Menchik Speaks at Harvard Law School on Bureaucratizing Islam
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke last week at a workshop on “Bureaucratizing Diversity in Muslim Southeast Asia and Beyond.”
The two-day workshop was sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World and the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. The workshop was hosted by Professor Kristen A. Stilt, Dominik Müller and Salma Waheedi.
The workshop investigated a question increasingly relevant in Southeast Asia and elsewhere — what happens when state actors operating in the name of Islam, or Muslim communities themselves, seek to adapt Islamic discourse to bureaucratic settings of the modern nation state? For the past 20 years, European and Southeast Asian governments alike have been seeking ways to “control” Islam through the creation of hierarchical, standardized, and disciplined bureaucracies. This process is most visible in Brunei, where the state Mufti and his fatwas enjoy the force of law, without any alternative space for alternative Islamic legal reasoning. Yet, likewise, since 9/11 European governments have been searching for Islam’s “Archbishop of Canterbury” or at least Islamic ‘representative’ bodies that are bureaucratically legible and thus controllable. This workshop maps the similar processes of bureaucratization and social control.
At the workshop, Menchik presented a paper on the “Politics of the Fatwa” that mapped the Indonesian government’s attempts to control Islam thru bureaucratization. From the abstract of the paper:
Fatwas from Islamic organizations are prominent elements of public debates in democratic Indonesia, as well as the broader Muslim world. Yet scholars lack a clear theoretical explanation for the power of fatwas in politics. This paper draws on original archival material to explicate the authority of the fatwas from the Indonesian Council of Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI), which over the past twenty years has become one of the country’s most influential actors. The paper distinguishes three periods in the growth and transformation of MUI’s authority; starting with charismatic authority and expert authority, MUI later gained regulatory authority, and now uses agenda setting, lobbying, mass mobilization, and the threat of violence. By examining how the power of MUI’s fatwas increased as the organization accrued more forms of authority, this periodization demonstrates that explaining the political power of the fatwa requires understanding the modern organizational authority of Islamic actors.
Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the co-winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. His research has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Asian Studies Review, South East Asia Research, and Politics and Religion. His recent research focuses on the politics of modern religious authority and the origins of the missionary impulse.