Next week (Thursday, November 7, 14:15-15:30 CET) we welcome you to our RDV seminar with an exciting speaker, Nurul Huda Mohd Razif. She will give a presentation titled “Lost in Implementation: Lawless Intimacy & Legal Inconsistencies in Malaysian Islamic Law”, in which she will discuss state attempts to gatekeep access to “halal” intimacy in Islamic law.
In Muslim-majority Malaysia, an extensive Islamic bureaucracy exerts significant force in determining where and with whom Muslims can be intimate, and what constitutes “halal” (lawful) intimacy.
This is achieved through Islamic criminal laws that enable state surveillance and criminalisation of extra- or pre-marital sexual intimacy, and through Islamic family laws that govern the rules of marriage.
In this talk, Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif demonstrates that state attempts to gatekeep access to “halal” intimacy may not be as airtight as it seems due to legal ambiguities and loopholes in Islamic law.
To illustrate this, she draws on two recent debates and developments in Islamic family law: the first concerns a scandalous union between a 41-year-old polygamous man with his (third) 11-year-old wife; and the second addresses the rising incidence of eloped polygamous marriages contracted across the border in Southern Thailand.
These issues, she suggests, reveal inherent inconsistencies in Islamic family law that perpetuate unregulated marital practices such as child marriage and polygamy.
Nurul Huda is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at UiB, and we invite you to join us physically at Bergen Global (Jekteviksbakken 31). For those who can only join digitally, please use the Zoom link provided by Bergen Global event page.