Making Legibility between Colony and Empire

Hussin, Iza

doi:10.1017/9781316471586.015

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Municipalities are the least powerful among the institutions considered here, and these are only two of Jordan's one hundred municipalities. Nevertheless, they demonstrate how heterogenous and sometimes incoherent states can be (Janoski et al, 2020), and also that legibility can come from below (Hussin, 2017). Additionally, they show how state institutions do not always hover above a society, but are influenced by cultural factors that blur the assumed lines between them (Mitchell, 1991;Morgan & Orloff, 2017).…”

Section: Municipalities: Different Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Jordanian municipalities are not obliged to conduct a census of non-Jordanian populations. But UJM rendered Syrians legible for the central state, as well as for itself, 'from below' (Hussin, 2017) that conferred benefits from the King. I do not know how Araheeba secured a meeting with King Abdullah II, and as I visited ZAM before UJM, I did not think to ask Al-Khalidi if he had contacted the King.…”

Section: Assistance From the Central State And International Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…States can shape social relations, defining, classifying, and measuring the world around them in ways that enable officials some control over it (Morgan & Orloff, 2017, p. 11). Legibility -rendering legible the incomprehensible and unpredictable elements of everyday life -has been at the core of the modern state (Hussin, 2017;Scott, 1998, p. 183). But, says Hussin, rendering legibility has not only been a top-down endeavour, but also a project undertaken from below which can 'confer benefits for those positioned to receive them' (Hussin, 2017, p. 349).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disaggregating Jordan’s Syrian refugee response: The ‘Many Hands’ of the Jordanian state

Ali

2021

Mediterranean Politics

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This is a disaggregated study of different factors which shaped Jordan's Syrian refugee response. It considers the response's internal workings and how hosting a large displaced population from the Mediterranean state of Syria is distributed across different public institutions with the involvement of international actors. The argument is that an agenda intent on securing the status quo influences the response, but that it is not always coherently implemented by the many hands of the Jordanian state. The main aims are to resist the permanence of Syrians so as not to undermine the demographic balance that favours Trans-Jordanians; to secure income for hosting Syrians; and to limit the possibilities for formal Syrian economic competition with Jordanians. At the same time, and related to these aims, there are initiatives to render Syrians legible, and these legibility initiatives serve different goals depending on which hand of the state is enacting them. The paper is based on qualitative fieldwork conducted from December 2016 to March 2017 in Jordan. It features interviews with Jordanian officials from national and municipal institutions, and with staff from international organizations.

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Section: Municipalities: Different Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Assistance From the Central State And International Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disaggregating Jordan’s Syrian refugee response: The ‘Many Hands’ of the Jordanian state

Ali

2021

Mediterranean Politics

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“…The state is not a unitary actor, nor is it fully in control of governed religion. (Hussin 2017a;Neoh 2014, 204-206) Approaches to the study of religion, law and politics that emphasise the tendency of state law, institutions and actors to produce outcomes that discipline state subjects provide important perspectives on the operations of language, politics and power in line with secular logics. Yet to the extent that they present an account of state power that is unitary, they overstate the degree to which states hold coherent views, manage the language and logic of state institutions and agents, and control the reception of their acts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The New Global Politics of Religion’: religious harmony, public order, and securitisation in the post-colony

Hussin

2017

Journal of Religious and Political Practice

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This article explores key concepts in legal reasoning on the issue of 'religious harmony' in Malaysia. It argues that the concept of religious harmony belongs to the realm of public order, and public order is indexed to the legal logic of internal security. In Malaysian legal reasoning, the genealogy of these concepts runs through India and the United Kingdom. Arguments for religious freedom based upon normative commitments to liberal rights do not take into account the institutional and legal logic of internal security, within which toleration has different stakes and meanings. When resources are deployed to support the state governance of religion in service of international security concerns, they further consolidate the confluence of internal security and religious harmony, often at the expense of religious minorities. Through a tracing of the reasoning and references of judges and litigants in a series of judgements on the uses of the word 'Allah' by Christians in Malaysia, this article details a post-colonial genealogy of religious harmony through concerns not for toleration or liberty, but for order.

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“…Their institutional genealogies stretch far beyond these beginnings, to the imperial construction of personal status law and its application, in British imperial governance, based on newly rigidified categories of religion, and to the parallel construction of a domain of autonomy reserved for local Muslim authorities, based on newly reified understandings of Islamic law. 6 Through these constructions, the authority and independence of local Muslim elites would overlap with a newly constrained but increasingly symbolic domain allowed to Islam -marriage, family, and ritual observance. Generally, studies of family and religious law tend to take the category of 'personal status' for granted, as pertaining to matters of family, gender and religious observance, in which the personal laws of Hindus, Muslims and others would differ in their details but not their scope or arena of enforcement.…”

Section: Gender and Justice In The Common Law: South Asian Translationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citing Gender: Constituting the Muslim Woman in Malaysia

Hussin

2017

Cultural and Social History

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In 2006, two Malaysian courts, making determinations in cases involving Muslim women leaving Islam, came to contradictory verdicts. One court was the civil federal jurisdiction of the Malaysian Court of Appeals, and the other a syariah state jurisdiction in Negri Sembilan, applying hukum syara' (the Malaysian version of Islamic law). The first of these cases, Lina Joy, is perhaps the best known Malaysian court case worldwide, involving a woman whose petition to have her conversion from Islam to Christianity recognised by the state, in order that she might marry her Christian fiancé, was denied on the grounds of her race. To be 'Malay', according to Article 160(2) of the Malaysian constitution, is to be 'a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language and conforms to Malay custom.' 1 The 2001 judgement on Lina Joy argued, 'a person as long as he/she is a Malay and by definition under Art. 160 cl. (2) is a Malay…cannot renounce his/her religion at all.' 2 In the second case, Nyonya Tahir, decided later that same year, a Malay woman was declared shortly after her death by the Syariah High Court of Negri Sembilan to have left Islam, allowing her body to be released to her family for burial beside her Chinese husband in a Buddhist cemetery. 3 Studies of gender and justice have often shown that broad questions of constitutional law and the identity of the state tend to be fought over the lives and bodies of women. These cases about religious identity began as matters of the administration of everyday lifemarriage, family life, death-then quickly became contests over a state's control of the religious identity of its subjects, emerging as matters of apostasy and test cases of the religious identity of the Malaysian state itself. 4 Yet explanations of these developments in

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Making Legibility between Colony and Empire

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Disaggregating Jordan’s Syrian refugee response: The ‘Many Hands’ of the Jordanian state

Disaggregating Jordan’s Syrian refugee response: The ‘Many Hands’ of the Jordanian state

‘The New Global Politics of Religion’: religious harmony, public order, and securitisation in the post-colony

Citing Gender: Constituting the Muslim Woman in Malaysia

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