Islamic Finance and the Afterlives of Development in Malaysia

Government regulators, Islamic scholars, finance professionals, and secular academics have recently taken steps to turn Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, into a global hub for Islamic finance. This article describes some of the actions these actors have taken to position Kuala Lumpur as the central node in this emerging financial system. This article highlights key principles of Islamic finance and the debates in which practitioners are engaged while developing a shariah ‐compliant financial system. It shows how these plans draw on previous efforts by the Malaysian state—in part in response to Islamist political critiques—to design techniques for the provision of capital commensurable with both Islam and capitalism. In so doing, Malaysia's Islamic finance project expresses four dimensions of the afterlives of development: the creation of alternative political and economic networks; a managerial role for the state; the creation of new forms of expertise; and the assemblage of religious and economic practices, two domains that earlier efforts toward secular modernization had presumed separate.