Islamic Women Challenge Malaysian Crackdown

By admin-s Last updated Nov 10, 2014

Zainah and Marina take on the clerics

The excessive powers exercised by the religious authorities, “with the complicity of the executive and legislative bodies are dragging the country down the road to theocratic dictatorship.

‘Sisters in Islam’ will not go quietly, says leader

Asia Sentinel

Saying religious “Rottweilers” are out to destroy her organization, one of the leaders of a progressive Islamic women’s group in Malaysia is vowing to challenge an edict by the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (MAIS)* seeking to put Sisters in Islam out of business.

“Women are earning more than men, topping the universities, they are financially independent, they are not going to take any shit over this,” said Zainah Anwar. “Refusing to recognize and acknowledge that change is galloping before their eyes, that doesn‘t work anymore.”

Sisters in Islam has been in the business of helping Muslim women find out about their rights for more than two decades, including telling them their husbands only need one wife and that they have a right to property. Sometime earlier this year, that got to be too much for Islamic religious leaders. The department issued a fatwa, or religious ruling accusing the organization of “liberalism and pluralism” – in effect ordering SIS, as the group is known, out of business.

The fatwa calls for publications by SIS that are deemed “liberal and plural” to be banned and seized and the religious authorities have demanded that any form of social media printing or broadcasting Sisters in Islam materials to be blocked by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.

But Sisters in Islam, led by Zainah and Marina Mahathir, the daughter of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, and others, is refusing to go, saying they were never asked to explain their activities before the ruling was issued and that they only found out about it by reading the department’s website.

It’s easy to see why SIS, as the organization is known, is getting up conservative religious leaders’ noses. Religious themselves, they have put themselves at the interstice between religious conservatism and a society that is urbanizing and liberalizing and whose political underpinnings are fading. The United Malays National Organization, which has claimed to represent the interests of the country’s 60 percent Malay Muslim population for more than half a century, is losing its grip because of corruption and cronyism.

As it has sought to reclaim its hegemony, UMNO has increasingly turned to Malay supremacy organizations like Perkasa, headed by supremacist firebrand Ibrahim Ali, and the Selangor Islamic Religious Department (JAIS) to try to quell the rebellion.

SIS pins its hopes on the fact that as Malaysia matures, Islamic groups, Zainah said, are evolving and splitting in different directions, with some becoming more progressive while others are becoming more hardline.

“There is a larger political challenge where UMNO is losing support, they released the Rottweilers to use race and religion to maintain their position, a fiction that Malays are under threat to bring them back into the fold. They are becoming more radical than PAS. They have out PASsed PAS,” she said.