Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

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Anna Spiegel Contested Public Spheres

VS RESEARCH

Anna Spiegel

Contested Public Spheres Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

VS RESEARCH

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Dissertation Fakultät für Soziologie, Universität Bielefeld, 2008

1st Edition 2010 All rights reserved © VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2010 Editorial Office: Verena Metzger / Anette Villnow VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften is a brand of Springer Fachmedien. Springer Fachmedien is part of Springer Science+Business Media. www.vs-verlag.de No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Registered and/or industrial names, trade names, trade descriptions etc. cited in this publication are part of the law for trade-mark protection and may not be used free in any form or by any means even if this is not specifically marked. Cover design: KünkelLopka Medienentwicklung, Heidelberg Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-531-17453-2

5

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been an enlightening and adventurous journey for me in both intellectual and personal ways. I want to thank all those who have accompanied me on this journey both during my field research in Malaysia as well as back home in Germany and who contributed to making this book possible through their scientific, structural and personal support. I want to thank Prof. Dr. Gudrun Lachenmann for inspiring discussions and committed advice and Prof. Dr. Ursula Müller for her assistance and flexibility. This book was carried out under their guidance. I am especially grateful to my colleagues from the research project “Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” Dr. Petra Dannecker, Dr. Nadine Sieveking and Dr. Salma Nageeb. They involved me in the most invigorating intellectual debates and opened up new vistas that I could not have acquired without them. I am deeply indebted to all those who supported me during my field research in Malaysia. Conducting research for the first time in Asia provided me with a truly global perspective on the world. I want to thank, first of all, all those who agreed to be part of this study as interviewees and informants and who shared their thoughts and histories with me for their confidence, commitment, and openness. Furthermore, I want to thank the entire staff of the Sisters in Islam and the Women’s Aid Organisation who hosted me during my stay in Malaysia and who showed me the possibilities of thinking beyond cultural clashes. I want to thank Prof. Dr. Norani Othman, Dr. Rashida Ramli, Dr. Junaenah Sulehan and all others from the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) and the National University of Malaysia (UKM). My special thanks go to Prof. Dr. Saliha Hassan for not only giving me initial insights into Malaysian civil society but also for opening the doors of her house to me and making me part of her family. And, of course, I am very grateful to my research assistants Phaik Fern Chiok and Dashanti Mohd Shafiee for their scientific, technical and personal support. I also thank Jonathan Harrow for proofreading this study.

6

Acknowlegdements

Last but not least, I want to thank my parents, Kirsten and Erich Spiegel, and my beloved husband, Claudius Torp. Without their unshakeable optimism and never-ending support, this book would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank all those who provided me with support and whose names are not included here. Anna Spiegel March 2010

Contents

7

Contents LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS …………………………………….………… 13 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 17

1 1.1

RESEARCHING THE GLOBAL EVERYDAY OF WOMEN ACTIVISTS: EXPERIENCING AND DOING GLOBALISATION ............................................ 17

1.2

CONNECTING THREADS: GLOBALISATION, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, AND SOCIAL SPACE ................................................................................. 19

1.3

THE CASE: WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN MALAYSIA........................................................................................... 23

1.4

1.5

RESEARCH DIMENSIONS .......................................................................... 26 1.4.1

Changing identities ...................................................................... 26

1.4.2

The local and the global............................................................... 27

1.4.3

Global and translocal agency of women ...................................... 27

STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY ..................................................................... 28

PART ONE ENTERING THE WORLD OF NGOS .......................................................... 31 2

ENTERING THE WORLD OF NGOS: THE RESEARCHER’S TRAJECTORY ..................................................................................... 33 2.1

THE PROCESS OF FIELDWORK ................................................................. 34 2.1.1

Towards a dense global ethnography........................................... 34

2.1.2

Interview situations: “This is off the record” .............................. 39

Contents

8 2.2

GROUNDING GLOBALISATION .................................................................. 46

2.3

EVENTS .................................................................................................. 50

2.4

BIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIONS ................................................................... 51 BECOMING AN ACTIVIST: THE ACTIVISTS’

3

TRAJECTORIES .................................................................................. 59 3.1

ANIZA’S TRAJECTORY .............................................................................. 59

3.2

“I STARTED TO QUESTION …”................................................................. 63 3.2.1

… the ‘tradition’ of the mothers and the ‘power’ of the fathers... 63

3.2.2

… institutionalised gender hierarchies ........................................ 71

3.2.3

… ethnicised hierarchies.............................................................. 80

3.3

“STUDYING ABROAD, I SAW HOW THINGS COULD BE DIFFERENT”............. 86

3.4

“I CAN’T WORK FOR A PROFIT-MAKING COMPANY ANYMORE” .................. 94

3.5

DEVELOPING EVERYDAY LIFE TECHNIQUES OF REFLEXIVITY ................... 100

PART TWO INSIDE THE WORLD OF NGOS: CONSTITUTING FEMALE COUNTERPUBLICS ..……………………..………………………....……..107 4

NEGOTIATING GENDER EQUALITY AND LEGAL REFORMS: WOMEN’S ORGANISATIONS IN KUALA LUMPUR ............... 109 4.1

CELEBRATING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN KUALA LUMPUR ......... 109

4.2

NEGOTIATING WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN A MULTI-ETHNIC SPACE.................... 113

4.3

THE DEBATE ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ........................................ 122

4.4

FROM LOCAL SERVICE TO TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION ..... 129

4.5

POPULARISING FEMINIST CONCEPTS...................................................... 138

4.6

CONCLUSION........................................................................................ 145

Contents 5

9

PROTECTING WOMEN’S DIGNITY: WOMEN’S ORGANISATIONS IN KELANTAN ................................................ 149 5.1

“SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE FOR THE UNFORTUNATE WOMEN”: INSIDE WOMEN’S ORGANISATIONS IN KELANTAN .................................... 150 5.1.1

Wanita Inovatif Jari Diri (WIJADI), Women’s Innovative Self-Development Centre............................................................ 150

5.1.2

Women’s Development Foundation of Kelantan (Yayasan Murni)......................................................................... 152

5.2

“WE DON’T DABBLE WITH LEGAL THINGS”: DEBATING DIFFERENT MODES OF SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION .................................................... 158

5.3

“WE IN KELANTAN”: NEGOTIATING FEMALE DIGNITY FROM AN EVERYDAY PERSPECTIVE ....................................................................... 163

5.4

CONNECTING TO THE WORLD: REARRANGING LOCAL CONCERNS IN A GLOBAL FRAME .............................................................................. 178

5.5

CONCLUSION........................................................................................ 182 DEFENDING THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN A GLOBAL

6

ECONOMY.......................................................................................... 185 6.1

DEFENDING THE RIGHTS OF WORKING WOMEN AGAINST GLOBALISATION: THE SUPPORT GROUP FOR HOME-BASED WORKERS ...... 185

6.2

DEFENDING THE HOUSING RIGHTS OF THE URBAN POOR: ALAIGAL AND THE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CENTRE........................ 189

Contents

10 6.3

HISTORY OF THE ORGANISATIONS .......................................................... 191 6.3.1

From university to the plantations: Changing perspectives....... 191

6.3.2

From educational programmes to confrontation: Changing strategies .................................................................................... 195

6.3.3

From an NGO to a political party: Changing political understandings ........................................................................... 199

6.4

FROM ‘DEVELOPMENT’ TO ‘QUALITY OF LIFE’: DECONSTRUCTING THE STATE’S DEVELOPMENT CONCEPT ................................................... 200

6.5

6.6

DEVELOPING POLITICAL AGENCY ON THE BASIS OF RIGHTS..................... 210 6.5.1

De-ethnicising rights .................................................................. 214

6.5.2

Engendering rights..................................................................... 216

6.5.3

Globalising rights....................................................................... 221

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON PART TWO: MULTIPLE FEMALE COUNTERPUBLICS ................................................................................. 223

PART THREE NEGOTIATING THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN LOCAL AND TRANSLOCAL SETTINGS …………...…….……………………….…….227 7

MECHANISMS OF PUBLICNESS: DRESS, CULTURAL BELONGING, AND EDUCATION................................................... 229 7.1

FACING SYSTEMS OF IGNORANCE........................................................... 229

7.2

“YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE A MUSLIM TO ME”: DRESS AND AUTHORITY OF KNOWLEDGE ................................................................................... 237

7.3

“THE TERM ‘SISTER’ COMES FROM CHRISTIANITY”: CULTURAL BELONGING AND AUTHORITY OF KNOWLEDGE ........................................ 241

Contents 7.4

11 “WE CANNOT QUESTION THESE THINGS”: EDUCATION AND AUTHORITY OF KNOWLEDGE ................................................................................... 246

7.5

CONCLUSION........................................................................................ 252 CONSTRUCTING NEW NOTIONS OF PUBLICNESS ................ 255

8 8.1

RECONSTRUCTING DRESS: “ISLAM IS NOT ABOUT DRESS” ...................... 256 8.1.1

8.2

Between political uncovering and the apolitical garment.......... 265

RECONSTRUCTING CULTURAL BELONGING: “BEFORE PATRIARCHY, WOMEN WERE THE LEADERS”................................................................ 268

8.2.1 8.3

Between appropriation and rejection of cultural otherness ....... 276

RECONSTRUCTING EPISTEMIC CULTURE: “DO WE NEED A DEGREE IN ISLAMIC STUDIES?”.......................................................................... 277

8.3.1

Between feminisation of Islamic knowledge and de-Islamisation of the public sphere .......................................... 281

8.4 9

CONCLUSION........................................................................................ 285 NEGOTIATING RIGHTS WITHIN DIVERSITY: TRANSLOCAL NETWORKING AND COMPARISONS ............. 287

9.1

TRANSCULTURAL INTERACTIONS AT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES: THE ASIA-PACIFIC NGO FORUM .......................................................... 288

9.2

9.3

BETWEEN NATIONAL DIVERSITY AND GLOBAL SISTERHOOD ..................... 291 9.2.1

Rejecting sisterhood: Young women .......................................... 297

9.2.2

Rejecting diversity and claiming sisterhood: Muslim women .... 298

BRINGING DIVERSITY AND TRANSLOCAL COMPARISON BACK HOME: POLITICAL DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY ................................................... 303

Contents

12 9.4

BRINGING SISTERHOOD BACK HOME: THE CEDAW PROCESS IN MALAYSIA......................................................................................... 310

9.5

CONCLUSION........................................................................................ 319 CONCLUSION: TRANSLOCAL KNOWLEDGESCAPES

10

AND TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERES ............................... 321 10.1

CREATING FEMALE COUNTERPUBLICS ................................................... 321

10.2

MODES OF POLITICAL ACTION AND OF CONSTITUTING PUBLIC SPHERES .. 324

10.2.1

Creating alternative media spaces ............................................. 324

10.2.2

Connecting different fields of knowledge ................................... 325

10.2.3

Redefining places ....................................................................... 327

10.2.4

Redefining tradition and culture ................................................ 328

10.2.5

Translocalising networks, issues, and bodies............................. 329

10.3

EMPIRICALLY GROUNDING … ............................................................... 332

10.3.1

… translocal agency of women .................................................. 332

10.3.2

… the transformation of identities.............................................. 333

10.3.3

… the emergence of multiple transnational publics ................... 335

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................... 339

List of Abbreviations

13


ABIM AI ARROW APWW AS AWAM AWAS BPFA CAW CDC CEDAW CIAM CLD DAWN ERA ESCAP FOSIS ICT IDP IIIT IIUM ILO INA IRC ISA IT IWD IWRAW JAG JIM

Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia, Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement Amnesty International Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women Asia-Pacific Women Watch Anna Spiegel All Women’s Action Society Angkatan Wanita Sedar Beijing Platform for Action Committee for Asian Women Community Development Centre Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Central Indian Association of Malaya Counter Legal Draft Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era Education and Research Association for Consumers in Malaysia United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Federation of Student Islamic Societies Information and Communications Technology Internally Displaced Person International Institute of Islamic Thought International Islamic University Malaysia International Labour Organisation Indian National Army Islamic Representative Council Internal Security Act Information Technology International Women’s Day International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific Joint Action Group on Violence Against Women Pertubuhan Jamaah Islah Malaysia

14 KAF KFC KL KLCC KLIA LRC LRT MAC MCA MIC MISG MNP MSN MTUC MU NACIWID


Konrad Adenauer Foundation Kentucky Fried Chicken Kuala Lumpur Kuala Lumpur City Centre Kuala Lumpur International Airport Labor Ressource Centre Light Railway Train Malaysian Aids Council Malaysian Chinese Association Malaysian Indian Party Malaysian Islamic Study Group Malay Nationalist Party Monitoring Sustainability of Globalization Malaysian Trade Union Congress Malayan Union National Advisory Council for the Integration of Women in Development NCWO National Council of Women’s Organisations NEP New Economic Policy NGO Non-governmental organisation PAS Parti Islam Se-Malaysia PCP Popular Congress Party PERTIWI Pertubuhan Tindakan Wanita Islam, Muslim Women Action Society PETRONAS Petroliam Nasional Berhad PKPIM National Muslim Students Association PMIP Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PSWS Persatuan Sahabat Wanita Selangor PUSPANITA Persatuan Suri dan Anggota Wanita Perkhidmatan Awam Malaysia SIS Sisters in Islam SPCA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals SUARAM Suara Rakyat Malaysia SUHAKAM Suruhanjaya Hak Asasi Manusia Malaysia, Human Rights Commission of Malaysia TIE Transnationals Information Exchange UKM University Kebangsaan Malaysia, National University of Malaysia UM Universiti Malaya UMNO United Malays National Organisation

List of Abbreviations UN UNDP VAW WAC WAD WAO WCC WDC WID WIJADI WIMTEC WLUML WTU YWCA

15

United Nations United Nations Development Programme Violence Against Women Women’s Agenda for Change Women and Development Women’s Aid Organisation Women’s Centre for Change Women’s Development Collective Women in Development Wanita Inovatif Jaya Diri, Women’s Innovative Self-Development Movement Women and Worker’s Independent Media and Training Center Women Living Under Muslim Laws Women Teachers’ Union Young Women’s Christian Association

1.1 Researching the global everyday of women activists

17

1 Introduction 1.1 Researching the global everyday of women activists 1.1 Researching the global everyday of women activists: Experiencing and doing globalisation Going through the broad spectrum of globalisation research and literature, one might be astonished at how much it assumes the force of global change, and how little of this literature demonstrates this force in an empirically grounded way. This study, being based on six months of empirical research in Malaysia in 2004, sets out to counter this lack of thick description of globalisation processes. It takes up the challenge of researching the “global everyday” (Appadurai 2000, 18) of civil society actors in Malaysia and focuses on how social activists belonging to different branches of the women’s movement selectively appropriate, transform and even create global meanings and materialise them in local practices. The methodological endeavour of combining globalisation research and ethnography has been taken up by a diversity of authors. Burawoy and his research team have developed a complex methodological framework by focusing on the experiential dimensions of globalisation. They want to produce a “grounded globalisation” or “perspectives on globalisations from below” (Burawoy 2000b, 338, 341). This perspective is very fruitful, as the notion of experiencing globalisation as “forces, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al. eds. 2000) relocates the global in the local and ties both together in mutual constitution. However, in emphasising the experiential dimension of globalisation, the local is in danger of being reduced to the receiving end of social dynamics and remaining rather passive and reactive within processes of globalisation. Burawoy et al. argue that from a local perspective, globalisation can be experienced as an “inexorable supranational force that reshapes, mutilates, and overturns the local” (Burawoy 2001, 149). This external force can be “resisted or accommodated”, “avoided and negotiated”, and the locality can “fight back, adapt, or simply be destroyed” (Burawoy 2000a, 5, 29). Although the passivity of the local is not as pronounced when global connections and imaginations come into play, resistance is still the dominant form of local agency in these dimensions. So, whereas Burawoy and his research team focus on the power of global forces, I felt that it was necessary to offer a more balanced account between experiencing and resisting globalisation on the one side and the

18

1 Introduction

dynamics of doing globalisation on the other side, that is, between external forces and agency. Such a balanced account can be found in approaches that work with the concept of gendered social space and take up an actor-centric research perspective. Both the idea that structuring and agency go hand in hand in globalisation processes and the focus on dealing with the production of social meaning in translocal contexts have been particularly cultivated in the work of researchers at the Sociology of Development Research Centre at Bielefeld University (Werner 1997; Dannecker 2002; Peleikis 2003; Lachenmann 2004b; Müller 2005; Nageeb 2005; Gerharz 2007). Here, social actors are understood as both objects and subjects of global processes, as both recipients and creators of global meanings, structures and flows. This perspective was also at the heart of the research project “Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002) out of which this study emerged.1 This project aimed at showing the manifold processes of how globalisation and translocalisation are ‘done’, how global development concepts are defined and how they are reshaped by the everyday agency and interaction of different non-Western actors. Lachenmann, in particular, has proposed a threefold perspective for the endeavour of “empirically grounding globalisation” (Lachenmann 2008, 2, 18) which has served as a guideline to this study as well. First, phenomena constitutive of globalisation, such as social movements, need to be examined within a framework of transcultural sociology. Second, transnational social practices, such as interlinking and networking, deserve special attention. Third, it is necessary to include knowledge accumulated by regional studies (Lachenmann 2008, 2, 18). Along these lines, processes of glocalisation and localisation and the making of global flows can be studied within the paradigm of “social construction of reality” (Berger, Luckmann 1966). In an actor-oriented approach, this leads to the analysis of collective or individual actors who are involved in “stimulating, blocking, steering, manipulating these flows” (Long 1996, 50). The main subject of this study is thus women’s organisations in Malaysia and their negotiations of global concepts such as women’s rights, gender equality, violence against women, empowerment, and development. These negotiations are situated within the tension between a growing cultural fragmentation of the Western and the Islamic world on the one hand and a 1 I conducted my research in Malaysia as a junior researcher of the VW research project “Negotiating Development: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” at the Sociology of Development Research Centre, Bielefeld University, directed by Prof. Dr. Gudrun Lachenmann and Dr. Petra Dannecker. This also comprised further case studies in Senegal (by Dr. Nadine Sieveking) and Sudan (by Dr. Salma Nageeb). (Lachenmann, Dannecker eds. 2008)

1.2 Connecting threads

19

growing interwovenness and connectivity of women’s organisations and other discursive formations worldwide on the other. The study sheds light on how the global concepts under question are localised within the Malaysian context, and which transformations they undergo in the process of localisation. I shall pay special attention to not only popular political practices and discourses at the level of everyday life but also to more formal political practices on the level of collective action. Both forms of political action are based upon specific forms of identity politics and concepts of power (Müller 2000) which need to be researched to understand the global-local nexus of Malaysian women’s organisations. Starting with the case of the Malaysian women’s movement, the aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of changing gender relations in a translocalising world and to show how societal transformation is shaped by the translocal agency of social movements. More than ever, research on the everyday agency and interactions of different non-Western actors is necessary to break the stereotypes and generalisations which dominate the public discourses on women and Islam and to contrast these uni-dimensional accounts with empirically grounded multi-dimensional perspectives. 1.2 Connecting threads 1.2 Connecting threads: Globalisation, social movements, and social space The idea of analysing the negotiation of gender relations and women’s rights in multiple public spheres stems from a combination of several threads of sociological theorising and empirical research. It will be necessary for this study to combine approaches and theories on multiple social spaces and public spheres, interfaces, knowledge systems and glocalisation in order to contribute to the endeavour of empirically grounding globalisation theories (Lachenmann 2008). Since the 1990s, globalisation research has hinted at the significant transformation of the social set up of our world. The changing relation of social formations and the nation state has been examined in a multitude of different contexts.2 Globalisation processes lead to a fundamental restructuring of physical and social spaces. Anthony Giddens argues that globalisation processes expand the range of social relations and increase their interconnectedness. He understands globalisation as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens 1990, 64). Modernity thus 2 De-territorialisation has been discussed in the context of migration (Glick Schiller, Basch, Blanc Szanton 1992; Castles, Miller 1993; van der Veer eds. 1995; Pries 1999; Faist 2004; Faist, Özveren eds. 2004; Lachenmann 2004a; Dannecker 2005), the economy (Marchand, Runyan eds. 2000), and the media (Appadurai 1996).

20

1 Introduction

provides disembedding mechanisms which are able to detach social relations from confined local contexts. At the same time, these social relations are reorganised in forms of networks with completely new features in terms of physical space and physical distance. Arjun Appadurai also emphasises the growing fluidity and deterritorialisation of social and cultural configurations, which he identifies as belonging to the “brute facts” of the 20th century (Appadurai 1996, 48). He uses the term translocalities for new social formations which develop out of the growing interconnectivity and interdependency of different regions (Appadurai 1996, 192). Translocalities are concrete local spaces characterised by a high density of global flows of things, money, information, people, and imaginations. Translocalities are thus spaces whose dimension of everyday life constantly refers and links to other more distant places. Appadurai argues at the same time that translocality describes a general condition of the organisation of space in the age of globalisation: the disconnection of social practices from exclusive and discrete geographical spaces. This disconnection can be traced first in the reduction of geographical distance and second in the intensification of connectivity between different localities. These two faces of de-territorialisation lead to a constant redefinition of the local within supralocal or translocal frames of reference, a process in which the local and the global are connected in a way that goes beyond a relation of dualistic antagonism. Robertson calls this process glocalisation (Robertson 1998). This means that globalisation has to be seen as a process in which the ‘own’ and the ‘other’ are becoming co-present in one place, in which they mix and interact in often paradoxical and unexpected ways. Increased global connectivity produces cultural heterogeneity and hybridity of meaning and cultural repertoires. When new elements are integrated into local culture, completely new cultural phenomena and identities emerge (Hannerz 1987; Appadurai 1990; Hannerz 1991; Nederveen Pieterse 1998). For the configuration of public spheres, civil societies and the modes of political action and social transformation, these processes bring about significant changes. Social movements belong to those new forms of social organisation and of epistemic communities which are constitutive of globalisation. Whereas, in the past, it was appropriate to define social movements and public spheres in the frame of the nation state, today, a different picture has emerged. For example, gender relations and social transformation are nowadays negotiated among a broad variety of local, translocal and global organisations and institutions. These actors are part of an ongoing debate carried out in global communicative contexts about what should be a desirable way of social transformation, what is meant by a ‘good and just life’, and through which means it is to be achieved (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002). The global discursive arena formed by these

1.2 Connecting threads

21

debates makes it complicated to speak about national civil societies in the way we did before (Olesen 2005, 419). Furthermore, social movements are increasingly confronted with concepts which were not created in their own cultural context, but which, nevertheless, claim universal validity. Or they experience that concepts which they claim to be universal are rejected by other actors on specific cultural grounds. Gender becomes relevant in this scenario in two ways: First, “female global networks” having “the ‘development’ world as a global knowledge framework” (Lachenmann 1998a) belong to the most successful of the new social movements. Second, the debate on gender relations is of special explosiveness in such translocal arenas because it proves to work as a near universal instrument in processes of cultural othering. This is especially pertinent within interactions between the ‘Western’ and the ‘Islamic world’. In this context, gender relations are instrumentalised in Western identity politics to spotlight the underdevelopment and misogynism of the Islamic others. At the same time, gender relations are also being instrumentalised in Islamic identity politics to accuse the Western others of moral degeneration. The notion of women’s rights, as intimately linked with a ‘Western’ notion of modernity, is being especially debated globally by a diversity of cultural forces that are “laying competing claims to provide nations and groups with the framework for identity formation” (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002, 3). Theoretically, the concept of social space as proposed in this study supersedes the concept of society as the classic unit of sociological thought. The notion of society, as used for a long time, was related intimately to the idea of the unity of a territorially bounded nation state, a population living within this territory, and their distinctive and shared cultural identity and expressions. With the compounding of social and geographical space, the nation state and society were conceptualised as a container of a culture and identity. This idea, however, holds at least two significant weaknesses and problematic assumptions. First, it assumes the natural constitution of society, culture and identity. But a constructionist perspective questions this givenness and the ‘natural’ character of concepts (Schütz, Luckmann 1973), revealing the invented and imagined character of nations, culture and peoples (Anderson 1991; Bayart 2005). Meaning has to be produced continuously within interaction. Second, the concept of society is challenged empirically through the dramatic changes that globalisation has caused for the constitution of social formations and for processes of identity construction. Following these two lines of critique on the homogeneity suggested by the container concept of society and nation state, I suggest employing the concept of social space (Bourdieu 1985; Massey 1994; McDowell 1999; Löw 2001;

22

1 Introduction

Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002; Nageeb 2004; Lachenmann 2004c). Theoretically, this concept focuses on the constructed nature of space and locality (Appadurai 1996) and hence on the practices of social agents who construct these localities while reserving a specific identity. Social space is constituted through meaningful everyday practices that structure material and symbolic elements of the life-world. Being constituted by human agency, social space is inherently dynamic, relational and process-like in character and an object of change and transformation. Social space is partly the result of the actors’ capability to structure and to synthesise their life-world through social interactions, but it also has a very material character, because it consists of bodies and objects (Löw 2001). Empirically, the concept of social space is able to deal with the increasing multiplicity and diversity of contemporary social formations, which is reflected in multiple national, ethnic and political identities. On the one hand, ‘social space’ is ‘smaller’ than society or the nation state, and is able to grasp the overlapping of different social configurations in one physical space, as, for instance, within the socially, ethnically and economically highly fragmented global cities of our time (Sassen 2001). On the other hand, it is able to capture social formations that transcend borders of the nation state, such as the emerging transnational social spaces produced through migration or the networks and discourses established by the translocal activities of NGOs. In that sense, social space goes “beyond community, place, and territorial or physical space” (Lachenmann 2008, 4). Both levels, the processes of wider social restructuration and everyday practices, are being connected and brought together in the intermediary concept of social space (Spiegel rapp. 2005).3 The dualism between micro and macro structures is thus neutralised, and it becomes possible to describe complex social constellations beyond the nation state––be they transnational or such consisting of multiple overlapping spaces. In contrast to structural approaches, the analysis of social spaces and the everyday practices of specific actors within these spaces can show how globalisation is ‘done’ at the interactional level: that is, how global structures are produced and reshaped by social actors. Translocality and transnationalism are concepts which capture the specific interconnectedness of different regions and the intermingling of formerly separated cultural forms which is so typical of the contemporary world (Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996; Nederveen Pieterse 1998). How social movements, identity politics and translocal networking are inter-

3 In her study of women’s space in Sudan, Nageeb approached social space by grasping, on the one hand, the nature of the social restructuration imposed by the Islamist state and, on the other hand, the common sense world, the everyday social and symbolic interaction shaped by the nature of social order and structure (reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005).

1.3 The case

23

twined and influence each other will be shown for the case of the women’s movement and female activists in Malaysia. 1.3 The case: Women’s movements and social transformation in Malaysia 1.3 The case In February 2006, the New York Times (Perlez 2006) reported two incidents which led to controversial public debates in Malaysia. The first incident was the expressed intent of the government to pass amendments to Islamic Family Law and the successful protest of women’s organisations, one of them the internationally well known Sisters in Islam, against these amendments. These organisations criticised not only the fact that the amendments would have made it easier for men to practice polygyny and to divorce, but also the undemocratic procedures by which they had been enacted. The amendments had been passed only because those female delegates, senators, and ministers who personally were against the amendments had been forced to vote along party lines. What followed was a process of consultation between women’s groups, Islamic scholars, and clerics which finally led to the withdrawal of the amendments. The second incident referred to in the article was a debate that arose around the fact that the Islamic religious authorities refused to defer the Islamic burial rituals of a Malaysian celebrity of Indian descent who had officially converted to Islam. Although his family insisted that he had continued to be a practising Hindu until he passed away, his body was taken away by the respective religious authorities. This event also led to loud protests by women’s groups such as Sisters in Islam. Both incidents are evidence of the frictions and negotiations that the ongoing process of Islamisation is producing in the multi-ethnic context of Malaysia and of its relation to questions of gender relations, democratisation and cultural and religious identities. Only just above 50 % of Malaysia’s citizens are ethnic (‘indigenous’) Malay, 34 % are of Chinese and about 10 % of Indian origin. Nevertheless, the Malaysian nation state is based on Malay political and cultural dominance: The Malay language is the official language; Islam is the state religion. Furthermore, the constitution stipulates that the Prime Minister and the chief ministers of the individual states be Malay (Nagata 1997, 134). Although jus soli was introduced to convert the migrant population into Malaysian citizens, Malay primacy is secured in a series of provisions and policies in both the economy as well as education (Nagata 1994, 69).4 4 The term ‘Malaysian’ refers to the Malaysian nation state, whereas the term ‘Malay’ refers to the ethnic category. In contexts where ethnicity is relevant, I shall talk about ‘Malay’ women in contrast to women of Indian and Chinese origin. In other contexts where this ethnic differentiation is not relevant, I shall talk about Malaysian women, referring to their national origin. I shall also use the

24

1 Introduction

Nevertheless, precisely because of Malaysia’s multi-ethnic composition, MalayMuslim identity has always been confronted with its boundaries. It is constructed to a significant extent by the direct confrontation with ethnic and religious others: in confrontation with the West and the non-Muslim others, historically embodied by the British colonisers and later by a post-national, culturalist concept of the West, but also in confrontation with the Asian others through the presence of millions of migrants mainly from China and India but also from other Asian countries (Dannecker 2005). Malaysia is a country where several particular cultural identities coexist and shape each other respectively. Since its independence in 1957, Malaysia has experienced an unprecedented process of social and economic transformation. From a mainly rural society and a colonial economy concentrating on the export of natural resources, it has developed into a mainly urban society (over 60 %) with a diversified industry (Jomo K.S., Edwards 1993). Economic development has gone hand in hand with deep social transformations: urbanisation, the re-shaping of ethnic spaces through the formation of a Malay middle class, the re-shaping of gendered spaces through an increasing rate of participation of Malaysian women in the formal economy (Othman 1998, 172) and the emergence of Islamic revivalism and the politicisation of Islam (Nagata 1994; Camroux 1996). Being initially carried by Islamic social movements, the so-called dakwah movements, Islamisation later became partially incorporated into state policies. The state-led project of Islamisation resulted mainly in an increased institutionalisation of Islam with more rigid interpretations and a direct translation of Quranic principles making their way into established legal texts. This institutionalisation led to a homogenisation of local Islamic practices and a reduction of personal freedom regarding everyday practices, interpretations, and visions for Muslims. At the same time, it also led to the establishment of more pronounced boundaries between the different ethnic groups by accentuating and codifying the differences between Muslim and non-Muslim forms of life including, for example, eating habits, dress codes, burial rituals, and family laws. Starting in the 1970s, the dakwah movements established an Islamist discourse and a political programme partly by formulating a critique of capitalism aimed especially at its looseness and its lack of moral standards. Capitalism, it was said, is not based on “divine morality but on sensuality and as such not according to truth and justice” (Anwar Ibrahim, quoted in Ong, 1990, 267). With this emphasis on morality versus sensuality, dakwah movements took up the rhetoric of global Islamism that promoted Islam as a counter-model to Western culture and lifestyle, operationalising its difference through gender term ‘Malayan’ to refer to pre-independence time. The official name of the British colony was ‘Malayan Union’. An independent nation state with the name Malaysia formed only in 1963.

1.3 The case

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relations. Constructing women as carriers of tradition and group identity, and thus aiming to gain control over women’s bodies, is typical of the discourse and practice of cultural revivalism (Othman 1998, 176). By instrumentalising gender relations as a standard of social morality, dakwah groups ‘invented’ new Islamic traditions and practices. In reshaping the interaction of men and women, they referred to a mythic homogeneous Islamic past and rejected Malay-Muslim traditions and cultural heritage (Ong 1990, 268 f.). One of these new practices was the covering of the female body, which has been emphasised more strongly than any other rule by the different dakwah groups (Karim 1987, 48). Topics of female decency and the covering of female bodies became an obsession in these movements for both women and men. Veiling stood for a rigid separation between male public and female domestic spaces, thus breaking clearly with traditional Malay arrangements and also demanding a more pronounced separation of Muslim and non-Muslim spaces. Islamic movements in Malaysia organised their political action around discourses about anti-capitalism, antimulticulturalism and gender relations. In Malaysia, women remain at the heart of at least three different dimensions of boundary construction: against the West, against the other ethnic groups, and against traditional Malay Islam. Also the Malaysian state instrumentalises women and gender relations in its identity politics. In contrast to its undemocratic practices, the Malaysian government promotes the vision of a modern, rational and enlightened Islam in a modern, dynamic and developed Malaysian state. As cheap labourers, women play a substantial role in the modernisation and industrialisation plans of the government (Nagata, 1997, 78). To prove the progressive character of Islam in Malaysia, women are encouraged to attend higher and tertiary education and overseas training programmes and to become professionals or public sector workers (Nagata 1997, 142). Simultaneously, women are part of the ethnic chauvinist population politics propagated by the state, where they play the part of mothers of the nation. Both state and Islamist movements are reshaping and redefining women’s place and spaces in society. At present, this is leading to an intensification of gender inequality (Ong 1990, 272). However, the two incidents reported in the New York Times also show the sites of resistance and active opposition to such developments. Women’s organisations, whose involvement in public debate about politics, women and gender issues dates back before independence, are playing a significant part in this resistance. To conclude, it can be said that Malaysia is a country with a growth-oriented development model, an authoritarian political system and fierce cultural debates based on religious and ethnic identity politics. This and the specific combination of modernisation and Islamisation discourses and policies

26

1 Introduction

make Malaysia an interesting case for researching the complex public negotiation processes of gender relations. 1.4 Research dimensions 1.4.1 Changing identities Whereas we can indeed observe processes of homogenisation of specific Western cultural, economic and social patterns and the emergence of global, ‘universal’ identities, the significant rise of fragmentation and competing identity politics also cannot be ignored as one outstanding feature of present globalisation processes. All over the globe, there is a revival of primordial cultures paired with a growing political relevance of particular ethnic, national and religious identities. Global Islam is one of these new particular identities that are challenging the dominance of Western culture. Such counter-identities have to be interpreted as meaning-making resources which emerge in a world in which actors have to deal with a multiplicity of cultural codes in an unprecedented way (Schlee, Werner 1996). The multiplicity and diversification of discourses, sources, and knowledge that actors can draw upon is a major consequence of globalisation processes. The negotiations of concepts such as women’s rights, gender equality, violence against women, empowerment, and development relate directly to such identity politics (Pfaff-Czarnecka, 2007), because local public spheres are spaces “constituted by social agents who attempt to reserve and constitute a specific identity” (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002, 3). Particularly in Muslim societies, this leads to multi-level negotiations to ensure the compatibility of development visions with local culture and Islamic identity. At the local level, such concepts can be (partially) adopted, criticised, transformed, or reinterpreted. Their universality can be questioned, and alternative local visions of women’s rights and modernity can be developed which are linked discursively with local culture. My research sheds light on how Malaysian women’s movements relate to identity politics at the national and global levels. How do Malaysian women’s activists situate themselves on the global map? Which identity constructions do they use to ground their arguments? Universalistic or particularistic? Traditional or modern? Local or global? Or something in-between?

1.4 Research dimensions

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1.4.2 The local and the global The use of the concept of social space for researching the translocality of the negotiation of gender relations results in the question of the global and the local being addressed from the perspective of repertoires of knowledge, interpretations and meaning. Globalisation is only meaningful if social actors are able to make sense of these new experiences and if they are able to integrate them into already existing repertoires of knowledge. That which is reinvented as tradition or as local is a result of processes of interaction, of encounters “between different frames of meaning and action” (Long 1996, 50). Bearing in mind the arguments about the restructuration of space in globalisation processes, the question arises of how the newly shaped local, global and translocal spaces that women’s organisations and social movements create are interconnected (Lachenmann, reported by Spiegel, Harig rapps. 2002, 4 f.). Which social practices lead to the creation of translocal social spaces? Through which popular and everyday life political practices do women’s activists contribute to the emergence of transnational discursive arenas and networks? How are global concepts transformed by Malaysian activists in the process of localisation? What kind of local women’s rights concepts do Malaysian women’s organisations and activists develop? How are national and transnational publics related? 1.4.3 Global and translocal agency of women The question whether globalisation processes have positive or negative outcomes for women is discussed in very contradictory ways. Some authors uphold the view that globalisation bears no positive potential for women, but produces, as Brigitte Young ironically said, a “nightmare scenario” (Young 2001, 46) for them. Different facets of globalisation processes, be they economic or political, are said to endanger or even destroy the basis for women’s agency, which is thus reduced to a reactive resistance. In my research, I shall examine the role that increasing interconnectedness plays in the local and national struggles of women’s organisations. How does global and translocal connectivity influence and transform the political agency of women’s organisations in Malaysia? What does globalisation mean for women’s organisations in Malaysia and their attempts to create public spheres for the negotiation of gender relations?

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1 Introduction

1.5 Structure of the study In order to deal with these questions, the study is divided into three parts. Part One accompanies both the researcher and the young activists on their way into the world of NGOs. In Chapter 2, I shall trace my particular trajectory as a researcher developing approaches and methodologies for researching women activists in an increasingly globalised and interconnected social space. By reconstructing biographical narrations (Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997; Rosenthal 2004, 2006), Chapter 3 will explore how young female Malaysian activists approach and enter the world of NGOs. The activists or staff members of the most prominent women’s organisations in contemporary Malaysia who were interviewed for this study are young women between their late 20s and their late 30s. The chapter will focus on their motivations to become activists and on the issues that brought them to be involved in the project of social transformation. In this context, the critical points in their trajectory of becoming an activist will be analysed as well as the obstacles with which they saw themselves confronted once they had chosen this path. Whereas Part One deals with the different ways into the world of NGOs, my own way of becoming a researcher on NGOs and those of young women becoming activists, the chapters in Part Two are located within the world of Malaysian NGOs. Three different networks of civil society organisations will be analysed in relation to their history, their political practices to constitute female counterpublics, their specific appropriations of global women and development concepts and their identity politics. Chapter 4 deals with the network of advocacy-oriented women’s organisations located in the urban area of Kuala Lumpur. Chapter 5 examines women’s organisations in the Malaysian semiurban periphery whose major approach is social work. Chapter 6 finally deals with the network of socialist-oriented women’s workers organisations. Part Two concludes by elaborating on the idea of multiple overlapping public spheres. Part Three focuses more specifically on the negotiation of the public sphere in local and translocal settings. Proceeding from an event analysis, Chapter 7 explains the specific tropes around which publicness is traditionally constructed in Malaysia––dress, cultural belonging and knowledge. In direct confrontations with the ‘old’ tropes of publicness, Chapter 8 shows how new definitions of publicness are brought forward by young activists and women’s organisations. To conclude Part Three, Chapter 9 reaches out explicitly to the translocal level and analyses the practices of transcultural interaction and comparison initiated by events such as the Asia-Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10.

1.5 Structure of the study

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To finalise this study and to close the reflexive interplay between data and theory, Chapter 10 links back explicitly to the theoretical debates over processes of globalisation and the localisation of knowledge and the constitution of translocal public spheres. It argues that the practices of creating alternative media spaces and using mainstream media, connecting different fields of knowledge, redefining places, tradition and culture are crucial modes of political action and of constituting translocal public spheres. Furthermore, it shows that all the actors discussed in this study switch situationally between claiming particularism and universalism, and that their specific location within the translocal space is characterised through the constant tension between these two opposing poles. Instead of conceiving the global as flux and flow and correspondingly the local as the receiving and fixing end, the local appears as the place from which politics of fixing and flowing emanate.


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Part One Entering the World of NGOs


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2 Entering the World of NGOs: The Researcher’s Trajectory

Taking the importance of processes of globalisation for the production and transformation of knowledge seriously does not just open up new fields of research connected to the dynamics of knowledge generation within global and translocal spaces. It also provokes a discussion on methodological issues and on the creation of new methodological approaches able to adequately grasp new social formations. In that sense, globalisation is definitely one of the major challenges for a qualitative and ethnographic research traditionally oriented towards homogeneity, proximity and intimacy within a confined local setting (Akhil, Ferguson eds. 1997; Spiegel, 2007). Taking up this challenge, this research studies processes of globalisation and localisation with the aim of empirically grounding globalisation theories (Burawoy 2000b; Loimeier, Neubert, Weißköppel 2005; Lachenmann 2008). In doing this, it stands in the tradition of theory building research established in the 1960s by Anselm Strauss and Barney Glaser (Glaser, Strauss 1967; Strauss 1987; Strauss, Corbin 1990). Formulated to counter the dominance of hypothetico-deductive models of social research, the Grounded Theory approach is based on acknowledging “a great need to stick to the data, be in the field, and generate theory that respects and reveals the perspectives of the subjects in the substantive area under study” (Glaser 1992, 17). The types of theory that Glaser and Strauss envisaged generating in a systematic and methodologically rigorous way were material middle range theories with a special relevance for a concrete social field in contrast to formal theories on a significantly higher level of abstraction (Glaser, Strauss 1998, 42). The following pages will be dedicated to reflections on the process of developing grounded theory as carried out in this study. Reflections of this kind are of utmost significance for the validity of qualitative sociological research, because they enable the reader to reconstruct the conditions under which the knowledge presented here was generated (Flick 1998, 243 ff.; Steinke 2000, 324). The first section deals with the necessary reconstruction of the process of developing appropriate methods and collecting/selecting relevant data under the paradigm of theoretical sampling (2.1). Departing from the premise that the

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research process is an interactive process of knowledge production (Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen 1973; Hermanns 2000), this includes addressing the field entry, the research situation per se and questions of trust and confidentiality. I argue that reflecting on the conditions of this interactive process is not just necessary for the sake of validity. From a Grounded Theory perspective, these reflections on specific problems and frictions arising during the research process already produce knowledge and reveal first insights into the structuration of the field under research. “The body of the researcher moves in space forming an imaginary map, a trajectory that may be the geographical expression of the networks s/he establishes (Balasescu 2006, 19)”. The second section addresses the process of analysis and writing–focusing on how different methods and data are integrated (2.2). In the third section, I want to present in depth two of the most significant types of data in my research: events and biographical narrations (2.3 and 2.4). The following describes my trajectory as a researcher as well as the basic mechanisms of and steps in developing grounded theory. 2.1 The process of fieldwork 2.1.1 Towards a dense global ethnography In March 2004, I travelled to Kuala Lumpur for the first time to do ethnographically inspired research on women’s organisations and the constitution of translocal social spaces and public spheres. Already in this very first sentence, the methodological challenge of such a project becomes pertinent. How can one do research on translocal or even global phenomena in one particular locality? The starting point of my research was Malaysia, or to be more precise, the metropolitan area of Kuala Lumpur, where most of the data in this study was collected during six months of fieldwork. The fieldwork was divided into two research phases: an exploratory phase of two months from March to April 2004 and an in-depth research phase of four months from July to October 2004. The location of the study, the metropolitan area of Kuala Lumpur, makes it necessary to reconsider the nature of ethnography in urban contexts. I clearly started my research with the self-understanding of doing interpretative sociology in an ethnographic tradition and of celebrating the “happy marriage” of ethnography and grounded theory (Pettigrew 2000). The aim of interpretative sociology is to reconstruct the meaningfully lived worlds of everyday life and to view these social worlds from an “inside” perspective (Lachenmann 1997, 100). However, my research took a very different form than that of classical

2.1 The process of fieldwork

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ethnographic research based on permanent and long-term presence and participation in the field of research (Malinowski 1953, 1-12). In the eyes of Edward Evans-Pritchard, the ideal anthropologist “would throughout be in close contact with the people among whom he was working, he must communicate with them solely through their own language, and he must study their entire culture and social life” (radio lecture by E. Evans-Pritchard quoted by Hannerz 2003). When conducting my research on women’s organisations and the constitution of translocal public spheres, I was confronted with a fragmented urban environment offering solely “pockets of contact” with the field (Balasescu 2006) and with the hard work of creating such encounters between myself––the researcher–and my research field. Besides the contacts to the field established through our project partner Prof. Norani Othman from the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the National University of Malaysia IKMAS, who is at the same time one of the leading heads of Sisters in Islam, the prime methods for establishing such “pockets of contact” at the beginning were countless phone calls to the organisations’ offices to arrange initial visits and interviews with the ‘very busy’ representatives. The phone calls were followed by initial visits to the offices of the organisations and by first semi-structured interviews about the programme and history of the organisations with their representatives along with first observations of events. To identify the next interview partner, I usually followed the system of snowballing (Lachenmann 1997, 107); that is, following up networks and interactive linkages existing in the field itself as indicated to me by sentences such as: “You have to talk to so and so”. Interviews and events in the first research phase constituted singular “pockets of contact” which, in their combination, produced a dense fabric of different sorts of data. However, the feeling of a significant spatial and social distance between myself and the particular social space of female activists and the women’s movement remained every time I concluded an interview with an activist, every time I left the office of an organisation, and every time I came home to my room in a student dormitory at one of the most important local universities after travelling 60 minutes from one of the workshops or conferences. The positive role of strategically combining phases of entering the field––“going native”––with phases of withdrawal from the field––“coming home”––for the process of decoding structures of meaning has been rightly emphasised (Amann, Hirschauer 1997). Still, I felt that my participant observation in these confined social spaces was too punctual and limited. My research field constituted mainly by ‘professional feminists’––activists working in offices, writing reports, reading articles––turned out to be one of those “settings of modernity […] which may be monotonous, isolated and difficult to access” via permanent long-term participant observation (Hannerz 2003, 211).

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These difficulties in gaining access to the NGOs were addressed through changes in the research strategy in the second research phase. Although the first phase aimed primarily at obtaining an overview of the landscape of women’s NGOs in Malaysia and at establishing important contacts within the NGO scene and the scientific community, it also built up the basis for extending and multiplying my presence in the field. In order to intensify the dynamics of ‘going native’, that is, to get a deeper insight into the everyday practices and work of the respective NGOs––but also in order to simplify the interaction with the NGOs who did not always know how to treat a researcher––I acquired the status of an intern, completing short term internships (of two weeks each) with two of the local NGOs: the Women’s Aid Organisation and Sisters in Islam. During my two weeks with SIS, I supported the programme manager in editing and proofreading the latest SIS publications. During my two weeks with WAO, I supported the organisers of the National Conference on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), especially by taking notes during the conference itself and reporting afterwards. Particularly in this second research phase, by staying the entire day in the office and going for lunch with the staff members, I was able to participate in the everyday life context of the activists, a perspective that produced the most interesting and richest insights. The spatial precariousness and fragmentation of the urban research field also led to an intensified reflection on where to locate and how to operationalise the research ‘sites’ that were relevant for my concrete research topic. Besides minimising and condensing the research site spatially to the offices, an additional strategy in the second phase was to stretch the concept of ‘site’ beyond physical space and include elements of a multi-sited research methodology. In his article on ‘multi-sited ethnography’, George Marcus has argued that “cultural logics so much sought after in anthropology are always multiply produced. […] Strategies of quite literally following connections, associations, and putative relationships are thus at the very heart of designing multi-sited ethnographic research” (1995, 97). The fundamental idea of this new generation of ethnographies (Gupta, Ferguson 1997; Hannerz 1998; Hendry 2003; Hannerz 2003; Balasescu 2006) is that the increasing de-territorialisation of social spaces and knowledge has to be reflected in a dynamisation of research methods and design. Marcus argues that the researcher herself has to follow the global flows, and he develops a concise research programme for multi-sited ethnography. The techniques of follow the people, follow the biography, and follow the metaphor turned out to be of the highest relevance for my own research on knowledge and public spheres in a globalised world. First, the spatial dimension of my research field needed to be broadened. Initially, my research was concentrated in the urban area of Kuala Lumpur, but


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within the process of theoretical sampling (Strauss, Corbin 1990) and of following the actors’ networks and mental maps, I included visits to other regions: Penang, Ipoh, and Kota Bharu which were part of the networks and spaces created by women’s organisations. I also directly followed the movements of the activists within their translocal space, for instance, travelling to the Asia Pacific NGO Forum in Bangkok, where several of the Malaysian activists I had met in Malaysia participated. Following the people is one possible way to grasp the translocal nature of the field under study. If social actors who are engaged in the production, dissemination and transformation of the field under study are spatially mobile, and knowledge is produced in several and distinct locations, research has to take into account these different sites of knowledge production. In social anthropology, this approach of mobile and multi-local research has a long history, for instance, in research on nomads (Schlee 1989). Secondly, following the biography turned out to be a further method to grasp the connections between different sites and arenas of knowledge production and the constitution of public spheres. Already in earlier studies (Spiegel 2005a), the focus on biographies and trajectories turned out to be very fruitful in showing how different localities were woven together by young migrant women through the practices of travel and dance, and how this translocality was embedded into the biographical continuity of everyday life. Also for the research on translocally networking social movements, the analysis of trajectories and biographies of activists turned out to be an important method for gaining access to the trajectories and interdependencies of different knowledge elements in the process of negotiating global development concepts. The focus on the diachronic character of agency particularly makes biographical methods useful instruments for research on social movements (Miethe, Roth 2000). Social movements are the articulation of individual agency and collective action, of personal change and social change, a connection that the biographical perspective is especially able to grasp. “In order to understand the willingness to protest, we must examine individual biographies and cultural practices and meanings, as well as––in the final stage of the causal chain––the resources and strategies of formal groups. We shall see that emotions, morality and cognitive beliefs are inseparable in action” (Jaspers 1997, 101). Fifteen interviews were conducted with a biographical and narrative focus in order to collect biographies and trajectories of individual staff members and volunteers which would shed light on their social background and motivations for engaging in social work. These narrative biographical interviews (Schütze 1976; Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997, Rosenthal 2004, 2006) with women whom I knew already were conducted mostly in the office during work time; in two cases, I was invited to

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visit the activists at home, so that I was able to conduct the interviews there; in some cases, the interviews were conducted at my home. Thirdly, following discourses, metaphors or symbols as part of global ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990) served as a methodological entrance to processes of knowledge creation within translocal social spaces. Similar to Millie Thayer (2000; 2001) and Kathy Davis (2006), who analysed the global trajectory of one of the most important documents of the US American women’s movement, the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” first published in 1969, I emphasised concepts of women’s and human rights. Tracking global symbolic formations and the diversity of local appearances sheds light on glocal processes of translation and transformation of meaning. Selecting these different sites was an integral part of the general process character of theory building research, “gradually and cumulatively, as new insights develop, as opportunities come into sight” (Hannerz 2003, 207). Combining these different approaches of mobile and stationary research by focusing on both the spatial mobility of the actors but also on their imaginary and discursive connections to global landscapes of meaning and their concepts of the world, this research was engaged from the very beginning in experimenting with the intensity of ethnographic fieldwork in line with Hannerz’s description of the practice of translocal ethnography (Hannerz 1998). Throughout this experiment, it became increasingly clear that the question on whether it is possible to conduct research in translocal or even global phenomena in one particular locality emphasises a false antagonism between the local and the global. Globalisation has to be understood as a process experienced and mediated in concrete local settings that acquires concrete relevance for the everyday life of people through a process of interpretation and appropriation of cultural phenomena according to local conditions of reception. I propose that exactly because of these changed patterns of the local within globalisation, the local becomes the prominent site for research on globalisation and situated everyday experiences. Local realities become central in the analysis of the local global nexus (Davids, van Driel 2006a, 4). This means to conceptualise globalisation from a local perspective as an heuristic frame in which local actors situate their action and their experiences and to analyse the “lived experience of globalisation” to which “the ethnographer has a privileged insight” (Burawoy 2000a, 4). In that sense, the following study is a local “anthropology of globalisation” “exploring the local experiences of people as their everyday lives become increasingly contingent on globally stretched out social relations” (Inda, Rosaldo 2002, 26 ff.), or it is a “global ethnography” (Burawoy et al. eds. 2000). Experimenting extensively with both the intensity of ethnographic fieldwork and the degree of invasion of the ethnographer to the field produced a


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trinity of qualitative methods based on the theoretical assumptions regarding the construction of social reality and social spaces through processes of negotiation of meaning (Berger, Luckmann 1967; Schütz, Luckmann 1973). This trinity of methods included 1) observations, participant and non-participant, of formal events: workshops, lectures, conferences, meetings organised by local or regional women’s organisations, but also of informal meetings and situations: lunch meetings, dinners, parties, conversations; 2) interviews: both semi-structured interviews on the programme and approaches of the organisations and narrative interviews focusing more on subjective knowledge stocks; and finally 3) documents such as reports, flyers, publications of the women’s organisations. These different methods also refer to different levels––local, national, regional. On a local level, Sisters In Islam study sessions, Amnesty International volunteer training on their campaign on violence against women, celebrations of the international and of the Malaysian women’s day, and staff meetings were included in the research; on a national level, the NGO conference on the formulation of a CEDAW shadow report and other meetings of national networks; on a regional level, several workshops with a regional Asian participation, for instance, on neo-liberal globalisation organised by CAW (Committee for Asian Women) and the Asia Pacific NGO Forum +10 in Bangkok, where Malaysian NGO activists also participated. In total, around 40 interviews with individual female NGO activists and staff members and two group discussions were conducted and 27 events were observed. The interviews––conducted in English, the language of education of most of the interviewees, which turned into my working language as a German scholar–– were taped and later transcribed by my local research assistants. Observations were constantly turned into text in the form of field notes and research notes, and memos were written in a regular manner according to Grounded Theory methods (Glaser, Strauss 1967). 2.1.2 Interview situations: “This is off the record” Taking theories on interaction and the social construction of knowledge seriously also has methodological and epistemological consequences. Interviewing has to be seen as a social practice and the interview as a specific type of interaction in which data is reciprocally constructed by the interviewer and the interviewee. “Reflexivity and relationality, which are defined as attending to the effects of researcher-participant interactions on the construction of data and to power and trust relationships between researcher and participants” (Hall, Callery 2001, 257) are thus indispensable to enhance methodological rigour. In a significant part of

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the interviews I conducted, I was confronted with a more or less subtle atmosphere of distrust regarding my research and regarding my position as researcher. “This is off the record” was a phrase I heard repeatedly. At both personal and organisational levels, people were very concerned about what would happen to the information they had given me, and wanted to make sure that certain information should not be made public. The phrase “off the record” was usually followed by a critical comment on the government, state institutions or civil society organisations, which were perceived as being close to the government, such as the National Council of Women’s Organisations (NCWO) or the National Human Rights Commission (SUHAKAM). In cases where NGO activists were employed in government bodies or worked very closely with them or in cases where the interviewed persons were prominent public characters, they especially wanted to make sure that their criticism could not be traced back to them. But also without being explicitly part of government institutions, there was a certain fear of voicing too critical comments, especially concerning religion. For instance Noraini, a young activist, interrupted the interview in a very startled way when she realised that she had just mentioned the name of the town where she had studied overseas. The long biographical interview with her had focused on this study visit overseas and her very personal reflections on religion, religious plurality and being a Muslim woman that had been initiated through this study visit. She asked me very anxiously to erase the name of the town “because if they read it, they will surely know that it was me who told you all these things, because there were not so many students there at this time.” After having clarified that the name of the town would not appear in any research paper, she agreed to continue the interview. Again, after the interview, she pleaded very emphatically to erase the name of the town, so that she would not be identifiable. This also happened in another interview when the interviewee interrupted the flow of her story with the phrase: “Maybe I should not tell you about that”, hesitating over whether to continue or not. After a few moments, she continued with the remark “…but anyway”, relating that she was member of a small study group of gay and lesbian Muslims who were meeting regularly to read and discuss the Quran from a gay perspective. Another example showed that especially for Muslim women, the public sphere is a difficult and tricky terrain. This was a weekend trip to the beach with a very vocal and publicly active Muslim NGO activist. During this weekend she dressed more casually than during the week, when she was working in the office of her organisation and often had to give public statements to the press. When we took a picture of ourselves at the beach she said, half jokingly, half seriously: “But don’t show this picture to the press. Because then I cannot say anything any


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longer about the rights of Muslim women. Because then they will attack me all the time: how can she be dressed this way and talk about Islam.” Another example of the cautious behaviour of the interviewee was the first meeting with Lilian, the representative of one of the organisations for female workers. This meeting took place at a café in the main railway station KL Sentral. During the telephone conversation, I had made clear my willingness to come to the organisation’s office which was a half-hour train trip away. But Lilian insisted that our first meeting should not take place on the organisation’s premises but in a neutral place like a café at the station, through which she had to pass that day on her way to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. We had coffee together and I introduced myself and the research project to her. The conversation was friendly but I had the strong feeling of being tested. Only after this first meeting on neutral ground did she invite me to meet her at the office. During my second interview with her, I found out that she had been in jail for two years. She also mentioned several times that she and the office had been watched by the police. Besides these cases where interviewees shared information with me but later reminded me to handle this knowledge carefully, or, metaphorically speaking, besides these cases where they opened their doors but closed them behind me to make sure that nobody else was listening to our conversations, there were also situations where I could not get the information I wanted and where doors did not open at all. Through one of the women’s organisations, I got the opportunity to participate in a workshop organised by one of the more stateoriented organisations. There I got to know an officer of this institution and we made an appointment, as I thought for an interview. She received me at her office and I started to prepare myself for the interview, as I always did: taking out paper, pen and my tape recorder and asking for permission to tape the interview. Normally this was no problem, but this time the officer panicked and explained to me very nervously that she was not allowed to talk to me, that she could not give me an interview because there was an order from above, that only the highest officer was allowed to give interviews. I tried to calm her worries saying that I would anonymise the interview anyway. But she was still not convinced and said: “Even when it is anonymous and you say ‘Somebody from this organisation told me…’, they will automatically know that it is me who told you.” Even when I replied that is was not so much her personal opinion that I was interested in, but the history and programme of the organisation, she said that she was not able to tell me anything. Instead she handed me over a lot of materials and publications like the annual report. These exemplary cases are characterised by a subtle fear of a more or less clearly defined authority or public, the fear that “they will know”. In the case of the officer in the stateoriented organisation, ‘they’ could obviously be her concrete superiors. In the

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case of Noraini, the figure of ‘them’ is less concrete and refers more to a vague public, to abstract superiors who could order sanctions. In the case of the young Muslim activist concerned with her dress, ‘they’ would stand for the Muslim public, or Islamic religious authorities. Although normally very open, on two occasions, my requests to attend seminars or workshops organised by NGOs as an observer were refused. In both cases, the topic of the workshop was women’s rights in Islam and the addressees of the workshop were partly representatives of religiously more conservative groups. The organisers of these seminars explained to me that my presence at the training sessions would hinder the training process, because firstly, the organisers would then run the risk of being associated with Western ideas and culture. This would weaken their position in the dialogue with the more conservative groups. Secondly, they feared that the participants at the workshops would not feel comfortable and not speak out as openly if they had the feeling of being observed by an ‘orang putih’, a white person. On the one hand, all these incidences show that the interactions in which the exchange of information and knowledge was embedded take place in a field which is clearly shaped through power relations, and that these power relations do not remain outside the interview situation, but are at the very core of it. I quickly had the feeling that there were right and wrong questions, and that there were sensitive topics, which were difficult to deal with. The dress code for Muslim women and sexuality would certainly be among those sensitive issues. For the development of Grounded Theory, it is often the circularity of the research process that is highlighted (Flick 2006, 96 ff.). In most cases, authors refer to the simultaneity and interdependence of data collection and data analysis and emphasise the significant role of theoretical sampling and of writing field notes in the production and maintenance of this simultaneousness. Another approach to instrumentalise circularity is to integrate reflections on the research practices and field entry into the analysis, as they provide initial insights into the logics of the field. Analysing the reactions to my research pointed to the fragility of the discursive public sphere in Malaysia. Civil society in Malaysia is extremely regulated and restricted by the state. The Malaysian state possesses powerful resources to control civil society activities: control over media and repressive anti-subversion laws (see Chapter 4). In this “pseudodemocracy” (Uhlin 2002, 154), democracy is reduced to voting rights, and political activists have been seriously harassed. One incident that illustrates the fragility of the public sphere in Malaysia is ‘Operation Lalang’, in which 100 civil society activists were arrested under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1987.5 Some of 5 Recently, the act has played an important role in the government’s anti-terrorism policies (SUARAM 2002; Uhlin 2002).


