The problem of lifestyle and consumption has been a critical theme in modern Islamic reflections on economy and morality. The liberal and neoliberal emphasis on free choice and unfettered consumption has posed a particular dilemma for Muslim economic theorists because its focus on individual choice challenges the very bedrock of Islamic ethics, which affirms that personal consumption must take heed of a broader moral order. Concerns such as these have long been particularly salient in the Southeast Asian Muslim country of Malaysia. There, the rapid growth of an affluent Malay middle class juxtaposed with the conspicuously different consumption styles of Western and Chinese consumers has raised bitter debates among Malay Muslims as to what constitutes a properly religious Islamic consumption.
Johan Fischer's new book on shopping among modern Malay Muslims aims squarely at these issues, albeit primarily from the perspective not of Islamic intellectual argumentation, but of the consumption practices of the suburban families among whom he lived while conducting dissertation research. Fischer is an anthropologist trained at Roskilde University in Denmark. He brings to his project a theoretical orientation that draws heavily on cultural studies and on Pierre Bourdieu's classic work on class and social distinction as practice. He devotes less time to and appears less interested in or familiar with the abundant literature by contemporary Muslim intellectuals and jurists on Islamic economics, consumption, and modernity.
Fischer lived for a year with his family in a middle-class gated community located about 15 kilometers outside Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur. He conducted a quantitative survey of 241 households in his suburban complex but focuses his attention mainly on ten Malay Muslim families, examining their consumption practices through interviews and participant observation. His aim is to contest the widely held idea that consumption is essentially intimate and “beyond the state.” On the contrary, he argues that “the Malay state's presence in consumption is ubiquitous” (p. 9). He contends that various state policies have worked to reconceptualize consumption in a way that identifies Malay ethnicity, consumption practices, and Islam. The association of these domains has made shopping a “patriotic duty,” which Fischer refers to as “shopping for the state.”
The former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, was an enthusiastic proponent of Malaysia's New Economic Policy, first implemented in the early 1970s. The New Economic Policy aimed to improve the economic and social situation of the demographically predominant Malay population (the bumiputra) in order to create a new Malay middle class or “New Malays,” a term that many of Fischer's informants used to refer to themselves. In 1991, the policy was succeeded by the National Development Policy. At the center of both was the privileging of the Malay middle class and the nationalization of Islam as the core of the Malaysian nation.
The same economic policies that supported the development and expansion of the Malay middle class have resulted in the mass availability of a dizzying array of new commodities, shopping malls, theaters, and entertainment venues—inevitably raising questions of proper Islamic consumption. Against this backdrop and within the context of a resurgent interest in normative Islam, increasing numbers of Malay Muslims refer to the halal/haram binary to inform their consumption practices. Halal refers to that which is permitted by Allah. Its opposite, haram, is that which God prohibits. Fischer argues that Mahathir's move to assert control over the certification of halal commodities under the Islamic Affairs Division was part of a wider effort to preempt the initiatives of dakwah (proselytization) groups such as Darul Arqam and the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party. The result has been state control over those commodities deemed acceptable for consumption and those that are to be avoided, and thus, according to Fischer, the emergence of a “unique Malay Muslim ontology of consumption” (p. 226).
Related to the concern with the halal/haram binary, Fischer finds the theme of excess versus balance at the center of suburban class distinctions, as reflected in patterns of consumption. In his discussion of the domains of food, dress, interior decoration, cars, and cultural consumption, he identifies two rather different approaches to Islamic consumption among his respondents. One group performs proper Islamic consumption as a form of purism; the other is more pragmatic in orientation. Among the purist group, halalization is a moral given. For members of the second group, the distinction is either reluctantly accepted or is rejected as a shallow material display of belief. He argues that the two groups can be further identified by a wide range of material and ideological distinctions. For example, the purists view the headscarf for women as required by Islam. Conversely, the pragmatists view it as excessive and material and as an ineffective indicator of personal piety. But Fischer refuses to assign his respondents to either one group or the other (purist or pragmatist), arguing that in their discourse and performance, informants constantly wove in and out of these identifications and that both groups were intensely focused on more general concerns of excess versus balance.
Despite Fischer's overuse of a sometimes unhelpful academic jargon, Proper Islamic Consumption addresses issues that are both timely and important. Fischer convincingly argues that the Malaysian state has taken on the certification of halal commodities as part of its attempt to nationalize Islam and has effected a Malaysian ontology of consumption that is poised between individual consumer desires, social anxieties, and halalization (p. 102). As part of a neoliberal paradigm within the framework of a “Malaysianised mode of millennial capitalism,” the state has continued to deliver a steady stream of privileges to the Malay middle class in return for patriotic consumption or “shopping for the state.” These privileges have come at a cost, however. The price of proper Islamic consumption in the case of Malaysia, Fischer observes, is deepening state authoritarianism.
