Blurring Islam

This article centers on a sensory ethnography of the Malabari community in the state of Johor in Malaysia. In a country where Islam is legally and bureaucratically tied to the Malay “race,” the collective mobilization of the Malabari community was observed to be primarily through the cultivation of a sensibility that is discernibly Islamic but distinct from that of the majority Malay Muslims. The ethnography demonstrates this through the capacity of particular sensations to become sedimented in the body through collective practices. Having explored how the senses are collectively privileged by them, the article then moves on to the question of why. I argue that the cultural attention granted to the senses arises from the particular context of Malaysian secularity, wherein Islam is actively invoked for mobilizing and regulating a segment of the population. Sensory ethnography of Malabaris thereby discloses distinct features of secularity in Malaysia while concurrently stimulating a distinct means of conceptualizing it through the notion of sensibility.