Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia * By SYLVA FRISK

Abstract

Few would deny that the veil, worn by Muslim women as a symbol of modesty, has today become an immensely controversial issue. Whether between traditionalists and feminists or liberals and conservatives, the veil and what it represents (or is perceived to represent) has inspired heated debate in academic and public policy circles throughout the world. Is the Muslim female's headdress a symbol of oppression by male-dominated interpretations of religious strictures, an assertion of religiosity and religious identity, or a liberating return to a more ‘pure’ interpretation of Islam? The search for answers to these fundamental questions has given rise to a veritable cottage industry of literature that purports to investigate and interrogate the doctrinal, discursive, and sociological dimensions of women's roles in Muslim society. In Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia, Sylva Frisk wades carefully into the waters of the debate. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Kuala Lumpur, the urban capital of Malaysia, home to approximately 16.5 million Muslims, Frisk examines the role of women in Malaysia as both recipients and agents of the state's Islamization process. She notes a tendency within the feminist literature to either showcase women as victims of circumstances or equate all sorts of agency as deliberate acts of resistance against male dominance in religion. In order to correct this, Frisk calls for a generative notion of agency, where religious commitments of women are taken interpretively away from the themes of resistance or subordination as a point of entry, and are assessed in relation to how women as agents express their piety and religiosity. In Frisk's own words, the objective of the book is ‘to investigate how Malay women have come to understand themselves: as religious/pious subjects, or rather as gendered subjects, since the construction of the self also involves a construction of gendered identity’ (p. 5).