| Summary: |
At the start of his outstanding new book, Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State, Tamir Moustafa explains that initially his ambition extended beyond Malaysia to a comparison of Malaysia, Pakistan, and Egypt. As one with an interest in both Malaysia and Pakistan, I read his book with that ambition in mind. Specifically, I read Moustafa’s new book as an account of the ways in which a particular country’s constitutional tension between “individual” and “group-based” religious freedoms has been legally and politically operationalized. In my reading, Moustafa’s account is not limited to Malaysia; the experience of Malaysia is also tied to the constitutional experience of South Asia.
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