The attitude of Malaysia toward the Islamic law: A comparative studyacross the society

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the perception of Malaysian on the implementation of the Islamic law in the country. Altogether 2287 respondents from all over Malaysia, obtained randomly participated in the study. The respondents from the age 20 to55 years old, male and female from different religion and race were given booklets of questionnaire, with statements about the Islamic law. They were asked to response to the statement “The Islamic law is relevant to be implemented in this country”. Each statement was provided with responses in the form of Likert type scale ranging from 1. Strongly agree, 2. Agree, 3. Not sure, 4. Disagree, and 5. Strongly disagree. The booklets were collected after 30 minutes and the data was analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) to obtain the means and percentages. The differences of means were also tested using the t-test and one-way ANOVA. The finding of the study shows that 74.1% of the all respondents accepted the statement, 4.7% rejected and 20.7% not sure. In addition, analysis of the percentages of responses based on the religion shows that for the Muslim respondents 90.1% accepted the statement, 9.5% not sure and 1.3% rejected the statement, the Buddhist respondents 37.3% accepted the statement, 50.8% not sure and 11.9% rejected the statements, for the Hindu, 46.5% accepted the statement, 47.6% not sure and 7.9% rejected, and for the Christian, 32.1% accepted the statement, 50% not sure and 17.9% rejected the statement.