Marie Curie - CanCode

In March 2024, Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif officially begins her Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, to work on her research project, "MALAYMATRIMONEY: The Division of Matrimonial Wealth in Malay Polygyny & the Codification of Culture in Malaysian Islamic Family Law” (2024-2026). This project will be supervised by Eirik Hovden, and shares various conceptual and thematic links with the CanCode Project. 

About the Project: 

This project is a socio-legal study of the division of matrimonial wealth (harta sepencarian) in Shari’ah (Islamic) courts in contemporary Malaysia.  Under Malaysian Islamic family law, matrimonial wealth can be claimed upon the death or divorce of a spouse, or before a monogamous marriage becomes polygynous – that is, when a husband is applying for a Shari’ah judge’s permission to marry a subsequent wife in polygyny (one man married to multiple wives). Although existing Islamic family law enactments in Malaysia today contain provisions for claiming matrimonial wealth, the concept of “matrimonial wealth” itself traces its origins primarily to Malay adat (customary traditions). This points to the malleability of Malaysian Shari’ah law and its complementarity with Malay adat, which calls for a deeper investigation into the dialogical relationship between Islam, adat, and gender.

Research Objectives: 

This research will address research gaps in two fields: first, in the study of marriage in the Malaysian Islamic family law; second, in the codification of law in Muslim-majority states. It is thus designed with the following objectives: Objective 1: To capture, through ethnographic and archival research, the everyday experiences of men and women claiming for matrimonial wealth in polygyny applications; Objective 2: To investigate the textual sources, legal reasoning, and judicial practice that allows for the “codification” of culture (Malay adat) in Malaysian Islamic family law.

Methodology: 

This project will implement anthropological methods of research based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork that will examine the practical and empirical outcomes of the codification of adat in Malaysian Islamic family law. This fieldwork will be conducted primarily in the Shari’ah Courts situated in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area. 

Connection with CanCode Project:

My MSCA project will add a Southeast Asian regional focus to the CanCode Project by examining how codification takes place in modern-day Malaysia's Islamic family law, in connection with historical and contemporary processes including British colonial legacy and the bureaucratization of Islam. 

About the Researcher:

Nurul Huda moved to Bergen from Kyoto, Japan, where she was Postdoctoral Fellow for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and has held fellowships in Leiden, Paris, and Cambridge (MA). Her work primarily focuses on the intersection and tensions between intimacy, Islam, and the state in contemporary Malaysia & Southern Thailand, where she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork since 2014.  

For updates on her work and on MALAYMATRIMONEY, visit https://nhmraz.com/malaymatrimoney/