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them were kept in jail for two years under the charge of planning a communist insurgence. The ISA is one of the most repressive laws implemented against civil society actors in Malaysia. It allows detention without trial for up to two years if the government perceives a threat to internal security. The state’s practices of registration for non-governmental organisations are another example of the limitation of the democratic space. The Malaysian government is so restrictive that some of the most vocal national NGOs as well as branches of internationally established NGOs have not succeeded in getting registered as ‘societies’. Amnesty International, for example, has been applying for registration as a ‘society’ under the Society Act for ten years now and has been rejected four times. Hence, in order to achieve a legal basis for their activities, these organisations opted to register themselves as companies. The refusal of the status of ‘society’ has to be interpreted as the refusal to acknowledge critical civil society actors as equal partners in a public debate about important societal issues (Weiss, Hassan 2003a, 7). NGOs are not acknowledged as participants in the redefinition of important social issues. Although providing a degree of legal security, being registered as a ‘company’ is a very fragile and ambiguous legal basis for NGOs, as their work goes beyond the activities of a normal company. That means that they are pushed to the margins of legality and can be objects of state arbitrariness. If an organisation is considered too critical, this registration can be withdrawn very easily (Lim Teck Ghee 1995, 167). For people working in state or state-related institutions, this fragility is especially relevant, because they are situated in the realm of state control which creates a research atmosphere of general fear and distrust. I encountered a very clear structure of hidden and public spaces with significant consequences for my research––very different from the structure I had encountered during my research on Bolivian migrants in Buenos Aires (Spiegel 2005a). In Buenos Aires, it was rather the private spaces, the homes of the parents, which were critical areas for young female Bolivian migrants. They had been trying to escape those controlled spaces at home and were very happy to meet in coffee bars and restaurants where they felt that they could speak openly. In the case of the Malaysian social movement activists, it was private, or at least secluded spaces that seemed more secure for them to be interviewed: at my home, at their home or at their office. The space that was perceived to be insecure and threatening when it came to talking about sensitive issues was the public space. The somehow hidden space of their workplace, the offices of the women’s organisations, provided the young NGO activists with the possibility to reflect on religion and religious norms in their own way, and to live a lifestyle that would not be tolerated in public––neither by their parents nor by state or religious authorities.

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On the one hand, these very initial experiences in the interactive setting of conducting interviews shed light on the restricted space for political dissent in Malaysia. On the other hand, I was forced to reflect on the balance between confidentiality (that is, the ethical standard of not harming the interviewee) and the desire to produce accurate and also socially transformative knowledge (that is, knowledge which also discloses oppressive structures and uncovers existing subversive agency). The question that arose was how to observe the rules of confidentiality protecting personal rights of privacy and freedom from harm while simultaneously producing valid scientific knowledge. This means that not only methods but also presentation styles have to be appropriate to the research subject. Reflections on what consequences the knowledge produced in sociological research can have are especially pertinent in qualitative research which presumes to be closer to the life-world of individuals. Undertaking research in a context where the re-circulation of specific information6 given by the interview partners is as problematic as in the case at hand creates a situation of insecurity for both the researcher and the individuals being researched. This insecurity also includes the ethical question of where the research starts and where it ends, which information about the interviewee should be included as data into the research, and which parts should be left in the realm of intimacy. Within the formal interview situations, this problem was not difficult to handle. All the aboverelated situations are examples of the awareness of my interviewees about the possible harm that could be caused by giving certain information to a researcher, and of their ability to exercise agency by controlling the flow of information within the interview situation in a general atmosphere of authoritarian control. However, for ethnography and general qualitative research, where the researcher’s body and her everyday communicative abilities are converted into research instruments, this problem gains a new quality, as it is more difficult for the research partners to distinguish between personal communication and research. Qualitative research and specifically ethnography probes into areas that constitute participants’ private space and exposes participants’ views or actions that might have damaging consequences. It is caught in the paradox that “the respondent seeks to maintain some control over her realm of secrets, while the researcher attempts to penetrate that realm, that the respondent seeks to protect 6 Usually, the question of double hermeneutics, that is, the question of the interrelatedness of researcher and the object of research, is discussed in the context of how the knowledge the researcher possesses prior to the research process should be treated, problematising mainly the transfer from interpretations of first- to second-grade interpretations in the hermeneutic circle. But the other side of these double hermeneutics is the process by which the second-grade interpretations generated in sociological studies are re-embedded and translated back into first-grade interpretations of everyday life, and what consequences this process has for the actors (Schütz, Luckmann 1973; Giddens 1984).


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information, that the researcher wants undisclosed” (Baez 2002, 45). Emphasising the side of the researcher brought me into the problematic situation that people were insecure about how to deal with me in everyday interaction contexts. Emphasising the personal side was no less problematic for me, as I had to decide how to handle the information gathered in such everyday contexts. In contrast to the solution to this dilemma offered by other researchers (Baez 2002) of “withholding much of the information” that they had obtained and sacrificing the scientific project of producing “compelling stories” for the sake of the interviewees’ identities and privacy, I opted for a different approach. I chose to emphasise the disruptive potential that qualitative research provides while at the same time securing basic protection of my interviewees’ privacy. In order to protect their anonymity and privacy, all individual names used in this study are fictitious. This also meant that I was unable to name some interesting connections: for instance, the connection of biographical information with positions and statements made by the same activists in a public realm as authors of publications or as public speakers. In order to protect the interviewees, I took the decision not to link these two dimensions so that the person could not be identified. The described practices of selecting cases and methods, of minimising and stretching the sites of research and of reflecting on interview situations and the research contexts are part of the endeavour to build an empirically grounded theory. “A grounded theory is one that is inductively derived from the study of the phenomenon it represents. That is, it is discovered, developed, and provisionally verified through systematic data collection and analysis of data pertaining to that phenomenon. Therefore, data collection, analysis, and theory stand in reciprocal relationship with each other” (Strauss, Corbin 1990, 23). To discover what Amann and Hirschauer have called the specific “Methodenzwänge” (Amann, Hirschauer 1997) of the field, that is, the specific relationship between data collection, analysis and theory, it was necessary to follow the general methodological openness and flexibility of theory building research (Glaser, Strauss 1967; Eisenhardt 1989). Thus, the appropriateness of methods and theories was guaranteed through a process of adjusting the theoretical concepts and instruments of data collection (Eisenhardt 1989; Strauss, Corbin 1990; Lachenmann 1997). In contrast to hypothesis testing research, which is based on random sampling, theory building research is based on theoretical sampling, meaning that cases are selected for theoretical not statistical reasons. Theoretical sampling “is sampling on the basis of concepts that have proven theoretical relevance to the evolving theory” (Strauss, Corbin 1990, 176). Within this process, cases were selected for either their similarity with or their difference from cases already analysed. This minimising or

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maximising of differences is a significant part of the method of permanent comparison. Last but not least, the reflection on interdependencies between the research practices and the logics of the field was another component of theory building research, taking into account the circularity of analysis and data collection and the basic similarity of communicative structures in the field and that of research.7 “We are engaged in a reflexive science in which the limitations of method become the critique of society” (Burawoy 2000a, 28). 2.2 Grounding globalisation The goal of this study is clearly “to construct perspectives from below, what we call grounded globalisations” (Burawoy 2000b, 341). This process of constructing such perspectives from below starts from empirical research. It sets out “from real experiences, spatial and temporal […] of mobilised feminists […] in order to explore their global contexts”. Besides the process of data gathering, which is described in the previous sections, the process of analysing and coding data is at the heart of building theory from empirical research. It is the process of “ascending from the local to the global by stitching together our ethnographies” (Burawoy 2000b, 343). Strauss and Corbin have defined coding as the “process of breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualising, and categorising data” (Strauss, Corbin 1990, 61). The data with which I ‘interacted’ during the process of coding was produced by mixed methods as described above. The triangulation of methods was applied for two reasons: First, the triangulation of different methods during the process of data gathering increases validity and reliability of qualitative analysis. Playing different methods off against each other enhances their mutual validation (Denzin, Lincoln 1994; Kelle, Erzberger 2000; Flick 2000b). However, the main reason for using multiple methods stems from the insight that the social world itself is complex, is fragmented and has multiple meanings. A triangulation of methods is then needed “to reveal the different dimensions of a phenomenon and to enrich understandings of the multi-faceted, complex nature of the social world” (Moran-Ellis et al. 2006, 48). Complex fields require complex research designs and multiple research methods (Lachenmann 2008, 13). Rather than increasing validity, triangulation generates complementarity 7 The empirical research concluded with a workshop held on 6th October 2004 at the Shah’s Village Hotel in Petaling Jaya, a location favoured by a lot of local NGOs for their meetings and conferences. The workshop was conceived as an initial evaluation and discussion of preliminary findings with important actors of ‘civil society’ as well as academics who had been involved in the field research.

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(Moran-Ellis et al. 2006, 47-48). However, just collecting data with different methods is a simple affair compared to the interesting methodological challenge of how to integrate these different types of data or “communicative genres” (Luckmann 1986) into the process of analysis and writing. This form of triangulation of complementary methods applied during the process of data gathering clearly produced different types of data: transcripts of biographical narrations and other interviews, protocols of events, field notes, and memos. Each method constituted the object of research in a specific way, and the data produced with each method had its own, sometimes partly specific logic. The important methodological issue confronting me during the analysis and writing process was how to use triangulation in the process of analysing, writing and theory building without destroying the logic of the different types of data, and how to integrate data with different logics into the coherent structure of a book. How could these different angles or perspectives improve the possibility of theoretical generalisation (Flick 2000a, 260) and lead to what Geertz called “thick description” (Geertz 1983)? This question is especially pertinent in qualitative research where the process of writing is not only a documenting practice but actually the very practice of analysis, interpretation and creation of knowledge as researchers have discussed in the writing culture debate (Clifford 1986; Fuchs, Berg 1999). For comparative analysis, the concept of permanent comparison within the approach of Grounded Theory (Glaser, Strauss 1998, 107-121) turned out to be very useful. In this approach, the comparative perspective is present in all phases of the research process and is the main instrument of scientific insight and knowledge generation. Besides the practice of theoretical sampling discussed above, comparison also takes place during the process of coding and analysing the data with the aim of producing a saturated and empirically grounded theory. According to the Grounded Theory approach, the analysis of my empirical data started with the elaboration of codes, that is, with the process of “reducing the meaning of a given unit of text” (Rennie 2000, 485). This reduction of meaning was first carried out during the two-month interval between the two research phases to reorient the research according to the data. It was then continued during the second research phase before being finally carried out more intensively after definitely returning to Germany. The starting point in this third phase of analysis was a within-case analysis of one particular interview that I considered to be especially relevant. This first step of within-case open-coding (Strauss, Corbin 1990, 181) then led to the generation of a cascade of codes. However, in the process of further coding and cross-case comparison with other textual data, disregarding their communicative genre, some of these codes proved to be relevant, whereas others vanished into insignificance. Here “the

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meaning of a given fragment of text (or meaning unit) is constantly compared with the meaning of other units” (Rennie 2000, 485) proving its general relevance and power of explanation. From the very beginning, the interplay between natural codes and sociological codes played a significant role in the process of permanent comparison (Strauss 1987). The basic idea of following othering processes and comparative horizons from the actor’s perspective led to a first generation of meaningful, mostly natural codes (such as We/‘the Others’, today/before, new knowledge/old knowledge, local Islam/Arabic Islam, flexible/strict Islam, Muslim/non-Muslim, open/narrow, soft/tough, progressive/conservative, Asia/West, Islam/West, transformative/non-transformative, equality/difference, strength/weakness). In a second step, those natural codes of othering were analysed according to the material and symbolic dimensions through which they were articulated, and codes such as “dress”, “knowledge”, “tradition” or “cultural belonging” came to the forefront. However, they existed as relatively separate codes for some time. The additional analysis and writing consisted in increasingly integrating different data, theoretical concepts and context. In this approach, contextualisation served as an “instrument of validation–– and not, as is often the case––just one of background information” (Lachenmann 2008, 19). This integration was achieved by writing texts with different degrees of abstraction––detailed memos on particular interviews or events, memos on particular codes, and memos that connected both data and theory. Throughout this process, it became clear that the categories of dress, knowledge and culture were not just isolated topics, but were related by their significance in the negotiations of “publicness”––the most abstract category in this study. The concept of publicness turned out to be one of the most important key categories, that is, a category which is able to integrate different codes into one coherent narration or topic. The interpretation of comparative horizons or alternative social practices identified in the stocks of knowledge of the interviewees finally built the foundations for the development of theses and arguments which are meaningful and generalisable even beyond the individual case. The theses generated using the Grounded Theory approach can thus contribute to a general theory building on a more abstract level. The administration of data and the process of coding were significantly supported by the programme ATLAS.ti, especially in the first phases of analysis when the “skeleton” of codes was being developed. However, during the course of the analysis, it proved to be more productive to distance myself from the technically mediated analysis and carry out the analytical fine tuning with more traditional techniques, like working with index cards and other visual techniques, such as diagrams, maps and schemes.

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But while emphatically celebrating triangulation, literature on this approach does offer a rather short-sighted account of problems inherent in this practice. Especially the opposing logics of diachronicity within biographical interviews and synchronicity within documents, texts or events do create certain problems in the analysis. The biographical or narrative approach privileges “in-depth holistic accounts of individuals’ experiences” (Hoskins, Stoltz 2005, 96). It is also based on the idea that before one can understand the actors’ rationality, it is necessary to know her social position in order to contextualise it and explore its situatedness. Here the actor is taken as the point of articulation between structure and agency (Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1985; 1990). However, the analytical process of permanent comparison goes hand in hand with the disaggregation of the primary research unit, a process where the actor with her unique story is divided into units of meaning, codes, categories, and dimensions and is compared with other codes from other actors or from totally different types of data, such as documents or field notes. This process of disaggregation and of disembodiment plays an essential role in creating codes and reaching the necessary degree of abstraction. This results in the question of how the different logics of the data could be reflected in the product of writing and in the logic of the chapters––embodied or disembodied. The form of this study and the organisation of the chapters present an intermediary solution to these problems. For the presentation, I returned to emphasising the natural or emic codes due to their figurative power, choosing partly literal quotations from the interviews and presenting modes of transformation and production of knowledge through the reconstruction of cases and dense description. Chapter 3 explicitly follows the logic of biographical narration, which is contextualised but does not contain much triangulation with other data, whereas Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are more clearly organised around specific discourses or events and do not contain significant amounts of biographical data. However, in departing from a specific event, Chapters 7 and 8 do integrate both types of data in a systematic way. Starting from a rather biographical perspective, the density of triangulation increases during the course of the book in an upward intensification of abstraction. By doing this, the structure of the whole book ought to be oriented towards a typical trajectory of an activist: from being outside the world of social movements to being inside the world of social movements and from being locally active to being translocally active.

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2.3 Events The focusing on events developed gradually and was based on the idea of minimising and condensing the research sites not only spatially but also temporally. Events then have to be seen as specific temporary sites (Hannerz 2003, 210) and play an essential methodological role in gaining access to travelling concepts. In an increasing number of publications, events are taken as the unit of observation and analysis (Gebhardt, Hitzler, Pfadenhauer 2000; Long 2000; Salzbrunn 2007; Lachenmann 2008; Nageeb 2008b). However, some of these approaches differ quite significantly from the one adopted in this study. Talking about “critical event analysis”, Norman Long gives examples of “dramatic situations” such as the explosion at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Southern Mexico (Long 2000, 193-94). What makes an event for Long is the “disruption of an existing set of social relations or the breach of norms” (Long 2000, 193). A similar notion of events as the “extraordinary” is found in recent publications in the German context (Gebhardt, Hitzler, Pfadenhauer 2000) where events are equated with pop-cultural festivities, celebrations and gatherings with a spectacular quality. The approach adopted in this study differs significantly from these notions of events as “dramatic situations” or reflections of the “extraordinary”. I suggest conceptualising events as manifestations of social spaces, where discursive battles relevant in the field materialise in spatially and temporally confined interactive settings with the participation of multiple relevant actors in the field. Similar to the coffee houses in Great Britain, salons in France and table societies in Germany, which Habermas had in mind when talking about the meeting places of the bourgeois public sphere in Europe (Habermas 1989), I treat training sessions, study sessions, workshops and other events organised by the cosmopolitan women’s organisations as creating important spaces where a critical discourse is cultivated and where the very foundations of the public sphere are negotiated in Malaysia. These events frequently take place in the offices of the host organisation and bring together a variety of different social actors often from very distant poles of the political spectrum. Using Nancy Fraser’s metaphor of the public sphere as the “theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk” (Fraser 1997, 110), such events are the stages where the public is performed and the conditions of publicness are negotiated. Based on the approach of an interface analysis (Long 1989; Long 1992a, 1992b; Long, Long 1992 eds.; Lachenmann 1995; Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002; Lachenmann 2004b, 2008), the negotiations and interactions which can be

2.4 Biographical narrations

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observed in such complex interactive settings have to be interpreted as the situational expressions of interfaces between different knowledge spaces and systems within the arena that is constituted around the debates on women’s rights and cultural/religious identity. According to Long, an interface is “a critical point of intersection between multiple life-worlds or domains where discontinuities exist based on discrepancies in values, interests, knowledge and power” (Long 1996, 56). The approach of highlighting the often conflicting and ambivalent perspectives of different actors, their “strategies, manoeuvres, discourses, speech games, and struggles over social identity” is chosen in this study in order to “tease out the intricacies of how knowledge is internalised, used and reconstructed” (Long 1996, 56) within the process of negotiating global development concepts and gender relations. However, whereas Long focuses on the processes of knowledge transformation within the context of globalisation, that is, within the local/global dynamics, the emphasis in this study is on the significance of such “encounters at the interface” (Long ed. 1989). These interfaces connect different, sometimes overlapping social spaces relevant for the constitution of a public sphere (Habermas 1989) and for the analysis of the mechanisms and restrictions that this public sphere is based on in Malaysia (Spiegel, Harig rapps. 2002; Lachenmann 2005; Spiegel rapp. 2005; Dannecker, Spiegel 2008; Lachenmann 2008). When doing this, I shall use the event concept as an operationalisation of Long’s “interface situation”. I shall take civil society events as a prominent unit of analysis (Salzbrunn 2007, 6) and treat them as significant platforms for the negotiation of gender relations and societal transformation processes. By focusing on events, one can observe the emergence and dynamics of public discourses and the development of new hybrid forms of knowledge. Events are the stage on which the imagined other is produced within the urban political environment (Salzbrunn 2007, 13). Hence, by asking “who organises, invites, participates, excludes?” and “what are the major topics, discussions, conflicts, consequences?” (Lachenmann 2008, 20), the research on events organised by civil society actors contributes to the theorising about how the public sphere is structured. 2.4 Biographical narrations One of the fundamental theoretical and methodological questions discussed in biography research (Schütze 1976; Fuchs 1984; Rosenthal 1995, 2004, 2006; Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997) addresses the kind of insights narrated life stories are able to produce and what kind of information can be gathered using a biographical approach. This question also became relevant for the analysis and

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reconstruction of biographical narrations of Malaysian women’s activists collected for this study. Are these texts direct expressions of lived experiences accumulated by the narrator throughout her life and reproduced during the interview, thus providing the researcher with insights into the actor’s frameworks of action in the past and a chronology of a lived life? Or are these narrations exclusively expressions of present cultural and social constructs shaped by the narrator’s individual location within these constructs and the communicative coercion at the very moment of the interview, thus producing insights into the interviewee’s strategies of self-performance in her present situation? Or to put it into more empirical terms: Do sequences about events in the childhood which are part of biographical interviews with a Malaysian women’s activist produce insights into the childhood of this activist, or do they produce knowledge about how this activist perceives her childhood as an adult person? Is the narration told by an activist the story of a girl who became an activist, or is it a story of an activist who looks back on her childhood and evaluates her life from her present location? Although these questions may sound very basic, they are linked to the most fundamental questions in empirical social research: the dualism of agency and structure, the relation of experience and narration and the relation of life and text. The answer to the above will be “neither or both”. The simple objectivist perspective equates the biographical narration with the real chronology of the actor’s life, treating it as a simple communicative copy. It is based on the assumption of homology between life and text and assumes a totally autonomous actor as the planner of her own biography. This approach can easily be debunked as a retrospective (Osterland 1983) or a biographical illusion (Bourdieu 1986; Järvinen 2000). The first argument brought forward by those critics is that within biographical narrations, the real character of human life, being full of contradictions, ambiguities, frictions and inconsistencies, is straightened out and is translated into a specific communicative form, the biography, that constructs the individual life as “clearly delimited and progressive process formed by the individual’s characteristics, experiences, triumphs, and crises” (Järvinen 2000, 372). The second criticism that has to be taken seriously is the argument about the interview situation itself as a specific site of knowledge production. Interviewees are not the sources of knowledge that can be merely collected by the interviewer. Instead, knowledge is produced within the very interactive situation with the researcher (Arbeitsgruppe Bielefelder Soziologen 1973). Järvinen highlights that “interviews are not pipelines for transmitting knowledge but reality constructing, meaning making occasions” (Järvinen 2000, 371). Within these specific meaning-making situations, interviewees construct a biography with the aim of


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convincing the interviewer of the project character of their life. The awareness of such processes leads to an understanding of the biography as a “story put together with the help of culturally available instruments and ingredients” (Järvinen 2000, 372). That is to say, that autobiographs cannot talk about their real lives and past experiences, but express explanatory models that are available and plausible in their present culture, and that all meaning attached to the past events is actually located in the present. It is emphasised that verbalised and narrated motives within a biographical narration do not say anything about causes, but rather about the “legitimate conceptual models” (Järvinen 2000, 374) in the respective social space under study. Järvinen condenses this conception of the narration in the metaphor of the life history as a boomerang, that “is thrown from the present into the past and returns with a force bearing into the future but the direction and force is determined by the present” (Järvinen 2000, 385). These critiques of an over-simplistic model of biographies and life stories and especially the metaphor of the boomerang are very attractive. It is indeed indispensable to highlight the constructed character of biographies, where “the narrator’s current life situation operates as a prism through which earlier life experiences are filtered” (Järvinen 2000, 386). Some become magnified, zoomed in and attributed with meaning and significance; others become zoomed out or are even excluded from the narration in order to construct a coherent story with a clear theme and inner logic. It is clear that the individual is not a machine that starts recording its own life story from the moment it is born, which then can be simply reproduced when the researcher rewinds the tape and presses the play button (Fischer 1987, 465). However, while overemphasising the disconnection of biographical narrations from any lived experience, the approach of the biographical illusion contains considerable methodological weaknesses and theoretical shortcomings, especially concerning the understanding of experience and agency. Firstly, seeing biographical narrations solely as the process of individually assigning meaning to an objective process and describing narrated life stories as having a predominantly fictitious and virtual character creates a misleading tension between the fiction and the reality of a narration. This stands in the tradition of erasing the concept of experience from sociological thinking in an ardour of postmodern critique. Secondly, pointing to the ‘biographical illusion’ totally disconnects the current situation from a structurally and biographically formed social agency and hence does not overcome the dualism of individual and structure, but only resolves it in the short run by choosing one side of it, namely the side of individualism (Rosenthal 1995, 17; FischerRosenthal, Rosenthal 1997, 137). Thirdly, emphasising the fact that the biographical narration is produced in a specific interactive setting of interviewer and interviewee does not integrate an understanding of social structuration as a

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long-term interactive process through which an individual biography is produced throughout the life course of the interviewee. In contrast to such a rejection of the concept of experience and agency in favour of an exclusively discursive understanding of the social, I shall argue that both concepts––experience and agency––based on the approaches of a sociological theory of the life-world and the social construction of reality (Berger, Luckmann 1967; Schütz, Luckmann 1973) are key instruments in order to grasp processes of social structuration (Giddens 1984), negotiation and transformation. Human agency is embedded into the continuity of the everyday life-world, where it is manifested as bodily practice, and actors are situated within specific biographical situations within the taken-for-granted reality of the everyday world. Those biographical situations are constituted by the specifically structured sedimentation of experience. Talking about the biographical articulation of the life-world, Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann have explicitly argued for the historicity of the individual situation. “My situation consists of the history of my experiences” (Schütz, Luckmann 1973, 58). Every current situation and also every current experience is codetermined in its constitution by a specific “Vergangenheitshorizont”, a perceptual horizon on the past, which is a product of the process of sedimentation, where experiences are converted into knowledge, where they are integrated into already existing stocks of knowledge and where the polythetic structure of experiences is reduced to a monothetic, the relevant, typical meaning (Schütz, Luckmann 1973, 119 f.). As a result, present situations are defined and shaped by past experiences. Schütz also highlighted that the meaning of an action is constituted through a reflexive act on an already concluded action. Experience then consists of different layers of knowledge and is always connected to social processes of interpretation and production of meaning. The reality of life is only accessible through acts of interpretation. However, the relation between agency and knowledge is not linear, but rather circular, being articulated through experience. Meaning, knowledge, and discourses have to be realised in interactive settings through embodied social practices and thus converted into experience to become socially real. “A ritual must be performed; a myth recited, a narrative told, a novel read, a drama performed. […] It is in that sense that texts must be performed to be experienced” (Bruner 1986). This makes it clear that the social construction of reality cannot be truncated to discursive elements alone, as assumed in poststructuralist approaches. Experience is not only discursive, but comes out of social practices, agency and interpretation (Rief 2000). That means that experience has a twofold temporal horizon. In addition to the horizon of the past that is given through the sedimentation of experiences and its conversion into


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knowledge, experience has a horizon of the future as it generates orientations for future actions. “The concept of experience contains a dual temporal horizon of both the past and the future. Experience stands for a typification, which simultaneously preserves and mobilises past typifications and fixations. ‘Expectation’ opens up the horizon of expecting a successful future orientation on the basis of past situations of action and perception.” (Fischer, Kohli 1987, 87; translation by the author).8 The link between the past and the future of a life history is to be found within the biography, experience and the biographical knowledge generated by these experiences. Experiences are important resources, which are biographically constructed (Alheit, Hoerning 1989; Hoerning 1989). Biographies are not only the articulation between past and future but are also important interfaces for the articulation between structure and agency. Although experience is individually concrete, it is always social experience. This leads to a theoretical linkage of the concepts of structure and agency which goes beyond a dualistic opposition. Anthony Giddens, who has argued for such a concept of structuration, points to the fact of the co-production of agency and structure––structure understood as coming into being through regularly and continuously acting actors (Giddens 1984). In that sense, human agency is not to be understood as the aggregation of separate actions, but as a continuous and permanent reflexive process which is embedded into the durée of everyday life. Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1998) also points to the way in which corporal and discursive sediments of social experiences shape current frameworks of action. The habitus is socially and historically constructed and is based on individual and collective experiences. Habitus is formed through the internalisation and incorporation of external social conditions which are transformed into internal structures of a cognitive, evaluative, motivational and action-generating nature and it materialises itself in the body. The habitus itself generates specific social practices, without, however, strictly determining their content, but rather the way in which they are performed. The concept of habitus contains a dialectic dynamic and a co-constitutive relationship between agency and structure. On the one hand, habitus is incorporated social structure, and, in this dimension, structures the practices of the actors; on the other hand, structure does not have an ontological character and is only realised by the social practices of the actors who generate social structures though their meaningful practices. From such a perspective, the social actor with her specific biography becomes the main point 8 Original text: “Im Erfahrungsbegriff ist […] ein doppelter Zeithorizont der Vergangenheit und der Zukunft mitgegeben. Erfahrung steht für eine Typisierung, die vergangene Typisierungen und Fixierungen gleichzeitig bewahrt und verflüssigt. ‚Erwartung’ eröffnet den Erwartungshorizont einer gelingenden künftigen Orientierung auf der Basis gültiger Folgerungen aus vergangenen Handlungsund Wahrnehmungssituationen”.

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of articulation of structure and agency. The actor is then the definite embodiment of general sociability and society (Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997, 139). After discussing the theoretical questions of agency and experience, the methodological question of what kind of knowledge biographical narrations produce appears in a different light. In this sense, biographical research and methods are one promising way to break with the dualism of individual and society. Biographical narrations constitute social reality within the ambivalence of unique individual experiences and structural patterns offered by society. Biographical self-representation gives us insights into not only the process of life history as a steady process of internalisation and sedimentation but also the rearrangement of biographical experiences within the light of present knowledge and present location in society (Rosenthal 1995, 13). Life stories are more than individual endeavours. They are realised in interactions with others and within specific institutions and stocks of knowledge. Neither can they be reduced to the individual, nor to the settings and contexts that society provides. The discussion of experience and sedimentation of experience have made it clear that not all knowledge that can be found in a biographical narration is merely and exclusively dominated and shaped by the current interview situation. Generally, narrations are a specific communicative genre (Luckmann 1986) with natural discursive and communicative techniques applied by actors and narrators in their everyday life, typically in situations where they have the aim of defending and justifying individually lived experiences (Schütze 1976). Narrations have to be treated as a modus of knowledge (Flick 1998, 115) and presentation of experiences. They are the typical form that lived experiences take when they are communicated, and are thus elemental institutions of human communication. Narrations in contrast to other communicative forms can produce life histories in the form in which the narrator has experienced them: that is, experience is activated in the way it has been sedimented within the actor’s stock of knowledge in different layers of relevance which not only constitute the actor’s identity but are also relevant for her agency (Bohnsack 2000, 108). The narrator activates the perspectives that she had immediately after the event which is the object of the narration; so, in a way, the past is also shaping the present (Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997, 148). People recapitulate what they thought in these particular moments, and these evaluations and observations which are located in the past are an integral part of their biography. The meaning related to these events was partly attached to them in the past. Actors have a history and the reflection on their own life does not only start at the moment of the biographical narration. For their narrations, they make use of sediments of experiences, evaluations, and reflections that are indeed activated creatively and


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linked spontaneously, but which have been appropriated throughout the long durée of agency––even corporally as Bourdieu’s work on habitus suggests. When the narrations and the self-descriptions are problematic and deviant, as is the case for women’s activists who utter a basic alienation towards the taken-forgranted life-world, the narrations have a particularly direct relevance to their everyday life. Reflection on their position in society, experiences of conflict and the perceived difference between the social space constituted by the women’s organisations and that of mainstream society are an integral part of their lifeworld. The type of knowledge which is then constructed through the collaboration of the interviewee with the researcher as the addressee of the narration is a mixture of themes and tropes which are already available to the interviewee and tropes that are constructed at the moment of the interview. There are indeed distinct fields of experience and narration. Experience as sedimented in memory but at the same time the reciprocal and exclusive co-presence of these two distinct domains in the everyday communication is what constitutes social reality (Rosenthal, Fischer-Rosenthal 2000, 460). Instead of talking about a retrospective illusion, I would prefer to talk about a narrative and retrospective reworking of experience. Staying within the metaphor of the boomerang, the discussion on experience, agency and narration can be concluded by saying that the boomerang is thrown from the present location of the narrator. The boomerang, however, is not an external tool used by the narrator, but one produced throughout her life course, during which it has acquired a specific shape, size and weight. By throwing this boomerang, a special construction, the biographical narration, comes into being, which besides being shaped by the present location of the narrator, is constituted by the specific features of the boomerang. The biographical narration is thus the point of departure for the reconstruction of specific cultural and social milieus and spaces and their processes of formation. With these concluding remarks on biographies, I shall end the methodological discussion and proceed to the reconstruction of the social world of the women’s organisations by analysing individual trajectories of becoming an activist.

3.1 Aniza’s trajectory

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3 Becoming an Activist: The Activists’ Trajectories

3.1 Aniza’s trajectory Aniza is 32 years old and works full time for the International Women’s Rights Watch Asia Pacific, which is based in Kuala Lumpur. Additionally, she is a member of Sisters in Islam (SIS), an organisation of Muslim women also based in Kuala Lumpur. The first time I met her was at one of the monthly study sessions that SIS organises in their main premises, where a guest speaker is usually invited to talk about relevant issues such as women’s rights or ‘reformist Islam’. Aniza was moderating the study session and discussion about ‘Islamic Modernism’. After that, I frequently met her at meetings of women’s activists from other NGOs, for instance, at the National CEDAW conference and at other events that SIS had organised. After several meetings Aniza agreed to be interviewed. Aniza was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1974. She describes her family as a quite ‘traditional’ and religious Malay family with a strong sense of gender segregation. Her father had been in the police force. After he retired, he went into business. Her mother has always been a housewife. Both Aniza’s mother and father came from rural village areas near Kuala Lumpur and later migrated to the capital. Talking about her upbringing and her family, Aniza locates herself between what she calls “Malay tradition” and “Western thinking”. Even when she was still little, Aniza says, she was very aware of the differences made in the treatment of boys and girls. Firstly, she clearly felt the differences in the education and treatment of female and male siblings. In contrast to her older brothers, the education she got from her mother was aimed very much at building up abilities and knowledge related to her future role as a housewife, knowledge about “how a wife should be”, like cooking etc. She also had to participate in the housework, for example washing dishes, a task her brothers were not responsible for. Secondly, because she was forbidden to play with boys of her own age from the neighbourhood and the remarks of her mother about her “reputation” that might be ruined, Aniza got the impression that “something was wrong with the boys”. During her teenage years, she was not even allowed to associate with boys at all. Aniza tells that she could not easily comprehend the instructions her parents gave her and the reasons behind these instructions. Both the differences in the treatment of her and her brothers and the way her parents expected her to interact with male friends somehow did not seem to be plausible to her. “So my interest in women’s issues comes from experiences when I was younger within the family that really made me think about the differences and how unfair they can be. I started to ask myself ‘Why are we treated differently and why do they not allow me to do certain things?”.

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3 Becoming an Activist: The Activists’ Trajectories At the same time, Aniza was very much interested in religion when she was a child. Although she attended a school with a Christian tradition, she also had a tutor in Islamic studies coming to her home when she was younger. Later, upon her own initiative, Aniza began to attend a sekolah agama, a religious school typically attached to a mosque, where she took Quran reading lessons in the afternoon and even participated in Quran reading competitions. During the interview, she was especially keen to tell me about her religious upbringing and about her own story of wearing the tudung, as the Muslim headscarf is called in Malaysia. Since she was twelve years old, she had always wanted to wear the headscarf because she thought that “this is how a Muslim woman should express herself”. When she finally covered up at the age of 15, she was overwhelmed by the consequences. Friends told her to completely change her lifestyle, to quit ballet lessons, and to stop going to parties; and her position in a Christian school also changed significantly. Until the time when Aniza started covering herself, she had participated in all of the school activities, but as soon as she started wearing the headscarf as a sign of being consciously Muslim, everybody expected her to be different, and suddenly her relation with the Christian school environment became problematic. The nuns became kind of “wary” of her, and her religious teacher demanded that she stop participating in ‘Christian’ school activities. “And I just tried to carry on being the way I am, but it was other people who had this expectation of me. You should be more this, you should be more that, you shouldn’t be going to these kinds of places, you should be doing certain things.” These experiences initiated a process of reflection on the issue of wearing the headscarf which finally led her to take it off at the age of 20, after five years of wearing it. Nowadays, she does not wear the tudung, which is quite unusual in Malaysia. Nor does she wear the Malay baju kurung, the traditional female Malay dress which consists of a knee-length loose tunic with sleeves to the wrist, the baju, and the kain sarong, an ankle-length also very loose fitting skirt. She prefers to wear Western clothes, jeans and blouses, nevertheless making sure that the shirts and trousers are not too tight fitting. She has a rather short hair cut like most Muslim women who do not wear a headscarf. For a long time, Aniza felt rather alone with these ideas about gender relations in the family and also about the meaning of Islamic dress. Neither in her family nor among her friends was there anybody who could understand her doubts. She says: “You can’t really talk to anyone about these issues. I mean, whom do you talk to about these things?” After finishing her school education in Kuala Lumpur, she first wanted to study law, but then changed her mind and decided to “do something that is straightforward like accounting”. She entered a sort of twinning programme, which means that she began her studies in Malaysia and then got a scholarship for her second and third year in Great Britain, where she also passed her final exams. In Great Britain, she lived in a house together with other Malay girls, all of them students, whom she describes as being more religious than herself and who constantly kept an eye on Aniza’s behaviour and controlled her social contacts. These two years abroad gave her time and opportunity to reflect on the differences that she perceived between

3.1 Aniza’s trajectory

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Malaysia, her own country, and Great Britain. “I was exposed to a lot of different ways of thinking there and of how things could be different.” Aniza came back to Malaysia in 1998 shortly after the economic crisis of 1997. After six months, she found a job in an accounting software company. But she resigned after only nine months because she no longer wanted to work for a profitmaking company. She decided to answer a job announcement from the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), an organisation she had read about in the newspapers some years before in the context of the introduction of the Domestic Violence Act. She went for an interview and got the job. Her family, especially her father, was not very pleased when she started to work in an NGO. Such work did not correspond to his ideas of a successful professional career. Against the wishes of her father, she accepted the job and has continued working with women’s NGOs until today. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

Participation in social movements is one of the most prominent forms of modern political activity, and highly committed activists are the type of actors who dominate social movements. In this chapter, I follow female activists who were part of this study, one of them being Aniza, on their way into the world of the women’s movement: young Malaysian women from their late 20s to their late 30s who are activists or staff members of the most prominent women’s organisations in contemporary Malaysia. What motivated these young women to enter the world of NGOs and to become activists? What were the issues that led them to become engaged in the project of social transformation? What were the critical points in their trajectory of becoming an activist? And what obstacles did they encounter once they had chosen this path? What does it mean to them to be an activist? These are the fundamental questions which will be addressed in this chapter. It reconstructs the biographical narrations (Fischer-Rosenthal, Rosenthal 1997; Rosenthal 2004, 2006) of the activists and follows their personal stories of becoming an activist from their own perspective. Doing this will illuminate the personal background of the young activists, their motivations, and their life histories. But by reconstructing these young women’s narratives, one can discover more than that. It is also an endeavour to see Malaysia through the eyes of young female activists, to elaborate and present a re-construction of their emic concepts of Malaysian society, of their selflocation within Malaysian society, and of the possibilities for social transformation and the negotiation of gender relations through the practice of debating, problematising, and arguing specific issues. The biographical perspective is chosen because it opens up the possibility of transcending the boundary which is typically drawn between the political or public sphere and the private sphere, and hence of working out the interconnections between social change, social movement, and individual change.

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The chapter will be structured according to the chronology of a typical activist’s trajectory: the case of Aniza. This case contains a set of dimensions which are typical of the majority of young female activists interviewed for this study. In order to explain why and how she first got interested in women’s issues and then became an activist in women’s organisations, Aniza starts her story with reflections on her childhood and youth and talking about experiences of ‘difference’ and ‘weakness’. For her, it is especially the reflections on issues such as gender relations in the family and the sexual division of labour that play a central role in the activist’s narrative. As in Aniza’s case, most of the young women describe their present identity as an activist as being biographically rooted in their own everyday life experiences. The initial question of how they became interested in women’s issues and the invitation to tell me their story stimulated the women to long narrative passages where they talked about experiences during their childhood, at school, or within their families. These situations, events, and incidents addressed a multiplicity of issues such as the gendered division of labour, the gendered structure of space, gendered hierarchies in decision-making processes, the shortcomings of Malaysian Islamic and civil family law, and the male bias of the Sharia court system, and also the issue of ethnicity in Malaysia (3.2). All these issues are related to experiences of ‘difference’ or ‘weakness’ which are perceived as being unjust or unfair. A significant influence on the formation of Aniza’s reflexive perspective was her stay in Great Britain, where she was part of transcultural interactions that initiated forms of transcultural and translocal reflexive techniques of selfdescription and othering (3.3). Coming back to Malaysia, Aniza begins to locate herself within the ambivalence of prestige and professional, economic success on the one hand and social engagement and activism on the other. Choosing the side of social engagement, which also brings her into conflict with her family, she finally becomes an activist and enters the world of the NGOs (3.4). In Aniza’s case, it becomes especially clear how these experiences initiate a process of critical analysis and reflexive alienation towards her taken-for-granted life-world (Berger, Luckmann 1967; Schütz, Luckmann 1973), a process in which she develops a set of everyday life techniques of reflexivity such as “asking herself” or “thinking about things” and of formulating dissent. Once she has developed these reflexive techniques in the observation and analysis of her everyday lifeworld, Aniza has the experience that the issues she addresses are not easily negotiable, and that there is heavy resistance from her parents and other people surrounding her. She is confronted with powerful barriers in the negotiation of gender relations which puts her in a situation of isolation (3.5).

3.2 “I started to question …”

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3.2 “I started to question …” 3.2.1 … the ‘tradition’ of the mothers and the ‘power’ of the fathers Like Aniza, most of the activists who are now in their late twenties and thirties grew up in families with clearly differentiated and demarcated gender roles concerning the distribution of productive activities and reproductive work. Most of the mothers were housewives, whereas the fathers were integrated into the formal labour market as wage labourers, state employees, or some sort of entrepreneurs. This gendered division of labour leads the young activists to a nearly standardised description of their families as being “very traditional” or “very patriarchal”. The young women especially discuss and distance themselves from the expectations and the way of life of their own mothers. Aniza problematises her mother’s perception of gender relations which clearly accentuate gender difference in the division of labour rather than equality among siblings. As a housewife, my mother stayed at home full time. She is very traditional in terms of her outlook of what women and men’s roles are. She had clear expectations of what a wife should be and she would bring all these values down on me. Like ‘You should learn how to cook’ and ‘You have to wash the dishes’. I started to question this, because I thought that there should be no difference. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

What Aniza describes as her mother’s “traditional outlook” is the clear distinction between male and female responsibilities, whereby reproductive work is attributed to the female realm culminating in the construction of women as ‘wives’. Also Nazia, who is 36 years old and holds the position of a programme manager in one of the women’s organisations, describes her family as being very “traditional” and “patriarchal” regarding the distribution between productive and reproductive work: her mother being a housewife, her father a former factory worker who managed to open his own cleaning service company. “In my family, the man is the leader in everything.” Nazia grew up as the youngest child in a very large Malay family with seven older brothers and four older sisters, and the gendered division of labour practised by her parents was also passed on to her and her siblings, assigning all reproductive work to girls while giving the boys the opportunity to grow up without that responsibility. For her, this was the crucial experience that initiated her consciousness of gender issues and discrimination, as she says.

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3 Becoming an Activist: The Activists’ Trajectories I wanted to join a women’s organisation because already as a child I felt the discrimination from very early. I always felt discriminated in my family. Because they expected me to do all the housework, and my brothers could just play around. I hated that. But I was the youngest, so what could I do? From very little I rejected these differences. (Nazia, SIS activist, 09.03.04)

Although Nazia had a strong feeling of injustice based on the difference made in the treatment of boys and girls when she was a child, she was unable at that point in time to protest openly or to oppose the rules of her parents due to the hierarchies of gender and age. Nor could Aniza who, when she asked her mother why there were such differences, got the answer: “That’s the way it is”. That the problematisation of tradition is not only relevant for Muslim activists is shown by the case of Ramani, a young Indian activist, who studied psychology and is now employed as a social worker in one of the women’s organisations. Ramani is very concerned with the issue of the gendered division of labour, and she distances herself from the “traditional” division passed on to her by her grandmothers and presented to her as a fundamental part of the construction of Indian culture. I always heard from my grandmothers ‘How much a woman studies, she still has to go back to the kitchen.’ So, that phrase I heard a lot. I was brought up from there and there are some people that really follow it and they are very into it until they cannot change their mind. But, women can do whatever men can do. There are women engineers, there are lady doctors. So, we must accept the change of the time. (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

Especially the metaphor of the “kitchen”, as a spatial manifestation of this gendered division of labour and a general gendered structuration of the economy (Cagatay, Elson, Grown 1995; Lachenmann, Dannecker 2001) and society, appears repeatedly in their narratives. In the following passage from an interview with Noraini, a 21-year-old Malay law student who is a very active human rights volunteer, this metaphorical use of the “kitchen” as a representation of gender segregation in different spheres becomes clear: My interest in human rights is especially related to women’s rights. It started when I was very young. […] I found it a bit hard to accept the traditional values of the Malay people, especially the role of women as we are expected to stay in the kitchen and everything and for me, when I was there, I cannot accept being in the kitchen all the time, I must go out there and be involved with people. That was one reason for me to be interested in women’s rights. And also at school for Muslims men and women are being separated during religious classes. I found that strange. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)


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Noraini’s critique is obviously related to the notion of difference in the distribution of productive and reproductive work. However, at the same time, it goes further than that, as her remark about the segregation of girls and boy in religion classes suggests. She addresses the gendered structuration of space, be it of the private space, the home, or of the public space, the school. On the one hand, Noraini explicitly addresses the issue of gender segregation within the private space and the attribution of different spaces within the house to girls and boys, women and men, whereby the ‘kitchen’ becomes the spatial materialisation of ‘difference’, a space that, in her eyes, stands for social isolation and hinders women from participation in the public sphere. On the other hand, Noraini refers to the gendered structure of the religious space as one of the features that she felt to be discriminatory from a very young age on. In Malaysia, as in other Muslim countries, religious instructions are usually organised separately for boys and girls. That the metaphor of the kitchen is not restricted to the gendered division of labour at home but stands for a general gendered structuration of the public space becomes clear in the following statement from Nazia. After having attended a girl’s school from the age of seven until the age of 16, she attended a coeducational technical school: There I felt even more the discrimination, especially because of the Islamic wave. So the guys were so hypocritical in a sense. They hung out together and monopolised the whole school, especially during recreation time. The girls got only a space in the kitchen of the cafeteria, and the whole cafeteria was occupied by boys. And the girls did not even complain! That made me so upset. Coming from a girl’s school I could not stand it. So, the sense of being discriminated I felt it all along. That’s why I want to do something for women’s issues and equality and especially from the perspective of Islam itself. (Nazia, SIS activist, 09.03.04)

Nazia describes a process of structuring a space according to gender where, again, the ‘kitchen’ becomes the sole female space within a male-dominated area. Nazia perceives this process of structuring, which she clearly relates to the process of Islamisation, as a process of “monopolising” or taking over of a gender-neutral space by men who push women back into segregated spaces like the ‘kitchen’.9 In Nazia’s eyes, the increase of male space and the decrease of female space were a product of, on the one hand, male expansive behaviour and, on the other hand, a lack of protest among the women. In her story, Aniza especially emphasised that it was her experience with the restrictions and regulations concerning the interaction of the two sexes that 9

See Mirza (2002) for a detailed study on gendered spatial structuration of offices in Pakistan. However, Mirza focuses on the autonomous gendered spaces created by working women as a female counter-strategy.

