Patricia Sloane-White is a social anthropologist who earned her DPhil at University of Oxford. She is an professor of anthropology, currently chair of Women and Gender Studies, and a member of the Asian Studies and Islamic Studies Programs. She has researched Islam, capitalism, entrepreneurship,  corporate business and gender in Malaysia for over two decades and was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Malaysia in 2008-2009 and a Fulbright Specialist Scholar to Malaysia in 2014. Her current book is Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press); previously she published Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (Macmillian/Palgrave 1999) and numerous articles on the Malay middle class, gender, sharia and the Muslim workplace

About Corporate Islam:  Sharia and the Modern Workplace.

My new ethnography, focusing on Muslims in Malaysia, tells a story that is often overlooked in the study of Islam: the trajectory of sharia, or Islamic law, in the modern corporate workplace. In Malaysia, advocates of sharia in economic life argue they offer the West a version of Islam that builds “banks not bombs,” as they define new rules for profit, capitalism, and socially responsible corporate practice.  Corporate Islam explores the modern Islamic corporation as a site where power, relationships, individual identities, gender roles, and practices—and often massive financial resources—are mobilized on behalf of Islam. Malaysia rarely figures in the global map of Islamization, Islamism, or the emplacement of sharia over a citizenry, but it has become a key site for emplacing Islam and its laws in the everyday modernity of corporate life.  Corporate Islam argues that sharia principles in Malaysia’s Islamic economy do not merely produce Islamically regulated things but produce a version of Islam that is increasingly conservative, financially and fiscally powerful, and committed to social control over Muslim and non-Muslim public and private lives.