Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace

by Patricia Sloane-White

Overview

Compelling and original, this book offers a unique insight into the modern Islamic corporation, revealing how power, relationships, individual identities, gender roles, and practices - and often massive financial resources - are mobilized on behalf of Islam. Focusing on Muslims in Malaysia, Patricia Sloane-White argues that sharia principles in the region's Islamic economy produce a version of Islam that is increasingly conservative, financially and fiscally powerful, and committed to social control over Muslim and non-Muslim public and private lives. Packed with fascinating details, the book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Islamic politics and culture in modern life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316877609
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Patricia Sloane-White is an associate professor of anthropology and chair of Women and Gender Studies with joint appointments in Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware. She is a social anthropologist with a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She has researched Islam, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and corporate business in Malaysia for over two decades. She was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Malaysia in 2008–9 and a Fulbright Specialist Scholar to Malaysia in 2010. In addition to her previous book, Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (1999), she has published numerous articles on the Malay middle class, gender, sharia, and the Muslim workplace.

Table of Contents

1. Corporate Islam; 2. The scholar-elites of sharia: men of the mosque and the market; 3. The corporate elites of sharia; 4. Sharia divisions of labor: khalifah and God's 'human resources'; 5. How divisions of labor are gendered: sharia, women, and the priviliges of men; 6. Zakat and its transformations: a pillar of corporate Islam; 7. Islamic corporate social responsibility and the 'public good'; 8. Corporate lives, sharia, and the 'small Islamic state'.

Editorial Reviews

'This volume contributes a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the corporation as a key site of Islamic moral production in late capitalism. Tracing the 'trajectory and emplacement' of Sharia in the modern Malaysian corporate workplace, Sloane-White provides an engrossing account of the spaces of work wherein both subjectivities and livelihoods are made and remade.' Laura Elder, Anthropology of Work Review

'This is a gem of a book, meticulously researched and incisively analyzed by the author, of a social site not usually accessible to scholars and ethnographers of Islam. The sometimes mundane but most times powerful life-changing workplace is easily missed as a site which informs the turns and tides of potent religious movements. The over-reliance on politics in explaining religious dynamics has led to another crucial location of 'religion making' being overlooked, a 'third space' that is neither 'fully ‘public’ nor in any way ‘private'', according to the author … It is in addressing this gap that Corporate Islam makes its mark. … All eight chapters are riveting, each bringing out the various dimensions of a flourishing Islamic corporate sphere.' Maznah Mohamad, Pacific Affairs

'Corporate Islam is a much-needed text on the contemporary engagement of economy with sharia and its demands and outcomes for both producers and consumers in the economy. The ethnography, which is rich and authoritative, highlights the distinctiveness of the Malaysian case … and it is sure to influence future scholars in the field for many years to come.' Sarah A. Tobin, Islamic Law and Society

From the Publisher