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had made her think about gender relations, increased her doubts about the existing gender relations, and made her reluctant to accept them. When she was around 10 years old, her parents forbade her to play outside with one of the neighbour boys. At that time, Aniza had started reading books by Enid Blyton, such as The Famous Five and she was fascinated by the world presented in these books, especially by the way in which girls and boys interacted with each other, because they were all given the same opportunities: In the book, there were a lot of kids and they were just having adventures wherever they were going. They could do everything together. They could go on a boat, they could climb trees, and there was no gender difference, no segregation of ‘you do this’ and ‘you do that’. So I thought that with this neighbour boy we could have these kinds of adventures, go to the park and play. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

What Aniza describes here are two conflicting versions of gender relations. From Aniza’s perspective, the version she had been confronted with through reading classic ‘Western’ children’s literature such as The Famous Five by Enid Blyton stands for gender equality in a sense that boys and girls are allowed to do the same things together. But this imagined world apparently contradicted Aniza’s real world, and the intent to bring the appealing features of this imagined world into her real world failed. Although she had been used to playing with boys when she was a small girl, her mother had become more sensitive as Aniza grew older and did not agree with her daughter’s ideas of having these kinds of adventure games with the neighbour boy. Instead, she frequently told Aniza that she “could not do that because you are a girl and he is a boy”. The reasons she heard from her mother were that it would be “dangerous” or that is would “ruin her reputation”, Aniza relates. Additionally, and in contrast to her brothers, Aniza was told not to go out late at night with the explanation that she “was a girl” and that this would also be “dangerous”. Aniza experienced these restrictions as a significant constraint to her freedom of action, which she did not understand. And then there were lots of things that then I started to question like, why do they treat you differently, why did they not allow these things to me. At that time, it seemed to me that these kinds of rules should be universal. If the thing about not going out late has to do with danger and safety, then why shouldn’t it be less dangerous for boys? (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

In contrast to the fantasy world of books, her real world, which materialises in her parents’ restrictions and rules, is characterised by differences between boys and girls and restriction of her freedom on the grounds of an undefined danger and threat. Inspired by reading books, which Aniza apparently takes as real


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alternative counter-version to the world she lives in, the naturally given character of her life-world is called into question by other possible gender orders. Within Aniza’s reflection, there is a critique of the general distribution of different social, symbolic and also real, physical spaces. Nazia, Aniza, Ramani, and Noraini distanced themselves at a very early age from the way they experienced “traditional” gender difference in their everyday life in their childhood within their families, namely as an unequal sexual division of labour, as was the usual practice within their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, and portray their own way of life as a clear alternative to that of their mothers. They highlight the significance of these experiences for their process of becoming an activist and developing a critical awareness on gender issues and voicing a demand for transformation. Taking into account the retrospective construction of life history (Osterland 1983; Rosenthal 2004, 2006), it must be asked at this point from which position the young women relate their stories. All of the young women interviewed for this study have an academic education. Most of them studied humanities such as law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, or political science; a smaller proportion were educated in businessrelated subjects such as economics, accounting, marketing, business administration, computer studies, or civil engineering. And all of them, except Noraini, who is still a student, are working full time; most of them, for one of the women’s organisations. Only one of them works as a journalist for an Englishlanguage newspaper. Half of them are married with children and have continued to go out to work. They are part of a new generation of Malaysian women which actively participates in the labour market and has developed in Malaysia during the processes of deep social transformation accompanied by major economic development, industrialisation, and urbanisation that took place from the 1970s onwards (Othman 1998, 172). Like other regions of the world, Malaysia also witnessed a general trend towards the feminisation of labour (Dannecker 2005). In the beginning, thousands of young unmarried Malay women from the villages migrated to the cities, where they worked in urban free trade zones, above all in labour-intensive subsidiaries of transnational corporations (Wee Siu Hui 1997). A new group of female urban factory workers emerged—economically and, to some extent, morally independent from their parents and families in the villages; able to save their own money for marriage, and therefore able to choose their husbands by themselves; even supporting their rural kin with a significant amount of their wages; and entering into competition with their male peers for jobs (Ong 1990, 265). The labour force participation among women rose from 30 % shortly after independence to over 40 % in the 1980s and slowly continued growing up to 47 % in 2000. Around 35 % of the total labour force in Malaysia

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are women (Ministry of Women and Family Development 2000; NGO Shadow Report Group 2004, 42). Through the integration of these young women into the formal labour market, industrialisation was connected to a drastic change in female and male spaces, in definitions of what was considered to be ‘male’ and what ‘female’, and which spaces, symbolic and material, women were supposed to occupy and which men. Likewise, the area of education—be it primary, secondary or tertiary—has changed significantly in the last decades, with more and more girls and young women entering institutions of higher education such as colleges and universities. Whereas shortly after independence there was a significant gap between male and female students (only 40 % of primary school students, 35 % of secondary school students and 10 % of tertiary education students were girls), the picture began to change significantly in the 1970s, when already 48 % of primary school students, 42 % of secondary school students, and 30 % of university students were female. According to numbers published by the Ministry of Women and Family Development, an equal participation of female and male students had been attained in all educational institutions in the year 2000, with even a higher number of female students in the tertiary educational institutions (Ministry of Women and Family Development 2000, 33 f.). The increasing rate of participation of Malaysian women in education and the formal economy along with the restructuration of female and male spaces initiated ambivalent and contradictory processes of negotiation of gender relations—processes of negotiation that have not been brought to an end, but are still going on and are articulated in the rejection of ‘tradition’ as the statements of the young activists indicate. Although the activists talked about their integration into the gendered division of labour in the household and the expectations of their family members, especially of their mothers, to be a good wife, their parents, especially their fathers (Ramani, Aniza), simultaneously pushed them into higher education. In their own lives, it was never a question of “kitchen” or “education”. On the contrary, their parents had very high expectations concerning economic and social success. This focus on economic success is typical of the way of life of the new middle class that emerged in the 1970s in Malaysia, and especially among the Malay population. as a consequence of the New Economic Policies (NEP) (Gerke 1995; Kahn 1995; Evers, Gerke 1997; Stivens 1998; Embong 1999; Jomo 1999; Evers, Korff 2000; 2001; Saravanamuttu 2001; Horstmann 2002). The professional careers of Aniza’s, Nazia’s and Amina’s fathers, who were government clerks and later on went into private business where they built up quite successful enterprises, are typical of the first generation of Malays affected by the NEP. The education of the children, be they girls or boys, was definitely part of this new way of life. On the one hand, the high educational level and relative economic independence the


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young women have achieved is at least partly a consequence of the strong family orientation towards upward social mobility and advancement. At the same time, Aniza’s case shows how real the option of being a housewife is, and how problematic this ambivalence can be even for the individual person, especially after being married and having children. Although she talks a lot about equality between men and women, she also highlights the difficulty of living this new way of life, being a mother of two, and working full time without any role models in her family. “My mother is a full-time housewife and my eldest sister as well. So, I don’t really have a role model in terms of seeing how women actually cope with having the double burden”. The young activists represent a generation ‘in-between’, with both new possibilities of leading independent lives as well as powerful restrictions and symbolic formations, such as the ‘good wife’, shaping their life plans from outside. At the same time, they are expected to be educated, to be upwardly mobile, and to fulfil their duties in the domestic sphere. Their identity as working women is very fragile, since, in their immediate surroundings, they observe women who have chosen the option of being a housewife. The metaphor of the kitchen, which is related to a globalised feminist discourse on housework and division of labour (Mies, BennholdtThomsen, von Werlhof 1988), allows them to reflect on these inconsistencies. The alienation from and rejection of these specific gender relations is a clear break with the way of life of their mothers and the older generation and with what these young women learned was their ‘culture’ or their ‘tradition’. Like Fariza, most of the activists perceive themselves as being a special generation. They perceive their way of life as an alternative based on ‘gender equality’, one of the basic terms of a global women’s movement. In the following statement from Fariza, a 31-year-old social worker who has two daughters, this feeling of a generation in-between is combined very explicitly with a strong sense of what kind of social transformation this special generation can achieve: We have to tell our society about gender equality. Maybe to tell our parents or other elderly people is too late already because they have that kind of opinion, ‘Oh, you as a daughter, you have to be in the kitchen, you have to do cooking, you have to washing, and you as a son, OK, you are free to do everything you want.’ So, that is why I believe that we have to teach our younger generation about gender equality. We have to start with ourselves. Like myself, I try to be fair with my children. I don’t have sons, only two girls. But, I tell them, ‘It is not compulsory for you to be in the kitchen, washing and so on. So, you also can do other things that man can do’. (Fariza, WAO activist, 10.08.04)

What motivates Ramani to work in a women’s organisation is especially the issue of how women can resist having important decisions in their lives

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controlled by family members and how they can lead self-determined and independent lives developing and following their own life plans. Ramani relates her life as a constant struggle against the way the gender hierarchies of the decision-making processes within her family interfere with her life plans: My family is ruled by men, always the king will be the man. Everything we do we have to consult the men: ‘Do you think it is OK? Do you think we can do it?’ If he says yes, then we can go ahead. In my family it is not so much my father, but is my uncle because he is the only educated person in the whole family. Everything we do, we approach him. I don’t blame my uncle; I blame the others because every time he goes to a person, then the person might think ‘Oh, he really is somebody’. And then you don’t give yourself a chance. (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

Ramani criticises the patriarchal structures of her family as an obstacle to individual independence and development. It is clear that, from her perspective, the power exercised over the rest of the family by the head of the family, in her case the educated uncle, is based on the willingness of the others to let themselves be controlled and to accept decisions taken by others over their lives. This, however, does not correspond with Ramani’s concept of how to lead her life. “I came out in a way. I am very, what we say, ‘independent’. I do everything all myself, I think. I do consider others’ ideas and comments as a suggestion. But, at the end of the day, I will think and ask, ‘What is best for me?’” Ramani claims the right to exercise agency, to develop and follow her own ideas, instead of those of others. Especially after school, when she wanted to take the first important decisions concerning her career, for example which subject to study and which university to choose, she was confronted with the constant interference and control of her family, especially her mother and her uncle, who had a different idea of what was ‘best’ for her. Ramani, who attended school in her hometown in the south of peninsular Malaysia, had decided to do a Bachelor’s degree in psychology. The only public university with a department of psychology offering a Bachelor’s degree at that time was the University Malaysia in Sabah, one of the major cities in Eastern Malaysia, the Malaysian part of Borneo. She applied and got accepted for a three-year programme in industrial and organisational psychology. This decision, however, was rejected by her family for several reasons. Her family did not like the idea that she would study in Sabah, on the one hand, because she would have to go there all by herself. This meant that she would no longer be under the control of her family, Ramani says. On the other hand, the university in Sabah did not appear to them as being prestigious enough in comparison with other universities, such as the famous Universiti Malaya (UM) in Kuala Lumpur. Additionally, they were not really satisfied with the subject of Ramani’s choice, psychology, preferring her


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to study something business-related. But Ramani insisted on her decision to study in Sabah, because it was the only possibility for her to study psychology: My family did not want me to go. […]. And also my mother sometimes does control me. She said, ‘Look, you cannot do this.’ So we had a lot of talks whether I should stay in this small town, or migrate to another bigger town nearby [...]. Or go to Sabah. But in the end my dad said ‘It’s up to you, which one you like best, you are the one in that situation’. So, I went, and transferred all the way to Sabah. There was nobody there I knew. I was so free and everything I did for myself independently. No one there to say, ‘Look, you have to do this or that’. So, when I came back, I felt like I was again controlled by my family, all of them giving me suggestions, but for them, when they give suggestions, we must take them, which I feel, ‘No, that is not the way.’ If I feel comfortable then I will go ahead. If I don’t, then I don’t. But here normally it is like the community makes decisions. In our family we used to say, ‘The father is the leader of the family.’ Who made that? We, the rest, the wife, the children, the other people make him to be the leader. If you as a woman say ‘I am to be the leader’, of course she will be the leader. So for me this is what women’s rights are about, that when a woman says ‘No!’ it is her right to say no, and you can’t force them to do anything. (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

Studying and living in Sabah, far away from her family, Ramani enjoyed a life now shaped by her own independent decisions. This enlargement of her room for manoeuvre, however, was again called into question when she finished her studies and returned to her hometown. Ramani’s narrative is about how to gain autonomy in decision-making and about how to enlarge one’s own room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis decisions made by others in a patriarchally structured family. To be able to make one’s own decisions is at the core of what she understands as women’s rights and also of her motivation to work for a women’s NGO. Seen through the eyes of these young female activists, Malaysia appears as a place where modernity and tradition are engaged in a constant intergenerational and gender struggle. The young activists reject the ‘tradition’ of their mothers and the ‘power’ of the fathers and elaborate notions of independence in a language of modernity. 3.2.2 … institutionalised gender hierarchies Ida is 29 years old. She is Malay and is the SIS legal officer. Our first conversation in her office at the SIS headquarters in Kuala Lumpur was a patchwork of interview sequences and fragments of conversations between her and her clients on the phone. During the entire conversation, the phone never stopped ringing. Ida describes her family as an “interesting mixture” concerning

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religious issues––her father being very “liberal”, her mother being very religious—a mixture that enabled her to “get the best of both sides”. On the one hand, although being informally educated in religious matters by her mother at home, religious rules and regulations never played a significant part in her everyday life. Ida relates that there was a relaxed atmosphere at home concerning religious rules of everyday life, such as those concerning drinking alcohol or gambling. Serving liquor for dinner was not unusual, and gambling also belonged to the family leisure activities at home. Also concerning her dress, Ida describes herself as a “modern girl” who was not restricted to a religiously inspired dress code. She even worked as a model when she was a teenager. On the other hand, she was very open and interested in religious issues. During 4th grade, despite her lack of formal Islamic education, she was appointed head of the Muslim religious organisation at her school. Although she relates that it was in a way “funny that a modern girl like me who doesn’t know much about religion is put into this place”, she embraced her new responsibility and started to acquire knowledge on the religious texts by attending usrah sessions, classes of religious instruction where the Quran is read and different interpretations are discussed, and other classes on religious topics. After her father had performed haj, the atmosphere of openness changed drastically, and she relates that he became very “fundamentalist”. Ida is very conscious about the changing role that religion, especially Islam, plays in her family and in Malaysian society, relating the changes within her family to a general societal trend: Religion has never been something that impeded me from doing something else; it never stopped me from doing something else. But the more I grew up I found that religion is being slapped into my face. Well, if I choose to drink, I cannot drink, if I want to go out late at night there is always this fear that the disco could be raided. That one could be caught. Previously, it was not like that. But recently, the religious authority will just come and question me and how I live. And that really annoys me that religion has been used to stop us from things that we have done before. Religion changed so much in the last years. I could remember attending parties where liqueur was served, and I am talking about a time when I was 10 years old, so this is only 20 years ago. And I remember that gambling was very common for Malays. I know, it is wrong, it is sinful. But the thing is between you and God. At that time you could not find signs saying that Muslims were not allowed to gamble, or to buy alcohol or what ever. It was a Malay habit to shake hands, men and women, as a sign of respect; if you meet somebody for the first time then you would shake hands. And not only one hand but two hands. And then bring it back to your heart. This is a Malay custom which is very beautiful in fact. But nowadays, I don’t know, they don’t do it anymore. Because they say it is not Islamic. With this whole process of Islamisation, they say that men should not touch a woman, because there could be something sexual about it. This is so ridiculous, they are just shaking hands. All


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these are new phenomena that were not there during the time of my childhood. (Ida, SIS activist, 28.03.04)

From Ida’s perspective, these “new phenomena” are not restricted to a changing lifestyle and increasing religiosity of Muslims in Malaysia, such as her father who began to adhere more strictly to the religious rules. Her criticism aims at the increasing political regulation and legal institutionalisation of religious rules, and, as a consequence, at the increasing encroachment of religious authorities into the private sphere of believers. For her, the main issue to be tackled is the institutionalisation of religious proscriptions, for example in signs of prohibitions and new laws, that interferes with the individual relationship between believer and God. The increasing regulation of everyday life by religious proscriptions and the changes to the face of religion itself that Ida describes are part of a process of Islamisation that has been taking place in Malaysia since the 1970s. Having arrived on the Malaysian peninsula only in the 15th century by way of India, Islam has undergone several processes of metamorphic change. It mixed easily with the existing Hindu-animist syncretism (Cederroth 1996, 363), and the result was the development of a syncretistic Malay religion, officially designated as Islam, but maintaining and containing manifold pre-Islamic elements, practices and beliefs, which can contest or even conflict with Islamic principles, as the well-established system of customary law adat does (Cederroth 1996, 356). In the 20th century, however, traditional Malay Islam was challenged more and more by modern Islamisation movements influenced by intense translocal intellectual exchange about religious ideas. This happened first in the beginning of the 20th century as a reaction against the externally imposed immigration of non-Malays and mainly based in rural areas,10 then in the 1970s 10 The first wave of modern Islamisation of Malaysian society at the beginning of the 20th century was embedded in a context of growing Malay ethnic awareness in contrast to immigrant groups. This led to a Malay nationalist driven anti-colonial struggle and hence to a Malay domination in the Malaysian nation state. At the beginning of the century, many Malay intellectuals travelled to the Arab world for study or pilgrimage for the first time. They came back to Malaysia deeply influenced by Middle East Islamic intellectuals and reformers, who demanded a removal of practices that had been added later, a return to original religious doctrines, and, at the same time, a contextualised interpretation and re-reading of religious texts from a modern perspective in order to make Islam fit for the challenges of the modern world (Cederroth 1996, 359). However, the intellectual, urban-based reformers in Malaysia were never able to assert themselves against the more conservative, ruralbased ‘traditionalists’. Thus, in the 1930s, the growing independence movement was dominated by ‘traditionalists’, who did not promote a reformed Islam as a basis for nationalist independence movement, but emphasised the ethnic factor. ”Instead of incorporating universalistic and humanistic Islamic principles, the anti-colonial fight was now being fought in terms of Malay rights and privileges as opposed to those of the other ethnic groups” (Cederroth 1996, 365). In this ethno-nationalist motivated struggle for independence, Islam played a role only insofar as it could unify different ‘indigenous’ ethnic groups under the label bumiputra on religious grounds (Ong 1990, 266).

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as a reaction to recent internal migration in Malaysia due to modernisation and industrialisation (Cederroth 1996, 382). This was driven by a movement among young, urban Malay students and factory workers (Camroux 1996, 855) with a pronounced anti-capitalist critique of uneven social development related to industrialisation. In the 1980s, the state started to co-opt the Islamic discourse and integrated it into its project of hyper-ethnicity (Ong, 272), which was then articulated increasingly in a religious language. Since then, the state’s Islamisation project has been linked discursively with the state’s modernisation project, as the new assertive, globally connected ‘Islamised’ identity offered the symbolic power to fight the stereotype of Malays being “backward” and “lazy” (Mohamad 2002b, 355). In the 1980s, this “economically induced cultural programme” (Mohamad 2002b, 358) turned more and more into an institutionalisation of Islam (Abaza 2002). Since then, the state has been promoting Islamisation by Islamising public space: through mosque building programmes; through strengthening the role of Islamic courts; through the installation of Islam teaching in schools; through financing Islamic schools; through the creation of an Islamic teachers’ college, an Islamic bank and insurance system, and an international Islamic university (Camroux 1996, 857-858; Othman 1998; 2003). Interestingly, the founders of Malaysia had a secular state in mind, and Islam was assigned only symbolic importance for ceremonial purposes and public occasions with no intention to apply Islamic law except for family law issues between Muslims (Nagata 1994, 67). Nowadays, the process of Islamisation is characterised by mutual accusations between the government and opposition, that is, between the United Malays National Organisation, UMNO, the main Malay party, and the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS, the Islamic opposition Party, of being infidel or heretic, and mutual efforts “to out-islamise” each other (Noor 2003a). “If necessary, UMNO is ready to fight PAS Islam with more Islam of its own” (Nagata 1997, 144). On a national level, the “kafir-mengafir exchanges” between PAS and UMNO in 1984 (Stark 2004, 53) led to the introduction of new Islamic laws or the amendment of existing ones “as part of the government’s efforts to upgrade the status of Islam in Malaysia” (Anwar 2004, 71). Significant amendments to Sharia family laws were made, such as allowing a polygynous marriage contracted without the permission of the court to be registered upon payment of a fine or jail sentence, deleting the ‘fifth condition’ for the permission of a polygynous marriage, which requires that the proposed polygynous marriage should not directly or indirectly lower the standard of living enjoyed by the existing wife and dependants, and allowing for a court to approve a divorce pronounced without permission of the court if it is satisfied that the repudiation is valid (Anwar 2004, 75). “The Islamic family law was amended to make divorce and polygyny easier for men and reduce men’s


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financial responsibilities towards women” (Anwar 2004, 71). And new offences were even created such as khalwat (close proximity) which prohibits the copresence in a secluded area or confined place of a man and a woman who are not legal spouses as engaging in “immoral” activity.11 Hence, the position of the Malaysian state versus Islamisation and the different Islamic groups or parties is an extremely ambiguous one that oscillates between accommodation, co-option, and confrontation (Camroux 1996, 857). This process of increasing institutionalisation of Islam forms the basis for Ida’s career as an activist criticising the homogenisation of the religious space that is the space for different practices, different interpretations, and different visions for Muslims, especially for Muslim women: What is happening here and in the entire world is so scary. That everywhere Muslims seem to be comfortable with these new trends and laws. That they don’t see the inequalities going on in their own community. So, for instance, that women keep on being second class. I couldn’t take that anymore. I started to question all these things. So that’s how I came to SIS. They are the only ones who work within an Islamic framework. That was something that I was looking for, because I describe myself culturally and religiously as a Muslim. (Ida, SIS activist, 28.03.04)

Other activists also place this process of Islamisation at the centre of their engagement. Whereas Ida highlights the changes she has observed within Malaysian society, several activists emphasise their personal experiences with the Sharia court system as being significant for their decision to become involved in the women’s movement and to question the gender order. In Amina’s case, the significant experiences she uses to explain her awareness of women’s issues are her quarrels with the Sharia court system when fighting for her divorce. She is 42 years old and the operation manager of SIS. She perceives the experiences with her divorce as being a major decisive point in her life that motivated her to join a women’s group like SIS. Amina had met her husband during her studies in the United States, where both of them lived and studied for several years with a scholarship from the Malaysian government. Although they got formally and correctly married in the US, the marriage was never registered 11 The conditions for khalwat are provided under the Syariah Criminal Provisions Act, and the circumstances differ from state to state. Generally, as provided by the Syariah Criminal Provisions Act (Federal Territories), Section 27, it entails: “Any man who is found together with one or more women, not being his wife or mahram; or any woman who is found together with one or more men, not being her husband or mahram, in any secluded place or in a house or room under circumstances which may give rise to suspicion that they were engaged in immoral acts shall be guilty of an offence and shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding three thousand ringgit or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both.”

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in Malaysia. When, after a couple of years, it had become clear for Amina that she could not continue this marriage, the problems started: When my first marriage broke down it really put me in a manner where I saw how things work when it comes to women’s issues. When things went bad and when I approached the Sharia court, they told me I couldn’t do anything because I was never registered in Malaysia. And at that point of time in the 1980s, the woman couldn’t register the marriage. It had to be the man. […] But I was very persistent, I kept on going to them and I said ‘I want to register the marriage’ […] so they finally acknowledged. Then we filed for divorce again, we had to go through a number of counselling sessions. In the counselling sessions, the frustrating part is that they tell you that it is not right for women to do certain things. And the men should be doing it. But, again I told them, you know why should a couple live together, when they feel that it is not working anymore? So, my ex-husband wasn’t very supportive at that point of time because he didn’t want to divorce but I was very persistent. Again you know I kept on pushing and pushing these people, in the end they called me for the court order, and they put a court order to my husband to attend. […]. So, you know these are the things whereby I feel when a woman is weak and she might not be able to pursue to claim her rights. […] That’s why I wanted to help other women in the same situation, just relate my experience to them, just make them feel that even when you are a woman, you are strong, and you can push things. Because when you are persistent about things, they would just listen to you and do it. When it came to the question of harta sepencarian, that is the wealth that you incurred during your marriage the judge just said, we have to settle it out of the court because he doesn’t want me to get any headache which I think is not right because in the end, it would just bring down the woman again. And when it came to the allowance for the children, again I actually consulted the ustaz, the religious people in Sharia Court and asked them, what amount I should put and they told me ‘Put RM500, he can very well afford it.’ But again during the court, the clerk who was in the court, approached my ex-husband and asked my ex-husband whether he really wanted to give that amount. So, then you see these are the things, there is no real protection over women even during the court session, because this clerk was actually alerting my ex-husband, this is the amount, are you willing to pay? Whereby the religious counsellors told me this is the amount that is feasible […]. So, that’s why I wanted to work with a women’s organisation. This experience really taught me a lot of things. When it happened I was a general manager for two companies. So, after that you know I really felt that I wanted to get involved in women issues and help in the very negligible way that I can, for women to enjoy their rights. Because during my divorce, I was like nothing, I did not get anything. I was actually starting like all over again. So, I didn’t want that to happen to others, because I didn’t fight for my reason because I didn’t want to keep suffering. So I agreed not to claim my share because the kids are more important to me than the material things. Because of these experiences with the break up of my first marriage, it really alerted me to be more involved in women issues. (Amina, SIS activist, 15.07.04)


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The picture that Amina draws of the Sharia court system is that of an institution that constantly and systematically discriminates against women: When Amina wanted to register her marriage, there were no equal marriage registration rights for men and women. She perceives a male bias in the obligatory counselling sessions which the Sharia foresees in cases where the divorce is initiated by the wife but the husband does not agree. Within these sessions, women are denied equal rights in the decision whether a marriage should continue or divorce be granted, and pressure is put on them to rethink their decisions. Also the court was biased in favour of the husband, suggesting to Amina that she should solve the property questions outside the court, and supporting her husband in reducing his subsistence allowance, although the amount had been set in accordance to normal standards. In the end, Amina also renounces her right to her share in the properties which the husband had acquired during the marriage. According to Islamic family law in Malaysia, women are entitled to one-third of the husband’s property in recognition of their contributions as wife and mother, an entitlement that Amina does not claim in exchange for custody over her children. Amina presents her experiences with the Sharia court system as a long fight where she oscillates between a feeling of helplessness and a feeling of strength. On the one hand, she tells a story of powerlessness and weakness, a story of being at the mercy of a court system that does not support women at all, which made her feel like “nothing” and led her to abandon claims to which she was entitled. On the other hand, she tells a story of strength and success, a story of achieving her aim against all institutional obstacles through doggedness and perseverance. Noraini, whose parents got divorced when she was 10 years old, emphasised the significance of her experiences with the divorce of her parents and the Sharia court system: My mother was advised by her doctor to get a divorce. And when the whole thing started, we found out that only my father could grant divorce. I don’t quite understand the process, but he would only do so if the custody of the children was given to him. […] So, at some point, they just came home and told me that from that point we were staying with our Dad and I thought, why. And then my father didn’t give my mum the right to visit the children as they stated in the court. Then he got married again and I realised that that was the cause of the divorce. So, I decided to run away from home to join my Mum. And my Mum didn’t know until the last moment. So, what she did, she picked me up instead because I was already with my brother’s things. My brother would just follow me and we ran and my father wanted to gain custody of my brother only. And I thought this is impossible, the way that the laws work; they don’t provide any safety for women. So, basically the man can just say, ‘I want to divorce you whenever I want’. Without any condition. If the woman wants to divorce then they say: ‘yes, but only if you give me the custody’. That is one of my reasons. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

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Today Noraini’s brother lives with their father and Noraini stays with her mother, who gained custody of her daughter after a protracted process. Mother and daughter live in a neat one-family house in one of the typical newly built middle-class suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. Noraini formulates her critique in a rather radical way, when she says that in Malaysia Islamic family law does not “provide any safety for women”. Noraini especially criticises the power inequality within the negotiation process, in which, from her perspective, the wife is always in a weaker position. Under Malaysian Islamic family law, there are four different ways to initiate the legal proceedings for divorce: talaq, khul, fasakh, and ta’liq (Nik Badlishah 2003; NGO Shadow Report Group 2004). These distinct proceedings, which differ significantly in terms of the applicant’s degree of autonomy and power, are accorded differently to husbands and wives. In contrast to men, who are perceived as having the right to resolve the marriage, and who can do so by simply pronouncing the formula of repudiation ‘talaq’ before the court, the wife can only apply for divorce before the Sharia court and has to prove reasons for her request, such as the husband’s desertion, failure to maintain his family, insanity, or cruelty (fasakh). That means that men only have to inform the court about their decision without any conditions and further justification, whereas women depend on the decision made by the Sharia court. If she is not able to prove the above-mentioned grounds, her application for divorce can be dismissed. When there are no ‘legal’ grounds of complaint against the husband, the wife can obtain a divorce by khul, that is, divorce by redemption, where the wife has to make a reasonable compensation payment to the husband, which is fixed by the court. In Malaysia, there is an additional way for women to obtain a divorce. This is the possibility of making a prenuptial agreement (ta’liq) which allows the wife to gain a divorce from the Sharia Court if the husband breaks this agreement. However, the basic tendency of inequality before the law still persists. In the case of Noraini’s mother, this unequal treatment before the law led to inner familial negotiation with the consequence that she renounced her right to custody of her two children in exchange for her husband’s agreement to pronounce ‘talaq’. According to Malaysian Islamic family law, mothers have custody of their children when they are under the age of mumaiyyiz (discernment), which is seven years for boys and eleven years for girls. Older children are able to choose with whom they want to live. The feeling of being without any “safety”, as Noraini formulated, points to the fact that the bargaining power of men within Islamic family law is so extensive, that different types of rights can be played out against each other in a way that even forces women to renounce rights granted to them. Noraini grounds her interest and awareness in women’s issues in these experiences of lacking ‘safety’ and the lack of women’s negotiating power in the divorce process.


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For Julia, who is 32 years old and works for the Women’s Aid Organisations (WAO) and the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW), it was experiences within the legal system as a practising lawyer that were critical for her involvement in women’s organisations. In contrast to the other cases, Julia self-critically describes her childhood, her time in school, and even her time at university as a time for her without developing major critical reflexivity on “deep issues” such as gender or ethnicity. “I went into university without being aware of many things. There was this ideal that I was going to be a lawyer to do good and actually fight for a cause and to help people. There was all that but I didn’t go really deep”. Julia relates this lack of ‘deepness’ to her own ethnic background. Not belonging to one of the major ethnic groups––Malay, Chinese, Indian––but to the smaller ethnic community of the so-called Eurasians,12 that is, people of mixed European, mostly British or Portuguese, and Asian descent, Julia says that she was somehow an outsider in her school environment. This was ethnically mixed, and hence strongly divided along ethnic lines. Julia describes herself as a “third-generation Eurasian”––it was her grandparents who intermarried––and as “quite a mix” with “Dutch, Javanese Indonesian, British, and Chinese blood on my mother’s side”. Perceiving her outsider status rather as a freedom than a stigma, Julia enjoyed “not to be boxed into one group” and having the possibility of maintaining networks of friendship to all ethnic groups. “Because I actually fit nowhere I could basically go anywhere and I was taken in and accepted” (Julia, WAO activist, 04.09.04).13 After studying law, Julia started working with a law firm in Kuala Lumpur. And this is the moment that Julia considers to be the main decisive turning point on her path to becoming an activist. Starting to practice law, she describes a “huge crash” that made her question a lot of things that she had learned: Throughout law school, you are presented with the law and you are told how the court system works. When I came out and started chambering for nine months and then working, it was really a huge crash, in terms of ‘Oh my goodness, this is how 12

In Malaysia the Eurasian community is estimated at around 56,000 persons. From her present perspective, she rather self-critically re-evaluates this feeling of freedom, saying that through “not really seeing the segregation that was going on” she did not develop a critical perspective on the “deep” or “major” issues, such as ethnicity or gender relations, but rather an “interest in certain causes like […] anti-smoking competition or anti-war things. You see, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but nothing major, you could say.” Julia goes on to say that during her time as a law student at the International Islamic University (UIA), she had not come in touch with thoughts or people that she would call ‘activism’. “Within the university, there wasn’t much in terms of activism, we have laws against that.” Based on her interest in studying law locally in Malaysia in contrast to going abroad, she had applied to several local universities, but was accepted only at the UIA which also accepts non-Muslim students. 13

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3 Becoming an Activist: The Activists’ Trajectories the system doesn’t work, this is how the law doesn’t translate into reality for people.’ It’s such a flawed system and this doesn’t really get reflected in your studies. And we have little influence on what it can and cannot do. Especially within family law, I saw how that was starting to play out for women and the whole issue of violence really struck me at that point of time. (Julia, WAO activist, 04.09.04)

In 1995, as part of her education as a lawyer, Julia had to participate in a ninemonth pupilage programme at the Legal Aid Centre run by the Malaysian Bar Council. This pupilage programme is obligatory for all law students and necessary to be admitted to the legal profession. The Legal Aid Centres provide free counselling in criminal and civil legal matters and also cooperate with women’s organisations: I think the first real contact I started to have with women issues was with women who would come for the legal aid services with really complex problems. There were a lot of painful cases; a lot had to do with violence and or custody for children. And these cases, in the beginning they would seem so simple, but then when you tried to offer a solution, you couldn’t really find a solution most of the time. That was difficult because you only ended up telling women that you are dealing with a flawed law or a flawed system. And this is hard, because you are not offering anything. There are no solutions that you can offer instead of telling them that this is a bad system and ‘Yes, we are trying to fight, but at the moment this is the way it is’. That seemed very difficult at first. (Julia, WAO activist, 04.09.04)

Julia’s case sustains the argument that Malaysian family law, be it Islamic family law or civil law, is one of the important dimensions where women’s room to manoeuvre is being restricted. This is true not only of women who seek their rights through divorce but also of women who practice the law, and who, like Julia, realise the shortcomings of family law. For Julia, the experience that the law she had been taught at university could, in practice, put women in very “painful” situations, was the main motivation for her to become more actively engaged in the world of women’s organisations, especially for the issue of legal reform. 3.2.3 … ethnicised hierarchies Jessica has been member of the board of Amnesty International (AI) in Malaysia for the last ten years. For a short time, she has held the post of the national coordinator of AI’s global campaign of ‘Stop violence against women’. I met Jessica for the first time during one of the training sessions for Amnesty International volunteers on gender and violence against women which she was


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organising together with two other board members. Jessica is 32 years old and was born in Kuala Lumpur. She comes from a Chinese family which she describes as being ‘very Chinese’. “I grew up in a very Chinese family, not very traditional Chinese but well Chinese: middle-class, urban, everyone has a job, typically a white-collar occupation. My Mom is a housewife and my Dad works for his own family” (Jessica, Amnesty International activist, 12.09.04). For Jessica, being Chinese is related to a specific socio-economic position, which she defines with the parameters of ‘urban’ in contrast to rural and ‘middle-class’ (Horstmann 2002) and ‘white collar’ in contrast to working class, and she also refers to a specific gendered division of labour. With approximately 34 %, Malaysians with Chinese origins form the second biggest ethnic group in Malaysia. Chinese migration to Malaya dates back to the 15th century when Chinese traders started to build up translocal economic trading networks and settlements all over Southeast Asia, for example in Malacca, Penang, Singapore, and Batavia (Evers 1994). The majority of Chinese immigrants, however, came to Malaya as coolies in the middle of the 19th century during the British occupation. At that time, the global demand for tin had increased dramatically due to new techniques for preserving food in tin cans. To meet the demand, Chinese coolies were imported by the British to work in the country’s rapidly growing mining industry. Chinese immigration was fostered by the British colonial administration because the mainly rural peasant Malay population was reluctant to work in the newly established tin mines (Milne, Mauzy 1986, 14). By the beginning of the 20th century, with a quickly growing automobile industry, rubber became a valuable commodity, and a large part of the Malayan peninsula was covered with rubber tree plantations. Due to the refusal of both Malays and Chinese to live and work in these remote plantations (Milne, Mauzy 1986, 20), European planters began to bring substantial cohorts of Indian immigrants into the country. Integration into the global economy as a result of British colonialism was definitely one of the major turning points of Malaysian history, because it laid the foundation for today’s multi-ethnic and multireligious Malaysian society. Today only slightly more than 50 % of Malaysian citizens are ethnic (‘indigenous’) Malay, 34 % are of Chinese, and about 10 % of Indian origin. This new face of Malaysian society is clearly a “legacy of colonial economic policies” (Nagata 1997, 134). The Chinese identity that Jessica formulates, which is strongly related to urban space and to the business and trading sector, is rooted in these historical developments. When Malaysia gained independence in 1957, the society and economy of the country were clearly structured upon ethnic lines. The cities, which had began to grow in the late 19th century with the tin boom, were inhabited almost exclusively by workers and traders of Chinese origin, whereas Malays traditionally engaged in agriculture

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and lived in the villages, and Indians remained on the plantations in remote rural areas. Overlapping spaces were rare. In one century of colonial enforced migration, class and ethnicity “had worked together” (Camroux 1996, 853) to create a complex multi-ethnic society with ethnically divided economic and social spaces. The relatively clear-cut ethnic structuration of the economy and even geographical space that had developed in pre-independence times—Malay in the rural areas, Chinese and Indians in the urban areas—was dramatically changed by the rapid economic growth that Malaysia has experienced since the 1970s parallel to other Southeast Asian ‘newly industrialising economies’. Government programmes to promote Malay economic development created employment in the formal industrial sector for young Malays from the villages and hence supported the general trend of rural-urban migration (Ong 1990, 263). Large sections of the Malay population shifted from traditional village life and settled in new urban surroundings. This Malayisation of the cities and the overlapping of formerly separated ethnic spaces did, however, not reduce symbolic othering. On the contrary, it led to more pronounced ethnic identities in the urban space. An excellent education is an important part of the urban Chinese middleclass lifestyle that Jessica describes. For her primary and secondary education, Jessica attended the Bukit Nanas Convent School. This is one of the very prestigious schools founded by Catholic nuns during the British occupation with the goal of providing quality education for girls. After the violent ethnic riots in May 1969, which were interpreted as being the result of a marginalisation of Malays within the socio-economic development of the country, these Englishmedium schools were converted into national Malay-medium schools adhering to the national syllabus. These measures aimed to promote not only national cultural unity through the use of the national language Malay, but also the advancement of Malays within the education system (Milne, Mauzy 1986). In contrast to so-called vernacular schools, which are mostly mono-ethnic spaces, Jessica describes her school as a “mixed school”. In this case, this does not refer to the co-education of girls and boys, but to the co-education of children with different ethnic and religious backgrounds, be they Malay, Chinese, Indian, or Eurasian. Malaysia’s education system and the debate about the question of language of instruction illustrate the general features of the multi-ethnic set-up of Malaysian society. Education and especially the question of the language of instruction is one of the main battlefields of ethnicity in Malaysia. For Jessica, an awareness of being treated differently “simply because you are not Malay” has been very present and tangible from early childhood on, and the reflections on what she calls the “racial tensions” in Malaysian society play a significant part in her narrative. Jessica openly criticises the “double standards”


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for Malays and non-Malays in, for instance, the distribution of scholarships, which she experienced herself during her school days. She very clearly remembers her frustrations when trying to get a college scholarship. “I had to fight very hard to get a scholarship and all simply because I was not Malay.” One of the private colleges had offered scholarships, and, according to what she had been told by the officials of her school, these scholarships were only for Malay students. But then one of the parents talked to one of the college officials, and it turned out that initially the scholarships were intended for all pupils irrespective of ethnic background. For Jessica, this was a clear sign of Malay privilege as practised by the Malay-dominated administration of her school. They converted it into scholarships for bumiputra only. So, you see the injustice, the double standard that you feel when you find out that you don’t get it because you are not Malay, because you don’t belong to the preferred race. A lot of the races feel that they are second class in their own country. (Jessica, Amnesty International activist, 12.09.04)

Despite its multi-ethnic reality, the Malaysian nation state is based on Malay political and cultural dominance. The post-independence national discourse on ethnicity debated the question of which people should belong to the newly established independent nation-state. Chinese and Indians were juxtaposed as ‘non-indigenous’ to the so-called ‘indigenous’ bumiputra, the sons of the soil, a category which applies to the Malay population but also to some non-Malay ethnic groups, such as the Iban and other Borneo groups.14 With independence and Malay nationalist policies, the Malaysian nation state blatantly secured Malay political and cultural dominance. In the constitution of 1957, Malayness was defined by means of a trinity of parameters: language, custom (adat), and religion. To be a Malay, one has to speak the Malay language, be a Muslim, and conform to Malay customs (Cederroth 1996, 362).15 This legal codification of Malay identity formed the basis for later programmes of affirmative action. Furthermore, the bumiputras were granted special rights in the constitution, known as hak istimewa Melayu: the Malay language was declared the official 14 The construction of a unifying label for Malay and non-Malay ethnic groups is discussed as a strategy of re-assuring the Malay majority and thus strengthening the legitimacy of Malay nationalist policies in Malaysia. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of indigenous versus non-indigenous is questionable, as many of the so-called non-indigenous can trace their presence in the territory of present Malaysia back four generations (Camroux 1996, 853). 15 Whereas the connection between Malay ethnic belonging and religion is unambiguous and even compulsory, since a non-Muslim Malay would be a legal anomaly (Nagata 1994, 69), the religious space for the other ethnic groups is somewhat broader: Sino-Malaysians (Chinese) can practice Buddhism, Taoism, or can be Christians or followers of Confucius; Indo-Malaysians (Indians) can practice Hinduism, they can be Sikhs and Christians or even Muslims (Camroux 1996, 853).

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national language and renamed ‘Bahasa Malaysia’, and Islam was declared the religion of official ceremonies. Furthermore, it was constitutionally fixed that the Prime Minister and chief minister of the individual states had to be Malay (Nagata 1997, 134). Although jus solis was introduced to convert the migrant population into Malaysian citizens, Malay primacy was secured in a series of provisions and policies (Nagata 1994, 69). This trend was re-enforced by the New Economic Policy (NEP), a conglomerate of programmes of affirmative action for bumiputra in the areas of employment, access to loans and capital, and especially in the area of education (Othman 1998, 173). The NEP was introduced shortly after the riots in 1969 to correct the economic and social imbalances between the three major ethnic groups, especially between Chinese and Malays. The aim of the programmes was to break the link between ethnic origin and socio-economic position in society (Camroux 1996, 854) and to create an urban Malay middle class and business elite. This programme, to which Jessica refers to very critically, explicitly promoted education in institutions of higher learning in the cities and even overseas (Ong 1990, 263) through the introduction of several quota systems for bumiputra. These include preferred admission to government educational institutions, especially in public tertiary education, access to public scholarships, jobs in government, and business ownership. From Jessica’s perspective, who claims to belong to Malaysia, to her ‘own country’ in the same way as Malay citizens, these special rights granted to Malays led directly to a strong feeling of discrimination and injustice within the other ethnic communities and to “racial tensions” in everyday life, for example in mixed schools. Talking about the other ethnic groups, especially about Malay schoolmates in a derogative manner, and also having multiple identities (Schlee, Werner 1996; Schlee 2002) expressed through switching between communication styles and issues in multi- versus mono-ethnic groups, was a part of everyday school communication patterns. Besides the racism she experiences from ethnic ‘others’, Jessica also criticises the practices leading to and maintaining ethnic segregation that she observes in the everyday life of her own ethnic group. Among her family, her friends, and among the Chinese community in general, ethnic slurs and “racist remarks” such as “this bloody Melayu is an idiot” or “this is a bloody Keling”, very degrading slang terms in Malaysia for Tamils and Hindus, would be normal, relates Jessica. She also comments critically on the marriage patterns of the Chinese community, who prefer to marry within their own ethnic group or ethnically structured networks of friendships. “Even after coming out of their school environment, they tend to mix around with their own kind. Like most of them would only hang out with Chinese and the Indians would only hang out with the Indians.” For Jessica, these tensions and ethnic segregation are omnipresent in the experiences of non-


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Malays in Malaysia: “The racial tensions are very high, and you realise you lived with it all your life, even if you don’t mean to be a racist […]. I think every person who is not Malay has felt the effect of these special rights. Everyone has to live with these kinds of situations all their life, even in my family. They’ve done it all the time.” In college she got in touch with Amnesty International for the first time, and participated in a programme that it had organised. This was a one day visit to a community of plantation workers on a rubber estate who were facing eviction. For Jessica, this visit meant being confronted with a reality that was totally different from her urban middle-class life-world. Her interest was “to get to know what it was like to live there, what problems they were facing and what they wanted out of their struggle. It was an exchange of different views, because we came from a very urban middle class, from the city, and their background was quite different.” The experience of the ‘exposure program’, as Jessica says, was the starting point for her and a group of friends to become active. “From that time on, a lot of us saw the other side of it”. When talking about ‘the other side of it’, Jessica is referring to the very ambivalent development process that Malaysia has experienced since independence, but especially within the last 30 years. Perhaps no other country in Southeast Asia has undergone such radical changes in society and the economy as Malaysia. From a mainly rural society and a colonial economy concentrating on the export of natural resources, namely palm oil, tin, and rubber, it has developed into a mainly urban society (over 60 %) with a diversified industry and service sector (Jomo K.S., Edwards 1993; Othman 1998). This development is, of course, embedded in the changes to the global economic system, the new global division of labour, but it is also the result of 40 years of development policies by a developmentalist state with increasingly authoritarian features. The state has been able to discursively and politically monopolise the classical development issues, like rural development, within a framework of authoritarian democracy, and has left no or little space for civil society and NGO activities (Weiss, Hassan 2003a). Since independence, Malaysian development policy has always been based on a quantitative growth paradigm and has rather neglected questions of social justice and equality (Bruton 1992). Especially since the 1980s, this trend has become more pronounced, and, since then, growth has been promoted not as an instrument for equity, but as a goal per se, even at the cost of producing social polarisation and inequality. The result of the statist development project has been a relatively successful industrialisation and also a general reduction of the overall poverty rate, from 50 % in 1973 to 7.8 % in 1999.16 However, the general income 16

http://www.worldbank.org/eapsocial/countries/malay/pov1.htm

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inequality has remained unaffected and is one of the highest in the region (Mehmet 1986; Bruton 1992; Chakravarty, Roslan 2005). After finishing school, Jessica started to study accounting, but she also did some courses in sociology. During her studies, she continued to keep in touch with what she called the ‘other side’, participating and even organising a small student research training project with the Orang Asli, the indigenous population of Malaysia. The group of students visited the Orang Asli village for about four to five days. Although the other participants in the research training became accountants, bankers, and economists, some of them continued “in the movement”, as Jessica says. “That’s how I started, like every volunteer without knowing very much.” For Jessica, the main dimension around which she constructs her picture of and her criticism of “Malaysian society” is ethnicity. Taking the activist’s narratives as a source for elaborating a re-construction of their emic concepts of Malaysian society, Jessica’s narration reveals the picture of a society that is ethnically segregated and where this segregation is the main motivation to develop political dissent and to take up concepts such as human rights. 3.3 “Studying abroad, I saw how things could be different” A significant proportion of the activists interviewed for this study highlighted the importance of experiences outside Malaysia, especially studying abroad. These experiences were crucial in their process of developing critical reflexivity towards gender relations and of formulating contrasting imaginations. Out of the 13 women with whom the biographical interviews were conducted, seven, all of them Malay, had studied abroad. They had been in Canada, the United States, Australia, but mostly in Great Britain. Amina studied marketing in Canada for four years and lived another two years in the United States studying for a second degree in computer and information systems with a minor in business administration and psychology. Maiza studied economics and computer studies in Australia and lived there for ten years. The others lived for some time in Great Britain: Aniza for two years studying accounting, Nazia for four years studying construction and civil engineering, Dina for three years studying political science, and finally Ida for one year doing a master’s in Islamic studies. At the age of 17, Noraini and her brother accompanied their mother to Great Britain and stayed there for three years. All of them had received government scholarships to study abroad. Besides the quota system at the local institutions of education, such as local high schools and universities, these overseas scholarships formed a significant element of the affirmative action measures for the Malay population.

