This individual is a guest contributor. MEI is not able to assist with contact requests.
Patricia Sloane-White is a social anthropologist who earned her DPhil at University of Oxford. She is an associate professor of anthropology with joint appointments in Asian Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, USA, where she serves as chair of Women and Gender Studies. She has researched Islam, Malay entrepreneurship, work, and corporate business in Malaysia for nearly 25 years. In addition to her book, Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (Palgrave/Macmillan 1998), she has published numerous articles on the Malay middle class, gender, sharia, and the Muslim workplace. Her new book is Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Men of the Mosque and Market: The Case of Malaysia
This brief ethnographic essay explores developments in Malaysia’s Islamic economy, not by focusing on the technical, sharia-based structuring of investment products, but on the corporate culture that has emerged alongside it. Based on interviews conducted with Malaysian corporate elites, the author shows that the latter — mobile Muslim professionals with global aspirations and networks — believe that Islam and sharia not only provide an ethical and moral template for participating in economic life and the human engagements that emerge from it, but also for organizing and managing the very structures and social relations of corporations.
