Are Women Getting (More) Justice? Malaysia's Sharia Courts in Ethnographic and Historical Perspective

Abstract

Religious law is commonly understood as deeply conservative and unfriendly to women, even when it is reform oriented and "this-worldly." This essay challenges that understanding. It does so by engaging the practice and lived entailments of Islamic family law and gender pluralism in Malaysia, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted since the late 1970s. My research reveals that sharia courts are more timely and flexible in responding to women's claims than in decades past, and that these courts are more inclined to punish husbands who transgress sharia family law bearing on women. In addition, women nowadays have far more access to resources for negotiating marriage, its dissolution, and the aftermath. This is not to say that women and men experience marriage, divorce, or the sharia juridical field as social equals; they do not. But this situation is changing in ways that benefit women as long as they embrace increasingly salient and restrictive codes of obedience and heteronormativity. More broadly, the essay problematizes tensions and oppositions between Islamic law and women's rights that are the subject of considerable scholarly debate and contributes to our understanding of the complex entanglements of religion and law.[A ] history of family law, written from an anthropological perspective, is a history of narrative strategies engaged in by the state to influence the life course of its nationals. These maneuvers ultimately aim to fix the meaning of kin relations essential to the constitution of citizens as subjects, meaning that the citizens themselves should preferably desire to I would like to thank Monika Lindbekk, Tamir Moustafa, Dominik Müller, Arzoo Osanloo, Jeffrey Sachs, Patricia Sloane-White, Amanda Whiting, anonymous reviewers, and LSR editors for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.

“Redha tu Ikhlas”: The Social–Textual Significance of Islamic Virtue in Malay Forced Marriage Narratives

“…Scholars observing the Southeast Asian region (Peletz 2018;Rinaldo 2019;Mohamad 2011Mohamad , 2020 note that practices of contemporary Muslim marriage are in fact less receptive to the script of mutuality expected in modern marriage. One can say that Muslim marriage and the preservation of separate responsibilities between spouses are maintained in different iterations and meanings as a response as much as a bulwark to modernity.…”

“…Enhanced expressions of piety after decades of Islamic revivalism in Southeast Asia saw an increased importance of Islam as the language to justify gender hierarchies (Rinaldo 2019). The Islamic 'paradigm of maintenance-obedience' (Peletz 2018) has taken hold in Muslim societies in Southeast Asia alongside increased access to education and work opportunities for women outside the home. In Indonesia, where Muslim marriage laws are less institutionalised than Malaysia, calls for reining women in from possibly overstepping their bounds are reflected in the rising numbers of legal disputes that allege a woman's lack of obedience to her husband (O'Shaughnessy 2009).…”

“…In 2011, the Obedient Wives Club (Kelab Isteri Taat Suami), a small organisation 2 led by affluent professional Muslim Malaysian women with global headquarters around the world became notorious for taking the 'maintenance-obedience paradigm' to the very extreme. The club became infamous for its advice to Muslim wives to be sexually adept and perform like 'whores' in the bedroom to maintain their husband's interest (Basarudin 2016;Peletz 2018). Unsurprisingly, the mission statement of the Obedient Wives Club drew outcry among feminist groups for reducing marital relationships to sexual transactions.…”

The adjustment process of young Bedouin women who were child brides

“…To avoid prosecution under Israeli law, most marriages of underage girls take place in accordance with Islamic Sharia law, which does not require registration in the Sharia courts or in the Ministry of the Interior. Under Islamic law, the marriage is valid if the bride's father and the groom's father agree, a marriage contract is drawn up in the presence of two witnesses, and a passage from the Quran (al-Fatha) is read (Peletz, 2018). Studies have shown a connection between standard of living, poverty, and marital age.…”

Intimacy Under Surveillance: Illicit Sexuality, Moral Policing, and the State in Contemporary Malaysia

“…On the other hand, scholars such as Peletz (2018) are more optimistic about the state of this revamped Syariah today, particularly in responding to women's appeals for divorce and in delivering justice in a timely manner. In his study of fasakh (judicial rescission) divorce-the only way women may get their marriage annulled should their husband refuse to divorce-he finds that:…”