Everything we do is for Allah: Gender Politics and Islamic Family Law Reform in Malaysia

Abstract

Islamic family law in post-colonial Malaysia has become a battle ground for gender advocates, religious authorities, and governments alike. This law regulates family relations in marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance, and has an inherent gender bias privileging the male in family relations. This was not always the case. When the Islamic family law (Federal Territories) 1984 Act was codified in Malaysia in 1984, it was hailed as model legislation for the legal protections it awarded women (Anwar & Rumminger, 2007). These legal protection measures were rolled back over a two-decade period, however.This thesis examines the various advocacy strategies that have evolved in response to this situation. It shows that a range of advocacy measures, both political and procedural in nature have occurred which have improved Muslim women’s access to their rights under existing legislation. This raises important questions about what women as proponents of reform can achieve in a political context marked both by regressive and progressive dynamics.Muslim women advocates in Malaysia, like their counterparts in Muslim-majority countries, have in the recent past worked through Islam and Islamic institutions to advance gender reform. This thesis studies this advocacy and concludes that, in addition to working at a distance from Islamic institutions, women can also work productively through Islam and Islamic institutions to achieve progressive ends. Indeed, this thesis argues that women’s advocacy within Islam is not a deviation from progressive politics, but a necessary part of the political agenda, and particularly so in post-colonial Malaysia where political circumstances required this type of strategy. This contention is put forward in three arguments. First, that Muslim women working through the Islamic bureaucracy to promote procedural justice reform can be viewed as promoting a progressive gender justice agenda because they centre women’s struggles to access justice, seek to apprehend the erosion of existing rights and highlight gender inequality in the legislation. Second, that Muslim women working through the state Islamic legal institutions, contribute to improving implementation of justice by normalising expectations of gender justice outcomes, utilising formal institutional rules in the implementation of Family Law provisions, and enforcing gender reforms that have been allowed to slip in practice. Third, that Muslim women advocates are contributing to the production of diverse meanings of gender and equality in family relations that challenge the prevailing institutional interpretation of these norms. These diverse articulations draw inspiration from the Islamic traditions and in some cases secular human rights concepts. Engaging in the production and distribution of ideas about gender relations in this way, unsettles the state’s male-dominated bureaucracy monopoly on Islam.To support this argument the thesis draws from multi-sited study undertaken in Malaysia with a range of relevant stakeholders ranging from government administration agencies, Syariah courtroom observation, conversations with Syariah academics, and representatives of non-government organisations. I place these contemporary insights in dialogue with policy shifts in family law throughout Malaysia’s post-colonial history. This historical work, together with my study of advocacy in the present has enabled the development of a grounded account of Islamic law reform, informed by reviews of existing scholarly research, as well as analysis of interview data, observation internal organisational reports, and government policy discourse.From these materials this thesis builds an account of institutional change that allows to us to see how advocates capitalised on the newness of programs to contest the Islamic bureaucracy’s approach to justice, family and gender, creating niche spaces for the advancement of incremental change in some cases, winning support for top-down reform in others, and sometimes, acting as knowledge brokers engaged in the indigenisation/Islamification of secular concepts to win local audience support (Merry, 2006). The thesis thus joins the growing literature that seeks to move the debate about Muslim women beyond binaries of tradition and modernity to a focus on institutions and actors and contributes to our understanding of Muslim women’s political agency and gender advocacy in hegemonic settings. It also provides insights into the ways that Islamic gender advocacy, through efforts to illuminate gender inequalities, improve women’s status and transform systems of law, sits within the broader landscape of global feminist politics.