GENDER EQUALITY AND REFORM
The Sisters in Islam actively debate government ulama, conservative nongovernmental forces, and the Malay political elites over many aspects of sharia family laws that relate to gender.
They criticize the standardized family law provisions pertaining to underage marriage, male marriage and family guardians, limited marriage contract stipulations, disobedient wives, polygamy, and divorce. From their perspective, these provisions discriminate against women, reinforce patriarchal norms, and do not fit with everyday experiences of women in contemporary families. SIS argues for reform of these laws, moving them in the direction of their conception of gender equality and justice and thereby fulfilling the overarching objectives of sharia. Their ideas of husbands and wives being partners or coheads of households is integral to their overall sociopolitical project advocating a form of secular modernity. Conservative nongovernmental forces, government ulama, and Malay political elites operate with traditional sharia models that understand properly organized Islamic families as consisting of male heads, providers, and protectors and female nurturers and caregivers. If family members are not playing these roles in everyday practice, then conservatives think the families need to be changed to better fit with the laws based on traditional interpretations of sacred texts. Although Malay political elites and government ulama acknowledge that their framework differs from that of the Sisters in Islam, they still invite SIS representatives to seminars and dialogues about sharia family laws. Furthermore, they have reformed sharia family laws by standardizing the requirement that both prospective husband and wife consent to a marriage, regulating male pronouncements of divorce, placing permission for polygamy in the hands of the sharia court judge, including domestic violence as grounds for stipulated and at-fault divorces, and adopting Mālikī legal positions that make it easier to provide evidence of domestic violence. While these reforms are not directly adopting the SIS proposals, they are responding to the concerns of Muslim feminists within an otherwise traditional framework.My sharia surveys also demonstrate that although the SIS perspective is marginalized, considered lacking in Islamic knowledge, and even “extremist,” the Sisters in Islam are still having an impact on the discourses of young women. Indeed, the normative Islamic cultural model is widely disseminated and internalized by Malaysian Muslims young and old, male and female, but a small segment of them are critical of the provisions on disobedient wives and polygamy and the idea of a male head of household. Most of my respondents believe that men should be leaders of the nation, family, and masjid, but all of them expressed support for gender equality at work.
In the sharia economic models of Malay political elites operationalized in the growing Malaysian-state-regulated Islamic financial sector, women serve at comparatively high rates as sharia experts. Intercultural studies scholar Laura Elder (2017) demonstrates that Malaysian women play a significant role in interpreting sharia compliance and creating new products in the Islamic finance industry. However, in the sharia economic models of “corporate caliphs,” Kelantan state officials, and Global Ikhwan more gender stratification is likely, given their use of political and domestic analogies that stress male leadership and female subordination and obedience. The Malaysian state’s emphasis on combining Islamic ethics with notions of development and economic growth in an Islamic modernity project appears to facilitate a lessening of gender stratification. In contrast to the nature of interplay between liberal rights and normative Islamic projects, the quality of discursive engagement of Muslim feminists with Malay political elites tends to be more compromising and interdependent.
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