CONCLUSION

Delineating the diversity of pro-sharia and contra-sharia cultural models is crucial to understanding the interplay of sociopolitical projects. PAS often finds its Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition partners, DAP and PKR, uniting with secular human rights NGOs, SIS, and IRF in liberal rights campaigns.

The interdependence between the feminist SIS project and the UMNO-led sharia project contrasts with the antagonism between the liberal rights project and the broad range of normative sharia projects. Muslim feminists make arguments for reform within prevailing social practices, while government Islamic agencies incorporate a gender perspective into their normative Islamic model of gender relations. Interplay between these reformist and normative sharia projects also entail interaction between their versions of modernity. Secular SIS modernity, with its Western, feminist-style model of gender equality, has inflected UMNO’s partially enchanted modernity with greater concern for the position and treatment of women. However, their activism alongside other civil society organizations around issues that challenge the underpinnings of the Malay- and Muslim-dominated sociopolitical order has met with censure from political and religious authorities.

As noted above, the growing polarization of liberal rights and normative sharia projects has only added impetus to the move of dominant Malay forces toward a more sharia-oriented state and Malay-dominated hierarchical image of the nation. Delving deeper into the cultural models and sociopolitical projects of the social forces arraying in a phalanx against proponents of normative sharia projects, this chapter helps to explain why this repositioning is occurring.

On the other hand, increased interdependence between liberal rights and normative sharia projects would create new possibilities. To facilitate the emergence of new forms of citizenship and statecraft, hegemonic Malaysian Muslims must envision more space for minority and individual rights within their normative Islamic worldviews, and Malaysian secular humanist activists must be able to admit more linking of the state with Islam in their notions of secularism.