Islamic Law, Women's Rights, and Popular Legal Consciousness in Malaysia

Abstract

In most Muslim-majority countries throughout the world, the laws governing marriage, divorce, and other aspects of Islamic family law have been codified in a manner that provides women with fewer rights than men (Na'im 2002;Mayer 2006). Yet despite this fact, the Islamic legal tradition is not inherently incompatible with contemporary notions of liberal rights, including equal rights for women (Wadud 1999;Na'im 2008;Souaiaia 2009). This divergence between Islamic law in theory and Islamic law in practice is the result of how Islamic family law was written into state law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout the Muslim world. A growing body of scholarship suggests that the process of legal codification was both selective and partial (Tucker 2008;Hallaq 2009a). Far from advancing the legal status of women, legal codification actually narrowed the range of rights that women could claim, at least in theory, in classical Islamic jurisprudence (Quraishi and Vogel 2008;Sonbol 2008).As a result, some of the most promising initiatives for expanding women's rights in the Muslim world today lie with the efforts of activists who explain that the Islamic legal tradition is not a uniform legal code, but a diverse body of jurisprudence that affords multiple guidelines for human relations, some of which are better suited to particular times and places than others. This approach represents a new mode of political engagement. While women's rights initiatives were almost invariably

The Fog of Extremism: Governance, Identity, and Minstrels of Exclusion

“…Religion is felt to be a precondition for individual moral standing by a majority of Muslims in all regions (Pew Research Centre, 2013). For large majorities the shari'a is the divine word, undistinguished from the corpus of legal rules or fiqh (An-Na'im, 2008;Moustafa, 2013;Pew Research Centre, 2013). It is also understood as subject to a single interpretation by the majority, especially in South Asia and the Middle East (Pew Research Centre, 2013); strong majorities in the Muslim world also hold to a singular understanding of Islam (Pew Research Centre, 2012).…”

Liberal Rights versus Islamic Law? The Construction of a Binary in Malaysian Politics

“…(Roff 1967: 67). As in other Muslim-majority areas (Hallaq 2009), the colonial period marked a key turning point for the institutionalization and centralization of religious authority (Hooker 1975;Horowitz 1994;Hussin 2007;Moustafa 2013a;Roff 1967).…”

“…The random stratified sample of 1043 Malaysian Muslims ensured a maximum error margin of ± 3.03 percent at a 95% confidence level. For more on the survey methodology, see Moustafa (2013a: 179).…”

Constituting Religion

“…Anxiety 60 These efforts are likely an important reason why most "everyday Malaysians" tend to understand Islamic law as being uniform and fixed, rather than pluralistic and responsive to local conditions. For survey results on these and related issues, see Moustafa (2013a).…”

“…The random stratified sample of 1,043 Malaysian Muslims ensures a maximum error margin of ±3.03 percent at a 95 percent confidence level. Additional findings from the nationwide survey are detailed in Moustafa (2013a).…”