SHARI'AH LAW IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE: THE APOSTASY CASES IN EGYPT AND MALAYSIA

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Introduction

In virtually all Muslim-majority countries, shari'ah principles are part and parcel of the national legal system. Islam as ad-deen, the way of life, requires that all manners of living are to be guided by Islamic precepts; the Western legal tradition of secularism, which assigns faith and its practices to a person's private sphere, is simply an alien concept for Muslim countries. The status of shari'ah within a Muslim-majority country is of paramount importance; at the very least, its principles govern the Mus-lim personal status law outside the secular realm of civil law, and at its maximum capacity, it is the be all end-all legal system with no separation between the sacred and the profane. The application of shari'ah principles depends on various factors, and not simply limited to the sheer number of Muslim citizens in the particular country. Having an overwhelming majority of Muslim citizenry is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for far-reaching implementation of shari'ah principles. While it is arguably easier to introduce and implement shari'ah principles in their totality in Egypt or other countries with Muslims as absolute majority, the same cannot be said for country like Indonesia, where Muslims constitute about eighty-eight percent of the population. Local factors such as long-standing tradition of religious syncretism, supremacy of secular principles and other non-religious identities such as nationalism, and complex ethnic makeup play such a pivotal role in determining the extent of shari'ah application in a particular Muslim country. Application of shari'ah law and its place within the national legal system are more troublesome for Muslim countries that have a long history of legal pluralism. In Egypt, the Article 2 of its constitution, which stipulates that shari'ah principles shall be the chief source of law, leads to the question of interpretive authority and the contestation for interpretive supremacy by various socio-political actors. Meanwhile, the dual-track legal system in Malaysia places shari'ah law and its attendant court system under state jurisdiction, which invariably leads to potential constitutional conflict within the Federal.