Islam and inheritance in Malaya: culture conflict or Islamic revolution?

Abstract

This essay examines the impact of the Islamic legal tradition on Malay ideas about the inheritance of property. It concludes that Muslim legal concepts have been fully incorporated into a Malay framework for the analysis of society and how it does and should work. Previous writers have seen Islam as part of a conflicting legal cultural dualism which opposes a harsh, male chauvinist and foreign Islamic law to a general fund of humane, Malay folk wisdom, implying inherent rural factionalism and a split peasant legal personality. The essay presents data from the West Malaysian state of Kedah to explicate the “typical” Malay case, in which Islam is said to give a bilateral kinship system a patrilateral bias. This analysis cites three interdependent factors in folk ideology which provide rationales for the distribution of property and have bases in peasant knowledge of Islam. The essay finds that Islamic law is so thoroughly part of Malay life that one may consider Malay culture part of a Southeast Asian Islamic Great Tradition. It concludes by exploring reasons for the appeal of legal dualism and discusses possible changes in Malay ideas about the morality of property distribution .