3.3 “Studying abroad, I saw how things could be different”

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They are part of the New Economic Policies (NEP) that the government pursued from the 1970s onwards in order to re-design Malaysian society and to balance the ethnic disparities in participation in education, the economy, and general social development discussed earlier in this chapter. The scholarships abroad were part of “an effort to produce as many qualified Malay experts in science and technology and professionals in other fields as fast as possible” (Anwar 1987, 25) in order to bridge the gap in these fields between the Chinese and the Malay parts of the Malaysian population. In the 1970s, the majority of Malay students receiving such scholarships were sent to Western universities, especially to British and American universities but also to Arabic universities. Research on Malaysian overseas students focuses mainly on their role in the rise of Islamic revivalism in Malaysia (Anwar 1987, 24-31; Abaza 1998b; Stauth 2002). British universities were the first places where Malaysian students came into contact with Muslims from all over the globe, especially with Muslims from Pakistan and the Middle East, and with new, more radical interpretations of Islam brought forward by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the first, largest, and probably most influential modern Islamic political organisation established in 1928 in Egypt, or the Jamaati-I-Islami movement, founded by Maududi, one of the key thinkers of the Islamic revival in the 20th century. The campuses of British universities were the terrain where a new translocal Islamic consciousness developed based on the globally attractive concept of Islam as a ‘complete way of life’. In her study on the dakwah movement among Malaysian students, Zainah Anwar highlights the attraction of such new Islamically based concepts and identities for Malaysian overseas students, arguing that it was “the cultural shock of being transplanted suddenly from a rural or urban yet traditional background to an alien Western environment with its different culture and liberal social and moral values that created in the Malay student a sense of alienation, insecurity, self-estrangement and powerlessness” (Anwar 1987, 25). This feeling of alienation was then bolstered by a community that reinvented its Islamic identity against the background of the non-Islamic environment, providing a sense of security and belonging for the students. What is emphasised here is the process of the formation of an assertive global Islamic identity as a consequence of othering processes embedded in the students’ experience of fundamental cultural and religious difference from the British environment. Coming back to Malaysia, these highly educated professionals played a decisive role in the politicisation and radicalisation of the Islamic movement in Malaysia. According to Mona Abaza, who elaborated on the role of such transcultural experiences among Third-World students at Western educational institutions for the emergence of pronounced anti-cosmopolitan identities, “Third-World students sent to the West experience rising right wing ideologies and

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conservative, stifling Western academics who are struggling for self interest; they return to their respective countries as vehement anti-Western pro-government academics who would abhor the ideas of East-West cooperation and obstruct sending more students to the West” (Abaza 2002, 220). The case of Dina, who today works for one of the rather moderate branches of the Malaysian dakwah movement, the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM), supports this idea of the decisive role of the experience abroad for the re-enforcement of othering processes in form of an assertive Islamic identity and the role of translocal networks within the Islamic movement. Today, Dina is in charge of the project of setting up a shelter for Muslim women only. In contrast to the first generation of students described by Anwar who belonged to the dakwah movement and who only discovered Islam during their time at university, Dina, who was born in 1975, had already experienced a very religiously oriented education from a young age. At the age of six, Dina was sent by her mother to religious classes at the mosque and was the youngest person there. She also emphasises that she was the youngest girl to be sent to an Islamic primary school in her area. At school, she continued with her involvement in Islamic organisations as the president of the school’s Islamic student society. Still, the decisive point in time in Dina’s engagement with the Islamic organisations was when she entered university after finishing secondary education. Dina left her hometown and came to Shah Alam, near Kuala Lumpur to do her A-levels. There she started participating in the activities of the Quran and Sunnah Association of her university, which included attending the Quran reading sessions (usrah) and talks by Islamic scholars. The so-called usrah groups are at the core of the dakwah movement at universities. Through these activities, Dina came into contact with other Muslim student organisations, and she was most attracted by two rather moderate organisations of the Malaysian dakwah movement, the National Muslim Students Association (PKPIM) and the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM). She was especially attracted by the possibility of women’s participation within ABIM and by the “flexible way” in which Islam was interpreted in ABIM, which Dina says distinguishes ABIM from other Islamic organisations (Dina, ABIM activist, 25.08.04). In 1995, before leaving for Britain, Dina became a member of ABIM. Having started her involvement in the dakwah movement locally, she was part of the activities that ABIM organised for Malaysian students in Great Britain and was integrated into the translocal structures described above based on an Islamic identity from the very beginning of her stay. She became a member of the Malaysian Islamic Study Group (MISG), one of the several Malaysian student associations founded in Britain in the early 1970s. The MISG, based in London and affiliated with the Arab and South Asian dominated Federation of Student Islamic Societies


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(FOSIS), was one of the first Malaysian associations and followed the internationalist outlook of FOSIS that aimed at an increase in the “Muslim student consciousness of the Islamic world”. Compared to other Malaysian Islamic student organisations, such as the Suara Islam (Voice of Islam), which adheres the teachings of Maududi, and propagated the formation of an Islamic Revolutionary Party in Malaysia, and the Islamic Representative Council (IRC), which instead of an open political struggle, opted for the strategy of education and infiltration of important political institutions in Malaysia, the MISG is a rather moderate, less radical organisation and nowadays closely related to ABIM (Anwar 1987). Dina was first elected executive director of the women’s wing, and then, after a year, she was promoted to the post of the women’s wing president. This made her part of the organisations line-up at the national level. During her stay in Great Britain, Dina was also involved with the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This was founded in 1981 in the United States and is one of the key actors within the project of Islamisation of knowledge (Abaza 1996) on a global level, operating several departments in Muslim countries all over the world (Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia) as well as in European countries with large Muslim populations (Great Britain, France). Dina attended several workshops offered by the IIIT, such as ones on political Islam and political science from an Islamic perspective or on public speaking. For Dina, who was already part of the moderate dakwah movement before travelling to Great Britain, the stay abroad meant an even closer integration and participation within a globally connected Islamic movement and a consolidation of her identity as an Islamic activist. Most of the other activists interviewed for this study, however, tell stories of alienation from the taken-for-granted meanings of ‘Malaysian’ and ‘Islamic’ culture and tradition, and increasingly distanced themselves from those groups of Malaysian students who support such meanings and constructions during their stay abroad. It is Noraini who emphasises this process of reflection, comparison, alienation, and reinterpretation most clearly, summarising the importance of her experience as follows: “Being abroad made me more aware of what was going on in my country”. The comparison between what is perceived to be Malaysian and what is ‘Western’ is of significant importance in her reflections: I think with my exposure to people of other beliefs I started to compare and contrast what I have and what they have, and what would be ideal. I think this is what happened abroad. When I was abroad, I watched the news, the magazines and just everything. And I started to compare it with our country and noticed that over there it is easier for people to achieve something because they are more tolerant with each other and because they respect each others’ differences. They say, ‘OK, in order to achieve something we put our values aside.’ I am not saying that everything should

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3 Becoming an Activist: The Activists’ Trajectories be put aside, but we need to achieve that objective. But here in Malaysia, before we do something, we have to take everything into account, what the other person might feel, what religion says, and so on. So, that’s why I feel that here human rights are a bit more difficult to achieve, because we have to take everybody’s view into account including the religious people, in fact, the muftis. I noticed that the people over there are more outspoken and they are more respectful of women. This is lacking a lot here in Malaysia. Concerning lets say marital rape. I feel that over there in the UK, it has been accepted a long time ago. But here it is difficult to accept because the people are still conservative and the religious people are saying ‘Oh in Islam once you married someone he has all the rights over you.’ With my stay there, I feel like, you don’t just claim somebody as your right, but they are your partner and you should treat them with equal rights. Personally, the time in the UK changed me a lot because I became more open and a bit more modern in my thinking. Before that, I used to be dominated by the fact whether things were according to the religion or not. But now, I would think, the implication that religion has for people would be more important for me than the question whether the religion says OK or not OK. But of course I am not the kind of person who would do things that are wrong or going against our moral values. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

Her stay in Great Britain initiated a complex process of reflection on differences between what she conceives to be ‘Malaysian’ and ‘Western’ culture and a process of personal reorientation and adjustment between these two very differently perceived poles. She constantly re-evaluates her own culture in the light of Western culture, but also Western culture in the light of her Malaysian culture in search of the “ideal”. On the one hand, she describes Western culture as being more ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’. The concept of tolerance that Noraini develops in this section is clearly related to the role that religion plays in the two societies. Whereas in Malaysia, religion is a public matter that is present in all social spheres, and, in Noraini’s perspective, even influences the implementation of human rights, it is “put aside” as private “values” in Britain. In Noraini’s perception, the encroachment of religion into society is detrimental to the development and progress of the country. The right of individuals to go against religious instructions and to re-evaluate them in the light of individual needs and wishes is positively emphasised by Noraini as part of Western culture. In contrast to that, Malaysian culture appears to be more conservative and more oriented towards religion and tradition and without spaces for individuals to demand their rights. This is especially true concerning the issue of gender relations that plays a significant part in Noraini’s comparison. Noraini highlights the positive aspect of granting the individual, but especially women, more rights, such as equal rights in a marriage for example through a law on marital rape, but also a greater voice to claim these rights. On the other hand, her criticism is not


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unbowed. The question of individualism is especially ambivalent for her, as the following remarks about the trait of ‘being outspoken’ suggest. I am not expecting our country to become totally like a Western country being very open in their values and everything. But, I am just hoping that at least people are given the respect that they deserve. The people that I mixed with during my stay there they were outspoken, the women and the men. OK, maybe they are a bit too outspoken, they just say whatever they feel is right without considering the implication of what we might do to others. That part I don’t do. Here I still maintain my Malaysian way. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

She is indeed critical of an unlimited individualism and very much esteems the sense of community and the consideration of the consequences that individual actions have for the community as a positive trait of Malaysian culture. Her remark that, despite criticising Malaysia, she would, of course, not go against any “moral values", also relates very much to her awareness of the danger of being labelled “Westernised”. To avoid such accusations, which she has already experienced, she distances herself from a total adoption of Western culture. She does not want to be associated with a one-sided negation of Malaysian culture and appropriation of ‘Western’ culture. Noraini describes her stay in Great Britain as an experience of intellectual freedom, being able to distance herself from the taken-for-granted world in Malaysia: When you are abroad, nobody is going to tell you what is right and wrong. You are the one who is supposed to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. I don’t believe that people who are not of the same belief would not go to heaven. Because I feel that God is for everyone. He put religions into this world to colour the things up. So that people would have different things to share and everything. Yes, but of course knowing the nature of human, we tend to use religion to justify things and control people. I don’t have that abroad. Abroad I can do whatever I want and nobody would tell me that what I am doing is right or wrong. That is actually what I enjoy about the freedom. Because when I am given the freedom, then I am given the chance to think what is right and wrong on my own without having people to tell me this is right and wrong. But here I feel that it is a bit oppressive because of the religion, not as much as the other countries, but still. I am given the chance to look at my non-Muslim friends. They can go anyway without problems. They can stay in a room and male and woman together without any problem. But here, I cannot do that without being thought of as doing bad things. And then obviously, the women will look bad, not the men, things like that. And of course, here the male, the Malay males don’t want to marry a non-virgin girl. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

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Aniza’s comments on her stay in Great Britain also reveal the great importance attached to the fact of getting to know different social and cultural arrangements and realities enabling her to reflect on Malaysia: I was also exposed to a lot of different ways of thinking there and how things could be different. I don’t want to use the word “progressive” because there are also some aspects in the UK that are not as progressed as they are here. But, things are more structured. What was amazing to me was the public transportation, how they gave such a big importance to it. And also how they managed to have an environment that was so conducive to the welfare of the people in terms of healthcare for example. And also that people care so much about the environment and are so concerned about recycling. Or in terms of getting to talk to someone about what you’re going through, in terms of your body changes, your reproductive health. That was really new to me. During that year I really opened up. So, that really pushed my reflection. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

Interestingly, Aniza rejects the notion of ‘progress’ or ‘progressive’ as a category for making distinctions between Great Britain and Malaysia. This points toward a new Malaysian self-understanding as belonging to the developed world. This new and self-conscious location of the nation within global hierarchies is a product of the process of industrialisation and urbanisation over the last 30 years. Aniza prefers the notion of ‘structure’, which, in her eyes, goes against the clear classification and opposition between Western progress and non-Western underdevelopment. Aniza’s comparison contains multiple dimensions. First of all, there is the level of infrastructural development. Coming from Kuala Lumpur, Aniza is used to the poor public transport which sometimes makes it impossible to reach certain urban areas without a private car. Like a lot of other middle-class families, she and her husband own not only one but two cars. She is used to continuously jammed highways, especially during rush hours, and complained regularly about the stresses and strains of driving every morning from the suburbs to her working place. The existence of an extended net of public transport is a remarkable experience for her. In Malaysia, owning a car is propagated as the essential step to modernisation and development. This has to do with the development of the national car, the ‘Proton’, whose production starting in 1985 was heavily promoted as part of the national development project. But it is not just the mere existence of public transport but the difference in the way that the state provides services to its citizens, for example, welfare and, especially, healthcare along with environmental consciousness. For Aniza, the Malaysian state does not seem to provide these services in a similar and adequate manner. But alongside these differences at the state level, she is also impressed by how openly issues related to gender and sexuality, like


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reproductive health, are addressed in the public discourse as well as in private conversations. Like Noraini, Aniza also describes her personal development during this time as a process of opening up. But, interestingly, it was not only the comparison with the ‘other’ in the shape of what Noraini calls the ‘Western’ culture but also the contact and interaction with the ‘other’ in the shape of the Muslim other, that is, with migrants from other Muslim countries living in Great Britain, that initiated the process of reflection, analysis, and re-positioning. In Noraini’s case, the Muslim others came from Pakistan. When I went there for the first time, I stayed with a Muslim family from Pakistan living in the UK. And I noticed that they were more religious than people in Malaysia. They were extremely religious. Compared to them, here in Malaysia we are open. Because they think that when the male comes in the girls are supposed to go upstairs and hide themselves. I am not used to that. In my country at least we go to the kitchen but there they suppose to lock the door and everything. I was like: Why? Why? I questioned that. And then, being me, when I question something, I want the answer. So, I started to read books that were not available here at that time, books about the stories of Muslim women, for example by Zana Muhsen. This is about a family in Birmingham, where the woman is married to a Yemeni guy and the guy abducted the children during the holiday in Yemen and then they never got to see the mother again. And I noticed that in the family that I lived with, the daughter would be given in an arranged marriage when it was time. And looking at her, she is very open; I wonder how she is going to tolerate that. I also read in a newspaper about girls being victims of honour killings, and that it is usual in Pakistan that women have to accept that they will be given in an arranged marriage and the male can just marry whoever they like. But, they expect the love to come later. I was brought up in a less strict Muslim society and then I went there and I was exposed to the extreme side of Islam. That made me question. And not because of the Western exposure, that came later. So, me being educated less strictly I was exposed to the strict family, which made me start questioning and questioning. And when I questioned, I thought: OK, I should not only see the Muslim perspective. I should go and see what people who are not Muslim think about it. So after that, after comparing, I thought that each of these people are good in their own ways. But I wanted to make the best out of this. For example, being born as a Muslim, I tend to be a moderate one, I would like to take the Western values into my life and use that analysis that I have to help improve human rights here in Malaysia. Because I feel that I probably have the mind to make things work without being totally bound by religious values, and without going totally against it. When you want to achieve an objective, not everybody will agree with you. But, if you can see things from different perspective, you can probably help to achieve what is best for everyone. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

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For Noraini, the Islam that she encountered in the Pakistani immigrant family was very different from what she knew from Malaysia. Even Malaysian society, which she had criticised so harshly as not being open, appears to her as more open and less conservative when compared to this other version of Islam, This “extreme side of Islam” is characterised by a stricter gender segregation than is the case in Malaysia and by arranged marriages, which for Noraini are not acceptable. Nazia and Amina, who both stayed in boarding houses for female Malay students, pointed out that they were controlled by other Malaysian students. Amina emphasised the pressure coming from fellow Malaysian students especially concerning the issue of Islamic dress. Because of that pressure, she started to wear a headscarf during her stay in Canada. “There was so much pressure. You know when you are surrounded by Malaysian students, so I just put on a scarf.” Aniza, however, did not wear a headscarf then, something that resulted quarrels with other female students. Her lifestyle in general was harshly criticised by her roommates: There were certain expectations like when I wanted to go to the pub, then they said: ‘Look at her. She is going out at seven o’clock when everybody should be at home.” That kind of thing. So, that’s very much a gender thing again as well and also the expectation that if you are a Malaysian student your priority should be your studies and nothing else. But there are all these friends to be met and UK is very much a pub culture. Everything is about being in the pub. If you go out you go at least to one pub. So, I was comfortable with that because nobody pressured me to drink. So, I could have soft drinks. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

3.4 “I can’t work for a profit-making company anymore” Aniza came back from Great Britain to Malaysia in 1998 shortly after the economic crisis of 1997, because her visa had expired. Actually, she just came back to renew her visa and then return to Great Britain to work there. But because of a tragic incident in her family, she decided to stay in Malaysia. After six months of looking for a job—for her, a long time—she finally found work in an accounting software company. But after only nine months, she resigned. She told me about a conversation with her then future husband, with whom she discussed her doubts: I said to him: ‘I can’t work for a profit-making company anymore because they are only thinking about making money’. I just couldn’t see myself working without

3.4 “I can’t work for a profit-making company anymore”

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having something more than that, it felt just so empty. Then I told him: ‘It would be really nice if I could work for an NGO!’. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

So she answered a job announcement from one of the women’s organisations and started working there in 2000. She started with a one year contract without being an expert on gender issues, as she says. Her family, especially her father, was not very pleased when she started to work in an NGO. This did not correspond to his ideas of a successful professional career, especially because Aniza was the only one of his three children to graduate from university. “That’s why my father had a lot of hope for me in terms of becoming somebody. He had a different definition of success. To him success is very much like earning money and being in the position where you can sign a piece of document over RM 5,000 or RM 10,000.” Aniza succeeded in calming his worries, arguing that because of the bad economic situation, she could not be too choosy with her jobs, and that the work she had performed in her previous job had also not corresponded to her actual qualifications. Like Aniza, the other activists interviewed also position themselves within the ambivalence of prestige, professional, and economic success on the one hand and social engagement and activism on the other. They relate their story of becoming an activist as a process of gradual rejection of economic success in favour of work to which they could attribute more meaning. Most of them started their professional careers in a “profit-making company”, like the majority of their friends did. Amina, for example, had worked as a general manager for two companies, and as a management consultant for both IBM and a prestigious Malaysian Bank, and Ramani started her professional career as a personal assistant in a wholesale company. However, like Aniza who said that her work felt “empty”, they were not satisfied with their work. Amina relates that after having worked her entire life for a profit-making company, she reached a point where she felt a great dissatisfaction with her work that was oriented only towards earning money but not towards “self-satisfaction” and that she felt a great desire to do something “more in life”. She explains her desire for “satisfaction” in the following way: I have been working for most of my life with a profit making company. And then I decided that I want more in life. I asked myself, where could I get this satisfaction with working? When I worked, it was more for the money, but not for self satisfaction. But when I started to join the NGO I could feel this satisfaction. (Amina, SIS activist, 15.07.04)

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For Ramani, it was rather the fact of performing a rather unchallenging job with little own responsibility for which she felt overqualified. Despite her high-level qualifications as a psychologist, she had to accept a job where she rather had inferior tasks: Every morning I had to make coffee for my boss, take down his appointments, and bring in his guests. This was my task and it was quite boring. I started thinking that I had not studied for this. I did something else. And now I’m ending up doing something like this? (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

Like Aniza, the other activists also related that their family and friends did not appreciate their decision to become involved as a volunteer or even to work for an NGO. In many cases, it was especially the break with their parents’ aspirations and ideas of a successful professional career in business or, especially for Malays, in the government sector that caused this disapproval by their families. In Ramani’s case this disapproval was especially strong: So, of course my family did not agree. They said, ‘you can’t really cope with this kind of organisation.’ Even after I joined WAO, I still was harassed by my family for almost six months. They asked me to change the job, ‘We don’t think this job is suitable for you.’ They even started to look for other jobs for me and then they used to call, ‘look, there is some vacancies here, call here and go for the interview.’ Everyday they would harass me and after that, I did tell them once, ‘look, I am enjoying my life here. You know this is what I want. This is what I studied for. I don’t like to be a marketing executive because I did not study for that’. Especially my uncles and aunties they don’t like what I am involved in. To me they just say, ‘Look, you can’t be a successful lady in this kind of organisation. There is no way for you to go up you know and they won’t pay you much.’ Yes, in terms of salary and everything, it would be like the same. Maybe they are a bit materialistic. So, my uncle and my auntie feel that there is no point I am going here. They might think if I join some other field, I might earn more because they all are earning more and they are living very well. So, until now my youngest auntie, she will ask me, ‘Are you still with that organisation?’ So, I don’t want to hurt her heart and I say, ‘Yes, I am still there, I am quite OK.’ And maybe one day I will make her realise that maybe we can put some sense in a head. For me the most important thing is that I am happy with what I am doing. (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

In contrast to her family’s imaginations of a proper workplace for a “successful lady”, which includes upward mobility and a high salary, Ramani chooses to work in an NGO and rejects what she considers to be a “materialistic” world view. The notion of success is intimately linked to financial success, and an understanding of success that is not rooted in financial success seems to be very


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strange for her family. In an economically dynamic society like Malaysia, working in other sectors than “business” meets with incomprehension not only on the part of the parents’ generation but also among their own generation. Fariza, who is employed as a social worker in one of the women’s organisations, especially experienced incomprehension on the part of her friends and peers, who being Malay, work mostly in government service and some in the private sector. Fariza is the only one who works with an NGO: The famous question that they always ask is: ‘You get paid? How much?’ Most of the people think that when you work with an NGO, you are not paid and that you are just a volunteer there. I said, ‘Of course I get paid according to my qualification.’ You can see their shocked face. And then also, like sometimes my friends said, ‘Why you want to work in that kind of organisation, there are no benefits at all; you just get your basic salary. There are no special things for you. It is not like being a government servant, where you have this benefit and that benefit.’ So, I said, ‘It is not the question why I’m working here. I’m working here because I can see the wonderful things that WAO is doing. Because WAO works in the real world. We cope with the problems that exist everyday everywhere.’ (Fariza, WAO activist, 10.08.04)

As my data has shown, salaries in the NGO sector are not lower than the salaries the same person would earn in the government sector, but indeed lower than a salary in the private business sector. Interviews with NGO staff revealed that women’s and human rights organisations are very concerned about remuneration for their employees, paying them on par with the government or even somewhere in-between the government sector and the private/business sectors. However, when it comes to career development, the disadvantages of working in the NGO sector are more relevant because it offers only a limited potential for upward mobility and very few choices for career development as all occupations in NGOs are limited in scope when compared to other employment sectors. Most NGOs need only one “executive director”, which is equivalent to Head of Department in the government or a Chief Executive Officer in private sector. Also, the other two types of occupation that require persons with at least a university degree are limited: NGOs only need certain types and only a limited number of “Programme Managers” and “Programme Officers”. In addition, regardless of the employment level, there are hardly any perks or benefits like housing or car loans as provided in the government sectors and also in the private sector. These benefits play an important role in choosing one’s future employer, as the comments from Fariza’s friends indicated. In conclusion, one can say that there are certain disadvantages for young highly qualified women who work in the NGO sector even though the salary scale may be comparable.

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However, in the perception of their family and friends, these economic disadvantages are overemphasised, and the NGO image of not being an appropriate workplace and not being in accordance with middle-class ideas of career and social upward mobility is very strong. The strength of this negative image of NGOs is, however, related not only to economic aspects but also to an uneasiness with political activities that is deeply rooted in the milieu of Asian middle classes in general and the Malaysian middle class in particular (Gerke 1995; Embong 2001; Saravanamuttu 2001; Horstmann 2002). Talking about her family’s disapproval of her work in an NGO, Ramani also mentions that her extended family could be afraid that she might draw a connection from her work in the NGO to her everyday life and her family relations: I can understand it psychologically, maybe they are thinking that I might know more than what they do and then I might start to question. Because my family was ruled by men. Always the king will be the man. For anything we have to consult, ‘Do you think this is OK? Do you think we can do this or that?’ If the man says yes, then everything is fine and one can do it. (Ramani, WAO activist, 04.07.04)

Also in Jessica’s case, her parents were not very pleased by her activities with Amnesty International. The economic aspect played a role, but the most important aspect that caused their uneasiness with their daughter’s NGO involvement was the political one. Although they never actively tried to stop her from participating in the movement, her parents’ disapproval of her work is very clear to her: Coming from a middle-class family, we were pretty much the type of family that didn’t want to rock the boat. Things are all right, we know that certain things are wrong, but that’s all right. Let’s just leave it as is. As long as we have certain things, which would be a place to live, a stable job, looking at the essentials; as long as we have those, then it was pretty much all right. So they weren’t very happy when they found out about what I was doing. In terms of getting myself involved with NGOs and other organisations and movements in Malaysia, their mentality was always to be on the cautious side. I also know a few friends who did get involved and after that pulled out as well. Some because of family concerns. Most simply because they didn’t feel that it was something that they needed to do in life. They were pretty much like, ‘Yeah, it’s nice to volunteer but maybe I help SPCA instead.’ (Jessica, AI activist, 12.09.04)

Referring to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), Jessica distances herself in a very ironic way from the consumerist and apolitical middle-class lifestyle of her family and some of the former Amnesty International volunteers. In contrast, she promotes a life project that prioritises a


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critical view of society over the pursuit of economic stability, political and social conformity, and the practice of ‘rocking the boat’ over putting up with social inequalities (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). But not all activists distance themselves so clearly from the career-oriented and apolitical orientations of their parents and friends. Some activists, of course, have also incorporated these standards themselves, as the story Fariza tells about her first day at WAO reveals. Although she distanced herself very strongly during the interview from the career- and consumption-oriented lifestyle of her friends who only chose their job based on the salary, Fariza also told me how shocked she was when she first visited the WAO office, which did not correspond to her dreams of working for a “big company”. The WAO office is located in a normal residential area with private houses and has a rather unpretentious appearance. In order not to attract much attention as the office and the secret shelter run by the organisation are both located in the same building, there are no signs outside the house which would indicate that these are the premises of one of the most active women’s organisations in Malaysia. For me, it was even difficult to find the office the first time I went there. For Fariza, this modest appearance was a great disappointment the first time she went for her job interview: The first time when I came for the interview, when I first time stepped into the office, I thought ‘Oh, my God. I don’t think I can work here’. I thought this is the first and my last time to be here. Because when I got the call for the interview, I imagined that it was a nice office, a big building that had a car park. You know like when we study, we dream about working with a big company. So, when I read about the Women’s Aid Organisation, my first impression was ‘This must be a big company’. But, the first time when I came, I had to ring the bell and I had to wait outside. It was just like an ordinary house and one of the residents opened the gate for me. So, when I saw the environment my impression was that I would not have a good place to work. But, then when I joined, I found out that this was a suitable place for me. (Fariza, WAO activist, 10.08.04)

For Fariza, it was a difficult process to balance her “dreams” of working in a big company with her ambitions of doing a job where she would be able to help people and to “tell society about gender equality” as she had stated before. Recognising that she could not have both things at the same time, she opted for working with the Women’s Aid Organisation. This was despite the rather small and cramped office which she has to share with seven other social workers and the incomprehension of her family and peers who still uphold the “dream to work for a big company”. To work in an NGO initiates a process of reflection on the activists’ own biography and social background and also a significant break

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with their parents’ ideas of economic success. Activists are trying to renegotiate the concepts of ‘success’ and ‘satisfaction’, thereby creating new lifestyles and constituting new social spaces. 3.5 Developing everyday life techniques of reflexivity Reflecting on their childhood, the young activists describe their initial experiences with the gendered division of labour, with different spaces allocated to girls and boys, men and women, with rules and restrictions concerning the interaction of the two sexes, and how this gendered knowledge is transferred from one generation to the other from mother to daughter. The young women emphasise that these reflections on the construction and the effects of ‘difference’ in their families were central to their self-understanding as activists. Their reflections on difference are based on their own perspectives of being ‘daughters’ and ‘sisters’ who are subject to family hierarchies and who negotiate their room for manoeuvre within these hierarchies. In particular, the experience and the rejection of gender ‘difference’ play a central part in the young activists’ narratives. Aniza formulated her basic uneasiness with ‘difference’ in a very clear way: “When I was small it ticked me off that the treatment of girls and boys is so different.” Difference was experienced in a wide range of situations and dimensions as discrimination. Apart from the narrative of experiencing and aspiring to overcome ‘difference’, it is the narrative of experiencing ‘weakness’ and gaining strength that the young female activists construct. Moreover, the narrative of ‘weakness’ has several biographically rooted dimensions, centring around specific institutions of the gender order, such as the Sharia court system, family hierarchies, and the situation of women-headed households. In Amina’s account of her experiences with the Sharia court system, the narrative of experiencing ‘weakness’ and gaining strength and negotiation power is particularly strong. As shown so far, the experiences of ‘difference’ and ‘weakness’, but, at the same time, the processes of overcoming ‘difference’ and gaining strength, are essential parts of the biographical narratives of these female activists. On the one hand, they relate situations and events where their room for manoeuvre was severely restricted, situations where they were forced into a pre-given social and gender order based on gender difference, gendered construction of morality, and gendered division of labour that restricted their choices and where they felt discriminated against. These were situations of social and financial marginalisation, of stigma and inequality in decision-making processes; situations where they felt “like nothing”, “weak”, and as if they “couldn’t do anything” (Amina),

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where they had to make disadvantageous compromises or where they felt “controlled” by others, for example their family (Ramani) or their co-students (Noraini, Aniza). Especially the institution of Malaysian family law, be it Islamic or civil family law, is seen as a source of this discrimination, because it provides “no safety” and “no real protection” as Noraini and Amina put it in a nutshell. The women draw a picture of their society and culture as constantly putting women into weaker positions. On the other hand, the incidents described by the activists are testimonies of overcoming this difference and weakness by aspiring to equality and gaining strength. Instead of resigning themselves to the restriction of their room for manoeuvre, their narratives contain multiple sites of resistance. Instead of accepting the decisions made by others, the young women develop strategies to enlarge their room for manoeuvre. They are “strong” in order to “survive in such a society” (Dina), “persistent” in order to “push things” in the way they want (Amina), and “independent” in pursuing their interests and defending their rights (Ramani). The activists develop an identity based on the concepts of gender equality and female strength. Within these complex processes of the negotiation of gender relations, specific reflexive techniques play a significant role. The process of becoming an activist is described by the young women as a process of increasing critical analysis and reflexive alienation towards the taken-for-granted gender order. During this process, they develop a set of everyday life techniques of reflexivity and of formulating dissent. As the quotations and passages from the narratives have shown, the young women do not conform to the gender order they encounter in their everyday life. They “hated it”, “could not stand it”, and “rejected” it, like Nazia. The differences “ticked them off”, like Aniza, who says that she started “questioning” the things she had learned from her mother, and it “annoys” them like Ida. Ida stated her disagreement thus: “I realised that something was wrong somewhere. Why the hell is it that women keep on being second class. I could not take that any longer”. At the core of this reflexive alienation stands the practice of “questioning” in a sense of de-plausibilising and challenging the taken-for-granted social and, of course, gender order (Schütz, Luckmann 1973). In Aniza’s case this practice is especially clear: There were a lot of things that I started to question. Why are girls and boys different, and why do they not allow me the same things as boys? And also the things that my mother brought down on me, I couldn’t understand. I questioned it and of course when I asked her about it, she would just say ‘Oh, that’s the way it is.’ And I thought ‘Why?’ (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

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Noraini also distances herself from the construct of reality she encounters in her life-world by making it an object of analysis and inquiry: Some of the things we were taught, like ‘Women do this, women do that…’ I found ridiculous. I thought, why are we supposed to listen hundred percent to our husband? And when we are married to this guy he can just tell us what to do and we are bound to follow his words. Otherwise, we would not go into heaven, so to speak. I think this is ridiculous. I mean, they are just saying what women should do without giving us the opportunity to actually explain what we want to do. Well, I asked myself, why do all these things happen to women? (Noraini, Amnesty International activist, 07.09.04)

Using such everyday life techniques of observation and analysis, the young female activists develop an objectifying perspective toward their own society. All of the young women presented here share this distanced critical reflexivity towards their society. Their narratives reveal a process of increasing reflexivity, where they describe moments of doubt and moments of insecurity, moments of distancing and ‘othering’ themselves from the “normal” environment they encounter in their everyday life-world, and moments of silent questioning and openly uttered protest. An important step in this process of negotiation is the analysis of family relations and school experiences—the first interfaces with institutions and the state. Their narratives also show a transformation of power from the feeling of being oppressed by the power of men to the will to enter women’s organisations and to exert power themselves. This understanding of power aims at transforming cultural and societal institutions (Müller 2000) and is central for female agency. Questioning and challenging the taken-for-granted social order, especially the gender order in the true sense of the word, by asking “Why is this happening to women?” or “Why are things arranged like this?” implies that other gender orders could be possible as well. Talking about the interrelation of internalisation, identity, and social structure, Berger and Luckmann (1967) highlight the question “Who am I?” as the basic question by which actors are able to develop contrasting definitions to an interactively constructed social reality. As the interview passages suggest, for the female activists, it is not so much the question about their own identity but rather the question “Why is society or reality the way it is?” or “Is reality right the way it is?” that challenges the taken-for-granted status of the gender order as it is observed by the young women, and that leads to the development of an identity which is no longer an “absolute representation of reality” (Berger, Luckmann 2001) but a contrasting imagination of reality and a contrasting identity. Through this process of negotiating gender relations and questioning the plausibility of tradition and


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culture, the young activists develop an everyday life concept of social transformation. On the one hand, this type of reflexivity is based in the reflexive regulation that is intrinsic to all human agency and action (Giddens 1984). But it also goes beyond this basic self-reflexivity of knowledgeable social actors, since the frame of reference for this reflection is not only the concrete actions of social actors in their direct environment but also the wider societal context such as gender relations. The reflexivity developed by social activists is usually related to a societal level, that is, their reflectivity also includes those rules that are usually part of the taken-for-granted world and do not belong to the stock of knowledge that is part of everyday communication and reflection. The sort of reflexivity developed by the activists is typical of a critical public which problematises, as Habermas states, the “informal or non-public opinions, those attitudes and assessments that are taken for granted within a culture and that make up the lifeworld constituting the context and ground of public communication” (Habermas 1997, 440). The activists however, try to discover these rules and to convert nonreflected context into public issues. This type of reflexivity is closely linked to Giddens’ concept of reflexive modernisation (Giddens 1990). However, activist reflexivity shows that reflexivity is not restricted to the field of sciences, as Giddens argues, but that it is deeply embedded into everyday life practices and interactions. Beck also argues that the fundamental loss of taken-for-granted and collective sources of meaning is a basic feature of modern society. Modernity, Beck says, opens up the actor-structure dichotomy in favour of individual choice. “The more societies are modernised, the more agents (subjects) acquire the ability to reflect on the social conditions of their existence and to change them in a way” (Beck 1994, 174). In Beck’s approach, modernisation means the loss of taken-for-granted collective sources of meaning; it sets people free to reflect on tradition and society. Within a globalised world, however, such reflective techniques are globalised within multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 1999) and serve as techniques of transcultural interaction (Stauth 2000). Once having started questioning the taken-for-granted character of the gender order, many of the young women encountered heavy resistance against their re-interpretation and re-definition of gender relations in their everyday life. As a consequence, they developed a feeling of being isolated within their family, friends, and at school with their ideas about gender relations and social change. Like Aniza, who was fobbed off by her mother with the sentence “That’s the way it is”, who did not get any further explanations from her about the differences in the responsibilities at home, and who experienced social pressure to change her lifestyle when she started to wear Islamic dress, the other activists also experienced taboos regarding communication and social practices and non-

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negotiable rules of the gender order. Ramani had even formulated these social rules that were not open to negotiation in the form of a quasi-doctrine and other sentences that she had heard several times by her grandmothers. Ramani also used other phrases with law-like character, such as “In our culture they say, ‘Women should be in the kitchen and men will go out to work and to earn money. Women take care of their family’”, which give an initial impression of how intimately linked the constructions of gender and of culture are, and how unusual it was to question such doctrines. This isolated position becomes clear in the use of the personal pronoun in Ramani’s formulation “in our culture, they say ...”. She is obviously part of that culture, but the rules are made by others. For Aniza, Nazia, and Maiza, this also brought a feeling of isolation and powerlessness. Nazia, as the youngest in her family and thus the lowest in the chain of power, just said: “I was the youngest, so what could I do? And also later I didn’t really have the chance to share this with anyone”. Likewise Maiza, a prominent SIS activist, highlighted the fact of being alone with her perspectives on society and religion, be it within the Muslim majority or among her nonMuslim friends, whose lack of understanding for the issues that she was worried about is emphasised in the following quotation: When I came back from Australia, I did not think that anyone would understand what I was thinking. I lived in Australia for 10 years. And so I came back and thought this cannot be true. You know because I have a different conception of what it means being a Muslim. And the one that I saw here is so awful; it’s so negative. That God is waiting to punish you. I don’t believe in that kind of God. I think God has better things to do than waiting for me to punish me. I have a different conception of that, and I had a different conception of what Muslim women were meant to be. And I really realised that I couldn’t speak to many people. Because when I spoke to non-Muslim women, they could understand what it is being a woman, but they could not understand what it means being a Muslim. Because the laws of that country govern you in a way that is so frightening. So they don’t understand sometimes how difficult it is. If you (talking to AS) were a man and we were sitting like now […] this would be already breaking the law. Because we are in a room together. That’s the fatwa. The close proximity law. And I’m often aware when my male friends come. Now I am a little bit relaxed because I know the terrain now, and a lot of people know me here. Even when my friends come, I leave the doors wide open. So a non-Muslim woman would never understand that. They might go on an intellectual level: ‘Oh yes! Of course.’ But they would never understand how internalised it is. Watching your back every time you do something. Watching your back when you are waiting for a cab, watching your back when you’re eating in a cafe. You might have done something illegitimate. There is the whole fear of surveillance. (Maiza, SIS activist, 25.03.04)


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From the narration of their own experiences, the women quickly move on to generalised arguments on the nature of their culture, their tradition, or religion, putting their own individual story into a broader context of historical and social processes not only in Malaysia but also globally. Nazia talked about the Islamic wave, Jessica about the political organisation of ethnicity in Malaysia, Ramani about what Indian culture is supposed to be, and Aniza talked of universal rights for men and women. This, of course, is a degree of reflexivity that has to be located within their identity as activists and not within their childhood. It leads to the argument that being an activist implies an ambivalent process of disembedding and re-embedding everyday life experiences and practices and of combining different sources of knowledge. On the one hand, biographical experiences of discrimination, which all of the activists have had to different degrees, are disembedded from their everyday context by the activist throughout the life course and integrated into more abstract discussions on specific social and cultural institutions. Biographical knowledge is combined with knowledge that the women have acquired through their participation within the women’s movement. Although all of the women reported situations and experiences of discrimination in their childhood and youth, the statement that they did not know anything about gender and women issues when they started to work for one of the women’s organisation was quite common. All of them highlighted the acquisition of new knowledge and insights as one of the most intriguing experiences of being involved with the women’s movement or working for a women’s organisation. In that sense, the biographies of the activists reveal how the slogan that ‘the private is the political’ (Pateman 1989, 131), which was formulated by the feminist women’s movement, is put into practice in a biographical perspective. Feminist scholars (Hausen 1990; Knapp, Wetterer eds. 1992; Müller 1993; Knapp 1999) have highlighted how supposedly private matters such as family life are regulated politically through a multitude of public institutions and interventions such as laws concerning “rape and abortion, by the status of ‘wife’, by policies on child-care and the allocation of welfare benefits, and the sexual division of labour in the home and workplace” (Pateman 1989, 131). The trajectories of the activists are thus part of the re-negotiation of the relation of the private and public sphere using a discursive framework provided by the feminist and women’s movement. An essential part of the knowledge that they did not possess before and that they acquired in a “high-learning curve” was certainly a new language with new concepts coming from feminist discourse such as gender equality and empowerment but also discourses on tradition and patriarchy as sources of women’s subordination. The integration of these two repertoires of knowledge—biographical knowledge and feminist knowledge— takes place through re-embedding the newly acquired discourses into a bio-

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graphical perspective and through the retrospective reconstruction of one’s life stories in the light of this new knowledge, concepts, and discourses. The prominent role of concepts of gender equality and women’s rights as opposed to difference and discrimination in the narrations of the young women are indications for the process of re-embedding and localising such concepts which are used on a global scale. From such a retrospective perspective, the narrations of the activists are an attempt to politicise their own biographies and hence the private sphere. Everyday life experiences such as playing with the neighbour’s child, conflicts between boys and girls or between different ethnic groups at school, conflicts between daughters and mothers or daughters and fathers, or divorce are redefined in the process of making their private sphere a public one. Choosing the point of view of women’s life, the perspective of women, is an adequate instrument for gaining fundamental insight into both the private and public worlds and, above all, the shifting boundaries between the two spheres (Showstack Sasoon 1989, 13). It produces knowledge about the transformation and interlinkages between the private and the public. Researching the women’s movement and the life of female activists adds an additional aspect to this connection, offering new insights into what happens if the ‘natural’ state of these connections is questioned, and how it is questioned by women’s capacity and creativity. Seen from this perspective, not only the mutual connectedness and constitution of the different spheres become evident, as argued in feminist writings (Pateman 1989; Showstack Sasoon 1989; Meehan eds. 1995; Fraser 1997), but also the process is revealed by which such theories are put into practice through transforming everyday forms of dissent into collective social movements and through politicising the private sphere.


Part Two Inside the World of NGOs: Constituting Female Counterpublics

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4.1 Celebrating International Women’s Day in Kuala Lumpur

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4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms: Women’s Organisations in Kuala Lumpur 4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms 4.1 Celebrating International Women’s Day in Kuala Lumpur On the first weekend of March 2004, I attended the celebration of International Women’s Day in Kuala Lumpur. The celebration took place in Kuala Lumpur’s biggest shopping centre, the Mid Valley Megamall, as an event called ‘A Girl’s Day Out—It Starts With Respect’. The event was hosted by the popular television programme 3R, a programme targeting young women in Malaysia. On the official website of 3R, which stands for ‘Relax, Respect, Respond’, the programme presents itself as taking up ‘women’s issues’ and as employing staff members who are engaged in different NGOs. For the first time in the history of International Women’s Day in Malaysia, it was organised not only by the two oldest feminist women’s organisations—the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) and the All Women’s Action Society (AWAM)—but also by human rights organisations such as the local branch of Amnesty International (AI), the Malaysian Aids Council (MAC), and the Sisters in Islam (SIS), an organisation belonging to the current wave of Muslim feminism. The event took place in the Exhibition Centre of the gigantic Megamall, normally reserved for commercial exhibitions such as an ‘Indian Wedding Exhibition’. The whole event addresses a rather young public, especially young girls, and is centred on the idea of ‘respect’ and girl power, self-empowerment and self-defence. The theme of girl’s and women’s right to a safe environment was chosen in relation to a recent increase in crimes against women. The joint press statement of all the organisations involved in this IWD refers to this issue: Sadly, with the many brutal incidents of sexual violence highlighted in the press lately, women and girls have become afraid of going out to public places and there are more restrictions facing women’s activities and movements. We believe that women in Malaysia have the right to feel safe not only in the home but also in public spaces and should be able to have the same freedom as men to move around and participate in events and activities around them. Our theme for this year 'A Girl’s Day Out—It Begins with Respect’ emphasises this need to create a safer environment for women to be equal members of society. (Women's Aid Organisation et al. 2004) The announcement for the event on the 3R website highlights the combination of fun and seriousness:

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4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms If you are a woman, and you've ever felt afraid or found yourself in a potentially dangerous situation, or even been a victim of crime, A Girl’s Day Out seeks to address your safety concerns. With self-empowerment as the key, this event will showcase simple and effective protection tips for girls regardless of age and size. […] Conducted in a fun and interactive way by the 3R hosts, this is an event not to be missed! WAO will also be presenting a fun way of engaging with a serious issue—come join us as we put male celebrities to task on handling the challenges of housework! (3R 2004) On the stage, in front of dozens of enthusiastically participating girls, the female moderators of 3R are conducting a show with one performance after the other. These include performances by some of the most popular local singers and bands, especially girl bands, demonstrations of self-defence techniques, and a cheerleader contest. During the action ‘Men at Work’, male TV and movie celebrities have to perform a variety of household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers. The information booths of the women’s organisation, situated in the centre of the hall, are surrounded by commercial promotion and advertising booths of companies such as the Body Shop, Kotex, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, and Maggi. Taking a break from their shopping tour, hundreds of teenagers—mostly girls but also boys—and young families squeeze themselves between the information and commercial booths. At the booth of the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), Ramani, the young Indian-Malaysian volunteer who was introduced in the previous chapter, is explaining to interested visitors the ‘cycle of violence’ and how this cycle can be broken. Women who suffer from domestic violence are caught in this cycle in which violence, the feeling of guilt, the silent suffering, and the social isolation of women reinforce each other. Doing so, she gets into discussions with some of the male visitors, who asks whether the WAO is a feminist organisation. The activist starts to explain that she would not call herself a feminist, because she does not like any classification and stereotyping of people. She neither wants to be classified in ethnic terms nor as a feminist. When I look at a Chinese, Malay, or Indian, I don’t want to make a classification. The moment I allow myself to classify, I am a chauvinist. And I don’t like chauvinism. I want to fight for women’s rights, so just call me a women’s rights fighter, but don’t call me a feminist. The question is also what you mean by feminism. Why don’t you talk about strong women, women fighting for women’s rights? Yes, we fight for women’s rights, some of us are feminists, and some aren’t. So what is the difference? After the event, she explained to me that she argues like this because a lot of men feel intimidated by the word feminism and do not like feminists, because they think they are strong-minded. She explained that opting for a more neutral view would open up people to dialogue.

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At the booth of the All Women’s Action Society (AWAM), Maiza, who was introduced in Chapter 3, invites the visitors of the ‘Girl’s Day Out’ to participate in a game of skill. Most participants find it extremely difficult to master this game which consists in drawing a geometric figure while looking in a mirror. Maiza explains that this feeling of being stuck, of being lost, and having everything turned upside down is a common experience that women have in their everyday lives, especially when they are survivors of sexualised violence. At the booth of Sisters in Islam (SIS), Ida, Amina, and Nazia (see Chapter 3) are motivating young women to participate in a poll. They are asked to answer the following questions: Should there be a law regulating women’s dress? Should a man, despite his precarious economic situation, be allowed to take a second wife? Could a man beating his wife be justified under any circumstances? And finally: Should a Muslim woman be able to get a divorce without the consent of the husband? Over 300 persons participated in the polling. On the second day of the two-day event at the mall, the results were posted at the Sisters in Islam booth. 74 % of the participants rejected a legal dress code for women, 85 % said that a man should only engage in polygynous marriage when he has the economic capacities to support two wives, 58 % answered yes to the question whether there were any justifications for a man beating his wife, and 85 % said that they would not agree to polygynous marriage themselves. Young girls were also invited to write poems on women’s rights. SIS also organised a ‘Pop-Quiz’ on stage with questions on famous human rights and women’s rights activists but also on famous Muslim women in religious scriptures and history. The booth was also used to advise women on Islamic family law. One woman approached Nazia, the SIS activist, reporting the case of a friend who got married to a Muslim Malaysian in the UK. After giving birth to three children, she found out that her husband was already married to another woman. Now she wanted a divorce. When the woman asked what could be done in such a case, Nazia told her to come to the office and contact the legal officers who were specialists in this area. At the Amnesty International (AI) booth, Asha Gill, a shooting star in the entire Southeast Asian media landscape, is asking visitors to put their coloured handprints on a big poster as a sign opposing violence against women. This was part of the global campaign “Stop violence against women” which AI started in March 2004. Asha Gill is one of the most prominent spokespersons of AI in Malaysia. Raina, one of the volunteers, is distributing leaflets which are part of the global tool kit of the campaign: leaflets with information about violence against women in the US, Mexico, Columbia, Swaziland, and the Philippines. Visitors who are interested in becoming AI members are brought to a little table at the back. Handing over the membership documents, Jessica, who is in charge of the ‘Violence Against Women’ campaign, is also distributing some leaflets on the human rights situation of female migrant workers in Malaysia. Only after five minutes of small talk, in which I expressed my interest in AI’s work in Malaysia, did she address the overall political and human rights situation in Malaysia, taking the imprisonment of the former vice minister Anwar Ibrahim and the restricted civil rights as examples. This reference to

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4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms the current Malaysian political situation is, however, neither represented graphically nor mentioned anywhere at the booth. At the booth of the Malaysian Aids Council (MAC), Marina Mahathir, the former prime minister’s daughter and president of the Malaysian Aids Council, is distributing leaflets and brochures about the living conditions of people with HIV in Malaysia. Beyond her engagement in the MAC, Marina Mahathir is a prominent figure in Malaysian civil society and an important hinge between civil society and government institutions. Since 1997, she has been a member of the Women’s Advisory Council on Women and Development (NACIWID). This council was established by the government in 1976 as part of the process of the first UN women’s decade 1970 –1980. Her presence, and also the short visit of her mother, resulted in significant media coverage of the event.

The organisations which participated in the International Women’s Day celebration at the Megamall in 2004 are at the core of what most of the literature refers to as ‘the new women’s movement’ in contemporary Malaysia: the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), the All Women’s Action Society (AWAM), and Sisters in Islam (SIS). This movement consists of several organisations which emerged in the early 1980s under the influence of the UN’s Women’s Decade and declared themselves as ‘feminist’. Nonetheless, in 1984, none of the organisations present at the IWD were mentioned in an article on women’s organisations by Nik Safiah Karim, the long-time president of the National Advisory Council on Women in Development (Karim 1984). Either they did not exist at the time the article was published, or they could still be ignored by the state. Today, however, this is inconceivable. Understanding events as focal points of spatially and temporally compressed social interaction, this celebration of the International Women’s Day 2004 in Kuala Lumpur can be seen as a magnifying glass for some of the distinctive features of the urban Malaysian women’s movement. The event stands (1) for a specific form of strategic networking and division of labour between partly ethnically and religiously defined women’s organisations. This division is the result of the ambivalent processes of negotiating women’s rights in multi-ethnic Malaysian society. It points (2) to the specific focus on the issue of violence against women or VAW, as it is abbreviated in the international women’s movement language, as an entry point into the public debate about gender equality. It indicates (3) how the gradually growing embeddedness into discursive spaces of a global women’s movement leads to a transformation of local practices in the sense of the emergence of a more self-consciously articulated transformative approach (Kabeer 1994). And (4) the event shows how this transformative approach is based on new forms of activism in the public

4.2 Negotiating women’s rights in a multi-ethnic space

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sphere, namely, the popularisation of feminist approaches through a combination of consumerism and feminist activism. 4.2 Negotiating women’s rights in a multi-ethnic space The ethnic structuration of the contemporary urban Malaysian women’s movement—with a special organisation for the issue of Muslim women’s rights besides other women’s organisations possessing an explicitly multi-ethnic selfunderstanding—is the result of very ambivalent processes of situating feminism and women’s movements in a postcolonial multi-ethnic society. Women’s movements and women’s involvement in politics in Malaysia have a long history with very different forms of connecting and institutionalising ethnic and gender identities. They range from ethnicity-based female nationalism, across consociational politics in a multi-ethnic framework, to cosmopolitan feminism within the context of identity politics (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006). There is a broad body of research on women’s political participation and the Malaysian women’s movement (Dancz 1987; Lai Suat Yan 2003; Stivens 2003; Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006). However, most of these publications focus on the participation of women in the formal, predominantly male political sphere including political parties, and have a quite narrow definition of ‘the political’; they do not take into account alternative female spaces where gender relations are negotiated. They ignore the “politics of the small things” (Goldfarb 2006) in the realm of everyday life in which women are engaged.17 By doing this, most of these publications tend to fall into dichotomies of inclusion to and exclusion from the public sphere, of participation or non-participation of women in politics without, however, analysing the gendered negotiation processes taking place within and between existing female spaces. Nonetheless, the historical perspective on female activism and the women’s movement in Malaysia offered in the following paragraphs will be based on this body of knowledge, as it provides detailed insights into the subject of women’s movement and the public sphere. Ng, Mohamad and Tan highlight the importance of the nationalist anticolonial struggle against Japanese occupation (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 17-19)18 during World War II and the subsequent British re-occupation for the 17

Dancz, for example, did not include spaces other than the political parties in her research. Cecilia Ng, Maznah Mohamad, and Tan Beng Hui are among the most important feminist activist-scholars in Malaysia. Cecilia Ng, who holds a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology, was previously an Associate Professor at Universiti Putra Malaysia and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. The sociologist Maznah Mohamad is currently Associ18

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formation of politically active and vocal women and their involvement in the formal political sphere. They argue that in pre-war Malaya, women’s presence in the public sphere and political participation had remained rather weak. Chinese women are said not to have played a substantial role in the traditional Chinese clan associations, secret societies, guilds, or merchant associations where leadership was reserved exclusively for men. Neither were Indian women visible in the pre-war public affairs of their ethnic associations such as the Central Indian Association of Malaya (CIAM). The only major exception to this invisibility in the public sphere was a small movement of urban educated Malay women, most of them schoolteachers, who were engaged in a campaign for the education of Malay women from 1935 to 1939. This is a fact that Ng, Mohamad, and Tan explain by the relatively greater degree of freedom of Malay women due to a more egalitarian gender order in adat, the traditional Malay customary law (see also Karim 1992). The Japanese occupation, however, it is argued, dramatically changed this political landscape and initiated the first significant wave of women’s politicisation in Malaysia. On the one hand, World War II and the Japanese occupation resulted in a transformation of the gendered structuration of economy, as Dancz argues (1987), although with very different results for the different ethnic groups. For Malay women, the Japanese occupation is said to have resulted in greater participation in the formal economy and the administrative sector, due to the fact that the Japanese administration encouraged Malay women to fill in the gaps resulting from male participation in war-related activities (Dancz 1987, 27). For Indian women, the occupation meant an increasing participation in the public sphere and a “political awakening” (Dancz 1987, 70) as well. This was based on the Japanese policies intended to weaken British power and influence in Asia through the support of Indian nationalist movements such as the Indian National Army (INA). Over 1,000 Malayan women of Indian descent joined the allfemale Rhani of Jhansi Regiment of the INA which was set up by Subash Chandrah Bose in 1943. One of them was Rassammah Bhupalan who was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, in 1927 and who, along with other Malayan Indian women, went to Burma at the age of 16 with the first contingent of the female regiment in order to fight for the independence of India from the British Empire. Later, she became one of the founding personalities of a post-independence women’s movement. In contrast to Malay and Indian women, Chinese women are said to ate Professor of Development Studies at the School of Social Sciences, University of Science Malaysia (USM) and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Both of them have a long trajectory of involvement in different women’s organisations. Tan Beng Hui is a trained political economist and economic historian and is one of the leading activists of the International Women’s Rights Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP).


