Lost in Implementation: Lawless Intimacy & Legal Inconsistencies in Malaysian Islamic Law

Description:

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, an extensive Islamic bureaucracy exerts significant force in determining where and with whom Muslims can be intimate, and what constitutes “halal” (lawful) intimacy. This is achieved through Islamic criminal laws that enable state surveillance and criminalization of extra- or pre-marital sexual intimacy, and through Islamic family laws that govern the rules of marriage.

In this talk, Nurul Huda Mohd Razif demonstrates that state attempts to gatekeep access to “halal” intimacy may not be as airtight as it seems due to legal ambiguities and loopholes in Islamic law. To illustrate this, she will draw on two recent debates and developments in Islamic family law: the first concerns a scandalous union between a 41-year-old polygamous man with his (third) 11-year-old wife; and the second addresses the rising incidence of eloped polygamous marriages contracted across the border in Southern Thailand. These issues reveal inherent inconsistencies in Islamic family law that perpetuate unregulated marital practices such as child marriage and polygamy.

Biography: Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif is a social anthropologist and Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen. She read Anthropology and French at the University of Western Australia and Sciences Po Paris, before receiving her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2018. She has held research fellowships at Harvard Law School and centers for Southeast Asian Studies in Leiden, Paris, and Kyoto. She works primarily on the intersection of Islam, intimacy, and the state in the Malay world and Muslim Southeast Asia.