seen through legal lenses; hence, Tamir Moustafa argues that there is a systematic “judicialization of Islam.” In this book he presents, as a case in point, the resulting legal contestation between liberal constitutional values and Islamic law and symbolism that permeates the politics and culture in Malaysia. Moustafa begins his thoughtful and interesting book by claiming that, unlike conventional wisdom that expects courts to mediate conflict between religion and liberal values, in Muslim-majority societies courts are “catalyzing and fueling” these struggles that then are radiating through the society at large. This radiating impact of legal struggles between liberalism and Islam reveals how courts and the state itself are implicated in the construction of religion in Malaysia.

Moustafa arrives at the conclusion that prevailing tensions between Islam and liberalism, religion and rights, secularism and religion, and individualism and collectivism as manifest in Malaysian politics stem from the peculiar legal dichotomies in Malaysian state formation—especially the tension between state and federal courts. State courts are charged with dealing with matters of shariah law, and federal courts enforce civil law, which deals with all issues other than Islam and religion. Tensions arise because these court systems enjoy overlapping and hence confusing jurisdictions in a multicultural and multireligious country like Malaysia. His most troubling finding is that Malaysians, both liberal and Islamist, are reaching the conclusion (as a result of the judicialization of Islam) that Islam and liberalism are incompatible. I fear that, if this is true, it will impede the development of democracy in Muslim societies like Malaysia and also inhibit Muslim integration in Western liberal democracies.

The book is based on a very complex methodology of data collection. Moustafa essentially uses a process-tracing research design to map the radiating impact of courts on society. He collects data from analyses of court cases, semi-structured interviews with elite and ordinary Malaysians, and several vernacular media sources to grasp the sociopolitical perspectives of the various ethnic communities (Malays, Chinese, Indian) that themselves come from distinct religious backgrounds (Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism). Moustafa is aware of the fact that his arguments are based on just the one case study of Malaysia. He thus argues that his work should therefore be seen more as theory building, rather than theory testing. I hope he or someone else does test his theoretical claims in cases such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia, Morocco, and Nigeria.

The book’s argument essentially is that the Malaysian constitution and courts try to balance both liberal and Islamic imperatives, and the ensuing tensions judicialize Islam/religion, which in turn has a radiating impact on society and how Islam/religion are imagined in public discourse. The author treats the constitution and the courts as independent variables, judicialization as an intervening variable, and sociopolitical ramifications as dependent variables. But he does not consider the possibility that the hundreds of amendments to the constitution and the changing role of federal and state shariah courts can be seen as dependent variables, and the rise of Islamic legal activism as an independent variable that is reconstituting (Islamizing) the constitution, national identity, and the court system, essentially reversing the causal arrow. I am suggesting that the legal structure and politics of Malaysia are co-constitutive: rather than one shaping the other, they are mutually shaping each other in what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens would call a “structuration process.”

The book consists of seven chapters and an introduction. The first four chapters provide the historical and theoretical background, and the last three chapters are more empirical in nature. The author’s approach is multidisciplinary. He uses sources from anthropology, political science, Islamic studies, legal studies, history, and religious studies to provide interesting observations and insights throughout the book. The book would have been still richer if he had also taken account of some of the critical developments in postcolonial theory that address how Islam has been distorted by its encounter with colonialism. This is especially true in the second chapter, “The Secular Roots of Islamic Law in Malaysia,” in which the author seeks to explain the emergence of Anglo-Muslim law in Malaysia when the British codified Islamic legal precepts according to English legal traditions. Moustafa argues that this so-called Islamic law would be unrecognizable to a classically trained Islamic jurist but not to an ordinary lawyer unfamiliar with Islamic law. In that same chapter, he recognizes the power of naming; perhaps he could have titled this chapter something like the colonial roots of Islamic law in Malaysia, because he is treating colonial powers as secular. But how could the colonial regime be secular if it was codifying and implementing religious laws? France passed a law in 1905 that is seen as the country’s main source of enforcement of secularism and marginalization of religion. But this law was not applied in Algeria, and a dichotomy similar to that in Malaysia was maintained in Algeria by France. Is it possible that the colonial legacy, and not Islam per se, is the main reason why Muslim societies are struggling to find a role for Islam in the public domain?

Chapter 4, “The Judicialization of Religion,” is fascinating. Moustafa examines several cases to show how decisions in those cases not only judicialized religion but also provided more fodder for conflict between so-called Islamic rites and liberal rights. This is the best empirical chapter in the book, and it suggests, at least to me, that the real tension might be one of levels of analysis. Liberalism conceptualizes religious freedom in individual terms, whereas Islamic jurisprudence constructs it in communal terms. For liberals the individual is autonomous and must have the freedom to choose. But in Islamic jurisprudence, religious communities must have the freedom from state interference to adjudicate their affairs freely; that may include the freedom to deprive their members of individual freedoms to choose without state interference. The subsequent chapters trace the radiating effect of court decisions and legal contestations into social and political spheres. Moustafa provides a very interesting and detailed account of lived Islam and lived liberalism in a Muslim-majority but religiously diverse society.

I started this review by talking about the securitization of Islam in the West. Here too the tensions between religion and secularism, Islam and liberalism, are destabilizing the historic balance of power between religion and the state. While Muslim states deal with the challenge of Islam to liberal constitutions through judicialization, Western states choose to securitize the issue. I wish that Moustafa had made some basic comparisons with Western liberal multireligious states like France or Denmark, which would have certainly enriched his analysis of the Islam–liberalism dialectic.