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have suffered most from the occupation, due to the fact that China was one of the enemies of Japan, and, as a result, Chinese settlers all over Asia were perceived as belonging to an inimical force. Executions of alleged Chinese communists were not rare (Dancz 1987; Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006). On the other hand, Ng, Mohamad, and Tan (2006) argue that especially the experience of changing colonial powers––from British to Japanese rule in 1941 and back to British rule in 1945––was a major stimulus for the politicisation of ethnically defined associations, especially Malay, and the formation of a nationalist anti-colonial independence movement. Such a movement had not existed prior to Japanese occupation. “The invasion signalled the end of the old order of unquestioned obedience and loyalty to the European ruler” (Dancz 1987, 71). Dancz stresses, however, that it was not the end to the clear framework of ethnically defined boundaries through which anti-colonial movements in pre-independence Malaya including female political activism were shaped. In contrast to earlier migrations, which were absorbed into Malayan cultural and religious cosmos, Chinese and Indian migrants––who had arrived mainly in the late 19th and early 20th century during colonial times–– remained within socially and culturally relatively distinctive and stable communities without mixing with the local population (Dancz 1987, 3). Indeed, within the first phases of anti-colonial movements shortly after World War II, these boundaries became even stronger due to the negotiations over citizenship and the construction of the nation state. It was not national unity but rather the Malay fear of losing privileges from colonial times which inspired nationalist movements. For Malays, nationalist mobilisation after 1946 mainly took place within the leftist Malay Nationalist Party (MNP), which was banned in 1948, and also the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). The same nationalistethnic drive was true for the Chinese political movements and led to the formation of the Malayan Chinese Association in 1949. This body was dominated by the urban Chinese business and trading elite. It was also true for the Indian political movements. The Malayan Indian Congress was formed in 1946. However, political parties or movements that tried to foster political mobilisation across ethnic boundaries did exist, such as the Independence of Malaya Party and the Pan-Malayan Labour Party, but they failed to attract voters and create a stable political basis. Female participation, according to the authors above, became a specific feature of this newly emerging independence movement, and women were strongly integrated into these ethno-nationalist identity constructions and political structures. Women of different ethnic groups, however, became politicised and organised in culturally and historically very segregated and distinctive social spaces within their respective ethnic communities. That is, they organised within

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the subordinate women’s wings of the ethnically defined parties, and were based on very different concepts of nationalism (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 17). At that time, there was no intent and no possibility of building up a multi-ethnic women’s movement based on a common gender identity rather than on ethnic affiliation (Othman 1998, 171; Mohamad 2002a, 219). According to Dancz’s analysis (1987, 84-86), it was the nationalist protests in 1945 against British plans to install a new Malayan Union (MU) with a central political body and equal citizenship rights to Malay and non-Malay, which brought Malay women into the male-dominated public sphere. A multitude of nationalist women’s groups were formed all over the country, thousands of women participated in processions of public protest, and women also acted as notable speakers at public protests against the Malayan Union. The Malayan Union was rejected by the majority of the Malays because it weakened the position of the traditional Malay rulers and the autonomy of the individual states and also granted citizenship to non-Malays who were not born in Malaya (Dancz 1987, 85). As in other independence movements, specific ‘women’s issues’ were not the basis of women’s political engagement, but rather a gender-neutral concept of independence. The two female political organisations for Malay women that emerged out of these protests were both attached as women’s wings to Malay political parties and served as a constitutive space for female Malay political participation. First, the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS) was created in 1946 by the leftist MNP and was the first distinct women’s wing in Malaya and thus the cradle for a whole generation of female Malay political activists. After the banning of the party, these activists continued their political trajectories in other Malay-defined political parties such as UMNO and PAS. Second, the Kaum Ibu UMNO (Mother’s Movement) had emanated from a diversity of Malay women’s groups engaged in nationalist activities which were then unified in 1947 under the women’s wing of UMNO. At that time, women of Chinese and Indian origins still maintained a strong transnational orientation towards their homelands, and their nationalist political activism was more shaped by and directed towards the political landscapes and struggles of their home countries than towards Malaya (Dancz 1987, xv). Women of Chinese descent were mainly active in the female wings of the Communist Party of Malaya and also in the anarchist movement (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006), but were mainly discouraged from participation in party politics during the repressive years of the so-called Emergency that followed the communist rebellion in 1948 and only increased the general mistrust of the state and formal political institutions. In 1953, the women’s wing of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) was formed. Indian women, however, continued to be oriented towards Indian independence. Dancz points to the interesting fact


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that, despite Indian women’s impressive participation even in the armed antiBritish struggle during World War II, they remained surprisingly silent in the post-war years. The Malaysian Indian Party (MIC) did not create a separate national women’s wing, but introduced a quota for women at the local and state executive level. Local women’s sections were formed solely in Kuala Lumpur, and even this section did not last more than five years (Dancz 1987, 104). Dancz argues that, within this phase of nationalist politicisation, politically active women in the women’s section did raise specific female issues, such as education, literacy, early marriage, divorce, etc., but that these issues remained rather secondary, since, regardless of their ethnic background, women’s wings were assigned only supportive roles in male political activities. For the Kaum Ibu, this meant “to strengthen UMNO as a Malay party, to oppose the Malayan Union, and afterwards, to push for an independent Malaya that would maintain the Malay domination in political life” (Dancz 1987, 100). Kaum Ibu acted as the main fund-raiser for UMNO by selling handicraft products and other nationalist paraphernalia at so-called ‘fun fairs’. They were assigned the organisation of electoral and pre-electoral activities at the local level, such as “canvassing, setting up polling booths, getting voters to the polls” (Dancz 1987, 95), without being significantly included in the processes of political decision-making and, more significantly, without questioning this division of labour. The same gendered division of labour was also found in the Chinese community. The following formulation in the MCA Newsletter clearly indicates that women’s role was: “to improve the objects, programs and policies of the MCA and to provide for its members opportunities and facilities for meetings and physical or intellectual pursuits” (MCA 1954). Among all ethnic communities, female political participation was interpreted first and foremost as a question of numerical increase in political power and legitimacy vis-à-vis the colonial powers. This was also the case vis-à-vis other ethnic or political groups by means of party membership and through voting in the elections. Neither were women nominated as candidates in elections in significant numbers nor were “women’s issues” included in the general agendas of the political parties (Dancz 1987, 86). Interestingly, only the non-ethnically defined parties explicitly put women’s emancipation, including equal pay for equal work or equal opportunities in the social and political sphere, at the top of their programmes. Yet, none of these parties survived the first general election in 1955. Ng, Mohamad, and Tan argue that, generally, it was not the idea of specific gendered issues that mobilised women to participate in the political sphere, but rather the idea of complementary gendered political activities within ethnicised communities. Male dominance, however, was not questioned:

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4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms Malayan women’s early involvement in formal politics was only successful if it allowed the model of the inter-ethnic consociational ‘cartel’. Through this model, nationalism was to be forged on the basis of compromise and accommodation of distinct ethnic concerns. This type of politics thus overrode all other political projects, such as feminism or labour unionism. (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 19)

This phase of ethnically exclusive nationalist politicisation and female nationalism ended in 1963 shortly after independence. At this time, the first nongovernmental women’s organisation with a multi-ethnic self-understanding and clear references to the topics of an international women’s movement, namely, equal pay for women in the public sector, was formed. This was the National Council for Women’s Organisations (NCWO). Both the Women Teachers’ Union (WTU) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) contributed to public awareness on the issue of women’s unequal pay and to the formation of the NCWO. The NCWO served as an umbrella organisation for women’s groups that were part of the formal political system, such as the women’s sections of the main political parties, but also for women’s nongovernmental organisations. Their lack of influence in the respective female party sections, but also their growing national identity as Malaysians, brought women from all ethnic origins together, and the NCWO became the platform for the creation of a unified political identity. This identity was based on gender rather than on ethnicity. As Mohamad argues, the issues addressed by the NCWO were related to the “legalistic and bureaucratic shortcomings of the emerging modernity” (Mohamad 2002a, 226) that did not automatically grant or even denied urban middle-class women their equal rights. These rights were denied women not because of their ethnic belonging but because of their gendered being. Rasammah Bhupalan, the new president of the council, emphasised that “the new Council of Women’s Organisations will act as a spearhead group initiating action for the betterment of women. Our whole idea is to work on unity. We feel that women in Malaya can play a vital part in the life of the country if they will unite themselves” (New Straits Time 1961). To achieve this unity, the women leaders of this umbrella organisation were elected from all three ethnic groups in equal proportions (Mohamad 2002b, 353). In contrast to the mostly conservative stand of female politicians on gender issues, the NCWO turned into the main actor pushing for legal reforms in different sectors concerning women. The NCWO campaigned for the improvement of the recruitment and payment situations of women in the public sector, for better income tax and pensions regulations for married women in the civil sector, and for the improvement of maintenance and divorce legislation (Mohamad 2002a, 226). Through formal and informal networking, strategic positioning of NCWO members in political bodies––two of the NCWO


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chairpersons became cabinet ministers––and “gentle pressure in behind-thescenes negotiations” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 21), the NCWO achieved significant legislative reforms in these areas. From 1966 onwards, the NCWO also petitioned the government for the further incorporation and institutionalisation of women’s issues into the state apparatus through the formation of a Women’s Bureau. These efforts were finalised in the creation of the above-mentioned National Advisory Body in 1976 during the UN women’s decade. The success of the NCWO was not in the least the result of its close cooperation with the state. The non-communal multi-ethnic approach practised in the NCWO was also closely connected to post-independence consociational politics and the ‘ethnic elite accommodation’ model, which the ruling Malay party UMNO propagated and which aimed at integrating the elites of every ethnic group into the political system. This was accomplished by forming a stable coalition of the major ethnic parties, the National Front (Barisan Nasional), without, however, challenging the cultural and political dominance of the Malays. The NCWO was not in a position to oppose the state’s paternalistic multi-ethnic project with a new, alternative vision of the social organisation of a multi-ethnic society. Nor did its close cooperation with the state allow the NCWO to touch upon more sensitive issues such as rights for female industrial workers. Equal pay campaigns were limited to women in the white-collar sector and public service. Despite these limitations, the formation of the NCWO was the first step in the direction of a strong women’s movement oriented towards a pragmatic and social feminism based on social movements and civil society rather than on the formal political system and the state. Analysing, however, the ethnic composition of such civil society groups, one could already observe the emerging ethnic structuration of the state-civil society dualism. While, on the one hand, Malay women were actively involved in the formal political system as it provided them with a number of benefits, they were rarely found in civil society organisations. On the other hand, non-Malay women, who did not identify that much with a Malay-dominated state, remained rather marginal in the formal political sector but were more active within the sphere of civil society. The tendency towards heightened identity politics was reinforced and perpetuated through the introduction of affirmative action programmes for Malays in the educational and economic sector in the aftermath of the 1969 riots, the emergence of a developmentalist state, and the beginning process of Islamisation. The process of Islamisation especially led to a reshaping of the identity landscape and a new divide among women. This divide was no longer along ethnic lines but between Muslims and non-Muslims. Ng, Mohamad, and Tan argue that this process of state-driven economic restructuring on the basis of

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ethnicity in addition to the redefinition and assertion of boundaries along religious lines led to an increased split-up and segmentation of the public sphere so that “Islamic women’s rights could be articulated only by Muslims, Chinese education rights taken up only by Chinese political parties, and estate workers rights only by Indian political parties. As a result, it was difficult to universalise social problems and their articulation as women’s issues, labour issues or as issues of civil liberties” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 23). The new “political feminism” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006) that emerged in Malaysia in the course of the UN women’s decade between 1975 and 1985 rejected such identity politics. In contrast to the earlier women’s movements, which were more or less part of the state’s ethno-nationalist projects, this new movement constructed itself as cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious with a clearly defined critical attitude towards the state. Women who participated in this movement were mainly women from the “political margins” (Mohamad 2002a), that is, neither from the government-related women’s institutions nor from the political parties who searched for a space to articulate opposition to the state-induced models of multi-ethnicity and wanted to create political alternatives to ethnocentric politics. However, they were not from the social margins but from the new middle class. The authors discussed so far maintain the dualism of male public and female private spaces and do not analyse any possible co-existing female spaces that existed at that time and the interactive negotiation between male and female political spaces. The authors neither provide an analysis of women’s politicisation and organisation outside political parties, nor do they include spaces other than the political parties in their research. Applying the concept of space from a gender perspective, as practiced in the frame of an interpretative sociology of knowledge, is an “alternative to the classical, dualistic idea of attributing public spaces to men and private spaces to women […] the emphasis should be given to the interfaces and linkages between male and female spaces” (Spiegel, Harig rapps. 2002, 3). The analysis of the structural transformation of the public sphere should explicitly consider “linkages and interfaces, where […] knowledge can be passed and is negotiated, and where the power structure and new gender relations are negotiated” (Lachenmann, reported by Spiegel, Harig rapps. 2002, 5) instead of maintaining the limiting dualistic perspective.19 This is the approach taken in the following section of this chapter dealing with the organisations belonging to the new Malaysian women’s movement. 19 The problems of such a dualism were discussed in the context of the workshop “Gender and Translocal Networking through Information Technology” held in February 2002 at Bielefeld University and organised by the Gender Working Group of the Sociology of Development Research Centre. See the workshop report by Spiegel and Harig rapps. (2002)


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One of the first organisations of this new type was WAO which opened the doors of Malaysia’s first shelter for battered women in 1982 (Spiegel rapp. 2005; Dannecker, Spiegel 2006; 2008). Even today, this direct and unbureaucratic support for survivors of domestic violence regardless of their ethnic and religious belonging is still one of the main focuses of WAO. Its goal is to provide shelter to battered women, 24-hour telephone counselling, face-to-face counselling, advice on legal issues, and support in negotiations with police and courts. A significant moment in the history of the new feminist movement, which arose around the issue of Violence Against Women (VAW), was a two-day workshop held in 1985. Around 1,000 interested women participated. This workshop constituted a platform where several organisations covering different aspects of the overarching problem of VAW––domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment––came into existence. Among them was AWAM, perhaps the organisation with the most strongly stated feminist self-understanding focusing on sexual violence such as sexual harassment and rape. In contrast to the WAO, AWAM does not run a shelter but concentrates exclusively on lobbying, advocacy, public education, and research on the topic. It also carries out workshops and awareness-raising seminars at schools, colleges, and for state institutions and private companies. However, despite their multi-ethnic self-understanding and their participation in the global women’s movement, the new women’s organisations did not remain untouched by the ethnic structuration and segregation of the Malaysian society which was part of the everyday life of the activists and advanced by the process of Islamisation. Although they did not argue on an ethnic basis, most of the new organisations were dominated by ethnic Chinese and Indian women until the 1990s, and the issues addressed arose mainly out of the concrete everyday life experiences of these women within a multi-ethnic society. The participation of Malay women in these new mixed spaces remained rather marginal, and most Malay female activism was attached either to the ruling Malay party or to the Islamic opposition party (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). In particular, the controversial public debates about a unified Domestic Violence Act for all ethnic and religious communities in Malaysia in the late 1980s extrapolated these tensions and ambivalences within Malaysian society in general but especially within the new feminist women’s movement. The debate about a new Domestic Violence Act changed the landscape of the women’s organisations. Notably, WAO broadened its service orientation and was one of the leading figures in the negotiation process with the Malaysian state about the formulation and introduction of a new Domestic Violence Act. The demand of the women’s organisations for the formulation and introduction of a new Domestic Violence Act, which would cut across ethnic and religious boundaries,

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was strongly opposed by several conservative Muslim groups with reference to the Quran, which was said to allow corporal punishment of women by their husbands, but also with the argument that domestic violence fell within the private realm and hence had to be treated within Sharia law (Anwar 2004, 74). This debate, dominated by culturalist arguments, increasingly challenged the legitimation of the multi-ethnic women’s organisations to participate in a debate on Islamic law––seen as the exclusive domain of Islamic jurisprudence. This marginalisation in the public debate affected Muslim women because of their sex, but especially non-Muslim women because of their different ethnic and religious affiliation (Mohamad 2002a). Because of this exclusion, it became more and more problematic for a multi-ethnic women’s movement to enter into a fruitful dialogue with religious and state authorities, and, to some extent, the multi-ethnic self-definition of these new women’s organisations was challenged. This was the moment when SIS came into being as an organisation of Muslim women dealing with VAW from a Muslim perspective. Seven Muslim professional women—lawyers, journalists, scholars—who were already active in other women’s organisations formed the group and developed a historically sensitive and contextualised approach to re-interpret the Quran in order to show that the oppression of women in Islamic countries is not based on Islam, but on centuries of male authority over the interpretation of the text (Nagata 1994, 80). The questions in the survey that SIS carried out at the International Women’s Day provide a good overview on the main issues addressed by the organisation today. These are the increasing pressure on Muslim women to dress according to an Islamic attire, polygyny, domestic violence against women, and Islamic family law. After years of controversy, the Domestic Violence Act was finally enacted in 1995, although with some significant changes. The debate about the Domestic Violence Act and the creation of the SIS exemplifies some of the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of the constitution of public spheres and discourses in multi-ethnic Malaysia. Although the aim of the new women’s movement had been to overcome ethnic and religious particularisms and to de-ethnicise national law, the process of societal negotiations is leading to the formation of an organisation with a specific ethnic and religious label and thus to a re-ethnicisation of the women’s movement itself. 4.3 The debate on Violence Against Women As the press statement of the International Women’s Day 2004 and the activities of the participating organisations at the event at Megamall indicate, the majority of the most popular and most globally connected women’s organisations in

4.3 The debate on Violence Against Women

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Malaysia emerged around the issue of violence against women. This is still their central topic. One of the activists from AWAM, an organisation which, as part of the division of labour among this network of women’s organisations, deals with sexualised violence, stated: “We identify violence against women as an important issue and entry point. Of course there are other issues about women’s oppression, like poverty, the economy, the social, but this is our entry point” (Huy Ling, AWAM activist, 25.03.04). Within this network, each organisation uses a slightly different dimension of the overall topic of violence against women as its entry point. WAO focuses on domestic violence and provides shelter for battered women. SIS works on the problem from a Muslim perspective. One of the first publications of SIS produced in the context of the debate about the Domestic Violence Act was the booklet Are Muslim men allowed to beat their wives? Other feminist organisations from urban areas outside Kuala Lumpur, who were not present at this event, are also part of this division of labour. These include the Women’s Centre for Change (WCC) in Penang which focuses on violence against girls and children. AI-Malaysia has also joined AI’s global campaign “Stop Violence Against Women” which was launched in March 2004. In Malaysia, it was almost exclusively the issue of VAW that served as an entry point to societal negotiation processes on gender equality. This indicates a phenomenon requiring further consideration. In the first place, taking into account the severe economic restructuration that Malaysia went through, one wonders why economic rights do not play a bigger role in the Malaysian women’s movement. Additionally, although an important issue on the international level through its interconnection with the ‘Women’s rights are human rights’ campaigns, VAW has generally not been very prominent in women’s movements in the South. Feminist networks in the South like DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era) for instance, had concentrated on socio-economic rights of women rather than on domestic violence (DAWN 1985; Holthaus, Klingebiel 2000, 45). The significance of that issue in Malaysia is also untypical compared with women’s movements in other Muslim countries such as Sudan where the issue of violence against women has been avoided as being too controversial. Among other global development issues, the VAW discourse had been strongly disputed by the Islamist Sudanese state which sees the issue of VAW as “a foreign agenda, an anti-Islamic vision which is not relevant to the so-called ‘Sudanese culture’ and ‘Islamic’ society” (Nageeb 2008a). Sudanese women’s NGOs taking up such issues were mostly banned; the few that survived were subjected to strict state control. Only recently, as part of the negotiations for a peace process in the South, did it become possible for VAW to be included in the strategies of a broader spectrum

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of Sudanese women’s organisations, pushing aside older issues such as poverty. In relation to these contrasting cases, the discursive space generated around the issue of VAW in Malaysia is rather broad and relatively uncontrolled, and civil society actors engaging in such a discourse have a relatively large room for manoeuvre. This is an interesting phenomenon that is based on the specific Malaysian constellations in two senses: First, VAW has been and still is one of the few issues that were not captured by the state (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 25). In Sudan, women’s NGOs had been able to engage in discourses and practices around poverty. In Malaysia however, issues related to socio-economic or civil rights had been co-opted and jealously controlled by the developmentalist state (Weiss 2003; Weiss, Hassan 2003a). In the context of a state-led restructuration of the economic sphere within the framework of global capitalism as it took place in Malaysia from the 1970s onwards, VAW rather seemed to be a non-political issue. Organisations and activists who concentrated on ‘dangerous’ topics were subject to severe consequences such as detention. For example, in 1987, one hundred human and workers’ rights activists, among them also several women’s rights activists, were arrested under the Internal Security Act. They were charged with organising a communist insurgence and threatening ethnic harmony. The Malaysian state had still not signed international treaties which could have strengthened the voice of critical civil society organisations.20 Due to their intimate connection to the shortcomings of the Malaysian development model, issues such as economic or political rights of women did not work as entry points for a social movement wanting to engage in a critical dialogue with the state (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). This is especially the case for democracy and human rights, as the following statement from one of the founding members of AWAM made clear during a discussion with other female activists: We find it very difficult at the local level to use the word human rights, which is such a bad word, when you are talking about women’s human rights, wow! To people on the street, it is equal to anti-government. […] And to be honest, even if you are talking to the young activists, you don’t say ‘I am a human rights activist 20 By 1994, Malaysia had ratified only two international human rights instruments: the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (ratified in 1957) and the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (ratified in 1959 with reservations). In the mid-1990s, however, there was a wave of ratifications of other international human rights instruments, such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 (ratified in 1994); the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1989 (ratified with several reservations in 1995); and, finally, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1979 (ratified with reservations in 1995) (SUARAM 1999).


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and a women’s rights activist at the same time.’ Because maybe some of them do not feel comfortable to use the words ‘human right’. Unless you are really meeting women friends who have been in the movement for a long time, you don’t say such things. Because of that kind of atmosphere, to be able to promote that concept of human rights among the NGOs and also to certain women’s groups, it is not easy at all. (Su Ling, AWAM activist, 22.10.06)

In contrast to other regions in the South, such as Africa and Latin America where women’s movements and civil society groups in general play a major role in constructing socially cohesive visions of social change after the vacuum produced by the breakdown of state bureaucracies (Lachenmann 1998a, 213), the civil society movements in Malaysia confront a strong developmentalist state which has clearly stated its monopoly in the spheres of development. The human rights situation in Malaysia is frequently criticised by local and international human rights organisations’ yearly reports for continuing police brutality, the practice of detention without trial and arbitrary arrests, the death penalty, restricted freedom of expression and association, and discrimination of migrant workers (SUARAM 2002; Amnesty International Malaysia 2007). Within the framework of an authoritarian state, the promotion of human rights is associated with being ‘anti-government’ and subversive. Civil society actors must take into account the repressive measures of the state and also, as made clear in Su Ling’s quotation, the reluctance of a significant part of the population to be identified with the concept. For the women’s organisations, one strategy to carve out space for political dissent was a translation of human rights into a terminology viewed as being less political. As Su Ling continues: “It took us a very long time for women to find a way. We had to find a different terminology for ourselves. Of course, violence, you know, and issues like that, is an easy, very nice issue to talk about, to start with”. Like the AWAM activist, several other activists also pointed out that VAW was a ‘good issue’ to get ‘normal people’ into conversations, because it was not immediately associated with being ‘antigovernment’. Other activists spoke about “magic words” such as health and citizenship, which were not as controversial. Based on the communicative taboo related to the ‘bad words’ and the atmosphere of fear around them, the adoption of the VAW language was the result of a specific female strategy (Mohamad 2002b, 360) for talking about gender relations and gender equality and creating a public sphere. Located at the crossroads between private and public spheres, VAW serves as the anchor point for the Malaysian feminist women’s movement from which a broad spectrum of other societal issues can then be addressed. Su Ling’s statement underlines the difficulties the women’s movement in Malaysia has when seeking for support in the multi-ethnic population as a societal basis

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for their activities while simultaneously trying to enter into a critical dialogue with state authorities in order to put social transformation into practice. AWAM, for instance, was one of two NGOs on the government’s Technical Working Committee that produced the Code of Practice on the Prevention and Eradication of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace introduced in 1999. The definition of sexual harassment of female workers as a form of violence against women makes it possible to address questions of women’s subordination in the economic sphere through the language of violence. The Code of Practice has been an important step in the anti-sexual harassment efforts in Malaysia, but it is insufficient, particularly since its implementation is not compulsory for the private sector (AWAM 2007). The spaces of informal female economy (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2001; Lachenmann 2001) remain unaffected by these instruments. Providing shelter for battered women, the WAO also opens its doors for abused foreign domestic workers, most of whom come from Indonesia. In this case, the language of VAW permits the WAO to enter into debates on migration and labour law in Malaysia. Abused foreign domestic workers are provided with shelter and assisted in the bureaucratic procedures of handling their cases with the respective state institutions. This includes “filing complaints with the police, Welfare and Labour Departments, processing applications with the Immigration Department, gathering medical reports, and other evidence of abuse, and assisting women in obtaining lawyers and initiating civil and criminal suits” (WAO 2000). The WAO also submitted proposals for a Model Contract of Employment and a sample of Guidelines for Employers of foreign domestic workers as practiced in Singapore to the Ministry of Human Resources, and it lobbies for specific changes in law and policy concerning foreign domestic workers such as the “implementation of a Fair and Standard Employment Contract between workers and employers, establishing workers rights and employers responsibilities” (WAO 2000). For SIS, the topics of violence against women and the rights of Muslim women in Family Law have been the starting points on which connections were based to the issue of freedom of religion and to questions of how a multi-ethnic society should be structured. These are problems that become virulent in interreligious marriages or cases of conversion. VAW has also been linked to other issues such as democratisation, political culture, and women’s participation in public space. Recent debates about the undemocratic procedures used in amending Islamic family law and about the imposition of Islamic burial rituals for a converted Hindu mentioned above (Perlez 2006) illustrate this connection. And finally, AI Malaysia uses the gender issues to attract volunteers and to reposition the issue of civil rights within the Malaysian context.


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But this societal relevance and the focus on the issue of violence against women is more than just the result of a pragmatic and strategic approach by the women’s organisations in order to avoid state repression. Without basing the analysis on the empirical frequency of the phenomenon, I want to argue that, in Malaysia, the issue of VAW became the platform for the negotiation of gender relations due to its connections to specific processes of social transformation. The issue of VAW includes a politicisation of the private sphere according to the feminist dogma that the private is political. This politicisation alludes to the restructuration and re-problematisation of the relation between private and public spaces through industrialisation, urbanisation, and the integration of women into the formal sector and to the gendered structuration of such spaces (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). Additionally, the process of Islamisation contributed to a redefinition of the boundaries between private and public spheres. Although it is correct to say that Islamisation leads to the re-privatisation of public issues—as the debates on the Domestic Violence Act in Malaysia showed in which domestic violence was defined as a private matter by Islamist groups—it is also necessary to highlight the contrary effect. Defining and proclaiming a politically oriented Islam as a complete “way of life” blurs the common dichotomisation between the private and the public and restructures it in the sense that everyday life practices and private matters are also ascribed with more than private relevance. These processes, in which the range and the shape of the private sphere is being essentially renegotiated, give the debate about violence against women its overall social relevance and explosiveness, going beyond the scope of inter-familial gendered violence. Mohamad argues that VAW was the only issue that was equally important and present in the lives of all Malaysian women, regardless of their ethnic affiliation, and that was thus able to unify women from different ethnic communities and build up gender solidarity beyond hyperethnicised political discourses on the basis of shared everyday life experiences (Mohamad 2002b, 360). This approach, however, is heavily debated among different civil society actors in Malaysia. The organisations that focus on the area of so-called classical civil rights are especially critical of it. Their contention is that although the women’s movement has managed to successfully influence national legislation on violence against women, for example, with the amendment of the Domestic Violence Act in 1995, it has only hesitantly engaged in general debates about the economic and political development of the country. Some of the women’s organisations did not participate in protests against the Bakun Dam or the Internal Security Act. Seen in this context, the negotiation of rights appears to be a juxtaposition of ‘women’s rights issues’ as ‘soft issues’ versus ‘human rights issues’ as ‘hard issues’. The death penalty and other symptoms of an undermined

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democracy belong to the category of ‘hard issues’. The following statement from Jessica, a young Chinese Malaysian journalist and the co-ordinator of the ‘Stop Violence against Women’ campaign of AI in Malaysia, reveals this juxtaposition: For me, I do co-ordinate the violence against women campaign but I don’t think it would be my issue, I don’t think it’d be my passion, something I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s a very important issue, but personally I prefer to tackle harder issues like the death penalty and torture that seems to be more of an interest for me than violence against women. I think the women’s movement is picking up and it will always be a very easy issue to push because it appeals so much to people, you don’t have to go very far. What happens to your family, marital rape and marital abuse is not right if it happens to your mother or sister. People immediately feel for that, but my interest has always been to harder issues like freedom of expression, justice in the court system, getting people aware, making them aware of these kinds of violations that happen on an everyday basis. (Jessica, AI activist, 12.09.04)

The Malaysian AI group saw the participation in AI’s global campaign on violence against women and the integration of women’s rights into their activities as a major shift in their thematic orientation. Due to the campaign, new forms of cooperation and exchange between women’s organisations and human rights organisations were built up and institutionalised. Women’s rights activists and representatives of women’s organisations are regularly invited to give talks and training to Amnesty volunteers, and International Women’s Day 2004 was organised by a range of women’s organisations and AI. However, this new orientation of the AI group in Malaysia is not very highly regarded by some of the other human rights groups. The Malaysian AI director talks about these tensions among the human rights activists: For us, the campaign on violence against women was a major shift from our civil and political rights focus. It was very hard. So here in Malaysia, people are saying: ‘Why do you talk about women? What about torture? What about death penalty?’ We lost people along the way, not so much members, but NGOs working with us. They say: ‘You are taking the easy issue, what about the harder issues?’ (David, Malaysian AI director, 19.03.04)

For the Malaysian case, the question whether there could or should be any prioritisation between differently interpreted rights is a central issue. There is an ongoing debate about which issues are to be considered as political and hence should be at the centre of political debate. The emerging discourse on ‘easy’ or ‘soft’ versus ‘hard issues’ has to be interpreted within the framework of a restricted and fragile democratic space.

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4.4 From local service to transnational social transformation All the organisations that participated in the International Women’s Day in 2004 are currently very active in the promotion of legal reforms concerning the issue of violence against women and other women’s rights, and they use a transformative rather than a service-oriented approach. Following Naila Kabeer’s work, “transformative or agenda setting strategies” differ from “integrationist approaches” insofar as they demand not only the participation of women in the ‘game’ but also a transformation of the rules of the game itself. Transformative strategies are more politically ambitious because they are about changing the rules, rather than playing by them. In development terms, they go beyond seeking to integrate gender issues into the development agenda and seek to broaden its goal to enable it to address issues of social justice. More crucially, they seek to give women a much greater role in setting the agenda in the first place. Because of the more radical goals, transformative strategies require a more nuanced and complex set of tactics: theoretical arguments which challenge established ways of thinking; creative proposals for alternative ways of doing; and political mobilisation to ensure more participatory and responsive decision making structures. (Kabeer 1999, 34)

Today, legal reforms are seen by most of the women’s activists as the way to implement women’s rights. Ida, a young lawyer and one of the SIS activists, makes the point: “What I want to do is to push for a law reform and put forward gender equality.” A closer look at the history of those organisations, however, shows that this approach has not always been so pronounced. Since their foundation in the 1980s, the feminist organisations have undergone a process of metamorphosis that has led them to go beyond a merely service-oriented approach in favour of more and more far-reaching visions of societal transformation and more and more self-conscious formulations of such visions. This process of metamorphosis from local service providers to transnational actors of social transformation has gone hand in hand with internal debates about the missions and objectives of the organisations (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). In a special 20th Anniversary Celebration Edition of the Annual Review of the WAO, leading figures, past and present, of the organisation reflect on its transformation from a predominantly service-oriented organisation into a women’s rights organisation with a feminist self-understanding that is actively engaged in the public debate about women’s rights and working for the change of national legislation within the scope of gender equality. In this special edition, the WAO’s president writes: “As years progressed, our focus of work expanded to look actively into laws that discriminated against women. We were no longer

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known just as a charitable service organisation, but also as a women’s rights organisation” (Samanther 2002). The director also emphasises the organisation’s metamorphosis: “WAO was maturing with a growing realisation that whilst it is vital to provide direct services to women and children, women’s human rights can only be achieved if human rights in general are preserved and protected” (Josiah 2002, 11). This “growing realisation” was the result of an internally controversial debate about the general societal relevance of “women’s issues” and about the connection of those women’s issues with human rights and civil rights. The director highlighted the fact that even in the 1980s, the WAO refused to sign a joint manifesto of several civil society organisations in which the Internal Security Act and state-driven development projects such as the Bakun dam were criticised. They refused on the grounds that these issues had nothing to do with “women’s issues”. Indeed, both thematic areas were already linked to each other on the level of personal involvement. This was because several activists from the WAO and other women’s organisations were also members of human rights organisations. This personal involvement in two institutionally distinct networks and discourses led to the demand to broaden the range of activities and issues debated within the WAO and to embed the question of violence against women into political, economic, and cultural analyses. However, activists from WAO had just realised the political nature of women’s issues when, in 1987, several women’s activists were detained in Operation Lalang (Josiah 2002, 10). Despite these personal networks linking more confrontational human rights organisations and the women’s organisations, and their analysis of the issue of domestic violence within a complex framework of gender relations and power, it was not easy for the WAO to participate in the protest against the detentions because this would have meant a clear confrontation with the state. “We did not want to be associated with any initiative deemed political” (Josiah 2002, 11). The director talks of a “let’s not rock the boat” strategy for dealing with state authorities in this context. However, the WAO presented the first Malaysian study about domestic violence, and since the enactment of the new Domestic Violence Act, it is constantly monitoring its implementation. The WAO has continued its efforts to push for a legal reform concerning women’s rights, and publishes reports on Sharia and non-Muslim civil laws. Since the 1990s, the WAO has been the organisation at the national level that works most actively on and with CEDAW and cooperates with the International Women’s Rights Watch Asia Pacific, an organisation which promotes CEDAW on a global level. Another example of the metamorphosis of women’s organisations towards a more assertive transformative approach is the case of AWAM and the use of the


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concept of ‘feminism’ within this organisation. In an interview, an AWAM activist gave an account of the controversies within the organisation: When you look at our booklet, you can see that we are a feminist organisation that tries to create a society where women are accepted and there is no discrimination. Through our activities, we want to empower women so that they can break free from oppression and can be stronger persons in society. In fact, we had a very long debate over this word. For many years, individual members would say: ‘Yes we are feminist. But it’s not the organisation’s style’. So we had debated it for a long time, and finally we said we have to make a stand, and then we said let’s go: let’s just put official that we are a feminist organisation. And when people ask, then we explain why we call ourselves like this. I have talked to some students who interviewed fellow students for a project with us. And most of them would think that AWAM is a radical group and on a negative side: they don’t like men! So that was our image, our profile in the public. It’s not so good yet. (AWAM activist, 10.03.04)

For a long time, the organisation did avoid the use of feminist concepts in public. Difficulties with this term, especially in public debate, increased in the context of the heightened identity politics and cultural particularisms which shape the Malaysian project of modernity to a significant extent (Stivens 2003). In an atmosphere overheated by the actors’ essentialist beliefs in distinctive identities, ‘feminism’ is easily perceived and attacked as culturally alien and identified with a generally “man-hating” position. Gender relations are at the core of the construction of cultural and social identities through processes of cultural othering. Lachenmann and Dannecker have argued that “questions pertaining to women and gender are instrumental in constructing a culturally specific vision of how to achieve change and development whilst retaining the so-called ‘Islamic identity’. On a global level too constructs of gender and gender relations seem to draw the boundaries between ‘Muslim cultures’ and the non-Muslim ‘others’” (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002, 3). They go on: Issues of family law, gender relations, sexual and social conduct, women’s space, place, work, dress, and rights are often fundamentalised and referred to when difference from others is to be marked, or when a collective and national identity is to be constructed, represented, or defended. It is thus no wonder that, as one can observe, in almost all of the Islamisation projects carried out by different states in Africa, South East Asia, and the middle East the women and gender questions are cornerstones in formulating or reforming national ‘identity’, policies, and laws—be these of a development, political, cultural, or social nature” (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002, 11).

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Another reason for the lastingly rather problematic relationship between Malaysian women’s organisations and the concept of feminism was the paternalistic features of Western feminism and it’s perceived overemphasis on sexuality which became the butt of postcolonial critique from women of the South (Marchand, Parpart eds. 1999). This issue was also raised during a group discussion among activists from several urban women’s organisations that was part of the research when one of the activists highlighted her difficulties at international conferences in connecting with Western feminists who would “talk much more on sexuality, and had all these slogans like ‘take off your bra’ or ‘free sex’ which made no sense for us” (group discussion, Petaling Jaya, 06.10.04). However, the president of AWAM highlights the connecting force that the concept of different locally defined feminisms offers for women’s organisations: Today we would not say that feminism was initiated in the West, it was just in the Western countries where the movement was pushed, and after that it came to the rest of the world. We would say that they popularised the women’s movement, but we localised it. Now in Malaysia, we say that we are feminist organisations, but what stands behind the meaning is different. So it does not mean that we adopt things from the West. The important things to us are the issues. We talk about violence and about oppression. (AWAM activist, 10.03.04)

Apart from these debates within the women’s movement, the cautious use of the concept of feminism has to be interpreted as a strategy of self-censorship within a public sphere whose forms are defined by a strong developmentalist state. Today, AWAM portrays itself as an “independent feminist organisation” engaged in “feminist counselling” in leaflets and in the Internet,21 which indicates a more assertive position both at the interfaces with a transcultural women’s movement and with the local Malaysian state. The fragile basis of such an assertive use, however, becomes clear in the intentions of Ramani, the young WAO activist who was present at the International Women’s Day event in the shopping mall (cf. above), to translate the concept of feminist into the term of ‘women’s rights fighter’ which she believes to be more neutral and less intimidating to men. Similarly, developments at SIS take the direction of a more pronounced transformative approach. In its first years, the focus of SIS was linked very closely to the concrete discriminations against women by Malaysian Islamic family law. As argued above, the formulation of a new Domestic Violence Act

21

http://www.awam.org.my/training.htm


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played a significant role. However, some of the members became dissatisfied with this focus, as Nazia, one of the SIS activists relates: It started out in ‘88 as a group of women, professionals, journalists, lawyers, who wanted to think more about religion, especially with regard to laws and discrimination that was happening to women in Malaysia at that time. So there was the Domestic Violence Act, and people were saying that a Muslim man can beat his wife. […] That was one of the reasons why they started. And there were also many laws, especially family laws that discriminated against women. So they came together and started discussing […]. In the beginning they wanted to do legal advocacy. But in the process of looking back, they said ‘we need to go back to the source and find out if it is correct or not.’ If they believe that Islam is just, how could these laws that are supposed to be based on the religion be unjust? So they said: ‘we need to do some research! Why is the reading of the Quran misogynistic’? So they started having study sessions, so that’s how it began basically. (Nazia, SIS activist, 01.04.04)

She describes a process in which the first efforts to change Islamic family law were replenished and backed up by the ambitious project to work on own feminist-inspired interpretations of the basic Islamic religious texts and to engage in the project of Islamic feminism. In Malaysia, the idea of such a project was the outcome of an intense intellectual exchange with Amina Wadud, an Islamic feminist and scholar from the United States who was Assistant Professor for Gender and Quranic Studies at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur between 1989 and 1992. Amina Wadud had been among the first female Islamic scholars to claim the right of women to interpret the Islamic textual sources and to ground gender equality within those sources (Wadud 2002). She is one of the leading figures of Islamic feminism. Critical Islamic scholars have globally engaged in the intellectual task of Islamic feminism to re-dynamise Islamic thought within the framework of a twofold critique of modernity and Islamic orthodoxies. The development of methodologies and approaches for an Islamic feminist hermeneutics of the religious texts plays a central role in the project of Islamic feminism.22 Looking back at the history of Sisters in Islam, the executive director highlighted the importance of the contact and exchange with 22 This issue was discussed intensively at the April 2007 Workshop in Berlin on “Reconsidering Islamic feminism: Deconstruction or the Quest of Authenticity?” organised by the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Science and the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) Berlin and initiated by Gudrun Krämer (Free University Berlin). Among the scholars invited to this workshop were Amina Wadud (Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley), Omaima Abu Bakr (Qatar University), Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (Humanistic University Utrecht), Sa’diyya Shaikh (University of Cape Town), Souad Eddouada (Marocco), and Norani Othman (Universiti Kebanhsaan Malaysia). http://jahresthema.bbaw.de/veranstaltungen_redaktion/april_redaktion/islamic-feminism

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Amina Wadud: “She taught us the way of looking at the Quran from a feminist approach and to understand the Quran not just from its literal perspective and meaning, which is very patriarchal. This other way of interpreting and looking at the Quran was a liberating experience, a revelation” (Chai Mei Ling 2006). Wadud’s first book Quran and Woman (Wadud 1992), which was first published by SIS and later republished with the subtitle Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, was groundbreaking not only for female Muslim activists in Malaysia but also for an entire generation of Muslim feminists all over the world. The SIS complemented their legalistic approach with this theologically sophisticated project of excavating the “original message” of Islam and freeing it from the layers of male interpretations accumulated over the centuries. This also meant problematising fundamental ideas about the participation of women in the production of legitimate religious and theological knowledge in Muslim societies (Abaza 2002). Recent publications by SIS activists, such as those on mysogynistic interpretations of the Hadith23 by Nik Noriani Badlishah and Norhayati Kaprawi (Nik Badlishah, Kaprawi 2004), continue this correcting of male knowledge about women in Islam. In the introduction they state: This booklet is written to provide the reader with an understanding of the Hadith and its complex history and methodology in determining its authenticity. Sisters in Islam hopes that with this understanding, Muslims are better able to evaluate and question the authenticity of Hadiths which are degrading to women that are popularly used in the media, publications and in talks on women in Islam. (Nik Badlishah, Kaprawi 2004)

The relation, however, between the life of the prophet, the documented Hadith, and the deduction of Sunnah from those narrations is highly problematic. Nik Noriani and Norhayati Kaprawi describe the problem as follows: Unlike the Quran, which was taken down in writing during the lifetime of the Prophet (s.a.w), most of the Hadith was recorded after the death of the Prophet (s.a.w). Therefore, while the authenticity of the whole Quran is unquestionable, the authenticity and authority of a substantial amount of Hadith has been open to dispute and debate among various scholars. (Nik Badlishah, Kaprawi 2004, 3) 23 Besides the Quran, several written collections of Hadith form the textual basis of Islam. Hadith literature contains “expressed opinions, exemplary practices, deeds, and tacit approvals” of the prophet Muhammad. These testimonies of the life of the prophet have served for the extrapolation of the Sunnah, that is, normative patterns of life valid for all Muslims based on the life of Muhammad. Besides the Quran, these have been institutionalised as the second source of Islamic canon law, the Sharia. The Arabic term Sunnah can be best translated by the broad formulation “a way, course, rule, mode or manner, of acting or conduct of life”.


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They argue that the transformation process from an oral into a written tradition started in the third century of Islam, and that there are six partly contradictory works on Hadith compiled by different Islamic scholars of the time that today are recognised as authoritative by the majority of Muslims. Nik Noriani and Norhayati Kaprawi go on to elaborate the mechanisms of authentification of Hadith: The narrations, traditions and stories recorded in the Hadith collections are reproduced through isnad, which refers to the transmission of Hadith through a chain of narrators. It is important to note that the authenticity of a Hadith depends on the reliability of its reporters and the linkage or transmission among them, i.e. the isnad. (Nik Badlishah, Kaprawi 2004, 4)

They also highlight the importance of an understanding of Sunnah and Hadith for Quranic exegesis or interpretation. By creating this kind of alternative female knowledge, SIS clearly attacks the monopoly on interpreting religious texts held by the Malaysian state and other religious authorities. The re-interpretations of the religious sources are related to new restrictions on women’s participation in public space, political participation, and issues like freedom of religion. This trend towards a general increase in the politicisation of women’s organisations through linking ‘women’s issues’ to socio-economic, political, and cultural developments in Malaysia has been intensified significantly by the reformasi movement (Martinez 2003). The reformasi movement located the women’s movement within a new frame of reference and supplied it with a new sense of the feasibility of social change. Both women’s and human rights movements “have been irrevocably changed and revitalised, adopting more aggressive strategies and attracting a broader, more highly committed base” (Weiss, Hassan 2003b). In 1998, shortly after the heyday of the reformasi movement and shortly before the 1999 general elections, the Women’s Agenda for Change (WAC) was compiled, and, for the first time, far-reaching demands for a structural change in the Malaysian development model were made from a gender perspective (Budianta 2003). As a joint document of 76 nongovernmental organisations, its strength was, above all, based on a broad and intensive social consensus of civil society actors on the need for social transformation, as formulated in the foreword to the agenda: The recent political developments in Malaysia have added the impetus and urgency to strengthen women’s participation in the cultural, economic and political life of the nation. We deplore the manipulation of ethnicity and religion, as well as the use of fear and oppressive forces to divide us. We want to contribute towards the building of a just, democratic and peaceful society for ourselves and future generations.

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4 Negotiating Gender Equality and Legal Reforms Hence, the Women’s Agenda for Change reflects our commitment towards the achievements of gender equality and sustainable development for women and men in Malaysia. (Women's Agenda for Change 2000)

The Agenda is divided into ten atricle, each covering a specific area: women and development, women and participative democracy, violence against women, women and land, women and health services, women and law, women and work, women and Aids, women and environment, women, health and sexuality. In addition to these ten areas which are based on the Beijing Platform for Action, the Malaysian WAC also contains an 11th article dedicated to “Women, culture and religion”. This is rather remarkable due to the fact that at the NGO forum in Beijing 1995 where the Platform for Action was discussed, the question of culture was ignored almost completely. Various women, arguing in terms of culturally specific gender relations, were accused of cultural relativism and of undermining human rights (Lachenmann 1996, 15). The chapter on women and development fundamentally criticises the Malaysian development model, which is oriented merely towards growth rates and is socially and ecologically unsustainable. “An alternative development vision is needed and it must ensure an equitable balance between economic development, social well-being and political participation of the people. It has to work towards achieving gender equality for women and men, redistribute resources equitably and democratically, and regenerate the economy with emphasis on indigenous industries” (Women's Agenda for Change 2000, 4). The women’s organisations propose a new development model which mainstreams social and gender equality into all areas. The WAC thus represents a complex transformative approach in the sense of connecting changes in the economic, political, and societal spheres with the transformation of gender relations. This transformative approach formulated in the WAC found its political implementation in the Women’s Candidacy Initiative which supported the nomination of an independent women’s candidate for the general elections in 1999.24 The programme that Zaitun Kassim promoted was basically geared to the WAC and formulated demands for more participatory and ‘people-centred’ forms of governance and development programmes. The Women’s Candidacy Initiative was an interesting attempt to transform the formal political system by subverting its traditional ethnic basis from a gender perspective. It was furthermore, and this is even more interesting, a moment where the formerly relatively fixed boundaries between civil society and the formal political sector were blurred by the attempt and the hope of women’s 24

Zaitun Kassim officially ran for election under the label of the Democratic Action Party, DAP. DAP was part of the Barisan Alternatif (BN), a coalition of opposition parties to which the main Islamist opposition party (PAS) also belonged.


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activists to achieve and accelerate societal transformation through inclusion into the formal political system. It meant a shift “from activism at the margins to political empowerment at the centre” (Martinez 2003, 75). As I have argued elsewhere (Spiegel rapp. 2005, 11 ff.), this shift has been partly successful. On the one hand, the issue of gender and gender equality became very popular in the mainstream political debate. In the year 2001, the term ‘gender’ was integrated into Article 8(1) of the Malaysian constitution. This is the section where regulations against discrimination are formulated. Before 2001, the categories included only religion, race, descent, and place of birth. In the same year, the Ministry of Women and Family Development was set up, and important amendments to the guardianship act were carried out. In 2003, the prime minister for the first time convoked a Women’s Summit, where leading women from politics and economy gathered to debate about women in the economy. In 2004, the series of Women Summits was continued with a summit on leadership. Also in 2004, a Cabinet Committee on Gender Equality, chaired by the Prime Minister, was created, and the initial report to the CEDAW committee was submitted. These events seem to be a concession to the growing international pressure to integrate discourses on gender equality into national policies.25 At the same time, however, they can be viewed as an appropriation of the gender discourse into the political system. “Gender became a site for contestation of the populist legitimacy by both state and opposition forces” (Mohamad 2002b, 350). On the other hand, after experiencing state repression during the reformasi time, the women’s movement itself changed and became more politicised in a sense that it sought more connections with issues like political rights and development issues. However, in the long run, this hope was the product of times of relative economic and political instability, and it was dashed when the formal political system re-consolidated itself after the economic instability of the Asian crisis and the political instability of the reformasi movement. As has been shown, the women’s organisations discussed here find themselves situated in the ambivalence between a rather transformative approach and a strategy of “let’s not rock the boat”. This ambivalence takes the form of situative negotiations and oscillations between different approaches and is typical of the constitution of a public sphere in Malaysia. Furthermore, the examples of urban and translocally connected women’s organisations in Malaysia show how the concept and definition of ‘the political’ and ‘the public’, and thus the self-understanding of those organisations, have changed over time. At the beginning of the women’s movement, activists and organisations 25

Malaysia had signed CEDAW in 1995 and also participated in the Beijing conference in 1995.

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emphasised their non-political orientation in order to enter the public sphere without too much confrontation with the state (for similar strategies of depoliticisation of women’s organisations in Senegal, see Lachenmann 2004c, 323, 330). In Malaysia, the notion of the political was related exclusively to the ethnicised formal political system. Thus, it was especially this image of feminism as being ‘non-political’ that made it attractive for non-Malay and middle-class women to engage in women’s organisations. “This [image] would enable them to work in women’s organisations without being seen as partisan. Many middle-class women were eager to help battered or abused women. They viewed their involvement as ‘volunteerism’ with elements of altruism and charity rather than something necessarily oppositional to the mainstream” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 24). However, the trajectories of the women’s organisations––SIS’s engagement in the production of alternative Islamic knowledge at the interfaces with Islamic ulama and the Malaysian state, AWAM’s open use of feminist positions in confronting cultural assumptions on gender relations, and WAO’s approach to violence against women within the framework of human rights and creating new conflict-ridden interfaces with the Malaysian state––indicate the decrease in such a strategic de-politicisation and the gradual expansion of their concept of ‘women’s issues’. This expanded meaning of women’s issues was able to blur traditional boundaries between political and non-political, between public and private spheres and issues. Such redefinitions of what can be thought of as “political” form a basic condition for what Naila Kabeer has called the “transformational potential” (Kabeer 1994, 36) of women and women’s organisations as a result of specific female forms of politics and translocal networking. Furthermore, it can be argued that the shift from a rather paternalistic and benevolent service-oriented approach to an approach of societal transformation is the result of intense transnational networking and exchange of knowledge between women’s organisations. This is especially true in the case of SIS. Discussions and knowledge exchange on a global level have led to the formulation of more and more complex and holistic concepts about gendered development processes: from Women and Development (WAD), to Women in Development (WID), and finally to an empowerment approach (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). 4.5 Popularising feminist concepts Events like the IWD 2004 stand for a new trend connecting activism and consumerism, a new practice of popularising feminist approaches that includes a strategic use of commercial spaces, popular mass media, a combination of “fun”

4.5 Popularising feminist concepts

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and “content”, the development of new funding strategies, and the integration of pop icons into the campaigns of women’s organisations (cf. above). The use of shopping centres as a location for events relating to the advocacy of women’s organisation, as in the case of the International Women’s Day celebrations in the so-called Megamall, is a growing phenomenon in Malaysia. In 2002, AWAM and WAO cooperated for the first time with 3R in the organisation of the International Women’s Day events in a commercial space, namely the KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre) Shopping Centre, which is located at the bottom of the Twin Towers. Also, these celebrations focused on the issue of VAW. Another event located within such a highly symbolic space of consumerism was the “Massive Appeal Day to Stop Violence Against Women” which was carried out by WAO and AI in July 2004 in cooperation with MIX.FM, an Englishspeaking radio station which is very ‘trendy’ among young Malaysians. Here as well, the TV star Asha Gill played a crucial role. At the entrance to the KLCC Shopping Centre, she sold ban-Ashas, small bananas which she dipped into chocolate or strawberry sauce. The use of shopping centres as a location for events relating to the advocacy of women’s organisations is a very interesting phenomenon in the context of a country with limited options for civil society actors in the public space. On the one hand, according to many civil society activists, it is nearly impossible to organise events or rallies in public spaces such as streets or squares. This is only one of the restrictive regulations that limit democratic space in Malaysia. The Malaysian state, characterised by a mix of democratic and authoritarian practices, possesses powerful resources to control civil society activities: control over state finances and over media, and a number of repressive anti-subversion laws.26 In this context, the use of spaces related to consumerism and lifestyle opens up new ways of reaching out to the masses. On the other hand, to stroll around and window-shop in one of the mainstays of consumer culture in Kuala Lumpur—going to Megamall or KLCC—is one of the favourite leisure-time activities of the urban Malaysian middle class (Chua 2000). This new middle class has emerged through the process of successful industrialisation and urbanisation. In a conversation on the way to the Megamall with Ramani, a WAO activist, I asked her how it came about that International Women’s Day should take place in a shopping centre. Her explanations focused on the relevance that these shopping centres have for Malaysians: “Well, Malaysians just go to the malls on weekend to walk around, to take their children out. They 26 The Sedition Act that penalises statements that might lead to conflicts between the different ethnic groups in Malaysia, the University and College Act that penalises political activities of students, and the Union Act that penalises the forming of national unions are further examples of the restriction of democratic space in Malaysia.

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don’t go to the park, but they love shopping and looking.” In other words, it is the place where you can reach people. Visiting shopping centres unites the two main features of middle-class lifestyle, namely consumption and leisure time, thereby becoming a social practice for displaying social distinction and for celebrating symbolic consumption. On the one hand, the visit to shopping malls has a deeply symbolic function related to the performance and consumption of identities (Gerke 1999), meaning the symbolic performance of a global middleclass identity. But these shopping centres are also very attractive for economically not so well-off parts of the population who do not belong to the middle class, as they at least maintain the illusion of participation in consumption, “even if in most cases that participation goes no further than window shopping” (Abaza 2006). These “empires of consumption”, as Mona Abaza (2006) calls the malls, are modern temples which glorify unlimited consumption but, at the same time, also serve the nationalist projects of the political leaders who supported their construction. In Malaysia, both the Megamall and the Twin Towers27 of the national oil company PETRONAS in which the KLCC Shopping Centre is located are intimately linked with the modernistic and developmentalist economic and social visions of the former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir. In that sense, these spaces were politicised by the state before, and are now being conquered by the civil society. Alliances and networks with popular media are another important opportunity for these women’s organisations to disseminate their ideas into the public sphere and to create a broad societal basis for the public negotiation of gender relations, as the collaboration of the women’s organisations with youthoriented TV programmes and radio stations such as 3R and MIX.FM shows. “We make ourselves be at the forefront of the media, of the press and if the issue comes in, the press will call us” (Ida, SIS, 15.03.05). 3R was not only present at the International Women’s Day at Megamall, but has also been an important partner for AWAM in holding different types of workshops for adolescent girls and boys over the last few years. From 2001 to 2004, they jointly organised 16 workshops with 3R under the heading of “respect-workshop”. Currently, AWAM and 3R are conducting workshops entitled “Young Persons Take Charge”, which deal with issues such as gender, violence against women, and rights and democracy.

27

Construction of the Twin Towers was completed in 1998, and, at that time, they were the highest building in the world. They symbolise economic competition and the successful cooperation of the government and the private sector ‘Malaysia Inc’. Two companies from Japan and Korea competed in the construction, each of them building one tower. Petronas occupies the main part of the building (Evers, Gerke 1999).


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Some of the women’s organisations regularly publish ‘letters to the editor’ or other columns in well-known Malaysian newspapers: SIS in the biggest newspaper in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia; and the WAO, in the English-language Sunday Mail. The success of such media use is overwhelming: They call from all over Malaysia. From Perlis to Sabah. Because we have a legal column in the newspaper. So we wanted to reach the public. SIS had been around for quite a long time, but we could not reach the public. So what did we do? Publish in a newspaper. And once you publish your email address and email and everything they don’t stop calling. (Ida, SIS activist)

The radio is also used intensively as a medium for debating gender relations. The WAO social workers are regularly on the air: in 2003, with a series about women’s issues although in a rather classical sense; and in 2004, with a thirteenpart series solely about domestic violence. The training programmes these organisations carry out also underline the importance which modern media and communication technologies have for the constitution of a discursive and transformative space where gender relations can be negotiated. A significant number of the awareness-raising seminars and workshops are designed for young lawyers and journalists who are perceived as important agents of social change. Besides the use of the shopping centres’ spatial symbolism and popular media, the incorporation of youth and popular culture celebrities into campaigns of the women’s organisations, such as Asha Gill for the “A Girl’s Day Out” as well as for the “Massive Appeal Day”, also serves as a strategy for creating a public space around the debates on gender relations and gender equality. Another key person in this respect is Marina Mahathir, the daughter of the former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who is executive producer of 3R. Activists from both AWAM and WAO highlighted the role of Marina Mahathir in the IWD celebration 2004: “We got this public attention because the former Prime Minister’s daughter was involved. She is the producer of this 3R programme and knows friends in WAO. She also knows friends in AWAM. So it was easy to get the space in the Megamall” (Ramani, WAO activist). The diversity of spaces where Marina Mahathir is involved––media, civil society, government bodies–– makes her a key person to constitute interfaces between these different spaces and to enlarge the room for manoeuvre for women’s organisations. The connection between a culture of consumption and political activism is also reflected in the funding strategies of advocacy groups. NGOs in general find themselves trapped in a dilemma. On the one hand, it is nearly impossible for most of the NGOs in Malaysia to obtain funds from the classical Western and global donor organisations, either because Malaysia is no longer officially considered a developing country or because their work does not correspond to

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the agendas of mainstream development donors. On the other hand, the advocacy groups do not receive substantial funding from the state because of their critical position towards government politics. In this situation, the private sector is becoming the major source of funding. This, in turn, leads to the commercialisation of some of the women’s groups’ events such as the International Women’s Day in the shopping centre, which was sponsored by Bodyshop, Kotex, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, and Maggi. Of the women’s groups represented there, the WAO is the one that searches most creatively and successfully for alternative sources of funding beyond international donor organisations and the state. In March 2004, the WAO started the campaign ‘Change for the Better’ in cooperation with Burger King. In all the very popular Burger King branches in Kuala Lumpur, a donation box was set up right on the counter. Furthermore, WAO is funded by the Bodyshop and by the publisher ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’. In summary, the women’s organisations, which are engaged in advocacy for legal reforms and societal transformation, use a quite complex set of practices which are closely related to the lifestyle of the urban middle classes and consumer culture. Not surprisingly, this type of popularising and commercialising of feminist ideas and events is not undisputed within the women’s movement. And it is not clear whether the NGOs instrumentalise consumerism or whether they are being instrumentalised by the market. On the one hand, women’s organisations are very conscious of the publicity that such strategies bring, as the following remark about the event in the Megamall indicates: Actually, the event in the Megamall was only one of our International Women’s Day celebrations, so we had another one. The other celebration is a lot more dry in a way, more conventional, more serious. It did not have a show. We had a workshop on child sexual abuse for children. So this IWD is the more serious one. We didn’t manage to get many people, the turnout was very poor. But it really depends on what one wants to achieve. This International Women’s Day celebration, the big one, is a fun thing, it’s fun, it’s music, so that people come in and see us. But how much do they really understand? I don’t know. I don’t know what the impact is. I think they got more impact with 3R and the concert, but in terms of learning the issues, I really do not know, unless the person has already interest and gets leaflets and reads about it. The International Women’s Day is the day that women’s groups come together to commemorate the past achievement in history of women all over the world. This day is to not forget that there are still issues to work on. Our publicity is weak. So with the big International Women’s Day, we came out in the papers, in radio, and TV. So that women know about us and the philosophy behind it. If we could combine these two, this would be great. (Maiza, AWAM, 25.03.04)


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This remark highlights the strategic nature of the popularisation of feminist programmes and the instrumental use of such market- and consumption-related social practices. These are used in order to reach out to a rather unpolitical populace. Referring to the activity of “Men at work”, WAO members also emphasised the importance of bringing “the issue of valuing the work done predominantly by women in the homes” to a “fun platform” which would attract more people to the issue. At the same time, Maiza’s remark shows she is conscious of the limitations of such activities, and contrasts publicity and fun versus deep understanding and a serious attitude. However, even if the unpolitical stand of the Malay middle class and its orientation towards consumption is criticised by the activists of the women’s movement and also by many scholars, it cannot be ignored; and it is used as a tool for political mobilisation precisely for this reason. The integration of the private sector into civil society activities is also debated critically within the women’s movement in the sense that it questions the independence of programmes and agendas. Additionally, not all the issues of the women’s movement are equally capable of being commercialised. For instance, the issue of rape, which AWAM focuses on, is not a very prominent issue among private sponsors. As a result, AWAM has problems raising funds to hold their seminars on this issue. Maiza, one of the volunteers, complains about this problem: A lot of activities need fund-raising; we don’t have a corporate sponsor. We know that WAO has a big corporate sponsor. Every year they get 250,000 Ringgit. Nowadays if you want to work with corporates, normally they have to engage with your programmes. We have written a proposal to corporates to run workshops for school boys and school girls. But that corporate is not interested, because they are worried about their image. So rape is not a good thing for the corporate. So if you talk about children its much more easier to get sponsors, corporate funding. Because the corporate company wants to show that they care for the community. But women issues don’t get sympathy. They are women, they are adult, they can make their own decision, but children they are young, they need protection, they are a better target for corporates. (Maiza, AWAM, 25.03.04)

Additionally, AWAM is also known to be an organisation which is highly critical of the commercialisation of feminist agendas through the involvement of the private sector.28 But the cooperation with the TV programme 3R on the 28

This situation is even worse for civil society organisations with a more radical critique of the state development programme, such as socialist-oriented ‘grassroots’ organisations. The research showed that these organisations cannot use public space in the same way. Mainstream media are not open to the issues of urban squatters and plantation workers. And also some of the remaining international donors have this problem. For instance, German foundations avoid supporting NGOs that are too critical of the state, as a programme officer of one of the leading German political foundations

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organisation of workshops, is evaluated very positively by AWAM staff members as it allows them to “make impact with these workshops, because its not just fun and all this festival stuff”. Also, SIS has to select its fund-raising strategies carefully, especially the degree to which elements of popular ‘Western’ culture are integrated into them. The suggestion to organise a fundraising or solidarity concert with Anita Sarawak, a famous Malay singer, offered by a relatively new member of SIS during a lunch at Burger King for example, was immediately rejected by a more media-experienced activist. “No, I don’t think so. I think SIS would not like to have this kind of promotion, you know with singing and so on. They are afraid of the backlash from the religious authorities.” (Amina, SIS activist) In the latest literature about the feminist movement in Malaysia as well, this popularisation trend is received very sceptically. Ng, Mohamad, and Tan talk about “market feminism” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 159 ff.) or “commodity feminism, since even feminist discourses can be used to sell commodities for profit”. They refer to cases where the management of department stores, shopping centres, or other actors of the private sector “cash in on the concept of empowering and providing services to women” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 160) such as setting up a Mother’s club or encouraging women’s organisations to celebrate International Women’s Day in a shopping centre. From their perspective, the popularisation of feminist approaches is not a new practice of a social movement, but an “appropriation of a feminist culture”, “a capture of feminist essence and symbols by the market” (Ng, Mohamad, Tan 2006, 162). This criticism is indeed very valid. However, I want to argue that both diagnoses—popularisation as a new practice and popularisation as an appropriation—are not mutually exclusive and can be equally correct if one takes an actororiented approach where different logics of action and rationales of agency can intersect. From this perspective, I want to focus on the popularisation of feminist concepts as a new practice, and on the instrumentalisation of the market by women’s organisations in order to construct public spaces and negotiate women’s rights in a limited democratic space. Although representatives from AWAM admitted that the topic of “A Girl’s Day Out” was chosen by the TV programme 3R, they still had a clear sense of ownership of International Women’s Day celebrations, seeing the media and the private sector as an instrument to achieve their aims: IWD used to be only celebrated by us, AWAM. So we even declared it as a holiday for us, for AWAM staff, a holiday to commemorate the struggles of women in the told me in a personal communication. Such NGOs develop other funding strategies based on personal networks and donations of the members and activists themselves (see Chapter 6).

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past. We started talking about IWD and celebrating it and then slowly moving to some activities in the public. And now we have people from 3R coming to work with us, WAO and AWAM, and SIS. MAC and AI only joined us this year. Since they both are organisations working on issues related to women, we decided to include them and to put the IWD on a broader basis. (Maiza, AWAM, 14.03.04)

The women’s organisations are part of the urban social space in a twofold way: On the one hand, the addressees of the programmes belong to the middle classes. On the other hand, the activists in women’s organisations are themselves also mainly part of these urban middle classes with Western-inspired consumption patterns. This leads to the highly auto-reflective lament that women’s NGOs are too middle-class-oriented and that the Malaysian middle class is not politically interested and active enough. But there is something more to this. Such events are laboratories for the development of new ways of doing politics in a highly consumerist and at the same time politically highly restricted society: the politicisation of consumption. In the case of Malaysia, Crouch (1993; 2005) and Kahn (1995) have highlighted the de-politicising dynamics of the global culture of consumption. Kahn argues that the middle classes did not contain the potential for political transformation such as democratisation because their first priority was to satisfy their consumption needs. The case presented, however, sheds a quite different light on the relationship between consumption and political engagement. The activities of the women’s organisations such as the celebration of International Women’s Day in a shopping centre show how, in a consumer culture where material goods are no longer mere utilities but ‘communicators’ (Featherstone 1991, 84), consumption itself can be politicised. A commercial space is turned into a space for negotiating gender relations and social transformation. To buy a ban-Asha from Asha Gill is not merely consumption, but a political statement in support of the cause of the women’s NGOs. To watch the popular television programme 3R is not merely a diversion, but a symbol of engagement with women’s issues. The meaning of the campaigns analysed in this chapter does, however, remain ambivalent in the sense that unpolitical consumption and commercial spaces are politicised, while, at the same time, politics is turned into commodities which can be easily consumed like any other global consumption good. 4.6 Conclusion Starting with the event of International Women’s Day 2004 in Kuala Lumpur, the aim of this chapter was to analyse the modes of constitution of one specific female space (Lachenmann, Dannecker 2002; Lachenmann 2004b; Nageeb

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2005): the network of urban advocacy-oriented women’s organisations in Malaysia. When doing this, it proved helpful to connect the concepts of social space and public sphere (Habermas 1989) in the sense of seeing social spaces as “elements that constitute a non-homogeneous public sphere, one that does not come up with one common public interest, since individuals do not have the same predispositions to participate in this public space” (Lachenmann, reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005, 3). The public sphere has then to be seen as “constituted through knowledge production and transfer, through social spaces and fora, networking and institutionalisation of knowledge production and transfer” (Lachenmann 2004b, 129). On that theoretical basis, I want to argue that this space has been constituted by autonomous women’s organisations who saw themselves as an alternative to the male-dominated system of political parties and a misogynist state-controlled public by cultivating different political practices and their own separate visions of a gendered common good. The interface (Long 1989; Long 1992a, 1992b; Long, Villarreal 1996) to the state is characterised by the oscillation between a “let’s not rock the boat” strategy and a more radical transformative approach, which leads to what is described by the women’s organisations as ‘critical engagement’: selective and critical cooperation with the state via the push for legal reforms (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006). In that sense, the public constituted by these women’s organisations is a counterpublic (Fraser 1997) in the true sense of the word. It is not only an alternative public or sub-public, but also one that explicitly aims at transforming and challenging the dominant male public by countering male power and institutions (Müller 2000). Harcourt and Escobar have pointed out that women’s movements have been entering the public sphere “in redefining what counts as political”, and that “at the heart of the politics of place, is a challenge and renegotiation of what is discussed and valued in public” (Harcourt, Escobar 2002, 9). This specifically female public made up of feminist cosmopolitan women’s organisations was formed around the issue of violence against women. By defining it as a “widespread systematic feature of male-dominated societies” (Fraser 1997, 129), violence against women was transformed from a private into a public issue. This feminist counterpublic was shaped significantly by translocal connections to a global women’s movement. Women’s movements worldwide have invented new terms for describing social reality, such as violence against women, sexual harassment, and sexism (Fraser 1997, 123). The formulation of oppositional knowledge systems and gender identities as an alternative to the hegemony of ethnic identities played another significant role in the constitution of this specific counterpublic. This includes the invention of (ethnicised) gender identities as opposed to (gendered) ethnic identities.

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The women’s organisations have developed specific modes of constituting female public spheres and modes of social transformation leading to the restructuration of public spaces. Among these are the redefinition of urban places, the politicisation of consumption, and the use of modern communicative technologies to lobby for legal reforms. In Malaysia, the redefinition of places plays a significant role for women’s organisations. Shopping malls, the “empires of consumption”, are used by women’s organisations as places where gender relations are brought to the public and are negotiated. Shopping centres become public laboratories for the development of new ways of doing politics in a highly consumerist and, at the same time, highly politically restricted society. Appadurai has emphasised this ability of consumption to provoke resistance, irony, and selectivity: “Where there is consumption, there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency” (Appadurai 1996, 7). Women’s groups strategically use the lifestyles of the consumption-oriented middle classes and politicise consumption in order to politicise the public space. Translocal networking developed as an important mode of locally constituting spaces for negotiating gender relations and the meaning of religion in response to the statebased Islamisation processes and the restricted public sphere. As we have argued elsewhere: Advocacy women’s organisations in Malaysia are actively participating in global human and women rights discourses through their networking practices. Reembedding and negotiating the global discourses and visions is thus an important aspect of their activities. Thereby they challenge the monopoly of knowledge production of established networks of Islamic thought as well as the knowledge production and the power of definition hold by the Malaysian government concerning the right ‘Islamic’ development. (Dannecker, Spiegel 2008)

As part of the endeavour to analyse the constitution of multiple overlapping female counterpublics, the following chapter will present a second network of women’s organisations with different modes of constituting a public sphere and modes of transformation, and it will analyse this network in terms of its agenda and discourses. As for the urban women’s organisation, I shall use an event to locate the presentation and analysis of the organisations within their frame of reference.

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5 Protecting Women’s Dignity: Women’s Organisations in Kelantan 5 Protecting Women’s Dignity

After having spent several months in the urban labyrinth of concrete highways and railways in the expanding Moloch of Kuala Lumpur and after being socialised and familiarised at workshops and conferences of the urban, multiethnic women’s organisations, I was eager to get to know other parts of the country. As a result, I travelled to Kelantan, the northernmost state of Malaysia, in September 2004. Many of the activists I had met in Kuala Lumpur suggested I should travel to Kelantan because “everything is so different there”. Some activists had stressed the traditional economic independence and power of Kelantanese women, referring to the well-known Kelantanese market women; others instead had referred more critically to Kelantanese women’s organisations as not being transformative enough. Nurhuda, one of Sisters in Islam’s internationally most prominent activists, whom I had met at a regional conference in Bangkok and who is currently living in Kelantan as a Professor for Health Studies, strongly criticised the organisations in Kota Bharu: NGOs here in Kota Bharu are not transformative NGOs. There was no reaction on the proposal to implement Hudud law. Their work does not lead to structural change. They don’t have the tradition and experience of fighting as the Kuala Lumpur NGOs. Also the legal literacy programmes that these NGO carry out are not reaching very far. It is the question whether they only teach the women about the law or if they also encourage critical reading. (Nurhuda, SIS member, 25.10.04)

Nurhuda harshly attacks the organisations in her town for being not critical enough and using the concept of rights in a non-transformative way. And as analysed in the preceding chapter, the notion of social transformation developed by the urban women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur is linked intimately to the concept of legal reforms and to a critical engagement with the state. So I travelled to Kota Bharu eager to meet these “other women”, trying to follow the horizons of comparison that I had encountered in the field, but also trying not to take these horizons for granted. Were the issues addressed by the women’s organisations in Kelantan so different from those in Kuala Lumpur? Were they not ‘transformative’ at all, or did they develop distinct modes of transformation

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due to their embeddedness in a different social space? And if so, how were these modes of transformation articulated in a local language? And how did they situate themselves in relation to the women’s organisation from Kuala Lumpur? Using the networks from SIS, I first contacted the president of an organisation named Women’s Innovative Self-Development Movement (WIJADI). I had first met her sister at a SIS study session in Kuala Lumpur, who then established the contact with her sister in Kelantan. The second organisation I contacted was the Women’s Development Foundation of Kelantan (Yayasan Murni). I want to argue that both organisations are based on a specific local concept of social transformation which is not concentrated on the formal political sphere in the form of legal reforms, but is more embedded in gendered everyday life spaces and practices. After giving a short sketch of the history and the activities of the two organisations (5.1), I shall extrapolate the ambivalent and even contradictory negotiations and othering processes between the urban women’s organisations and the organisations in Kelantan. The debate about the introduction of Islamic family law in Kelantan and Terengganu along with other measures which are part of the Islamisation project of the PAS state governments in both states are presented as an example (5.2). The third step (5.3) will analyse and discuss the specific local everyday approaches to social transformation based on the emic concepts of “unfortunate women” and “female dignity” in the idiom of a popular Islam and its ambivalence concerning female agency. I shall argue that the gendered structure of space and the question of knowledge and different constructions of Malay identity are the underlying topics of these negotiations. In the last step, I shall elaborate the growing translocal connections and their consequences for local transformation concepts (5.4). 5.1 “Something needs to be done for the unfortunate women”: Inside women’s organisations in Kelantan 5.1 “Something needs to be done for the unfortunate women” 5.1.1 Wanita Inovatif Jari Diri (WIJADI), Women’s Innovative SelfDevelopment Centre When I arrived in Kelantan, I was immediately invited to attend one of the regular meetings of WIJADI, which is located in Kota Bharu, the capital of Kelantan. Six women between 25 and 45 years old have gathered in the small WIJADI office. All of them are Malay and dressed in colourful baju kurung, a loose, knee-length blouse and a long skirt which is considered the Malay national dress, and they are wearing a headscarf known as the tudung in the local

5.1 “Something needs to be done for the unfortunate women”

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language. In one corner of the room, there is a small table displaying some of the items the women have produced to generate a higher income: handbags, little baskets, soap, and candles. Referring to the organisation’s income-generating projects, Saleha, the president of the organisation, states: “Our business is empowerment”. The other part of the room is the office with a desk and a computer. While the women sit there, they discuss the disadvantages of polygyny, the problems of differences between Islamic jurisdiction in the different Malaysian states, and the significance of taqliq, a contract that Muslims can make with their spouse before getting married. Some of the women’s organisations promote taqliq as a strategy enabling women to prevent polygyny within the framework of Islamic family law. And they share their stories and experiences with the Sharia courts. They tell stories of husbands who started an affair, of husbands who took a second wife and left their old wives, of husbands who appropriated the family assets. And they tell stories about how to manage such situations: by starting to change the decision power in the family, becoming economically independent, and going to court. WIJADI is a relatively young organisation. It was founded in 1999 and currently has forty members. Its primary aim when it was set up was to provide legal counselling to women experiencing difficulties with Islamic family law in the Sharia court system: women who had been left by their husbands because the latter had engaged in a second marriage, women who had decided to divorce and who were now struggling for maintenance for themselves and their children, and widows or divorcees who wanted to claim property rights. Besides this legal aspect, it quickly became clear that one of the main problems facing these women, divorcees, widows, and single mothers was their difficult economic situation and the responsibility of supporting a big family with only little or no income. According to official statistics, the national poverty rate among femaleheaded households was 15.1 % in 1997 and even rose to 16.1 % in 1999 (National Population and Family Development Board: Ministry of Women and Family Development of Malaysia 2002, 23). A great number of the women seeking support had stopped earning money when they got married, or could not access the money they had earned during their marriage because they did not have their own bank account. That meant that shared assets were controlled by the husband. Nowadays, WIJADI carries out a quite complex range of activities, all of which aim at “empowering” and “making women stronger”, as Saleha, the executive officer and chair of WIJADI explained during an interview. The main focus of the organisation is on economic activities. These economic activities include a herbal and bio-diversity garden with over 100 indigenous plants and herbs and a 0.8 hectare farm where citronella, basil, and kaffir lime are cultivated. The garden is used as an educational centre and is regularly visited by

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schoolchildren. “Kelantan Rural Women Living Sustainably in Harmony with their Environment”, which is the official title of the farm project, is supported by a UNDP grant to empower women while promoting sustainable livelihood. The plants are harvested twice or three times a year and sent for the extraction of essential oils which are then used to scent herbal soaps and candles. At the farm, there are collective plots where the plants are cultivated and women are employed as labourers. There are also individual plots where women who do not posess own land can also cultivate vegetables for their personal subsistence. WIJADI also encourages women to cultivate the plants on idle land around their own houses. The women employed at the garden and the farm can earn RM 10 (this is around 2.2 Euro) a day per person for half a day’s work in the field and about RM 100 (22 Euro) for selling the products. The combination of supporting women’s economic independence and sustainable development through the maintenance of bio-diversity is one of the “innovative” aspects of the Women’s Innovative Self Development Centre. WIJADI also provides psychological support and legal aid for women who have ongoing cases in the Sharia courts. Meetings, like the one I was able to attend where women gather to discuss their situation and share their experiences with others, take place regularly at the organisation’s office. Some of the first generation of clients now work at WIJADI and have taken over the role of counsellors. This self-help approach is of fundamental importance for the organisation’s self-understanding. “We all know these issues through experience, through our own experience with Sharia laws,” said Saleha. Furthermore, WIJADI gives shelter to women who have suffered domestic and sexual violence. These women are referred to them by the hospitals in Kota Bharu. In the beginning, WIJADI was also providing legal training workshops on women’s rights and Islamic law, but since the government has given funds to other women’s NGOs in Kelantan to do Legal Literacy Training, WIJADI is concentrating more on its economic activities. 5.1.2 Women’s Development Foundation of Kelantan (Yayasan Murni) Only one year after WIJADI, another organisation dealing with women and poverty came into existence following a similar trajectory as WIJADI: Yayasan Murni. It was formed in the year 2000 and started as a counselling centre for single mothers “to show them that this is not the end of the world”, as Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, explains. It came out of an initiative of local professional women, businesswomen, doctors, and lawyers. The major incentive for these women to form an organisation, as Rahima told me, was a national


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survey on poverty in Kelantan from the year 1998 that revealed that around 200,00029 women in Kelantan were living below the poverty line, and that most of these women were single mothers. The urgency of this situation was the major motivation for the women to get together and to establish a foundation: Actually, we started because we thought something needs to be done for the unfortunate women of Kelantan. That is our term, ‘unfortunate women of Kelantan’; they are helpless, and they are not able to do things for themselves. From the statistics, we knew that the women who were living below the poverty line were the breadwinners for the family, and we found that they were mainly single mothers, single parents. Therefore, we found that something had to be done for them. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to reach out to the 200,000 women, but at least we started by having our organisation and getting the women to come to us, then maybe we could do something for them. We registered our association in the year 2000. We were allowed to carry out our activity, and our main aim is to help the unfortunate women in Kelantan. We want to help single mothers to develop: starting from being a single mother who felt dumped, who felt that there is no place for her in the society, and who felt that the world is cruel. All that will change to the positive and she will be able to help other unfortunate people. (Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, 23.10.04)

In its early phase, the foundation held seminars focusing more on motivation and “giving hope”. But, through working with the women, it became clear that just giving psychological support would not suffice. The lack of job opportunities and money was detected as the major problem in the analysis of the founding members. The focus then shifted from motivational to vocational training and classes on economic issues and entrepreneurship. The aim was to provide skills so that women could participate in the labour market and be able to do skilled and well-paid jobs to generate income to sustain their families. In 2002, as a consequence of this learning process, the foundation opened a ‘Centre for Skills Training for Economic Development’, which held mainly tailoring classes. Later, IT- and ICT-literacy courses were incorporated for the younger women, but the tailoring classes are still the most important part of the work. The IT- and ICT-literacy courses are financed by the Ministry of Women and Family Development. The tailoring course, which offers different levels of training, is fully institutionalised; it follows a rigid syllabus that is recognised by the Ministry of Human Resources. Women who graduate from the tailoring courses receive a formal certificate. In 2003, the centre also started a course of vocational training for domestic workers. This was designed by the women’s ministry and 29 The population of Kelantan is 1,373,173. Therefore, 200,000 is around 14 % of the total population.

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carried out by Yayasan Murni. “We want to train domestic helpers so that they are really good at their work” (Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president). This training includes classes in house cleaning, cooking, and serving food. The idea behind this training is to convert domestic work, which in most cases is considered unskilled, into skilled work with higher wages, as the director explained. At the present time, the foundation is operating six workshops in four different districts. The foundation has about 3,000 “target members”. From 2002 to 2003, 530 women attended the tailoring training, and 396 attended the IT- and ICT-literacy courses. I visited one of the workshops in Kota Bharu, quite a big building with three storeys. Apart from the training, the foundation offers the women free health check-ups. The foundation is working very closely with the breast cancer campaign and the hospitals in Kota Bharu. They organise talks on law, economy, and religion and invite specialists to give these talks. The members are also encouraged to participate in courses organised by the women’s ministry, for example on leadership. The organisation explicitly locates its activities within an Islamic framework, offering, for example, courses in the ‘Basics of Islamic Faith’. Yayasan Murni has three major sources of revenue. Some of the activities are carried out in cooperation with the government, that is, Yayasan Murni functions as the executing agency for projects, for example, of the Women and Family Development Ministry, for the IT courses and the course on domestic help. The capital used for buying the sewing machines was also provided by the government. In addition, the foundation relies on “generous individuals” who donate money. Thirdly, some of the committee members have founded a company, and provided capital. Machines are financed partly by the government and partly by private members who have a share in the company. According to Rahima, the president, 30 % of the profits go to the foundation. And, last but not least, the foundation has a small income out of the fees paid by women to attend the courses. But these fees are only charged to women who do not fall under the category of “unfortunate women”: those who have an income but, nevertheless, want to participate in the training. The so-called “target members” do not pay any fees. Through its activities, the organisation intends to bring ‘unfortunate women’ back into society. This approach has to be evaluated as a very technocratic adoption of global concepts of income-generating programmes for women and has to be interpreted in the light of Malaysia’s culturalist position concerning gender politics. This sketch of the trajectories and activities of the two organisations indicates that they stand for a social space and for a type of women’s organisation which differs significantly from the urban advocacy women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur. These are mostly engaged in the realm of legal


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reform and practice a ‘critical engagement’ with state institutions. The Women’s Innovative Self Development Centre WIJADI and the Women’s Development Foundation of Kelantan (Yayasan Murni) represent a type of women’s organisation whose focus is more on social work and carrying out incomegenerating programmes and vocational training for ‘poor Muslim women’, including counselling in legal issues on Islamic family law, and that cooperates more closely with state institutions. What these two organisations have in common is the idea of assisting poor women or of ‘helping unfortunate women’, as Rahima, the president of Yayasan Murni, describes her work in an interview. The interface between these social-work-oriented organisations and state institutions could not be more different from the interface between the urban advocacy women’s organisations described in the previous chapter and state institutions. Many of the leading women in the social-work-oriented organisations are part of government service or of the different bodies of the National WID Machinery. For instance, Rahima, the above-mentioned president of Yayasan Murni, was the district education officer of Kota Bharu, the capital of Kelantan, for several years. Her knowledge of state and government structures is apparently very useful for her organisation, as she can make use of her personal networks. On the national level, Yayasan Murni has close ties to the Islamic Women’s Action Organisation (PERTIWI) which is located in Kuala Lumpur. Nik Adila, the president of PERTIWI is a showcase example of this type of activist forming a non-critical interface between NGOs and the state apparatus. She had been the chair of the National Advisory Council for the Integration of Women in Development (NACIWID), and she is still a member of the council. She was part of the government delegation to a number of world conferences and personally knows the Minister of Women, Family, and Community Development. Nik Adila is also a member of one of the sub-committees of the National Council of Women’s Organisations (NCWO), the official umbrella organisation for women’s organisations in Malaysia. With these intense connections, PERTIWI can be counted among the organisations that are connected not only to the government institutions and their technocratic gender discourse but also to global processes and discourses initiated by the United Nations’ series of world conferences on women—although they are not located on the side of independent women’s organisations like the organisations analysed in the preceding chapter but on the government side. Being active on both a national and global level, Nik Adila and her organisation were very attractive for the activists of Yayasan Murni who were looking for somebody with expertise in the area of gender and economy. They were also looking for someone with a good reputation in the country who could support their organisation. They approached Nik Adila to act as patron for Yayasan Murni.

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Especially in the first years, this contact was very important for Yayasan Murni and enabled it to establish a close cooperation with the government. Yayasan Murni is very state-oriented and is especially close to the state apparatus and discourses. It is among the ten women’s organisations that the government designated as having the best practices. This list was going to be presented at the United Nations, as Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, told me. The organisation has also won an award as the most effective NGO from the government department in charge of registering NGOs. This close relationship of the organisations presented above to state institutions is also reflected by their funding situation. In contrast to the advocacy organisations presented in Chapter 4, the social work organisations carry out programmes designed by different ministries and receive funding for their projects from the federal government. This is the case for Yayasan Murni. The foundation has received a large amount of funding from the Ministry for Women and Family development for their tailoring, IT, and domestic help classes. All through the interview, Rahima, the organisation’s president, stresses the good relationship and the support they received from the ministry: “We managed to get help from the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development. They are being very supportive. We have quite a lot of projects, and we managed to set up our shop.” The Kelantan state government is also involved and has provided funding to buy the equipment and machines. “The state government also helps, and we were able to buy the machines, able to get the teachers. With their support, we were able to start with the classes.” Also during official ceremonies, like the graduation ceremonies for the tailoring classes, the attachment to state institutions becomes visible as the certificates are handed to the women by representatives from the respective ministry. Working in the domain of female poverty, these organisations move within a space that has been monopolised almost completely by the developmentalist Malaysian state since independence. Several authors point to the fact that the Malaysian state dominates rural development and the provision of social services, and that there is a lack of critical civil society actors in the field of “agricultural extension activities, skills development or credit provision” (Weiss, Hassan 2003a). The few NGOs that do work in that area maintain a very close relationship with the state apparatus, filling in the gaps in the state service. They typically address those parts of society which are not integrated into state programmes without, however, challenging the state’s development project in any radical manner. This might be partially true for the organisations discussed here because of their strong links with state institutions. This issue is hotly


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debated among Malaysian women’s organisations. During a group discussion,30 activists from the more independent urban advocacy women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur expressed their scepticism about the function of NGOs as “gap stoppers”: The State does not promote programmes for single mothers, because this does not represent the state’s idea of the proper family. They promote a certain picture of the family, of women, and of the gender order. If then NGOs fill in this gap without questioning the gender order, then they don’t force the state to change its policies. (NGO activist, 6.10.2004)

Another activist who comes from the health sector very strongly supported the idea of making the government responsible: We have to use the Platform of Action and make the government responsible! Until now only NGOs are responsible. It is a misuse of NGOs when governments can reject the responsibility. So, for example, training people in health service. Nothing has changed, the government does nothing. They come to us to do it. (NGO activist, 6.10.2004)

Both of them rejected the argument raised by other activists belonging to more social-work-oriented organisations that it was positive, that the state would fund NGOs to fill certain gaps in state policies because “we as NGOs can do better work than the state”. In their analysis, it is the cooperation of uncritical NGOs and the state that gives the state an excuse not to fulfil its duties. Another aspect in which the social work organisations in Kelantan differ significantly from the women’s advocacy organisations in Kuala Lumpur is their position in regard to the politics of Islamisation of their PAS-led state governments and reforms of Islamic family law. This position will be discussed in the following section of the chapter.

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This group discussion was part of the Research Evaluation Workshop held on October 6th in Petaling Jaya. The idea of this workshop was to share academic knowledge and to disseminate preliminary empirical results of the research project “Negotiating Development. Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies” with the activists, researchers, and development workers who had been part of the research, and to engage in an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue with them (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapp. 2005).

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5.2 “We don’t dabble with legal things”: Debating different modes of social transformation 5.2 “We don’t dabble with legal things” In 1993, the PAS state government of Kelantan managed to enact an Islamic penal code––the Kelantan Syariah Criminal Code or the ‘Hudud Bill’ as it is called colloquially––through the Kelantan State Legislative Assembly. In Terengganu, an Islamic criminal code was introduced by the PAS state government in 2002. Despite its focus on questions of social justice on a rhetorical and discursive level, the concrete measures taken by Kelantan’s PAS state government have concentrated on the policing of moral issues and on restructuring the gender order. The introduction of Islamic criminal law in these two states generated a complex public debate as it constituted a completely new phenomenon in Malaysia. This was because of its break with the legal arrangements for Islam as spelled out in the Malaysian constitution concerning the relation between secular and religious law as well as the relation between state and federal law. The Malaysian State is based on a federal system with one federal government based in Kuala Lumpur and 13 states. The Ninth Schedule of the Malaysian Constitution defines the subjects over which the States in the federation have jurisdiction (Hooker 2003; Stark 2004). Combining federalism and traditions of the Malay Sultanates, the individual states are given solely the power to make laws on matter of Islam. These matters include, on the one hand, provisions in Islamic family law––which, as a consequence, is divided into Islamic family law for Muslims and secular family law for non-Muslims–– regulated by an independent Sharia court system, and, on the other hand, offences against religion. These are described, and penalties for violations are fixed in the Islamic law enactments of the different states. Criminal law, however, has always been secular and therefore applied equally to all religious groups. The relation between the two systems as defined in the constitution is clearly a hierarchical one: the religious courts being inferior and the secular courts superior due to their power to decide whether a specific case falls into their own or into the state religious courts’ jurisdiction (Hooker 2003, 83). Both the Kelantan and the Terengganu Code have to be interpreted as the most far-reaching attempt to “replace the existing criminal law (for Muslims) by extending the jurisdiction of the Syariah courts and redefining criminal law” (Hooker 2003, 82). Although the codes were enacted by the respective state governments, they can only be put into practice through an amendment to the constitution reshaping the relation of federal and state law, on the one hand, and secular and religious law on the other. Due to this clash with the constitution, the codes do indeed remain inoperative at the legal level, but have become a discursive battlefield about notions of modernity and the “nature and place of

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Syariah in contemporary Malaysia” (Hooker 2003). Furthermore, these codes stand for the prominent idea of political Islamists that the “duty to submit to Allah can and must be enforced by the state” (Hooker 2003, 95). Within the “nationalist-Islamic ambiguity” (Stark 2004, 53) in which Malay Muslims in Malaysia are caught, UMNO and PAS represent two different forms of identity. In contrast to the ruling party UMNO, which worked from its very beginnings on the basis of an ethnicised and nationalist idiom, PAS has always highlighted the universal dimension of Islam as their political foundation. After a short side trip to the nationalist end of the spectrum in the 1970s, PAS made a rigorous turn towards an Islamic identity. In 1982, the new leadership announced that their political goal for Malaysia was an Islamic state with a government led by the ulama moulded after the Iranian model. However, this radical project had to be reformulated due to its collision with traditional modes of Malay governance and social organisation of Islam, where the sultan and not the ulama is “the main representative and protector of Islam and Malay customs” (Stark 2004, 53). This balancing act between radical Islamist concepts of society and political feasibility was first tipped when PAS won the state election in Kelantan in 1990. As a counter-action to the federal government’s Islamisation policies in the cultural and social area, without, however, changing the secular basis of the Malaysian constitution, PAS opted for the Islamisation of the legal system itself. They announced and enacted an Islamic penal code in Kelantan and Terengganu. Furthermore, there were attempts in both Kelantan and Terengganu to significantly regulate the dress practices of both Muslim and non-Muslim women (for further discussion, see Chapters 7 and 8). Gender segregation was introduced for queues in supermarkets, cinemas, and bus stops. This is a common measure that has been taken by Islamist governments in several other countries as well (for Sudan, see Nageeb 2004). Popular forms of art such as the wayang kulit (shadow puppets) and women’s participation in public Quran reading competitions were banned “on the grounds that women’s voices were part of their aurat and consequently could not be exposed in public” (Stark 2004, 61). But ‘modern’ forms of entertainment were also restricted. First, all video and snooker parlours were closed; and later, establishments selling and serving alcohol were also restricted “on the grounds that they were encouraging drinking, dancing, close proximity between men and women and ‘unruly, unrestrained behaviour’” (Stark 2004, 69). The advocacy women’s groups, among them SIS, the WAO, and the AWAM, strongly opposed these measures by the Kelantan and Terengganu state governments as an Islamisation drive, and they reacted with a number of press statements, letters to the editor, and memorandums sent to the Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir presenting their own interpretations and visions of Islam. As

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argued in the preceding chapter, these groups are actively engaged in the creation of an ‘alternative’ body of knowledge about women and Islam on the level of interpretation, Islamic jurisprudence, and Hudud laws. Gender segregation in the public space and polygyny are at the centre of the campaigns of SIS and other women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur that have highlighted the discriminatory effects these laws have upon women (Sisters in Islam 1993, last checked 04.01.06; Coalition on Women's Rights in Islam 2002). The Terengganu law was criticised even more harshly as a “law to protect rapists”. In 2002, when the Hudud enactment in Terengganu was passed, a coalition of women’s organisations protested in a public memorandum against the introduction of the Hudud law, arguing that it “constitutes a gross violation of principles of justice and equality in Islam” and a “total distortion and perversion of God’s Law” (Coalition on Women's Rights in Islam 2002, last checked 04.01.06). Their memorandum emphasised that both codes deny women the status of being an eyewitness, and thus, in both codes, a woman who has been raped is required to bring four male witnesses to testify to the crime. If not, the woman herself can be charged for having committed zina (illicit sexual relations). The Terengganu enactment even goes so far as to say that women who cannot prove the rape in the way mentioned above will be charged for qazaf (slanderous accusation) and flogged eighty lashes. It also opens up the possibility of the death penalty for apostasy (Hooker 2003). Furthermore, the women’s organisations criticised the fact that both codes did not take into account the multi-ethnic composition of Malaysian society and the question of how non-Muslims should be treated under this Islamic criminal law. The gender segregation of the public space is also harshly opposed by groups such as SIS and interpreted as a “steady erosion of [women’s] freedom and rights in the areas of law and access to justice in the Sharia system, social rights in the family, dress, public participation and socialisation between the sexes” (Murat 2004, 141). In many publications by SIS and other women’s organisations from Kuala Lumpur such as the Women’s Aid Organisation, the fact that women and men have to form different queues in supermarkets and at bus stops, that men and women cannot use swimming pools together is taken as an example that “we are on the way to a restrictive society that uses religion to control women’s lives” (http://www.wao.org.my/news/20020601waohudud.htm). Also on a non-discursive level of activism and of everyday life, SIS activists debate the question of gendered space and sometimes negotiate it very provocatively. During a dinner with SIS activists that I attended, Maiza, one of the locally and translocally most active and well-known members of SIS, told the others very enthusiastically about a group of Muslim women in the United States who went to the mosque every Friday and wanted to pray in the male space together with

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the men. Being denied access to the male space with the argument of tradition, these women had answered: ‘OK, so what? If we are not allowed because of tradition, then we’ll make something new.’ After telling the story, Maiza suggested repeating this action in Malaysia: “We should go there on Friday and just reclaim the male space. What can they do? They can’t do anything.” During the same dinner, Nazia, another SIS activist, tells the others about a meeting she attended of oppositional Islamic groups such as the Islamic Party PAS and the Islamic Youth Movement ABIM. This meeting was held at the house of the former deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim who was still in prison at that time and had become the icon of an oppositional movement. The organisers had put up a stage for the speaker and told the women to move to the back of the room. Full of indignation about this demand, Nazia said: “But there you don’t hear anything, you can’t even see the speakers. So, I refused to go there. I just stayed in the front. And they got upset; some of the men even left the space around me. But I just did not understand why I should go to the back”. The fieldwork shows that the locally embedded women’s organisations in Kelantan, but also other social work organisations based in Kuala Lumpur such as PERTIWI, took a different position within this debate and developed distinct modes of agency. Nik Adila, the president of PERTIWI and patron of Yayasan Murni, defines her work as “helping poor women”. She clearly contrasts her work to that of organisations such as SIS who engage in public debates about Islamic Law that require profound knowledge of Islamic jurisdiction: Actually, there are two types of Islamic women’s NGOs: one deals with charity and social work, the other one, SIS, will look into the legal aspects and rights. But a lot of people go into voluntary work because they simply want to help. Not understanding very much of the legal thing, we don’t dabble with it. We just want to help. (Nik Adila, 16.10.04)

Her concept of ‘helping’ does not include participation in the formal political sphere, but is focused on an everyday life level which is seen as separate. She goes on to elaborate on her concept of helping by juxtaposing it with the practice of “talking” or participating in a public debate. Certain issues, you don’t talk about, because sometimes it is not easy to talk. Like polygamy, there is nothing to talk about, because it is allowed. So what we do is just to ask for education. You educate the women and the men, the men not to have two wives and the women not to be willing to accept another woman’s husband. That is the only way. You can’t go against what is written in the Quran. You can’t even talk about it. (Nik Adila, 16.10.04)

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The notion of a limited public discourse on religious matters becomes clear in this interview with the president of PERTIWI. That even Nik Adila, who is located at the centre of state institutions and of the National Women in Development Machinery, does not see herself and the women’s organisations as powerful enough to talk about religious matters such as polygyny is indicative of the communicative taboos related to this issue and the little authority that women have to participate in this discourse. Although her statement contains a strong sense of resignation about this fact, she perceives herself and the other women in her organisation as not entitled to challenge established knowledge in the field of Islamic family law. She has not developed a transformative understanding of power and female agency (Müller 2000). Although she stresses the individual agency not to practice polygyny, engaging in a public debate on the contents of Islamic law appears to her as ‘dabbling’, as illegitimately interfering in the field without entitlement. An even more affirmative version of an approach that does not aim at a direct confrontation with state or other authorities was formulated by Roslina, one of Yayasan Murni’s legal counsellors. Explaining the reaction of Kelantanese NGOs in contrast to other NGOs from outside, she said that she would accept anything that is related to religious affairs without any doubt. This sheds light on the strong notions of authority and hierarchy concerning the production of religious knowledge which are valid in Kelantan. What the religious and state authorities had decided should and could not be questioned by other actors. These incidents show the fragility of the public space in which such negotiations take place for women, and the highly limited access to such space for actors who are not seen as being entitled to participate in the debate (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel 2005, 12). For the women in Kelantan, the access to the public space appears to be even more restricted. In the case of the introduction of the Kelantan Criminal Code, the opponents of the code were even accused of apostasy, which made a local inner-Islamic discourse very difficult (Stark 2004). The fact that the local Kelantanese women’s organisation WIJADI was one of twelve women’s organisations that signed a statement against the enactment of the Hudud laws in Terengganu, the neighbouring state, while the organisation did not make a public statement concerning the religious criminal law in their own state, sheds light on the restriction of the local space for women’s organisations in Kelantan. It is only possible for them to participate in a public debate in a space where their political activities are not embedded into an everyday life context. On the other hand, the representatives of the local organisations who were interviewed did not perceive this law as being discriminatory against women but, on the contrary, cited the implementation of religious criminal laws as a way to

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improve their situation. Consequently, women who are active in these local social work organisations did not see the need to participate in the protest of the advocacy groups when the Islamic opposition party proposed the implementation of Islamic criminal law in 1993. Nor was there a local coalition of women’s organisations in Kelantan who showed signs of protest or disagreement in public. As the data have shown, women’s organisations in Kelantan and related social work organisations in Kuala Lumpur have a concept of social transformation that differs quite significantly from that of feminist-oriented urban women’s organisations. They act as ‘gap stoppers’ and executing agencies for inadequate state gender and development projects without publicly engaging in the definition of parameters and concepts on which these projects are based. But there are also indications that this strong tie with the state constitutes an articulation between the different spaces of knowledge production on women and gender relations, the state, the UN institutions, and NGOs; and that this knowledge chain does indeed challenge the state’s monopoly on defining and executing ‘development’ to a certain extent. It also leads to the introduction and dissemination of new, more critical gender approaches. In the following two sections of this chapter, I shall analyse and discuss this local concept of social transformation and its inherent ambivalences in more detail. 5.3 “We in Kelantan”: Negotiating female dignity from an everyday perspective 5.3 “We in Kelantan” Roslina, legal counsellor at Yayasan Murni, offered me the following explanation for the way she and her organisation view Hudud law: From our point of view, there is nothing harmful about Hudud law for women. On the contrary, it has safeguarded women in terms of their dignity and their role. But in public, the law has been publicised as if it would disregard women as human beings. But here in Kelantan, I don’t think we are going to get any response from NGOs, maybe because of our culture. In our culture, we will accept anything that is related to religious affairs fully and heartily. If you really research yourself, you can see the benefits of Hudud. You can see Saudi Arabia, they have implemented Hudud, and the number of rape cases there is very low. In general, the number of crimes against women is very low compared to other countries which have never implemented Hudud laws. I think that after the implementation of Hudud laws, we could see that it is able to cure some flaws in society. We in Kelantan are Muslims and we accept Hudud as something that is part of Islam. (Roslina, Yayasan Murni’s legal counsellor, 24.10.04)

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Roslina’s statement reveals a number of typical elements of the discourse of local women’s organisations in Kelantan. In the first place, there is a strong accentuation of a local identity in an ambivalent combination with a translocal Islamic identity. Roslina’s statement is full of formulations––such as “from our point of view“, “here in Kelantan”, “in our culture”, or “we in Kelantan”––which highlight the perceived distinctiveness of her local space from other social spaces, for example from what she calls “the public”—probably the women’s organisations and media in Kuala Lumpur. The formulations highlighting a strong “we” and a distinct local identity in spatial, religious, or cultural terms were present not only in the interview with Roslina, but also used frequently by most of the women in Kelantan in interviews and conversations. During a group discussion, women from WIJADI—both clients and activists—stressed the high value that is attached to women in Islam and the positive outcome that Islamic marriage arrangements, such as the dowry, have for women in contrast to the arrangements of other ethnic or religious groups using the formula of “we in Islam”. Saleha, WIJADI’s president said: Indians do it in the following way: the woman must pay the man. But we in Islam we do it differently: the man must pay for the woman. Twenty years ago it was only 2,000 Malaysian Ringgit, now it is 4,000 to 5,000 Ringgit. And in contrast to the Indian system, where the money goes to the parents, the dowry goes to wife. The dowry, this is a property that you get with the marriage and that you can claim. You are allowed to take it. (WIJADI client, 22.10.04)

What she is referring to as ‘dowry in Islam’ is actually mahr, the Islamic nuptial gift, where the marriage payments go from the groom directly to the bride and have to be considered her personal property, also after a divorce. However, the picture that she draws of the Indian dowry system is not very detailed. There is considerable differentiation within Indian dowry marriage payments. It includes cases where payments are made by the family of the bride to the family of the groom, where it is then controlled by women with higher status such as the mother in law (Sharma 1980; 1994), and cases where the dowry is wealth that is transferred intergenerationally from the bride’s family to the bride herself (Tambiah 1973; Upadhya 1990).31 So, whereas the differences between dowry 31

Although the paying party of the mahr is the bride-taking family it is not a form of bridewealth, as bridewealth payments are usually a lateral transfer from the bridegroom’s kin to the bride’s brothers or other male kin and not to the bride herself (Tambiah 1973, 62). Concerning the control over the marriage payments, the mahr has more similarities with specific types of dowry payments, where the dowry can be seen indeed as a “premortem inheritance” (Goody 1973, 1) under the bride’s control. However, in typical dowry payments, the paying party is the wife-giving party not the wife-taking.


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and Islamic nuptial gift in terms of the question of who controls the transferred wealth is not so obvious, it is clear that the direction of the payment in both dowry variants differs quite significantly from the system of the Islamic nuptial gift. That in Islam “men have to pay for the women” and that this price has risen in the last years is interpreted by Saleha as evidence for the high value of women in Islam. It can also be interpreted as a sign of individualisation that the women increasingly want to keep the money and use it according to their personal needs and wishes. Such formulations with a strong accentuation on “we” were used less frequently by the young urban feminist activists. When the young women in Kuala Lumpur used such formulations, it was always clear that they located themselves somehow outside of this tradition (see Chapter 3). In contrast, the women I interviewed in Kelantan used these formulas in a more inclusionary way that located them within the stated cultural contexts. The point of reference and the significant other of this “we” were not, in the first place, dimensions of their own culture, but a more or less clearly defined outside—be it outside Kelantan on a spatial dimension, outside Islam on a religious dimension, or outside the Malay culture on a cultural dimension. Hence, processes of othering did not just occur on the women’s organisations side in Kuala Lumpur as an internal resistance against tradition. Complementary elements of othering processes could also be encountered in Kelantan. Analysing Roslina’s statements within a relational framework of identity (Barth 1969; Hall 1996), her strong accentuation of her local belongings also indicates that she was definitely aware of the issue of the ‘Hudud law’ on a national level as well as the different positions in the debate. These processes of othering have to be contextualised within the social and political characteristics and conditions in Kelantan, which differ quite significantly from those in the rest of Malaysia. In contrast to other regions of present-day Malaysia, Kelantan remained almost completely unaffected by colonial migration policies which concentrated on the tin-rich west-coast states. The consequence is that east-coast Kelantan remains the state with the highest concentration of Malay population. According to official statistics distributed by the Kelantan state government, 95 % of the total Kelantanese population of 1,373,173 are Malays (Kelantan Tourism Information Centre 2007). Kelantan is a predominantly rural society, most of the Malays being wet-rice peasant farmers or coastal fishermen. Women also play a significant role in agricultural production as land owners, farmers, and food processors (Karim 1992, 126). In the cultural and national imagination of most other Malaysians, Kelantan stands, on the one hand, for a romanticised notion of remoteness and the natural beauty of women, traditional arts and handicraft, and nature. On the other hand, it stands

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for economic backwardness and religious fundamentalism (Roff 1974). Until World War II, there was no road system connecting Kelantan with the rest of Malaya, and even in the 1960s, “the 400-mile journey from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Bharu required no fewer than thirteen ferry crossings” (Roff 1974, viii). Also politically, Kelantan has maintained a certain uniqueness among the Malaysian states. It was the first state in Malaysia where a social movement and political party emerged that used the idiom of Islam in the political discourse. It is the heartland of the Islamist opposition party known under its English name, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PMIP), until the late 1980s, but since then, under its Malay name, Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS). Only Kelantan and Terengganu, the southern neighbour state of Kelantan, have been governed by parties other than UMNO or parties not belonging to the Barisan National. This is the national front made up of the main ethnic parties (Malhi 2003; Noor 2003b; Stark 2004). But, in contrast to Kelantan, where the PAS government was stable over a long time––first from 1959 to 1978 and a second time from 1990 to the present day––the rule of PAS in Terengganu was rather cursory. It lasted from 1959 to 1962 and from 1999 to 2004. Geographic isolation on the one hand and specific political constellations on the other seem to have contributed to the development of a strong regional identity, as captured in Roslina’s formulation “we in Kelantan”. Secondly, while strongly arguing from a local identity, Roslina clearly relates this concept of locality to the religious dimension, saying that “we here in Kelantan are Muslims…” and she is also aware of the translocal features of such a Muslim framework, offering the example of Saudi Arabia as evidence for the positive effects of Islamic criminal law for women. Within this very strong Islamic-oriented context in Kelantan, Saudi Arabia serves as a role model of how gender relations should be arranged. Reference to Saudi Arabia stems from the official arguments of the PAS government in Kelantan. PAS brought forward this argument to justify the introduction of the new Hudud code in the state (Hooker 2003, 95). Roslina thus repeats the state discourse on the Kelantan Syariah Code. In doing so, she refers to a translocal discourse on Islam which tends to idealise the gender effect of Islamisation. The comparison with Saudi Arabia is a clear indicator of such an imagined translocal Islamic community. The fact that, on her mental map, she is located closer to Saudi Arabia than to the rest of Malaysia can be explained by taking into account that whereas, historically, Kelantan had remained rather independent first from the Southern Sultanates and later from Kuala Lumpur and the southern parts of Malaysia, translocal connections had always been strong. Especially translocal connections to the ethnic Malay areas in Thailand and to the Middle East and Islamic India (Roff 1974), that is, connections based on a translocal understanding of the


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Muslim Umma, have been strong and significant for the cultural and social mental maps of Malays in Kelantan. The haj played a special role for these translocal connections to the Arab and Muslim Middle East, so that “it is not uncommon to meet Malays in rural society, as well as in more urban elite sectors, who have spent many years in Mecca” (Winzeler 1974, 262).32 And thirdly, Roslina makes clear that from her perspective, the law is not a law that “protects rapists” or “disregards women as human beings”. On the contrary, it is a law that is very beneficial for women, reducing the number of rapes and other crimes against them. The same argument about the positive effects of Islamisation for women emerges in the context of the gender segregation of the public space enforced by the Islamist Party in Kelantan. Saleha, chair of WIJADI, comments on gender segregation by means of separated queues for men and women in supermarkets and at bus stops: “In my eyes, gender segregation is about protecting women. Because there are so many social ills, and you have to do something about it. For instance in the supermarket the separated queues are meant to protect women from being sexually harassed, from being pinched and touched” (Saleha, 24.10.04). Both Roslina and Saleha share a similar discourse on the existence of social problems that are depicted as ‘social flaws’ or ‘social ills’, and on the specific gendered aspects of such problems. The specific negative effects of such social problems lie in the disregard of women as human beings and in the infringement of women’s ‘dignity’. They also share a discourse on the need for social transformation in order to tackle such social problems, to “safeguard” women’s dignity, as Roslina said, and to “protect” women, as Saleha demanded. ‘Social ills’ can be remedied by the implementation of Islamic religious laws such as Hudud or by segregating the sexes in public spaces. These measures are seen as capable of protecting women from mistreatment and to secure their ‘dignity’. But women’s dignity can also be reinstated by helping those who have fallen outside of the normal moral standards of local society, the “unfortunate women”. In one of Yayasan Murni’s publications, these unfortunate women are defined as “victims of divorce”, “victims who face pregnancy out of wedlock”, or as women “who face the following problems: marital turmoil, victims of divorce, unstable economy and finance, gender discrimination, social ills, mental or physical abuse” (YAYASAN MURNI 2003). The special focus on the marital situation of women relates to the fact that alongside divorced women (Wan 2003), widows and their children also suffer from severe social stigmatisation, 32 With increasing Islamisation and orientation towards Arabic and Middle Eastern Islamic practices, this translocal orientation has grown and is to be found in various societal contexts. For the debates in the field of social science and Islamic Studies, see the work of Mona Abaza (1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1999a; 1999b; 2002).

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and are exempt from neither the financial difficulties nor the moral accusations that divorcees have to face. As already stated, depending on a single income, which is often located in the female low-income sector, female-headed households have to face specific difficulties in securing their families’ livelihood. Additionally, within the context of polygyny, they are perceived as a deviant category and “often seen as a threat to the other married couples in their neighbourhood. [They] … are seen as potential ‘second wives’ by married man and as potential ‘husband stealers’ by married women” (Wan 2003, 156). This leads to the social marginalisation and isolation of single mothers and their children within their communities. Re-marriage is seen as the best way for single mothers to be re-integrated into society (Wan 2003). In the interviews with the staff members of all three women’s organisations, the concept of “helping unfortunate women” played a very prominent role in addressing the problem of poverty among women-headed households in Kelantan. Especially in the interviews with Yayasan Murni and PERTIWI, this concept was central to the description of their activities. Seen from this perspective, social transformation means bringing women who, for some reason, have moved out of ‘normal’ society back into society. This idea is expressed metaphorically in a poem by Nik Adila WIJADI’s patron and the president of PERTIWI. “That which is entangled is simplified, that which is impure is purified, that which is bumpy is levelled out, that which is bent is straightened, that which is apart is moved closer, that which is lost is brought back, that which is unwell is made well” (YAYASAN MURNI 2003). Furthermore, the situation of women is seen as part of the broader picture of a balanced morally stable society within an Islamic framework. Roslina said: “Because if women have been abandoned and neglected, the impact is not only for women, the impact is to the whole country. Instead it is emphasised in the Islamic teaching that women have to be dignified” (Roslina, Yayasan Murni’s legal counsellor, 24.10.04). These visions of social transformation and gender relations expressed in the concept of female ‘dignity’ and the ideal of a just society, which are so central in the approaches adopted by local social work organisations in Kelantan and Kuala Lumpur, are grounded discursively in an ‘Islamic’ social theory. This Islamic social theory is based on the tension between the religiously inspired world views and the social experience of the believer, as Clive Kessler, an Australian anthropologist who became famous for his research into the sources and character of rural Islamic populism in Kelantan (Kessler 1974; 1978), has argued. The quotations about the contrasts between the social reality of the neglect of women and the moral standards about dignifying women in Islamic teachings from Roslina and also the antagonistically constructed poem from Nik


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Adila show that this Islamic social theory provides a strong “vision of the kind of society which would, or presumptively should, emerge quite automatically if men would only act in accordance with those higher principles of personally disinterested motivation which the religion urges” (Kessler 1974, 301). For the Kelantanese peasants in Kessler’s analysis,33 the “appeal derives from the ability of an Islamic idiom of political discourse to transform the nature of political demands: to allow the presentation of sectional interests in a universalistic, and thus morally sanctioned fashion” (Kessler 1974, 276). However, whereas for the Kelantanese peasants, the Islamic idiom served as a means of collective political mobilisation and the “presentation of moral claims upon unresponsive authority” (Kessler 1974, 300) in the context of growing social inequality, it does not provide women the same room for manoeuvre. The preceding quotations highlight this significant difference. For women, the “unmediated polarity of individual and community” (Kessler 1974, 301) in Islamic social thought is dissolved through a strong inclination towards everyday life approaches. Nik Adila from PERTIWI, who perceived it as impossible to participate at that level of public discourse, adopts an ‘educational’ approach oriented more towards individual agency and everyday social practices. The aim of this approach is to 33 Kessler has analysed this tension in the context of the appeal of Islamist politics to Kelantanese peasants following independence. Analysing the overwhelming success of PAS in Kelantan, Kessler argues against approaches that see the strong presence of Islamist parties in Kelantan as a result of “its isolation, its alleged backwardness and its strongly and traditionally Islamic character” or as “pre-modern styles of political activity” (Kessler 1974, 275). In his analysis of the special characteristics of Kelantanese society, he emphasises instead the specific restructuration of elitepeasant relations through colonial rule, the rivalry of differently embedded elites––the established nobility and aristocracy of the state on the one hand and emerging non-traditional elites on the other hand––that became articulated in party politics in a modern political system and socio-structural transformations concerning the question of land. Kessler argues that British colonial policies in Kelantan did not aim at a radical transformation of Kelantanese society, but rather at a preservation of continuity in local society, and that the establishment of a “British sponsored Malay model monarchy” led to a significant strengthening of the “established traditional elite and its hegemony over local life even in the remoter villages of the state”. After independence, with the introduction of a political system based on parties, these traditional elites successfully managed to be integrated into the UMNO apparatus. However, the rural population especially had the expectation that independence would not only be the transfer of power from an “alien power to the leaders of their own people” but would also lead to a radical change in social hierarchies and a “redress of the neglect of Malay peasant life” by the political elites. When the question of land then became virulent because of the British-induced transformation from traditional to registered individual land tenureship “whereby encroaching market forces undermined the security of peasant smallholdings and placed control of the peasant sector increasingly in the grasp of those with more ready access than peasants to cash” (Kessler 1974, 289), the traditional aristocratic elites finally lost their influence and new political actors, mainly local Islamic authorities, appeared on the political landscape. Kessler argues that the Islamic idiom was the articulation of these inner-Malay class conflicts and political differentiation. He goes on to say that “popular Islam provides them with a repertoire of techniques for fashioning the world and themselves” (Kessler 1974, 310).

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educate women and men not to choose the option of a polygynic marriage without changing the legal foundations of the society. She stands for an approach that privileges alternative and transformative everyday practices over an alternative public discourse concerning religious issues. The transformative power of this everyday life-oriented approach is revealed in the trajectories of the women on the ground who are active in social work organisations: Adiba’s case (21.10.04): Before getting married, Adiba had worked in a small factory. When she got married, she quit her job to dedicate herself fully to family life and became a housewife. After 15 years of marriage, her husband took a second wife, left the joint household, and stopped financially supporting Adiba and their six children. This was a very hard time for Adiba, as she quickly had to find a way to earn money. She opened a small food stall and additionally started to work as a traditional massage woman. Through a friend, she got to know about WIJADI. She came to WIJADI because she was keen to meet other women who had experienced similar problems. Now she works as a counsellor in WIJADI. She says: “I was very naïve, but with WIJADI I learned how to go through my life with or without my husband.” Adiba is still married, but lives without any support from her husband. Maslina’s case (21.10.04): After her divorce, Maslina returned to her parent’s house in Kota Bharu. She had to leave her children behind with her ex-husband and arrived without any money, because he had taken all the money from their joint bank account. After one month, she heard about WIJADI. “I came here and I learned from what is being taught at the workshops, on women’s rights, and how to handle a case at court. First, I did not take any actions against my husband, because I wanted to understand and learn first. But after six months of following the WIJADI workshops, I started to take action. I went to court and made a report. I started with the custody over the children and child maintenance, and currently I am going up and down because of the property rights. It will take some time, my case is going on now for four years. Now I handle my own case, I go to court on my own, because I know what to do.” Airmi’s case (20.10.04): Airmi is one of Maslina’s old friends. Her husband left her and their seven children when he got married to a second woman. He took all the money from their joint account and left her with nothing. Airmi also takes care of her old father. Airmi was watching how Maslina’s case developed. “I joined WIJADI because I saw that my friend became strong, tough, happy, and beautiful after she got separated from her husband.” In the beginning, Airmi came to WIJADI to enjoy the community of women who had experienced the same thing as she and to learn about her chances at court. She did not want to take any action against her husband immediately, because, as she says, she knew that it would take a long time, and she did not want to fight her husband without being prepared. Six months ago, she finally got divorced and gained custody of her children “I learned to be tough for me and my kids. I work in construction and now I feel happy, young, and beautiful. I am proud of myself because I can live without my husband.”


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But not all the women who are active in the women’s groups opt for a divorce when they face marital problems and are confronted with the possibility of polygyny, as the case of Rashida shows: Rashidah’s case (20.10.04): Rashidah relates that she had a happy marriage until her husband started an affair with another woman. She finally came to WIJADI when her husband wanted to take a second wife “I had nobody to turn to because both of my parents had passed away already. I couldn’t tell my family because they would ask me to divorce. So I came here and the community made me happy. They offered me to participate in seminars and workshops and they made me strong.” Rashidah did not want support for the legal fight for a divorce, but support to find out how she could regain her husband’s respect. She opted for staying with her husband and her nine children, but managed to carry out significant changes in the processes of decision making and division of labour. She highlights that despite the fact that she came from a wealthy family, she had always helped her husband, working in his workshop, for example, polishing the cars. Now she says she has stopped helping him and takes the time to “only groom myself and make sure that he respects me. After I joined WIJADI, he looks at me with respect. Now whatever he wants to do, he asks me; any decision making is up to me. I will make sure that he respects me.”

These cases show how important this space is to women reflecting on their situation and how it enables them to make use of their agency, enlarge their room for manoeuvre, and thus change their situation. It shows, furthermore, that power relations in the family were changed, and that completely new models of female agency emerged. All stories are individual success stories. In this context, the central questions for the women were not only control over assets and property but also the limitations to their agency. Saleha, the executive officer and chairperson of WIJADI, criticises these power structures openly: “Our Malay women, when they marry, everything goes to the husband. When they marry they don’t have their own identity any more. The wife cannot go out anymore. She has to ask for permission from her husband.” To break with this financial and social dependence on their husbands was the most significant experience for women who have organised themselves in the women’s groups. As the quotations above indicate, all of them stressed the fact that, through their activities in WIJADI, they had learned to be economically independent from their husbands and to live independent lives on their own. This newly gained sense of independence is highlighted over and over. The following quotations are a sequence from a group discussion with Aniha, Adiba, Rashidah, Maslina, and Airmi at WIJADI’s office (21.10.04). Asked about what difference being in WIJADI makes for them, Adiba said: “I know my rights now. It made me empowered. Nowadays I can discuss with my husband. I am not a second-class citizen anymore, I can take action.” Maslina said: “I don’t think about a second

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husband any more, I just think about earning money for me and my children.” Airmi laughingly said: “Now I know that my husband is not important, I think if I would marry again I could not be a good wife anymore.” Rashidah added: “We have to trust ourselves first, and then we can trust our husbands.” The women built a space where established norms for gender relations can be challenged, as shown by Adiba’s joke about the fact that now, having realised her own strength, she would not be able to be a ‘good wife’ anymore. In her opinion, being a good wife means accepting anything the husband says without protest and devoting her life to her husband. Also, the idea of polygyny can be debated and challenged within this space. Asked about polygyny, Adiba, whose husband had taken a second wife and then left her, answered: I would agree, if it would be fair. But the husband cannot be fair, this is impossible, the first wife is abandoned by the husband and he only looks for the second wife. The first woman does not have her husband anymore, she loses her husband. And she only depends on herself. (21.10.04)

This argumentation is embedded in her personal experiences and contradicts the position that Muslim men have the right to marry up to four women, which is propagated very strongly by the Islamist opposition party PAS. Also during the group discussion, the women criticised the inconsistency of Islamic family law in different Malaysian states. These differences empower especially men to prevent or retard divorce. Both quotations are an example of how, within this space, common models of female identity and agency, namely women as dependent and obedient wives, are challenged. New models of female agency are constructed that relate to economic independence and social and moral strength. The cases of Adiba, Rashidah, Maslina, and Airmi show how these women build up a social space that empowers them to reflect critically on gender and power relations in their families and to take action. However, they do not take collective action like the advocacy organisations from urban Kuala Lumpur that use the structures and mechanisms of political institutions and a mediadominated public sphere with the aim of transforming society. In contrast, they employ individual strategies of resistance: boycotting the former division of labour and the distribution of the amount of labour between them and their husbands (Rashidah), rejecting polygynous marriage (Adiba, Airmi), and creating female solidarity by spending a lot of time with the other women at WIJADI’s office. These practices need to be understood as “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985), that is, as typical forms of subaltern resistance (Spivak 1994). Besides these practical agency-oriented forms of everyday resistance, they also develop forms of symbolic resistance where the meaning of a “good Muslim wife” is re-negotiated from a female perspective. Through a process of


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empowerment, these everyday forms of practical and symbolic resistance (Scott 1985, 304 ff.) are connected to the institutional level of the family courts where they develop forms of institutional resistance like demanding divorce (Airmi) or claiming custody and maintenance (Maslina, Airmi). The space in which these women can negotiate their visions of how gender relations should be arranged is constituted to a significant extent through the use of global development and gender concepts and the localisation of such concepts in everyday language. As the quotations show, both social activists and ‘clients’ of the organisations make explicit use of global concepts such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘rights’. Whereas the president of WIJADI and also Adiba use the concepts of ‘empowerment’ and ‘rights’ literally, the everyday language of the women also reveals aspects of the empowerment concept. They speak of economic independence from the husband (“to get through without a husband”), of new forms of knowledge and competence (“Now I can handle my own case, I know what to do”), of experiencing respect from others, and of pride, strength, happiness, and beauty. All of these aspects express a significant increase in female agency. What is outstanding here is the close connection between traditional Malay concepts of female strength and agency and those concepts stemming from discourses of a globalised women’s movement such as “empowerment” and “women’s rights”. The emphasis given by the women to “beauty” in this context stands for the translation and localisation of global modes of empowerment into local Malay understandings of female agency and a specific understanding of female sexual power based on beauty. In her ethnographic study of gender relations in a Malay village, Karim gives detailed evidence for what she calls a “Malay customary emphasis on physical appearance” (Karim 1992, 149) such as the elaborate body care techniques of Malay women after giving birth––body-toning massages by specialised midwifes, post-natal food taboos, use of traditional tonics and herbs, etc.––in order to restore a beautiful body. Karim relates this emphasis to forms of female power based on adat, a set of ideas about the organisation of social life in Malay village communities which concerns matters such as land, economy, kinship, and marriage. Adat is considered to distinguish itself through a bilateral and complementary construction of gender relations by which hierarchical differences based on gender are reduced to a significant degree (Karim 1992, 5). Within adat, a specific emphasis is also given to the economic independence of women: “A premium is still placed on the self-assured woman […] who competes with others to attain economic and social independence and who obtains rank and power through politics or industry” (Karim 1992, 5).

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The fact that Adiba works as what she called in English a “traditional massage woman” is an indication of how powerful the adat notions of female agency are even in urban areas such as Kota Bharu where Adiba and her friends live. Adiba works as a bidan, as the Malay midwifes are called, and her task is mainly post-natal care and treatment of mothers such as restoring their bodies to their former shape (Karim 1992, 145, 149). Adiba’s technique to bring the female body of her clients back into its desired form is to massage the superfluous air out of their bodies. During the massage, this air is absorbed by her, transferred from the clients into her body, and is then ejected by her through highly convulsive and strepitous belches. Adiba’s case also shows how much the social space of these women and their imaginations differ from the sort of Islam propagated by the Islamist party. One of the policies of the Islamists had been to ban traditional Malay forms of spirituality and folk belief. As a result, not only the Malay shadow puppet performances but also traditional healing practices have been prohibited (Stark 2004). The local concept of ‘helping the unfortunate women’ stands for a localisation and re-interpretation of the global concepts of poverty and poverty reduction within an Islamic framework. Besides assistance on legal matters, both organisations address the economic situation of women-headed households in Kelantan and try to give women economic security and independence. Yayasan Murni is not an income-generating project in the sense of generating direct additional income through selling produced goods. Of course, the foundation owns a small showroom in its main building where products can be bought. But the focus lies on the provision of skills, so that after completing a course, women can open their own workshops. The main aim is to prepare single women with children, who are mostly without any other support from family networks, for an economically independent life. The overall vision of how women should participate in the economy becomes clear in the following: The problem of single mothers is that they are not able to work full time because they have children to look after. For them, it would be perfect if they could work part time as domestic helpers and the rest of the day work as tailors at home. They could take orders and do the sewing at home. That will give them time with their children. We help our target members in giving them skills for domestic work, so that they should be paid RM 400 a month as skilled workers instead of RM 200, and we give them the skills in tailoring. I think that will enable them to earn enough in order to support their children. We feel that the skills we are giving them are very effective. If someone is hungry, we cannot just give him the fish, he would just eat it. That’s why we have to give them the tools, and that is what we are doing, and we feel that we are doing the right thing. (Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, 23.10.04)


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She goes on to criticise the government projects for poverty alleviation as not being sustainable: The government is not able to help much. Once a year during the Ramadhan, the government gives each of these poor families RM 200 so that they have a nice hari raya. But this is it. So what about the day to day basis? The children need to go to school. Things like that are not provided. (23.10.04)

In contrast to such mere charity projects which the state carries out, the programmes offered by her organisation aim at giving women a sustainable basis for their livelihood. In this quotation, she also uses the well-known global development self-help jargon of the fish and the fishing net that is meant to differentiate between projects that aim only at immediate aid and those which create sustainable livelihoods. The ultimate aim of the organisation is thus to provide women with knowledge and skills so that they themselves can build up economically sustainable livelihoods. So, to a certain extent, there is indeed a challenge to the state’s monopoly on defining and executing ‘development’. Both quotations are an example of the constitution of a female space where common constructs of gender and female agency, namely women as dependent and obedient wives, are challenged ‘silently’ on an everyday level, and new models of female agency are constructed that relate to economic independence and social and moral strength. These empower women to negotiate gender relations and to live economically independent lives. Within this space, issues which women in Kelantan cannot negotiate in public, such as polygyny, hierarchies in the family in the context of gender relations, and the process of Islamisation, are debated critically on an everyday life level. It provides a niche for developing specific socially embedded modes of social transformation. These modes of social transformation, however, are not recognised by parts of the urban, middle-class-oriented women’s organisations, as the strong criticism of the social-work-oriented women’s organisation in Kelantan by members of the advocacy groups shows. Nonetheless, this approach of “helping the unfortunate women” is still based on some problematic assumptions about gender relations, poverty, and women’s agency. Drawing on an individualistic Islamic social theory of the “individual, and […] the possibility of his behaviour being actuated by higher principle rather than being conditioned by […] actual social circumstances” (Kessler 1974, 301), it addresses neither female poverty and economic marginalisation nor the moral stigmatisation of single mothers as a societal problem. Although women are supported economically in these projects, there is no idea of a transformative economy. The basic sexual division of labour and the relation between the productive and the reproductive sphere remain untouched

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(Lachenmann 1998b). On the contrary, tailoring and domestic help are activities that do not challenge the established gender order, but even tend to reinforce the gendered structures of the labour market, as these economic activities are constructed as specifically female. The dichotomisation between unfortunate women and fortunate women tends to narrow the scope and perspective on gender and society by reducing it to only the marital status of the women. As long as women remain within the normalised family structures, for example, as long as they have a ‘loving husband’ who takes care of them, the gender order is not questioned. Thirdly, there is an interesting ambivalence and contradiction between the concept of empowerment and the idea of ‘unfortunate women’ in relation to women’s agency. Although, through such programmes, women are able to constitute a space for themselves where they feel “tough, strong, young, and beautiful” and reflect critically on gender relations, the concept of the ‘unfortunate women’ at the same time is discursively restricting the space of agency to a significant extent. Although the women emphasise their strength, their independence, they are simultaneously constructed as helpless, vulnerable, without any capacities to improve their own lives. Interestingly, the notion of vulnerability, which is part of the concept of the ‘unfortunate women’, and which is applied here by middle-class women to describe marginalised social groups, has its origin in the North-South development debates and was first introduced and publicised by the Commonwealth Expert Group on Women and Structural Adjustment (Commonwealth Expert Group on Women and Structural Adjustment 1989). Although this phrase played a major role in challenging World Bank policies, highlighting the marginalising effects of such policies on women, the construction of women as the vulnerable other at the same time “further entrenched the image of the helpless premodern, vulnerable ThirdWorld women” (Parpart 1999, 228). Such concepts tend to make women invisible as independent subjects with their own capacities and interests (Chowdhry 1999; Marchand 1999; Parpart 1999; Parpart, Marchand 1999). However, women in Kelantan also try to broaden this narrow concept of “unfortunate women”. One example of such a negotiation of social transformation is the debate among Muslim women in Kelantan on the integration of men into the gender programmes and the education of men in gender issues. Women from Yayasan Murni and WIJADI complained several times that it did not make sense for gender programmes offered by NGOs and the government to be directed only at women. Their reasoning was that the problems women had to face were not caused by women, but by their husbands or other men. “We always do workshops and seminars for women. But we have to do this for men, because in the end, the ones who make the problem are the men at home. So what? You won’t change anything without addressing the men”


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(WIJADI activist, 21.10.04). An important argument is the importance of the family and the responsibility of both women and men for the functioning of the marriage and the family. “If we have family programmes, the number of males who turn up is very small. But we cannot build a house or family if only the women know about their rights or liabilities and the men do not” (Yayasan Murni’s legal counsellor, 24.10.04). “If men do not attend, then how can they learn how to make a happy family? It should be compulsory for men to attend because it is so difficult to get men to participate” (wife of the Prime Minister of Kelantan, who attended the meeting with the chief of the Women, Development, and Sports Department, 23.10.04). Additionally, the limiting scope of the category of “unfortunate women” is negotiated not only through the inclusion of men into negotiations on gender relations but also through the attempt to blur the boundary between fortunate and unfortunate women: Right now, all NGOs are focusing on unfortunate women, but there should be programmes for fortunate women too, because if they are not controlled, they can be a problem tomorrow. Right now, they have a lovely husband but tomorrow she can be a divorcee, also if we didn’t give good education, good training, and good skills to these women. So we are discussing also a programme which will emphasise on women and teenagers who still didn’t have any problem because all of us are targeting to get a society which is very healthy in terms of family and emotions. If we don’t give enough emphasis and attention to these fortunate women, maybe someday they can be a problem to the country. We want to make sure that we can balance the society. (Yayasan Murni’s legal counsellor, talking about a meeting with a government officer, 24.10.04)

This can be interpreted as an indication of how women negotiate the transformation of gender relations within a context where an Islamist party has taken over the government. Although the transformation is not formulated on a structural level, the women demand that the relations between men and women, wife and husband, have to change. Through their work and through their experiences, these women have come to the conclusion that women’s issues are actually a question of gender relations. From their perspective, it does not make sense to educate only women, that is, to treat them as deficient entities. Men have to change their behaviour too. This integration of both women and men into the process of social change is an everyday criticism of the concept of female deficiency. Interestingly, this argument was not raised among the feminist women’s groups in Kuala Lumpur. In Kelantan, in contrast, it was highly prominent in discussions among women’s groups. The more ‘feminist’ groups in the urban setting of Kuala Lumpur can openly use a transformational approach on a societal level. Women’s groups in Kelantan, in contrast, negotiate their

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understanding of transformation and of women’s rights through the concept of the family on an everyday life level. This understanding is embedded in an Islamic argumentation. 5.4 Connecting to the world: Rearranging local concerns in a global frame 5.4 Connecting to the world As the preceding parts of this chapter have already suggested, women’s organisations in Kelantan, notwithstanding their pronounced local identity, are far from being isolated from global flows and discourses. Either they were using concepts relating to a translocal Islam, or they were using concepts that had been coined by translocal women’s movements in the last 30 years like empowerment or women’s rights. Another concept that was very important was ‘gender’. Taking the debates on gender as an example, I want to analyse the networks that these organisation maintain, and the effects that translocal networking with globally active women’s organisations have for the self-definition of local women’s organisations and their concept of social transformation. Through its connections to Nik Adila, the president of PERTIWI, two very important doors to different spaces opened up for Yayasan Murni: firstly, through the role of Nik Adila in the NACIWID, the door to the women’s ministry, the government space, and government discourses on gender issues; secondly, through the role of Nik Adila in her own NGO, PERTIWI, which is based in Kuala Lumpur, Yayasan Murni came in contact with other women’s NGOs in Kuala Lumpur that were following other approaches and involved in different discourses. Through these networks and contact with both the ministries and the other women’s NGOs, Yayasan Murni is connected with new ideas and new discourses, for instance, the discourse on transnational “gender issues”: It is very important to have women NGOs who are able to learn from other NGOs and to be able to work together as a bigger group so that we could make our voices heard in a much bigger group. So we learned about all that when we experience NGOs in KL and Penang that invited us to attend courses and seminars. If not, we wouldn’t be aware of all these. […] Now we have been given the job to carry out seminars and courses that will benefit all NGOs. Like there will be one on the 5th of December related to gender issues and this will benefit all NGOs, and we feel honoured that we have been chosen to carry it out. Things like gender issues are quite new to the Kelantan NGOs especially, and you cannot compare the NGOs in Penang and KL because they are so advanced. They’ve been around for decades. Actually we learned a lot from them when we attended the courses and seminars that they held in KL, or sometimes they do it here. (Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, 23.10.04)

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The networking with other organisations is not so intense on the translocal level, but highly appreciated. One member from Yayasan Murni’s committee even travelled to London and another to Japan to attend meetings. “We feel that we need all these exposures because the women’s organisations from the advanced countries can give us guidance, information, and all these new ideas, for example, of having a hotline for abused children. We feel that we do need to get in touch with the women organisations from other countries.” As mentioned earlier, the Women’s Development Foundation was founded in 2000. Of course, this was not the first women’s group in Kelantan, but it somehow represented a new type of women’s organisation, as the following quotation from an interview with Rahima, the president of the Women’s Development Foundation, shows: Women’s organisations here in Kelantan are a bit behind, but we are trying our best to move faster. The organisations in Kuala Lumpur are advanced in a sense that they have been formed many years ago, like PERTIWI. They are already 45 years old, and because they are in KL, they have access to materials. They have access to all the important occasions. Whenever there are courses overseas, they are able to attend, and they are also close to their ministry. All the global women issues are not new to the global women NGOs in KL. But they are very new to the Kelantan NGOs, since we are still new. But even the old women’s NGOs here in Kelantan are not aware of these global women issues. We do have quite a number of women’s NGOs here in Kelantan that have been formed quite a long time ago. But their aim is different. Because we have got women’s organisations to care for the people of certain professions. PUSPANITA [organisation for female employees in the public service] would care for the female employees and the wives of the male employees for a certain department. They would only mix within their own circle and only help one another. Their aim is not helping the unfortunate ones. They didn’t take any interest in issues of people who are suffering elsewhere. They feel that this is not related to what they are doing.

In this quotation, Rahima, the president of the Women’s Development Foundation, clearly distinguishes between the conventional women’s organisations in Kelantan and the women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur. What are these differences from her point of view? Organisations in Kuala Lumpur are “advanced”; those in Kelantan, “behind”. But what does this mean? The women’s groups that have existed in Kelantan for a long time were formed around specific interests of women, usually linked to their professional situation: women working in the public sector, or an organisation for the wives of police officers, etc. who would “only mix within their own circle”, that is, their own interest group, who would “only help one another”, but not help others outside their strategic group like “unfortunate women”. In Rahima’s eyes, these groups are not aware of global women’s issues. The “advanced” women’s organisations

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instead, have close relations with the government, and, even more importantly, with women’s organisations from other countries. They are “global NGOs with global issues”. For Rahima, what NGOs gain in translocal networks and what makes them different from others who are not part of these networks is the consciousness of social problems and a sense of solidarity among all women. This solidarity is grounded in their gender and cross cuts all other social boundaries and hierarchies in Malaysian society and even world-wide. “Global NGOs” are constituted by women from different social backgrounds who want to “help unfortunate women”, that is, socially marginalised women. Whereas the ones that are “behind” gather women from a specific interest or strategic group, the aim of her own organisation is ‘to do something for society’, for those ‘who are suffering elsewhere’. She claims to have developed an understanding of ‘society’, a social consciousness, and responsibility for others. The main difference for Rahima is the way the women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur are embedded in translocal networks. What NGOs, in Rahima’s eyes, gain in translocal networks is a consciousness of social problems and a sense of solidarity with others who do not belong to one’s own social strata and religious belief. This is actually what the concept ‘Gender’ means for Rahima: not the construction of social differences based on biological sex, as used in academic and NGO language, but issues that are important for all women irrespective of their social position and solidarity among women of different social strata. The concept of ‘Gender’ transcends social boundaries; it brings women’s experiences together as gender-specific experiences. Through the networks that the Women’s Development Foundation maintains, women are connected with these new ideas and new discourses, with the “gender issues”. In this way, the Women’s Development Foundation gained a new analytical perspective on society through the lens of gender, and became able to think outside of the box, to think outside of the known and established categories. Through these translocal networks, not only new topics but also new forms of collective action for women are brought into the local public debate. For Rahima, the discourse of gender mobilises women, as the following quotation where she talks about a workshop on VAW organised by the National Council of Women’s Organisations illustrates: Through PERTIWI, we got a number of the organisations from KL, and there’s one where all NGOs combine in one bigger organisation, it is called NCWO. They came and they had a two-day seminar in 2001 on violence against women. That was an eye opener, because there we did have access to all this information: how to go about it, and that when you want to get something done for the society, you have to tackle those who are in power, and you have to talk to the people who have been elected and the assemblymen and so on. We saw how we had to go about it and how

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we would be able to work together as a bigger group so that we could make our voices heard. Before the seminar, we had never heard of such things. I always say that women NGOs in Kelantan, they need a lot of exposure for these things. (Rahima, Yayasan Murni’s president, 23.10.04)

PERTIWI is a particularly strong role model for the two relatively young women’s organisations in Kelantan. These organisations talk about PERTIWI’s global contacts, networks, and approaches with considerable admiration. Women’s activists in Kelantan perceive a gender approach that could unite women beyond specific professional interests on the basis of a sense of solidarity as something new which they learned from globally connected organisations such as PERTIWI. The ‘things that they never had heard about’ is the possibility of not only helping the unfortunate women but also actively negotiating gender or women’s issues with state authorities and politicians—with “those who are in power”. They learned new forms of making oneself heard in the public and within the political system such as the practice of lobbying for gender issues through influencing political authorities. At this point, the everyday life approach to social transformation is being broadened through its combination with an institutional approach towards social transformation. In summary, it is through these networks that the Women’s Development Foundation gets in touch with new perspectives on what is actually defined as the main social issue they are dealing with, new perspectives on how to analyse the society from a gender viewpoint, and new perspectives on how to act and what strategies to employ as a women’s organisation. However, this happens within a specific Islamic framework that does not lead to an open distancing from the Islamisation project, the introduction of the Hudud bill, or the introduction of gender segregation in the public space, as pushed by the PAS state government. A global academic and activist discourse on Gender is localised in local understandings of gender and social relations. On the one hand, the Women’s Development Foundation sees global issues as empowering them. The concept of gender is not othered as Western or as culturally alien. But, at the same time, they also make reference to a translocal Muslim world and are clearly referring to the gender order that is promoted by the Islamist movements not only locally in Malaysia but also globally. Thus, this case is an interesting example of how Muslim women’s organisations can connect to different global flows and merge them together. The analysis of the data has shown that networking among women’s organisations on the national and international level leads to the enlargement of room for manoeuvre for women. Concepts that are localised provide a new perspective on society and women’s issues, and they give women’s groups new strength and power for analysis and action. Translocal networking with globally

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active women’s organisations can change the self-definition and the concepts of social transformation of local women’s groups. 5.5 Conclusion Following the comparative horizons of my urban research field, the aim of this chapter was to analyse the modes of constitution of a second distinct female public sphere (Fraser 1997) as constituted by the network of social-workoriented women’s organisations in the Malaysian semi-urban periphery (Kelantan). This social space is characterised by a higher degree of interwovenness of state and civil actors, and is based on different ways of being public subjects and of relating to the male public. The female associations discussed differ from the urban feminist public by being based on the idea of complementarity rather than on subversion. This idea of complementarity, on the one hand, gives them the possibility to gather in single-sex spaces; but, on the other hand, it does not lead to the emergence of a self-concept of a transformative public female agency. Instead, the relation to the male public takes the form of integrating men into their programmes. In that sense, the Kelantanese women’s organisations constitute not so much a counterpublic, but rather a parallel public. What became clear in the analysis is the triangle of meaning which constitutes the life-world in which female activists in Kelantan move. This triangle is shaped through the negotiation of the sometimes contradictory notions of female strength, independence, and beauty based on Malay adat; new concepts of female dignity propagated by global Islamist movements; and notions of female empowerment promoted by a global women’s movement. The result of the negotiations between these different concepts of female agency is very ambivalent: on the one hand, women in Kelantan develop symbolic resistance through a subversive discourse of economic and social independence on an everyday life basis where female subjectivities beyond dominant constructions of being a good Muslim wife are constructed in collective processes of reflection and learning. On the other hand, it seems that this does not lead to participation in public debates about existing laws and to challenging the hierarchies and unequal entitlements in the process of knowledge production concerning religious issues. The negotiations in Kelantan do not take the form of a “fight” on an institutional level between women’s organisations and the state, but rather take place on an everyday level between women and their family members at home and at court. In his groundbreaking book on the everyday forms of resistance of Malay peasants, James Scott has deconstructed the distinction between real resistance—as a collectively organised, selfless, and

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clearly intentional act with transformative consequences (Scott 1985, 292)—and other unsystematic, individual, and self-indulgent activities of subordinated groups. Following this idea, I argue for a deconstruction of the distinction of real transformative women’s organisations and non-transformative women’s organisations. Rather than deny the practices of women’s organisations in Kelantan a transformative dimension, I argue for the development of a specific mode of social transformation within a restrictive social space that is not articulated through the mechanisms and structures of the political institutions of a modern nation state and which does not aim at a direct confrontation with state or other authorities, but is based on the ability of women “to exploit the cultural system to their advantage and to transmit throughout history, components of the culture which significantly support their own power and autonomy” (Karim 1992, 7). This switching between different sources of power and autonomy “depending on which provides them with a wider practical venue for autonomy and self-expression” (Karim 1992, 7) may also shed new light on the othering processes described above between women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur with a ‘feminist’ self-understanding and those in Kelantan with a strong regional and religious discourse. Whereas they themselves perceive each other as fundamentally different, women’s organisations both in Kuala Lumpur and in Kelantan negotiate corresponding issues—discrimination, rape, and sexual harassment—but use different sources for formulating their claims. Advocacy organisations in Kuala Lumpur address these issues in the language of the global women’s movement as ‘Violence Against Women’; women in the social-workoriented organisations address them as questions of ‘female dignity’. While there is a correspondence of issues addressed within this translocal religious discourse and the discourse of a global women’s movement with a secular self-understanding, the localisation of these issues takes different forms since they represent competing projects of modernity (Eisenstadt 1999). In the case of the women’s organisations in Kelantan, the phenomena criticised are conceptualised as ‘social ills’, or ‘flaws in society’ that can be remedied by the implementation of Islamic criminal laws, such as Hudud, or by gender segregation in public spaces. In the discourse of the middle-class-oriented organisations in Kuala Lumpur, violence against women is explained in the framework of feminist theory as a result of uneven power relations between men and women in society and is seen to be intensified by the very process of Islamisation and the implementation of Islamic criminal laws. They seek a transformation of society through public education and legal reform. Both modes of transformation are embedded into different kinds of social spaces which provide women with a different amount of power to structure their room for manoeuvre.

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy 6.1 Defending the rights of working women against globalisation

6.1 Defending the rights of working women against globalisation: The support group for home-based workers In August 2004, the Support Group for Home-Based Workers, a network of women’s and labour rights organisations, carried out a consultation meeting on the “situation of home-based workers in Malaysia”. The invitation introduced the issue in the following way: “Persatuan Sahabat Wanita Selangor has completed a brief and initial study of home-based workers in some parts of the country. The study confirmed the difficulties that home-based workers face and the inadequacy of the Malaysian Labour Law in protecting such types of work. Increasingly, work for many workers is becoming more informalised. There are many issues that need to be addressed vis-à-vis these workers especially as they are unable to access the benefits that trade unions and labour organizations have argued for and obtained for workers. As a result, a few concerned NGOs (Persatuan Sahabat Wanita Selangor PSWS, Monitoring Sustainability of Globalization MSN, Labor Resource Centre LRC, Women and Worker’s Independent Media and Training Center WIMTEC) are calling for a brief consultation meeting to discuss how trade unionists, labour, women and human rights activists can together begin to address some of these issues for home-based workers.” All of the approximately 25 participants who answered the invitation and gathered in the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur were women, among them several representatives from different unions such as the Malaysian Trade Union Congress (MTUC) and the National Union of Workers in the Shoe Manufacturing Industry. Members of social movements such as community organisers and female factory worker activists from the Community Development Centre (CDC) in Kajang, one of the industrial centres around Kuala Lumpur, and finally one female home-based worker from Penang as well. It was a very lively atmosphere, and some of the women even brought their children. First, Lilian, the president of Sahabat Wanita––meaning Friends of Women in Malay—welcomes the participants and gives an overview on the historical background of the issue of home-based workers. Together with 19 other civil society activists, she was arrested in 1987 during the so-called operation Lalang and was kept in jail for 2 years under the Internal Security Act. She goes back into Malaysian history, talking about the first labour migrants who came to Malaysia: Indian and Chinese men. But later, she goes on, this type of migration stopped because of a new political situation in China, and Malaysian capitalists had to find new workers in the country. They discovered women. Nevertheless, Lilian emphasises, there was always a hierarchy between men and women which also included lower wages for

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy women. Import substitution was the main Malaysian economic policy after independence. This, Lilian elaborates, led to industrialisation and a division of labour where men did the skilled jobs and women the unskilled ones. Home-based work is just a continuation of this process. Lilian especially greets the representatives from the Malaysian Trade Union: “We are very happy to have the MTUC here, and that they recognise the issue.” Referring to neighbouring countries, she says that in Thailand, the government is doing research on the working and living conditions of home-based workers, and that they are now discussing how to improve work conditions. In Indonesia too, there is a cooperation of informal workers. “In Malaysia instead, there is only silence: no research, no study, no statistics.” This meeting, she concludes, is the first meeting in Malaysia with the goal of forming a support group for home-based workers. After Lilian’s introduction, Zarizana, one of the home-based workers from Penang, is asked to give a short description of her work and her problems. She starts telling the union members and activists about her working routine: she folds Tshirts, which means that she has to open the plastic bag with the unfinished T-shirts, sew on the buttons, check the T-shirts, fold them, and put them back into the plastic bags according to size. She gets 1 RM for every ten shirts. They want me to work faster, she says, I already get help from my children, but I can’t finish 300 per day, this is too much. Zarizana highlights the fact that she has to neglect her family because of the workload. Sometimes, she says, I have so many T-shirts that my children sleep on them. Sometimes I have to work all night too. I have no time to cook for my family, so my husband has to buy food for the children, and this is an extra cost. Sometimes the cost is higher than what we earn. She tells the others about her intent to improve her working conditions. She has asked her sub-contractor, whom she calls her “middleman”, to increase her salary, but without success. He also rejected her demands for a bonus, telling her that she was not eligible because she was only a part-time worker. Because he is her neighbour, she adds, she was at first not willing to fight with him. But then, Zarizana tells the others, she participated in another workshop organised by the Committee for Asian Women (CAW) in Kuala Lumpur on Women and Globalisation (this workshop will be dealt with in more detail later in this chapter). After coming back from the workshop, she put up a poster from CAW in her house. When the middleman came he was shocked, she says. Zarizana told him that she went to a seminar, that she knew her rights now, and that she knew what to do. After that incident, the middleman stopped sending T-shirts to Zarizana. Zarizana is very worried about her current situation. I cannot quit my job; I have to help the children. After the seminar, I put up the poster, and now I have no T-shirts any more. She asked all participants of the workshop to help her and to give her advice on what to do. After Zarizana’s report, a documentary is shown. This documentary about homebased workers in Malaysia was produced by a Chinese-Malaysian TV channel. It consists of several portraits of female home-based workers. The comment from the journalist: “They take up work to help, but then it turns into a burden, then the family wants to help. They are seen as housewives, that’s why they don’t get protection.” This is followed by a short presentation of the results of the research

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project “Home-based Workers in Malaysia: Challenges, Issues and the Way Forward” (Lee, Santiago 2004) carried out by Lee Siew Hwa, an activist from Sahabat Wanita who, at the same time, is the programme officer of CAW, and Charles Santiago, a Marxist economist and co-ordinator of Monitoring Sustainability of Globalisation (MSN). The research was based on interviews with home-based workers in the electrical, garment, and shoe and apparel industries along with trade union activists in Selangor, and aimed at giving a fresh insight into living and working conditions of home-based workers while formulating recommendations on the level of self-organisation and policy. As Charles stressed, the main concern of the report was to deal with the effects of globalisation on home-based workers. The study analyses home-based work as part of a global restructuration of the production processes to increase the mobility, flexibility, and informality of production arrangements. This growing informalisation of work has “a significant impact on workers and human security” due to the fact that it transfers the risks and costs of production to the home-based workers. Home-based workers receive lower wages as they are paid a piece rate and not a monthly wage, and they receive no medical coverage. They do not pay into the Employee Provident Fund (EPF) or the Social Security Organisation, so they have no insurance or safety and health protection at all (Lee, Santiago 2004, 8, 10-14). Their work is totally informalised as most homebased workers do not sign any contract between employer and worker. Interestingly, the issue of home-based work is, in the first instance, addressed as a workers’ issue and not as a women’s issue. Only after intensively discussing current features of globalisation and the informalisation of work within capitalist production in a nongender-sensitive way, is the fact that the majority of home-based workers are women mentioned as one of the “profile traits” of home-based workers along with their middle age, their low education, their location in urban areas, and their low income. The fact that the majority of home-based workers are women is related to the “ideology of perceiving productive employment at home as an extension of their homework” which lowers the costs of such work and leads to the “anomaly surrounding their legal status of workers”. Women themselves, as Charles highlighted, did not recognise their work as work. The report also gives examples of female home-based workers who perceive their work as temporary, as a way of passing leisure time and helping their husbands to support the family. This, however, makes it impossible for them to be organised, Charles criticised. Malaysian home-based workers are neither organised in unions nor in other more grassroots-oriented organisations. “First, you have to recognise that what you do is work, then you can form groups and organise yourself.” At the end of his presentation, Charles comes to the strategies for political action formulated in the report. Most importantly, he demands the recognition of homebased work as work. In the presentation, Charles says: “The government should recognise them as workers, and then they can get protection”. In the report, this demand is translated into the “institutionalisation of the employment relationship” (Lee, Santiago 2004, 17) of home-based workers. The legal recognition of homebased workers and the institutionalisation of the relation between workers and their subcontractors will “allow the enforcing of labour laws, employer obligations and

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy worker entitlements”. Secondly, due to their specific working conditions, specific legislation is demanded for home-based workers. This also includes reforms to trade union laws so that “informal workers including home-based workers can be organised and become union members”. However, Charles emphasises the need to form home-based workers’ organisations on a community and grassroots level. The report calls for “new innovative methods of organising home-based workers” in order to gain visibility. Thirdly, Charles draws attention to the International Labour Organisation Home Work Convention from 1996, and demands the ratification and adoption of this convention on a national level. He highlights the positive effects that the ratification of the convention has had in other countries such as Turkey, where the ILO is cooperating closely with trade unions on the issue of home work. After these presentations, an open round was initiated with the goal of identifying the main issues of concern and possible actions. The first issue debated was which ministry would be in charge and should be approached by the women’s organisations. Maiza, one of the organisers, suggested approaching the Ministry of Women and Family Development, but others expressed the need to include other ministries as well such as the Ministry of Trade or the Ministry of Human Resources, because the issue should not be addressed only as a “women’s issue”. They highlighted the fact that home-based work was a family issue and a labour issue in equal measures. On the other hand, Zarizana, the home-based worker from Penang, demanded that the issue of home-based workers should be related to other women’s issues such as violence and poverty which are also related to unequal power relations, as made clear in Zarizana’s report. All participants agreed that, in the case of female factory workers and female home-based workers, it is not possible to make a distinction between workers’ and women’s issues. One of the unionists says: “For us, all workers issues are women’s issues”. The basic question raised was about the problem of organising home-based workers. One of the union activists suggested identifying first the industry and the companies, then the respective unions, and then informing them about the issue, so that the unions could link back to home-based workers. Another representative from the union of the shoe producing industry interjected that it was not possible for informal workers to form a union. “If you are not a formal worker, you cannot found a union, you can only form an association.” She suggested that Sahabat Wanita should organise a home-based workers association. “Then we can step in and say: they should be recognised as formal workers.” Once such a group was formed, the unions could cooperate with it in the same way as with other women’s organisations. This view was supported by another female union representative who said that it was necessary to challenge the view that only trade unions could represent labour rights. She said that groups other than unions could also represent workers, and that grassroots groups also had the right to organise and to express their interests without being a union. One of the CDC activists called for a more pronounced grassroots approach. She highlighted the need to first get into contact with community centres and community-based organisations in order to ask the home-based workers what they wanted. “First, we have to raise awareness of the home-based workers themselves. The workers should be asked first. We should know what they want.

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And then we can go to the ministries with the organisation group.” Replying to a remark from the union representatives on the role of the media in sensitising the public about the issue, one of the factory workers from CDC supported the grassroots perspective of her fellow activist: “Of course we have to raise awareness among the public, but the most important thing is that the workers themselves have to know about their situation, they have to have their awareness. We must educate home-based workers about their rights!” One activist drew attention to the informal workers’ difficulties in organising and protesting due to the fact that their economic networks were embedded in neighbourhood structures and that the work was arranged by friends and neighbours. Zarizana’s case showed this too. “If you protest, you get blackmailed.” During the discussion, the participants mentioned several times that formal work is being reduced due to the fact that migrant workers are contracted at lower wages and under informal working conditions. One of the comments of a union representative reveals the shaky grounds of solidarity between formal workers and informal workers. “Outsourcing and home-based work is affecting our own livelihood. Goodyear started to replace national workers with foreign workers.” It is clear that when she talks about “our livelihood”, she means the livelihood of Malaysian formal workers in contrast to foreign informal workers. Other activists tried to bridge this gap, highlighting that is was not only a migrant workers issue, but that more and more Malaysian women were also engaged in home-based work. The discussion was concluded by Lilian who supported the idea of creating a support group for home-based workers. She highlighted the fact that not only ThirdWorld but also First-World countries are suffering from developments such as unemployment and informal work, and she questioned the meaning of globalisation. “The government says that it is good for us, but is it really good for us as workers?” In the end, she asks all the participants to go back to their organisations and discuss the issue internally and then come back to the following meeting with more concrete ideas.

6.2 Defending the housing rights of the urban poor: Alaigal and the Community Development Centre 6.2 Defending the housing rights of the urban poor

It is the 4th of October and World Habitat day. Three hundred people coming from five states all over Malaysia have gathered in front of the doors of the highly protected Parliament in the centre of Kuala Lumpur. Lifting their clenched fists, participants are shouting loud slogans in unison like “Comfortable houses for the people! No flats!” Men and women are carrying posters demanding decent housing or criticising the fact that in order to build the administrative town Putrajaya, plantations had been closed and workers had been evicted from their lands. The demonstrators come from different states and from quite different social backgrounds: some of them are Indian plantation workers, some are independent Malay rice farmers, others come from the urban areas, they are squatters or ‘urban

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy pioneers’ as they call themselves more positively. But all of them face the problem of forced eviction from their land. There are also members of student groups and other NGOs or community organisations, as they prefer to call themselves, among them: Alaigal from Ipoh and the CDC from Kajang. Some of the young student activists wear Che Guevara T-shirts. All groups present at this demonstration are part of JERIT, the ‘Oppressed People’s Network’. Besides the protest outside the Parliament, the network has formulated a letter to the members of parliament and succeeded in sending 20 representatives to attend the parliament session. The letter harshly criticises especially the new housing policy, the so-called ‘Zero Squatters 2005’ programme, and demands its review: “We from The Union of Urban and Housing Pioneers and the Network of Oppressed People (JERIT) would like to urge the Members of Parliament to discuss Zero Squatters 2005 and the low income housing policies. The above matters have affected the interest of many as the Malaysian government who has signed the Declaration of Habitation Agenda 1992, Agenda 21, and United Nations Resolution on Forced Eviction 1993 has violated these declarations and the resolutions.” The group had succeeded in convincing one Member of Parliament from the Islamist opposition party PAS to present this motion in Parliament. The motion was, however, rejected. Following the session of Parliament, the PAS politician approached the crowd and gave a short speech. He told the demonstrators that although the motion had been rejected, the Deputy Minister of Housing agreed to a meeting with three of the representatives. Later, the network’s representatives came out of the House of Parliament and gave a short press statement. The demonstration dispersed peacefully.

Both events, the consultation meeting of the Support Group for Home-Based Workers with female union members and the demonstration on the occasion of the World Habitat day are typical activities of a third partial public sphere in Malaysia. The organisations that constitute this sphere where the rights of women are negotiated belong to a socialist anti-globalisation movement that has developed from student activism into a broader social movement (6.3). Alaigal, CDC, and Sahabat Wanita explicitly address issues that are related to and caused by the rapid economic development that Malaysia has experienced over the last 20 or 30 years. Their discourse and their actions are based on an anti-capitalist and, more recently, an anti-globalisation critique of the Malaysian development model. They reflect on the processes of social transformation and the unevenness of the Malaysian development process and portray themselves as the mouthpiece of those people who have been marginalised within this development process and who have been excluded from enjoying the benefits achieved for a considerable part of the Malaysian population. The network of these organisations takes up issues related to the uneven economic development initiated from above without participation of the population, and campaigns for the rights of the urban poor, plantation workers, and female workers. These groups criticise and

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deconstruct the Malaysian growth-oriented development model, the state’s development policies and discourses, as well as Western consumerist culture, and promote an economic model based more on small-scale production embedded into community structures (6.4). Their main concern is political mobilisation, which means that the interface with the state authorities is rather confrontational. They negotiate the concept of rights within an authoritarian space and develop their own understanding of ‘rights’. This understanding deconstructs developmentalist visions of plantation workers, urban squatters, and informal workers as development obstacles, re-values them as pioneers and agents of development, and develops a new form of political agency based on the notion of ‘fight’ (6.5). Although women play a significant role in this movement, the language of gender is used only in part. Both groups formulate their critiques and demands in a very strong language of ‘rights’ referring to international human rights conventions such as the UN Habitat Agenda 1992, the Agenda 21, the United Nations Resolution on Forced Eviction 1993, or the ILO Home Work Convention. In that sense, both events represent examples of how global concepts of rights are localised. Because of the historical dominance of workers of Indian origin in the plantation sector and in the sector of the urban poor, this movement has a mainly ethnically defined, namely Indian basis. In this sense, the grassroots organisations portrayed here try to break up the mechanisms of authority and control of the total institution of the plantation, give negotiating power to female workers in a hierarchical production system, and establish a more participatory interface with the plantation management, subcontractors, and the state. 6.3 History of the organisations 6.3.1 From university to the plantations: Changing perspectives Alaigal started in the 1970s as small group of left-wing-oriented and sociopolitically interested students from University Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. They had participated in a university programme intended to give the students exposure to the living conditions of plantation workers, as Pravina, one of the leading activists in Alaigal tells me during an interview at her place. Pravina, the Alaigal activist, is around 40 years old and of Indian descent. When I met her for the first time, she wore a Che Guevara T-shirt. While showing me around in her house, which was decorated with items related to Latin American social movements and socialist revolutions such as posters with sayings from Che Guevara or Salvador Allende, she explained to me: “I like their heroes. And I

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really admire the strength and power of these movements. And they have achieved so much. In Latin America, social movements are so popular. This is very different here in Malaysia”. Her husband is one of the leading activists in the group. During the programme, in which Pravina participated as a student, she and her friends spent a month at a plantation near Ipoh, north of Kuala Lumpur. During this time, they lived together with a plantation worker family in their home. Their task was to organise small-scale social programmes like extra tuition etc. Despite its considerable contribution to the national economy, the plantation sector has the highest rates of poverty (Mehmet 1986, 19). Although the former “backbone of the economy” (Mehmet 1986, 19) in Malaysia, it has lost its vital significance for the Malaysian economy due to industrialisation and the emergence of service, technology-based, and knowledge-based industries. Nonetheless, it is still an important, even growing economic sector. The plantations employed up to 13.3 % of the total workforce in 2005 (Wong 2007, 5).34 Additionally, poverty in this sector has been very persistent in contrast to poverty rates among other ethnic groups in Malaysia, and it has declined only minimally since the 1970s. For other ethnic groups, this period had brought a significant improvement of living conditions and educational levels. The ethnic Malay population profited from the NEP that successfully contributed to the creation of an urban Malay middle class and business elite (see Chapter 3), and the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia were able to make use of their long history in translocal trade and engage actively in new business opportunities brought by industrialisation and urbanisation. Enclosed in the total institution of the plantations, the living conditions of the ethnic Indian workers were not affected by the processes of economic growth and restructuring in the same way. Plantations in general are characterised by a coercive type of labour control. Plantation workers are “settled, organised and employed as ‘brawn-power’ in relatively isolated and ‘protected’ areas” (Mandle, quoted in Ramachandran 1994). In this sense, the plantation represents a total institution, since not only the economic activities but also all other aspects of the workers’ everyday life are totally institutionalised. Plantation workers settle on the plantation land, and housing and other basic amenities such as water, sanitation, electricity, basic education and medical services are supposed 34

Whereas products from rubber trees and oil palms still accounted for 48.6 % of the total Gross Domestic Product in 1970 (Hassan 2004, 131), their contribution dropped to 17.6 % of the GDP in the year 2000 and to only 8.2 % in 2005 (Wong 2007, 4). However, this significant decrease in the contribution of the plantation and agriculture sector to the GDP is related more to an extraordinary growth of the manufacturing sector than to a shrinking agriculture sector. Agriculture’s contribution to the national economy even grew at 3.0 % per annum from 2002 to 2006 (Wong 2007, 5).


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to be provided by the plantation owners. This has two problematic consequences. First, the coercive character of the work, based on control and authority, is extended to all other aspects of life. This makes the plantation a social space with extremely rigid and hierarchical social structures. Second, an “inferior quality of life among estate workers” in Malaysia is still a common feature (Mehmet 1986, 29), because the management and plantation owners do not provide basic amenities corresponding to the living conditions in the country as a whole. Basic amenities in plantations are often below legal standards, and estate schools are considered to have the lowest quality in the entire educational system (Ramachandran 1994, 157, 193). The persistence of poverty among the mainly ethnic Indian estate workers leads some scholars to even describe them as the “persistent poor” or the “forgotten people” (Ramachandran 1994) of Malaysia. The plantation sector was mentioned neither in the government report on population and poverty presented to the regional United Nations Conference on Population and Poverty in 2002 (National Population and Family Development Board: Ministry of Women and Family Development of Malaysia 2002) nor in Malaysia’s Millennium Development Goals report from 2005 (Economic Planning Unit: Prime Ministers Department 2005). In the report to the UN Population and Poverty Conference, the ethnic factor of poverty was not mentioned; in the Millennium Development Goals, the problem of ethnicity and poverty was debated only in relation to the Malay rural population and so-called indigenous groups (Economic Planning Unit: Prime Ministers Department 2005, 39 ff.).35 Two of the more active students, among them Pravina, continued visiting the plantation even after the end of the programme and also after graduating. Together with three local university students, they formed a loose group organising sessions for young people at the plantation. Through these activities, they were able to establish contact with interested youngsters from the plantation itself, and in 1985, in cooperation with the plantation management and the older school students, they set up a formal extra tuition programme for children of plantation workers in five estates. The classes were given by the older children themselves, many of whom are nowadays members of Alaigal. They organised concerts and drama groups in the plantations to raise funds. The Community Development Centre in Kajang also developed out of an Indian student group, and followed a process of reorienting group aims. Slightly younger than Alaigal, this group was formed in 1989 by students of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, UKM, the National University of Malaysia. Today, it is still a student-based group, as I could observe during their meetings 35 Indigenous groups in Malaysia are called Orang Asli. These are non-Islamised ethnic groups who live mainly in Eastern Malaysia in the states of Sabah and Sarawak.

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in a small office in Kajang. Ten activists were present at these meetings, all of them 25- to 35-year-old students or former students of the UKM. In the beginning, it was an ethnically based group, concentrating on the problems of Indian students within the university system. Aneesa, one of the activists, explains the development of the group with the following words: We started with some students. We were an Indian-based group. So they tried to handle Indian students’ problems. Then they slowly developed and took into account more crucial issues like Indian students in plantations around here. In the Kajang area, we have more than fifteen estates around here. So they have a community there, generally very poor and very low in education and everything. So we tried to help them by giving free tuition to them. But as time goes on, we tried to tackle deeper issues; we tried to question their situation and why their situation is still like that. You know, the government is doing something else, they enrich themselves, but the workers are still very poor, so the students tried to involve in workers’ issues, in their parents’ issues; and then get to know them. If they are working so hard, then why is their wage so low? Sometimes, they have to depend on their children to help them. So they can’t send them to school. So this problem they slowly studied. Then they changed their strategy. After three to four years on campus, after they finished, some of them went back to their home towns, and they just left it like that. Some of them, especially the founder and some of the members, stayed here and came up with a new idea opening this centre, the community development centre, and they are continuously doing the same job. (Aneesa, CDC activist, 12.08.04)

This quotation describes the development from a student organisation dealing with student affairs and experiences of marginalisation among Indian students in an ethnically structured university space to an organisation dealing with ‘deeper issues’ such as living conditions of Indian youths and poverty in the surrounding plantations. Like Alaigal, CDC identified lack of education as one of the most pressing and more easily changeable problems, and started to give free educational programmes to young people at the plantation. Within a couple of years, the group had developed from a self-help group of Indian students into an ethnically based solidarity group addressing broader issues of poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth. What is especially interesting in this case is that it was “their parents’ issues” that these students started to address: the poverty of their parents who were working in the plantations. In 1992, when the founding members of the group had graduated from university, the group split up. The university student group continued in the form of a student welfare committee at UKM, and, outside the university, the Community Development Centre was founded.


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Like the other two groups, Sahabat Wanita also emerged from a student initiative. Their main activists, like Lilian, became involved in political activities in the 1970s through their mobilisation against the University and College Act (Lilian, Sahabat Wanita activist, 29.03.04). This Act severely restricted the possibilities of political engagement and freedom of speech at the universities. As Lilian told me, coming from university politics, they soon started to be involved in broader social issues and tried to organise workers in the neighbouring free trade zone in Sungay Wang near Kuala Lumpur. The histories of the three organisations under research show that the political engagement of the activists and the formation of the groups started in the 1970s and 1980s in the intellectual space of the universities and was organised around university politics: In the case of Lilian (Sahabat Wanita), it was the protest against the University and College Act; in the case of the activists from CDC, the discrimination against Indian students at the campus; and in the case of Alaigal, a student programme. From there, the three groups extended their focus and interest beyond the campus and came into contact with the ‘marginalised population’ in the plantations or in the factories. For some of them, this was the life-world of their parents. The universities provided the space for reflection and the production of critical knowledge. This critical knowledge led to an interesting shift in the organisations’ outlook: a shift from addressing problems in their own life-world—as students who are discriminated or restricted in their freedom of speech—to addressing the problems of ‘others’ who need to be educated. What ties students and workers together is an ethnic link, an imagined ethnic community, and the analysis of the problem as an ethnic problem. 6.3.2 From educational programmes to confrontation: Changing strategies During the first years of the organisations’ work, the education aspect was an entry point for Alaigal and CDC. Both organisations went to the plantations and offered educational programmes for children and adults. These educational programmes were one strategy to gain access to the plantation area and to create space for reflection and the creation of awareness in a rather prudent way without being too politically radical, as one of the Alaigal activists describes in the following quotation: We used the tuition as a point to get parents to come together to meet and discuss problems that children faced in tuition classes and parents’ involvement. And later on, also as analysis. But we were a very open group at that time. Basically, we are socialist in thinking. We are very much socialist. But we didn’t tell anybody about

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy it. We knew that the root cause of the problem was the fact that structurally something was wrong, and the workers have very low wages and all that. But, we never talked about that directly in our meetings on the estate, because the estate setup is so repressive. It is as if the manager would not only own the estate, the trees on the estate, but also the workers on the estate. So, even who is allowed to enter the living area is under question. Even that can be controlled by the management. So, at that time, we just wanted to be able to reach the workers. So, we didn’t want to be shut out at the gate itself. So, we didn’t try to challenge anything at all. So, we worked along with the management in that sense. We didn’t say or do anything that could upset them, as long as they let us alone to reach out to the parents. (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)

In this passage, it becomes clear how limited the room for manoeuvre of social movements is in the plantation sector. Because the plantations are privately owned, their management is able to control and deny access to people who are not employed on them. This makes it extremely difficult for NGOs or other political activists to enter plantations and carry out any activity (Ramachandran 1994, 326). This fact was strongly criticised by women’s groups’ activists during the discussion on ‘rural women’ at the ‘National Conference on CEDAW’ (see Chapter 9) and named as one major factor hindering the work of NGOs in this area. In the case of the plantations, it was not possible to express critical views of the plantation system directly and openly. So they used a rather unproblematic issue to get in touch with the plantation workers. In the 1990s, however, there was a major shift in the programme and approach of the group. The tuition programme was discontinued, because, as Pravina says, support from the parents began to diminish, and because the group realised that the workers had more pressing needs. These other needs had to be addressed, and a more confrontational approach towards plantation management was adopted. We learned a lot with our tuition programme. We could see that education is definitely not the way out. But I also felt that we were not going anywhere really otherwise. So, I think we were searching for a new way. And friends in Kuala Lumpur, who are now members of the Socialist Party of Malaysia, they tried a new approach, they tried the confrontational approach. They didn’t hide anything. I think we found that a good way of working, so we began with this approach. I suppose we were also pretty much influenced by the thinking of those days that everybody works behind the scene and underground. Then we started to confront the power and had our first demonstrations for housing and to stop eviction. (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)


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This confrontational approach consists in ‘confronting the power’, that is, the plantation authorities or owners, through political mobilisation of the plantation workers. The approach was developed through networks with other socialist groups in Kuala Lumpur and included the support and organisation of plantation workers threatened with forced eviction from the land they were living on, “because the estate was going for development”, which means, because the land had been sold to a developer. One incident that clearly illustrates this confrontational approach was the May Day Peace March 2002 in Kuala Lumpur under the theme “Return the Rights of Workers for Wages, Work and Union”. At this event, 18 activists were arrested, among them Pravina, Pravina’s husband, and also another Sahabat Wanita activist present at the workshop. “Among the key demands called for by 50 organisations were minimum wages, land rights for farmers and indigenous peoples, the right to unionise, workers’ welfare and an end to racial discrimination” (Community Development Centre 2002). In the urban areas, women’s organisations did not have an easy endeavour either. Traditionally, unions have a rather weak position in Malaysia. Already in 1959, the Trade Union Ordinance had given the state the power to easily suspend labour union activities, a power which the state made wide use of. Later in 1967, the Labour Relations Act provided special protection to so-called ‘pioneer industries’ against any significant demands from labour unions during their first years. Additionally, in some industries, only workers who have been employed for more than three years are allowed to unionise. In 1983, at least in-house unions were excluded from the ban on unionisation, but these are known to be less effective and easily controlled by the respective management (Wee Siu Hui 1997, 33-36). Alongside the control of labour organisations, for example, of labour unions, the Internal Security Act was a further political measure used to ensure social and political stability. In that way, the Malaysian state worked towards its aspiration “to ensure a politically controlled labour force which the foreign companies consider a necessary condition for profit maximisation” (Ong, 1983). Within this difficult environment, the organisation Sahabat Wanita, or Friends of Women, started to organise female factory workers. In 1987, Lilian was detained for two years. After her release in 1989, she continued her activities but in a reduced way. Her detention had created an atmosphere of fear among the other activists and the women workers. Before her detention, the activists and women would meet in front of the factories or at Sahabat Wanita’s Office. Now, they mostly meet in public spaces, at a café, or the like because women are afraid of being associated too directly with the organisation, as Lilian relates. They continue to be afraid, as the incident discussed in the methodology chapter indicates (see Chapter 2).

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But even more frustrating for the female workers' rights activists were their experiences in engendering the labour rights and workers’ movement. Since the 1970s, women had been continuously absorbed into the manufacturing sector, especially into electronics factories. The boom in the manufacturing sector was a result of a continuing process of state intervention. In the 1970s, Malaysia shifted from import substitution to export-oriented industrialisation, and the electronics sector was declared a ‘priority industry’ (Wee Siu Hui 1997, 29). Multinational companies were given investment incentives such as reduced taxes, and a significant number of free-trade zones were established. This shift was part of the new international division of labour, where the labour-intensive parts of capital-intensive industries such as garment and electronics were transferred from the centres to the peripheries in the ‘Third World’. These economic dynamics brought significant changes to the local economy and also to local gender relations. Due to their construction as docile and cheap workers, women especially were integrated into the newly emerging industrial sector in the urban areas. This occurred in Malaysia as well as in other Asian regions. At the beginning of Lilian’s and the other students’ social engagement, they took a non-gender-specific approach. However, during the course of their activities, it became clear that women’s working and living experiences were quite different from those of their male colleagues. At first, Lilian worked closely together with male-dominated unions, but the women activists realised that men were neither willing nor able to see things from a gender perspective, and continued to treat women’s issues as being of only secondary importance. Furthermore, the women’s activists were increasingly critical of the hierarchical and nondemocratic structures of these unions as well as a perceived lack of any political perspective. The relation between women workers and institutionalised male unions has always been problematic (for Asia, see Heyzer 1986, 131; for Bangladesh, see Dannecker 2002, 221 ff.). Under those circumstances, Lilian and her co-activists decided to organise women workers separately and to combine a critical perspective on capitalism with a critical perspective on gender issues. We wanted something more democratic, less hierarchical, so we wanted to set up an organisation for women workers in the garment industry. We wanted to create an alternative to traditional male trade unions. So we started to organise women workers to enable them to form their own trade unions. We encourage them to lead the trade unions they form and address issues that specifically affect women. (Lilian, president of Sahabat Wanita, in Balleza 1999)

These issues—childcare support, health, sexual harassment, and upward mobility at the workplace—reflect the intertwined relation between women’s productive and reproductive responsibilities (Lilian, president of Sahabat Wanita, in Balleza


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1999). This interrelation of productive and reproductive areas (Cagatay, Elson, Grown 1995; Lachenmann 2001) is reflected in Sahabat Wanita’s approach, and especially health issues, from stress to occupational diseases and miscarriages, play an important role in their meetings and group discussions with women workers. 6.3.3 From an NGO to a political party: Changing political understandings In 1993, Alaigal started the process of registration. First, the group tried to register as a consumer rights association, but was rejected. In their second attempt, they succeeded in becoming registered as a ‘company’ like other NGOs in Malaysia that are unsuccessful in registering as ‘societies’ (cf. pp. 25) They chose the name Alaigal, one of the characters in the dramas they had performed at the plantations. The frustrations Alaigal activists had getting local politicians to include the issue of housing in their agenda led to the idea of forming their own socialist party. 1998 was our turning point because all of us felt a need for a socialist party. Doing the campaign everybody was so disappointed because even the opposition candidates were reluctant to sign. So all the people doing the campaign felt like this. Why don’t we have our own party, a party that will truly represent us? (Binu, Alaigal activist, 21.09.04)

In 1998, the Parti Sosialis Malaysia was formed and ran for election. This meant also reflecting on Alaigal’s image as a “crisis organisation”, and giving the organisation a more political basis. One of the Alaigal publications (Devaraj 2002, 159-171) addresses this new understanding of the movement’s form and develops an alternative approach to politics. Devaraj’s argument is that the traditional political forces do not play a critical role in development policies. The party system is not functioning in the proper way, there is no real opposition, and the unions are oppressed or corrupt. The failure of the traditional political system makes it necessary to look for new ways of doing politics based on a more active role of intellectuals and activists and an alliance between grassroots and intellectuals. Nowadays, they cover around 16 areas in the state of Perak, where there are local groups that meet weekly. Every member of Alaigal covers two areas and attends the meetings of the community groups weekly. Alaigal also organises ‘awareness-raising’, ‘ideology’, and ‘sensitisation’ sessions. The women’s movement and the Women’s Candidacy Initiative discussed in Chapter 4 also experimented with formal modes of political action. Women’s groups seem to be repositioning themselves within the political landscape and

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trying to become more involved in the established political system. One of the NGO activists ran for elections as a so-called “women’s candidate” in 1999. This women’s candidacy was strongly supported by groups such as Sahabat Wanita. In contrast to the plantation workers’ movement, the women’s movement was, however, less successful in locating itself within the formal political sphere. For the women’s activists, the process of experimenting with new forms of political action was one of continuous disenchantment. The women’s candidacy was not repeated in the 2004 elections (Puthucheary, Othman eds. 2005) and, in an interview with the former candidate, the late Zaitun Kassim was very critical of this strategy, pleading instead for the creation of alternative political spaces and practices by civil society actors. The reformasi movement, which gave new impulse to political activism, played a key role in this process. During reformasi years, the relationship to the established political system was redefined, and civil society actors generally gained new strength. Alaigal founded a political party, and Sahabat Wanita actively supported the Women’s Candidacy Initiative. Through this process, these organisations slowly established themselves as critical groups by actively engaging in the public sphere and advocating for an intellectual, critical reflection and analysis of the social transformation process in Malaysia. This move from a cooperative approach to a more confrontational approach with state authorities and plantation management was accompanied by a change in their political self-understanding: Alaigal started as a rather informal, Indian-based student group providing services to marginalised groups in the population. It then turned into an NGO, before being partly included in the formal political system during reformasi times by founding a political party. 6.4 From ‘development’ to ‘quality of life’ 6.4 From ‘development’ to ‘quality of life’: Deconstructing the state’s development concept The following quotation is taken from the introduction of one of Alaigal’s publications: “There are many books chartering the economic development and political history of Malaysia. But there are very few written out of the experience of ordinary Malaysians who have been variously ignored, disinherited, exploited and marginalised by development” (Devaraj 2002). This passage stands for one of the strongest criticisms of the development project promoted by the state, namely, that no provisions had been made for local participation in the development process. As mentioned before, this non-participatory character of development is especially serious for female factory and home-based workers as well as plantation workers due to their integration into rigid social hierarchies

6.4 From ‘development’ to ‘quality of life’

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and the massive regulation of workers’ everyday lives. The development process Malaysia has experienced since independence is perceived as not being socially sustainable in the sense that it did not initiate a process of redistribution. Certain parts of the population are systematically marginalised within this process, and are not getting their fair share of the benefits of the development process to which they have contributed. These include indigenous people, plantation workers, farmers, urban pioneers, and women workers. They are the groups that the social movements represent. This position can be described as a local manifestation of a socialist discourse on development. This local manifestation represents an interesting mixture of classical socialist perspectives and new critical approaches to development articulated by identity-based subaltern movements. The following statement from Pravina, the leading Alaigal activist quoted before, clearly reveals the deconstruction of the state’s development model embedded in a clear antagonistic relationship between ‘them’ (the government and the private sector) versus the opposing ‘us’ (the people): I think the kind of development taking place now is not at all people-friendly planning. […]. The kind of development we have is not the development for the poor, it is development for the rich. For instance, the ‘Squatter-Free-Policy’ by the year 2005 is one policy that we have to deal with. Even if you look at it properly, it is not to rescue the squatters from the squatter area, and put them away in some nice decent houses. It’s not that. Someone wants the land badly. So, it is to wipe out squatters from the area and stick them into pigeon-holes, into flats. That’s exactly what is happening. That is not development. I don’t know whether the leaders and the system itself just don’t see it. Or is it the system itself that fails to see what the consequences are when you put people in a situation like that? It’s like a battle. […] You have all sorts of social problems coming up. So, it’s not creating an environment of well-being for all. […] Housing is so important, and they do say that too, in the Malaysia Plan, in the 8th Malaysia Plan. They talk about what housing should be like, it should be of high quality, it should have space, and it should provide the place for individuals to grow up. For the family, you need to be stable and all that and lead to a community that is harmonious and caring. But, it is hardly anything caring when they translate it into the housing schemes actually. It’s quite the opposite. So, we can’t call that development. Is it development for them, or for whom? Is this the purpose of development? (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)

In her deconstruction of both the practices and goals of development, Pravina clearly uses a vocabulary related to the two approaches of ‘alternative development’ and post-development that emerged as critique of mainstream development theories from the 1970s onwards. The idea that development “should be geared to the satisfaction of needs, endogenous and self reliant and in harmony with the environment” (Nederveen Pieterse 2001, 75) first appeared in

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the 1975 report of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation What now? Another development, and was institutionalised in the Human Development Report edited by UNDP in 1990. The concept of ‘people-friendly’ development and the question ‘Whose development?’ plays a central role in formulating a concept of alternative development. First of all, Pravina perceives development as a violent threat to the livelihood and ideas of a ‘good life’ of the affected people. In the social imaginary of plantation workers and urban squatters, ‘development’ is nothing that ‘ordinary people’ are engaged in, but is clearly a state practice that is ‘done’ to them and that does not benefit them. A view of development as a form of “authoritarian engineering and disaster” is one of the central points in postdevelopment approaches (Escobar 1995; Nederveen Pieterse 2001). The ‘violent’ character of development becomes especially clear in the issue of forced eviction of plantation workers and urban squatters, which is translated into a debate on the quality of housing schemes. Since the push to industrialisation beginning in the 1980s and the growing need for land in the rapidly expanding industrial and urban areas, a significant number of plantation companies—such as the plantation giants Sime Darby and Golden Hope—opted to sell their land to property developers or to venture into property development themselves (SUARAM 2002, 159). During this restructuration process, many plantations were closed down when the land was sold. Another facet of the restructuration, given the changes in the world market, is the transformation of rubber tree plantations into palm oil plantations, which require less manpower. For the plantation workers intimately connected to the concept of ‘development’, both processes led to retrenchment and their eviction from the land they and their families had been inhabiting in some cases over generations. In the social imaginary of these groups, ‘development’ apparently means building up industries and constructing flats on ‘their’ land which are not for their benefit. For the mainly Indian plantation workers, their alienation in regard to the development concept is intensified by the fact that, unlike the traditional Malay rural areas, estates and plantations have never been subject to development programmes carried out by the state. This is due to the private ownership of the estates which excludes them from the government definitions of both urban and rural areas (Ramachandran 1994). Precisely because of the special legal status of private property, the state sees the responsibility for the well-being of the plantation workers as being solely in the hands of plantation management (Ramachandran 1994). Concerning evictions from plantation lands, the image of the state as the enemy of marginalised groups of the population is reinforced by the fact that the government or government-owned corporations were also among the major buyers of former plantation land. The land was acquired to


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build new industrial townships or other prestigious projects such as Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and the governmental township of Putrajaya. “KLIA was once home to seven plantation communities while Putrajaya was home to four such communities” (SUARAM 2002, 159). This may explain why a concept that usually is so prominent among social movements in the South is not only deconstructed but also completely rejected. “So, when they talk about development, what happens is that the land is used for something else other than plantation. It could be housing, or some other commercial purposes in the industry maybe. That is development. Estates are sold for development” (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04). For squatters, the issue of land is of similar importance. Although not as visible and present as in other Asian or ‘Third-World’ metropolises, urban squatters are also a common feature of the urban landscape of Kuala Lumpur. Travelling with the Light Railway Train (LRT) through Kuala Lumpur, one can easily see pockets of squatter areas surrounded by skyscrapers, railway tracks, and highways. These squatter areas in the major Malaysian cities began to emerge in the 1970s. The export-oriented industries in the urban areas were booming at that time and offered plenty of job opportunities for the many migrants from the rural areas. This, however, did not mean a rise in social and economic status, as they were mainly employed as unskilled workers in the growing urban industries. A considerable part of the urban poor consists of ethnic Indian workers who were formerly employed in the plantations. However, the development of infrastructural conditions to cope with the high influx of rural migrants was inadequate. Many of the rural migrants settled in squatter areas on waste land (Evers, Korff 2000). Now, after 30 years of industrialisation and urbanisation, land, especially in urban areas, has become a very scarce and valuable resource. Squatters who settle on urban land without legal documentation are not tolerated like they were before.36 I observed this process in one of the so-called urban villages, the Kampung Abdullah Hukum. With its small wooden houses in traditional Malay style, or kampung houses as Malaysians explained to me, it lies in the middle of a modern urban landscape. During my first stay in Kuala Lumpur, this village already seemed to be squeezed by the growing city: to the South and West, the village was curtailed by a thick and noisy belt of railway tracks and highways, impossible to cross. The boundary to the East, the Klang River, seemed rather natural compared to this, but the impressive skyline of the biggest shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Megamall, just across the river, did not leave room for any idyllic visions. The only ‘open’ side was towards the North, where a remaining area of vacant land gave the 36

For processes of urbanisation and urban problems in Asia, see Rüdiger Korff for Bangkok (1986) and Erhard Berner for Manila (1997).

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village some breathing space. When I came to Kuala Lumpur for the second time, only two months later, this little piece of vacant land had disappeared and the first two storeys of a new housing block had been erected. Now the kampung was totally surrounded by urban infrastructure and construction sites, and probably the next step will be the eviction of its inhabitants. These evictions are part of the “zero squatter policy” launched by the government in order to eliminate all squatter areas in urban areas by the end of 2005. This programme includes the relocation of squatters into flats in newly built blocks. This has provoked loud protest among the groups presented in this chapter, as Pravina’s statement showed. In several Alaigal publications, this relocation is addressed as a “displacement of communities by development” (Devaraj 2002, 161). The flats in tenement blocks 18 to 20 storeys high, provided by the state for evicted urban squatters, are criticised as not being appropriate for the living conditions of poor families. This includes the size of the flats, which are described as being “bird cages” (The Union of Urban and Housing Pioneers, JERIT 2004, 2) and too small for the normally large families. It is also claimed that there are insufficient basic facilities and other infrastructural elements, such as playgrounds around the towers. Critics also complain that the flats do not provide any possibility for agricultural subsistence production. These features of the new flats lead to crime and drug addiction, a state of social disintegration which Pravina describes as a violent “battle”. The network demands terrace houses for the urban poor, “because terrace houses enable poor groups to improve their economic status by cultivating plants” (The Union of Urban and Housing Pioneers, JERIT 2004, 6). In the case of the plantation workers and the urban pioneers, ‘development’ in Malaysia is perceived not only as a paternalistic project, without local participation, but even as a project inimical to the basic interests of the people. From the frame of reference of plantation workers and urban squatters, ‘development’ means that villagers and farmers are being displaced because the government or private investors are carrying out large-scale projects on the land. The legal basis for the practice of forced eviction is the Land Acquisition Act. This act gives the government the right to acquire land and to sell it to developers when the goal is the pursuit of the common good (Persatuan Sahabat Wanita 1996). The analysis and deconstruction of the Malaysian development process by the women workers’ activists is especially related to the working and living conditions of women and is expressed in the framework of globalisation critique. During my first meeting with Lilian at a café at the modern railway station KL Sentral, she pointed to the postmodern architecture and said: “People watch all this economic development… They see what is built and they like it. They don’t connect it to their work situation, to their wages” (Lilian, Sahabat Wanita


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activist, 29.03.04). Urban buildings like the modern railway station KL Sentral, the so-called Twin Towers, and even Putra Jaya, the newly built administrative town where government offices are located, are often used metaphorically to depict the cleavages of an economic growth process characterised by a lack of social justice and sustainability (Evers 1997). This development which materialises in urban landscapes is seen to mask a development model that is highly exploitative and without social benefits for workers. “Globalisation is portrayed as a positive force for developing countries, creating wealth, increased wages, and jobs through the internationalisation of production, the lifting of tariffs, and the influx of foreign capital and technology. However, the ground reality of home-based workers suggests a different scenario” (Lee, Santiago 2004, 10). This different scenario is characterised by increasing “vulnerability of Southeast Asian workers”, especially of women, and by the “human and job insecurity” of workers. From the perspective of these movements, globalisation means the fragmentation of formerly intact community structures. Relatively small plantation communities are broken up and people are re-settled in anonymous urban settings. Family structures are changed, and the growing commodification of all aspects of social life occurs. These changes are denounced by the activists of the subaltern movements. The second dimension of the deconstruction of the state’s development model is the redefinition and reinvention of subaltern identities such as ‘squatters’ and ‘helping housewives’. In contrast to the term ‘squatters’, which is used by the state and clearly includes a perception of this phenomenon as a development problem requiring eradication, the movement presented in this chapter calls the inhabitants of wasteland ‘urban pioneers’. Whereas the term ‘squatter’ has associations of poverty, deficit, and marginalisation while criminalising the way of life of the slum inhabitants, the term ‘pioneer’ reinvents them as agents of development who explore, upgrade, “rehabilitate and occupy” (Devaraj 2002) urban land. The term urban pioneer evokes associations of exploring a new territory and being at the forefront of development. Moreover, the term ‘squatter area’ is rejected, and a demand is made to recognise urban villages as ‘traditional villages’—a term which grants these settlements more rights. JERIT publications stress the community character of these settlements. “They have traditions” and the families have lived there in an “area which has been their neighbourhood for decades” (The Union of Urban and Housing Pioneers, JERIT 2004, 2). While the government sees the squatters as a development problem that needs to be tackled, the movement deconstructs this negative notion and develops a positive self-identity as urban pioneers, as people who have chosen this way of life deliberately and who do not want to leave their settlements.

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The same process of redefining and reinventing subaltern identities can be observed in the working women’s movement which is involved in the redefinition of female economic activities. This question was addressed during the both Consultation Meeting of the Support Group for Home-Based Workers and in several publications by activists. In an article on home-based workers in Malaysia in the CAW newsletter, the author writes: “Home-based work was not considered as ‘wage-earning’ but as sideline work for married women” (Loone 2004, 13). They reject the notion of “helping house-wives” whose activities are not classified as proper work by either the state or the women themselves, and highlight the integration of women’s economic activities, even in their ‘private spaces’, as being embedded into global economic processes. Female activities are thus redefined from ‘housework’ to ‘real’ work which contributes significantly to the wealth of the nation. The following quotation from the report on home-based workers presented at this meeting exemplifies this redefinition of female economic activities within the framework of national development: The home-based workers’ distinct economic contribution and activity will force policy makers and trade unions to view this group seriously. Therefore it is imperative for their economic contribution to be valued in the context of overall macro-economic activity and labour statistics in the country. Put differently, homebased workers’ visibility and status could be enhanced by the recognition of their contribution to economic development of the nation. (Lee, Santiago 2004, 19)

“Gaining visibility” and the recognition as workers is therefore one of the aims being granted first priority. This recognition, however, is the basis for homebased workers to be covered by the Employment Act 1955––which provides a legal framework regulating matters such as wages, days off, hours of work, holidays, termination, maternity protection––and other legal protections or benefits for formal workers in Malaysia such as the Employees Provident Fund, 1991, providing social security protection through compulsory savings; the Employees Social Security Act, 1969, providing social security in case of work accidents; and the Safety and Health Act, 1994 (Loone 2004, 14). Up to now, none of these regulations has been applicable to home-based workers due to the fact that they are not recognised as full and regular ‘workers’. This reinvention of subaltern identities can be seen as one strategy to counter the epistemic violence that, as Gayatri Spivak elaborated, had denied subaltern subjects access to political forms of representation (Spivak 1994). The third dimension of the deconstruction of the state’s development model is the critique of the planning process. “Government has failed to carry out any discussion process and consultation in the process of relocating those squatters in accordance to United Nations Resolution on Forced Eviction 1993” (The Union


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of Urban and Housing Pioneers, JERIT 2004, 1). Local participation is demanded, and forced eviction is criticised as a human rights violation. All the demands concerning the issue of housing which the groups made to the government are linked to international conventions which Malaysia has signed. The government is accused of “violating” these conventions such as the Declaration of Habitation Agenda 1992, Agenda 21, and the United Nations Resolution on Forced Eviction 1993. In the case of the women workers’ movement, the failure of the state to control an unregulated market is especially criticised. The report on “Home-Based Workers in Malaysia: Challenges, Issues and the Way Forward” (Lee, Santiago 2004), presented at the workshop, highlights the role of national or domestic policies and the responsibility of an interventionist state to ensure the “equity, justice and rights” of home-based workers against an unregulated globalised labour market. It is, for instance, the role of the state to create an “enabling environment” in relation to education and training of home-based workers. However, the state does not fulfil this duty and is accused of colluding with private property interests. In contrast to other countries in the South, where the development paradigm has been appropriated positively by social movement activists, the term development does not enhance a space for positive self-identification in Malaysia. Among those Malaysian activists who see themselves as negatively affected by ‘development’, a positive exclamation like “Development is my life!”, as quoted from a Senegalese women’s activist in a study on Senegalese women’s organisations (Sieveking 2006, 50 ff.), would not be possible. Other Malaysian activists dealing with core development problems would also not identify with the term. One of the participants at the workshop “Negotiating Development: translocal gendered spaces in Muslim societies” held in Bielefeld in October 2005 (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005) was quite unsettled when I proposed a title to her containing the word ‘development’. She explained that she was not a development expert, but only a health and gender expert. ‘Development’ is not perceived as an activity that people are shaping through their own actions, but as an oppressive process to which they must submit. It is not perceived as a participatory process of self-empowerment and selforganisation but as an oppressive force. In the understanding of these anti-globalisation groups, ‘development’ threatens the everyday basis of their lives. The obvious consequences of development for them are retrenchment and forced eviction. They oppose this notion of development as rapid economic development. One of Alaigal’s publications formulates a complex concept of social transformation which includes a critique of the lack of “democratic practice” and “accountability of the government”, the demand to “humanise the development process” and to

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establish a “more equitable distribution of wealth”, along with the promotion of a “non-materialistic lifestyle” and a “non-ethnic, non-chauvinistic interpretation of Malaysian reality” (Devaraj 2002, 169). In the centre of the critique lies the unequal distribution of wealth sustained by an undemocratic system. But, of course, these groups have to reflect on the processes of economic growth, the formation of a middle class, and the phenomenon of consumerism. What they criticise is not only poverty in a material sense for some marginalised parts of the population, but also poverty in a symbolic sense. This includes poverty in social relations and the disability to reflect on their own living conditions. Pravina, the Alaigal activist, elaborates on her notion of ‘quality of life’ as a counterconcept to ‘development’: If you work from seven to seven … what kind of development is this? So what kind of people are we, and what’s the difference between the phase of industrial revolution where people worked 12 hours or even longer, and now, where they are working 12 hours too and sometimes even unpaid? People are working 12 hours. So, where is the quality of life? You might have people who have assets, they might have a motorbike, and they might have a big television set in their houses. But the quality of life is not there. You can’t get people together to sit down, and there is no recreation, no free time to sit down and to talk about this problem. No, nothing, they don’t have the time to do that. So, I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it is going to last. (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)

The kind of development that the activist describes and criticises does not create awareness about social problems or critical reflexive knowledge. It neither provides space for the intellectual and social development of people nor “enlarges people’s choices”, something that had been included in the official definition of human development by UNDP in 1990 (United Nations Development Programme 1990, 10). The counter-visions of a good life which these groups negotiate include a “quality of life” which is anti-consumerist, like Pravina stated, but which enables people to reflect critically and creatively on their living conditions and gives them the means to participate in the process of decision making about social changes. This ‘quality of life’ is clearly associated with community structures based on local solidarity and reciprocity instead of on a materialistic lifestyle based on global relations. At the workshop I attended on “Neo-liberal globalisation and women workers”, which was organised by Sahabat Wanita and CAW in April 2004, this criticism was discussed extensively by participants from Malaysia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Changes in family structures and rituals and consumption patterns brought about by industrialisation and modernisation were addressed under the heading ‘Gender, culture and neo-liberal globalisation’. Although the experiences of the three


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countries show significant differences, they all share the experience of local economies being integrated into the global economy and being restructured through globalising forces. The main complaint was that their ‘own, local culture’ and family structures were being destroyed through commodified mass consumption and industrialisation. One Indian Malaysian participant commented on the changes in marriage rituals: Formerly, the wedding took place in the house of the family or the temple. Now there is a big hall, which you have to rent. The food for the wedding was formerly cooked by the relatives. Now we have catering and we have to pay for the food. Also the bridal make up. This was done by the mother of the bride, now somebody else does it and we have to pay. And, last but not least, the invitations. Formerly, they were very simple. The printed ones that you use nowadays are very costly cards. (female factory worker, 22.04.04)

Another example of this critique was a short performance by some of the workshop participants on the topic of globalisation and consumption. The first scene showed a family watching TV and eating local food. One Sri Lankan participant imitated an advertisement for the fast food restaurant Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) that she had seen in Sri Lanka, saying that foreign food is very tasty. After having watched this advertisement, all the family members complained about having to eat rice and expressed their wish to eat fast food. The second scene showed the family members, who had decided that they preferred to eat fast food in the future, on their way to KFC. The third scene showed the mother participating in a training on globalisation and culture. The last scene showed her coming back home and telling her family about the bad effects of fast food. Following her advice, the other family members agreed to stop eating fast food and the mother began to cook again. To conclude the little play, the other family members very happily commented: ‘We missed family gatherings and local food’. This example draws clear boundaries between the local, healthy food and a sense of collective belonging on the one hand and unhealthy, foreign food, individualisation, and the breakdown of family networks on the other. Alaigal publications also address consumerism very critically as a part of Western culture: This has two major aspects. The first is the creation of a materialistic worldview. The pursuit of money and the display of one’s success in this endeavour through ostentatious luxury consumption seem to have become the credo for most of the richer people in the country. The materialistic worldview, that you are defined by what you wear, the vehicle you drive, the places where you eat, etc., has also been absorbed by people from the less fortunate strata of Malaysian society as well, and to their detriment! The other is the large-scale importation of Western youth culture

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy through mass media with all its anarchistic, hedonistic and a-social tendencies. Our large population of young drug addicts is one result of this importation. (Devaraj 2002, 162)

The mobilisation of marginalised groups does not aim at claiming the same share in consumption as the rest of the population, but at a transformation of what is perceived as a necessary and desirable form of consumption. The rejection of the materialistic worldview shows one of the most interesting ambiguities in this kind of grassroots movement. On the one hand, they criticise local economic and social structures (such as the plantation system) and use global concepts and declarations to put pressure on the government. The example of the World Habitat Day illustrates this. At the same time, they cultivate a sense of nostalgia and romanticism for local culture as creating more solidarity, and they reject globalisation and Western culture and the perceived alienating effects of these processes. Likewise, the notions of ‘human insecurity’, which are criticised by the movement of women workers as part of development, are countered by the rediscovery of community structures: We stand against globalisation. We think that globalisation should be reversed because neo-liberal extension is exploitative and brings disadvantages especially for women. This is a dangerous, but very powerful development. We can try to reverse it by going back to local small communities, going back from the individual to a more communitarian consciousness. We have to work at the community level. (Lilian, Sahabat Wanita activist, 07.04.04)

The development paradigm is deconstructed and countered by the concepts of ‘quality of life’ and ‘human security’. 6.5 Developing political agency on the basis of rights Alaigal and CDC concentrate especially on political empowerment in order to break out of what Ramachandran called the “ghetto-like existence” (1994, 2) of plantation workers. CDC assists the workers with all kinds of problems they might have with their employer: making sure that the employer pays his share into the Employee’s Provident Fund, making sure that workers get benefits after an accident, and supporting workers who were retrenched and later evicted from the land they inhabited. The group supports workers in writing police reports, letters, and memorandums to the local government. Alaigal focuses on the problem of forced evictions of former plantation workers from the land they inhabited by giving legal advice and by organising political mobilisation and

6.5 Developing political agency on the basis of rights

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protest. And, last but not least, it organises demonstrations such as the World Habitat Day, and––if the bulldozers are already on their way to destroy the settlement––it organises blockades. Also CDC assists people in writing police reports, sending letters and memorandums to the respective authorities, organising meetings with local government officers, and giving press conferences. Interestingly, both organisations, Alaigal and CDC, reject the term ‘NGO’ and ‘human rights’ to describe themselves. Pravina, one of the leading Alaigal activists, defined their work like this: “We don’t do much about human rights. Our work is about workers’ rights. But we don’t do advocacy, we are on the ground, we are a grassroots organisation. So we are fighting alongside them. So that’s what we are!” (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04). A similar understanding was formulated by a CDC activist during the World Habitat Day rally who stated: “We don’t call ourselves an ‘NGO’ because NGOs don’t work with the masses. They don’t work with the basis. We call ourselves community organisers” (William, CDC activist, 04.10.04). In both cases, “NGOs” are characterised as doing only “advocacy work” which is perceived as far distant from the everyday life of the people. The advocacy NGOs that these activists were referring to are probably the NGOs based in Kuala Lumpur that focus on publishing, researching, and raising the awareness of the broader public. The majority of the women’s organisations based in Kuala Lumpur, for example, carry out extensive public education programmes on violence against women, domestic violence, etc. by aggressively using different types of media, such as radio, newspapers, and TV (see Chapter 4). In contrast to those “NGOs”, the grassroots or community organisations focus on the direct political empowerment of marginalised groups. In their self-descriptions, they strongly emphasise this direct connection to the local population, as Pravina’s expression of ‘fighting alongside them’ suggests. The concept of ‘rights’ is linked intimately with this notion of the ‘fight’ against the plantation management, state authorities, and the legal system. This intimate link to the rights discourse emerged during a group discussion where one of the CDC activists gave an example of how this ‘fight’ is organised: We want to empower the people to be able to fight for their rights. We have an example, the Prima Estate Plantation. Their land has been called on for development of housing and a golf course. The people have been given notice to move out, basically they have been evicted. Of course, they went to see the political parties, the Indian party and all these groups, and finally they came to us. We told them what their rights are. We empower them, we work with them, but we did not go and negotiate for them, but told them that this is your rights. Housing is your basic right, and you have been working for the plantation, you have contributed to the

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy development of the country. So they fought for their rights for ten years, and finally they got their house for free. And it is not a flat house, a high rise building; but they got terrace houses together with the compensation. They made a deal with the developer, and now they are going to move into the houses. This is an example of how we work with the people, how we empower them to fight for their rights. (William, CDC activist, 25.09.04)

This quotation sheds light on specific aspects of how the concept of ‘rights’ is used and negotiated by these groups. First, plantation workers have acquired economic and social ‘rights’ through their work; that is, through their contribution to the country’s economic growth. Also the urban pioneers are seen as having acquired rights to the land they live on by ‘rehabilitating’ and developing it over a period of 20 years. And also, one of the main arguments of the working women’s activists was these women’s significant contribution to macro-economic processes. Consequently, poverty and uneven distribution of wealth are addressed as the denial of rights to the population. This is also expressed by another young Indian CDC activist: “Malaysia has developed and is of course no longer considered as underdeveloped, but actually only few people are getting the share of the economy, whereas the majority is still being deprived of their rights, their economic rights, and other social rights” (CDC activist at a group discussion, 20.10.04). Another aspect of negotiating rights which is related to the conditions of an authoritarian state is the relationship between human rights and the existing legal framework. This conflict is important for civil society activists in Malaysia, especially due to the fact that the state has partly appropriated the human rights discourse. An official human rights commission (SUHAKAM) was even established in 1999. The rights that the grassroots organisations claim are portrayed as being independent from the rights guaranteed in the existing legal framework, or even as being threatened by them. The ‘law’ is criticised as not being in line with the everyday life of significant parts of the population, and even as criminalising the way they earn their livelihood. The rejection of the ‘human rights’ approach also stems from the experience of the activists who work in state institutions that their perspective is not taken into account by the state officials, and that, despite the overlap of staff, there is no official cooperation between the state institutions and the social movements. In the eyes of the activists, it is rather difficult to integrate their knowledge and their point of view into the programmes of the state organisations where they work, because their superiors are afraid of being associated with the social movements. These are seen as being too radical. The activists perceive this situation as a fragmentation. William, who studied social sciences, is an activist in the social movement for habitat rights. He is also employed in the government-associated


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human rights organisation. He clearly distances himself from the human rights approach which has been adopted by this organisation: “The human rights approach that our commissioners use is very bad. They just use the law, but they don’t challenge the law” (William, CDC activist, 04.10.04). Also for Pravina, the Alaigal activist, the distinction between her organisation’s ‘workers’ rights’ approach and the ‘human rights’ approach in terms of the relationship between ‘rights’ and the ‘law’ is important for her selfunderstanding: We talk about workers’ rights, about the rights of the workers to housing, to quality of life, etc. We always tell people the difference between rights and law. What our rights are is one thing, but what the law is like is a totally other thing. So, what we say is that the law is not always right. So, we fight for what is right but what is not necessarily the law. The law tells us, for example, that urban pioneers are illegal settlers. But we don’t respect these laws because they violate our rights. (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)

Both quotations show the perceived gap between legal rights, arising out of the law, and moral rights, which are based in “principles of righteousness” (Donnelly 1989). From the ‘grassroots’ perspective, the legal ‘human rights’ approach is perceived as not being radical enough, and as stabilising instead of questioning existing inequalities and laws based on discrimination and marginalisation. When human rights are appropriated by government-associated human rights organisations and only interpreted within the framework of national legal rights as legitimate rights, the original concept of human rights, as “challenging or changing existing institutions, practices or norms, especially legal institutions” (Donnelly 1989), and hence its impact, is significantly undermined. Funding is a big problem for groups like Alaigal and the Community Development Centre. Alaigal has a small office and one paid full-time employee. This employee is financed by both private donations and donations from the group members themselves. There are eight members in all. Two of them, who earn more than the rest of the group, have been supporting the group financially for a long time, and another member makes regular contributions to finance the office and the salary of the full-timer. For the CDC, the situation is even more precarious. In contrast to Alaigal, which at least has one full-time employee, CDC is a purely voluntary organisation. All members have other jobs and do the CDC work in their free time, in the evening, and at the weekend. To finance their activities, they collect money among the members themselves and also among other friends who support the work. What is clear in both examples is that the basis of the work, even the financial basis, is a level of high personal

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commitment. This may well constitute a major difference from some of the more established advocacy organisations in the urban areas, who do constitute a labour market, even if a very limited one. 6.5.1 De-ethnicising rights The first site where the boundaries of ‘rights’ are negotiated is ethnicity, which is usually discussed at the local level using the emic term ‘race’. In Malaysia, the idea of specific collective rights on the basis of ethnic belonging is very prominent. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1969 shortly after violent ethnic riots, and it institutionalised this idea to a significant extent. This conglomerate of programmes of affirmative action for Malay and other bumiputra groups in the areas of education, employment, and access to loans and capital (Othman 1998, 173) was designed to break the link between racial or ethnic origin and socio-economic positioning in society (Camroux 1996, 854). It was also intended to create an urban Malay middle class and business elite. This programme explicitly promoted education in the cities and even overseas and employment in the formal industrial sector for young Malays from the villages (Ong 1990, 263). Although the notion of human rights received a partial delegitimisation through its appropriation by the state, it has taken on a specific meaning in this highly ethnicised context, which is revealed in the following statement by a young Indian activist from Alaigal: In Malaysia, a lot of things are about religion and race and skin. We try not to do this. The government is playing issues by races. They have implemented quota systems, for example, education is divided, so they try to divide people. They continue to do the same thing that the British started, that is, to separate people. Here in our group, we don’t use religion, because there are a lot of politicians who use religion to make politics. Others do this, but we don’t. Our work here is about human rights. We fight for human rights, and we tell people how to fight for their rights. (young male Alaigal activist, 23.09.04)

As well as criticising the limited potential of ‘religion’ for mass mobilisation, it is clear that for these young activists, the concept of human rights goes beyond ethnic divides. It is not related to any of the categories upon which the ethnic system in Malaysia is built like religion and ‘race’. It is especially interesting that precisely such a position has been taken by a group that is definitely ethnically based. A feeling of long-term marginalisation and discrimination and a criticism of ethnicised state policies is obvious in the narratives of the activists from Indian-based organisations presented in this chapter. But instead of arguing


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within the ethnic framework, this young Indian activist uses the concept of universal human rights––in contrast to particular ethnic minority rights––as an instrument for claiming equal citizenship rights for an underprivileged ethnic minority in a system where rights and duties based on collective ethnic identities are unequally distributed. In this localisation, the notion of human rights as rights which an individual only has because of the simple fact that “one is a human being” (Donnelly 1989) is employed by ethnic activists to break up ethnic hierarchies. On a national level, Alaigal and CDC network within a political context that breaks up ethnic communalism. Both organisations are part of the ‘Oppressed Peoples Network’ (JERIT), a socialist-oriented network that is comprised of indigenous groups, Indian plantation workers, as well as Malay rice farmers and urban squatters. For the rally on World Habitat Day, the Network even formed an alliance with PAS, the Islamist opposition party. The CDC activist William explained this alliance to me: With PAS we can work together on issues, and in general they have the same perspective on housing as we have. So they want good housing. We sent letters to a lot of MPs, but he was the only one who agreed to bring up the issue. Maybe because he wanted to show his commitment. But we can work together on the basis of issues. As long as they don’t hijack it and say that it’s all theirs. (William, CDC activist, 04.10.04)

In this case, the ethnic and religious factor does not seem to play an important role. The alliance is based on the fact that the Islamic opposition party criticises the government’s development policies for being too Western and not taking community values into account. This allows for a strategic cooperation between the Islamist opposition party and these grassroots organisations on the issue of housing policies. There is also networking and cooperation among the different ethnic groups as the event for the World Habitat Day has shown. This cooperation, however, can not be taken for granted, especially on the local level. The following quotation from an interview with Pravina sheds light on the ethnicised dimensions of activism: People tend to compare how the Malays, all the Malays are Muslim, how the Muslim get subsidies for this and that, how is their quota for this and that. So, there is a natural tendency to compare. Like here in Ipoh, for example, we don’t have a single Malay village facing eviction. All villages that face eviction are Indian and Chinese villages. Here the state takes care of Malay villages. Maybe UMNO needs them. But the Indians and Chinese have the problem. [...] The government looks after the Malay you know, and the anger is always transferred to the Malay villagers, not to the government. So, we have a job of getting the thing right for them. We see

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6 Defending the Quality of Life in a Global Economy a real ‘divide-and-rule’ policy, a poor Malay villager might get a crumb, he is not getting the main thing. And why does he get the crumb? Because the system doesn’t want us to unite. That’s the main thing. So, that time, the government talked so much about unity and harmony and all that. But when the government settles people on housing land, it segregates. And we have the job to explain this to the people. All these policies make it harder for us to mobilise people. Trying to get Malays in is not that easy. (Pravina, Alaigal activist, 22.09.04)

Within the framework of promoting Malay economic and cultural dominance, government development policies differentiate between ethnic groups as well. The quotation from Pravina clearly shows how housing policies are ethnicised. Although a multi-ethnic network such as JERIT manages to build up solidarity across ethnic lines on specific issues, for example, as part of campaigns criticising national housing programmes, solidarity remains on a fragile foundation, as the interview shows. Because of the perceived differences in the treatment of different ethnic groups by state authorities, it is especially difficult to establish solidarity between Indian plantation workers who are evicted from their lands and Malay villagers. This passage illustrates the institutionalisation of ethnic identities within state development policies, and shows how this institutionalisation re-enforces the image of a Malay ownership of the state. Furthermore, the quotation reveals one of the most critical consequences of the process of the state-driven ethnic policies: the de-legitimisation of the idea of an inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and inter-religious public sphere. 6.5.2 Engendering rights Although the organisations and activists presented in this chapter share a common critical perspective on development and neo-liberal globalisation, there are pronounced differences especially concerning the question of gender. Pravina, one of the leading female Alaigal activists, told me: Women or gender is not a separate issue for us. There are lot of women involved in our struggles, more than men actually. Women tend to feel injustice very fast, and they are more ready to respond compared to men. But we are not feminist. But, when we see gender problems, we try in a small way to address it. But, we are really a workers’ organisation that organises workers. And workers for us are men and women.


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Women constitute over one-half of the workforce on the plantations37 and work as tappers and rubber processing workers in rubber estate factories, as carriers for cutter-carrier teams in oil palm plantations, and as weeders and sprayers in both rubber and oil palm plantations. Despite the significant contribution of women to the work in the plantations and despite their active participation in the plantations workers’ movement––approximately three-quarters of the participants of at the World Habitat Day Rally were women and committees formed on the local level to resist eviction are also dominated by women (SUARAM 1999, 160)––gender issues are addressed only marginally in this movement. Their approach tries to treat men and women equally, as workers, without, however, undertaking a gender-sensitive analysis of the economy. One consequence of this approach is a male bias and a much reduced understanding of gender relations and questions, as the following paragraph from the writings of Pravina’s husband, the main male Alaigal activist, about “Additional burdens borne by women” shows: Women from the working classes face all the problems that their menfolk do. And in addition to these they face other problems and disadvantages that arise from their being women including: A system of laws that have gender bias, for example laws governing inheritance, guardianship of children, etc. Cultural systems and values that treat women as subordinate. This manifests itself in many forms, one of the worse being domestic violence which isn’t uncommon in Malaysia. (Devaraj 2002)

The typical gendered structuration of the plantation economy and gendered needs related to the issue of housing are not included in the debates of organisations such as Alaigal. In this quotation, all analysis of gendered structures of the labour market or the economy is absent; only family, motherhood, and domestic violence are treated as phenomena where gender matters, and women’s issues are addressed in the classical Marxist way, as a side- contradiction, if at all. This male bias, however, does not lead to an exclusion of women from the movement. Their active participation suggests that women within these movements become politicised not because of gender identity but because of an identity based on a non-gendered marginalization, and that the language in which women from the marginalised plantation and urban squatter sector express their ideas of discontent and visions of social transformation is not a gender language but a language based on the distinction 37

In 1986, the proportion of female employment in the plantations was around 57 % (Ramachandran 1994, 86).

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of ‘state’ versus ‘the people’ and ‘individualism’ versus ‘community’. Not surprisingly, despite the fact that one of their leading figures is a woman (Pravina), the organisation does not have networking linkages to the feminist women’s movement (see Chapter 4). Alaigal did not participate in the CEDAW process, although the CEDAW convention also covers rural women with their own article and the issue of retrenchment and forced eviction was discussed extensively at the National NGO Conference on CEDAW (see Chapter 9). In contrast to this, Sahabat Wanita was formed out of the experience of female workers’ activists that their concerns as women were not being addressed adequately by a non-gender-specific labour rights movement. The struggle out of which Sahabat Wanita was formed and its activists were socialised was the struggle to engender the labour rights movement and the idea of workers’ rights. The language Sahabat Wanita uses to formulate discontent and visions of social transformation is a clear gender language, and their perspective is to analyse and address the specific situations facing women as workers. The workshop on home-based work shows the innovative character of this endeavour. Although this issue is brought to the debate by women’s organisations, the position of Malaysian male-dominated trade unions towards home-based workers is usually one of ignorance. Since the trade unions see themselves as representatives of workers in the formal sector, the processes of increasing informalisation and outsourcing of work are perceived instead as a threat to the interests of formal workers. MTUC, for example, has called for the formulations and enactment of laws to control outsourcing and subcontracting of work. Women’s activists criticise that “there is no concerted effort in the union movement to realise such a goal [to defend home-based workers rights, AS] because home-based workers are not perceived as an important constituency, resulting in a lack of political will to champion the cause of home-based workers” (Lee, Santiago 2004, 15). However, the female participants answered the open question of one of the organisers as to whether the strategy should be to fight against and to reject home-based work as a whole, or to change the conditions for it and turn it into a decent work by expressing their solidarity with the home-based workers. They highlighted their will to support the home-based workers’ struggle for selforganisation and labour rights. The fact that the female union representatives did not echo the official position of the union, but that is was possible to build up solidarity between formal and informal workers on a gender basis was highly innovative. In a meeting with male union representatives, this would probably not have happened. The innovative aspect is the collaboration of women outside and inside the trade unions, constituting in this way new social spaces where gender issues can be negotiated in a framework of globalisation critique. Activists such as Lilian, who were politically socialised by their critique of


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traditional male-dominated trade unions, are now engaged in the project of a renewal of unions and talk about the “golden opportunity” (Xavier 2006) for trade unions to redefine themselves by including women’s issues in their agendas. Besides engendering the labour and workers’ movement, Sahabat Wanita has also been involved in the engendering of the housing issue. Alaigal and other groups also address housing, but without any reference to gender-specific needs or problems. In 2002, Sahabat Wanita dealt with the issue of housing in one of their newsletters containing articles on the land rights of indigenous women, the housing situation, problems of young unmarried female factory workers in urban flat areas, and the gender-specific problems in squatter communities which lead to uprootedness and violence against women. As for women the issue of land is closely tied up with their lifestyles. For example […] urban settler communities […] lack proper water and electricity facilities. This makes life harder for the women who are entrusted with the role of running the households. This makes the lives of women more difficult, tiring, and oppressive. […] We also find many living alone either to work or to study. […] To add to their problems, many local governments have a policy of not allowing single adult women to own low-cost houses. This does not ease the problem of shortage of lowcost houses nor does it maximise the use of low-cost houses. What we see rather is the difficulty of female headed families in buying a low-cost house. […] The government must ensure that women are not discriminated against in any way, so that they are not oppressed by the economic system and government policies. (Persatuan Sahabat Wanita 1996)

On their way from being female activists in a non-gender-sensitive movement to being activists for working women with a gender approach, Sahabat Wanita established networks with the feminist middle-class movement (see Chapter 4). Sahabat Wanita is part of the Joint Action Group Against Violence Against Women, JAG, a network of the most prominent women’s organisations in Malaysia (Women’s Crisis Centre, Penang, Women’s Development Collective, All Women’s Action Society, Women’s Aid Organisation, Sisters In Islam, Malaysian Trade Union Congress/Women’s Section, Women’s Candidacy Initiative). This arose in the 1980s during the fight for a Domestic Violence Act. Sahabat Wanita also participated in the ‘Women’s Agenda for Change’, the first lobbying document formulated by the women’s movement that called for policy changes and action to strengthen the goal of gender equality and sustainable development (see Chapter 4). The importance of these local networks within the women’s movement lies in supporting smaller organisations with less funding like Sahabat Wanita and in giving their arguments and issues a broader platform.

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Concerning the activities of the organisation, Lilian stresses the importance of networks like the Women’s Agenda for Change: “Apart from organising, we also conduct training, and from time to time, lobbying. But we don’t have the resources to really focus on lobbying. That’s why we work through networks like the Women’s Agenda for Change” (Lilian, president of Sahabat Wanita, in Balleza 1999). These networks can provide funds and discursive spaces that are difficult to achieve for a small and very critical organisation like Sahabat Wanita. Nevertheless, the relation to the other women’s organisations in Malaysia is not perceived as unproblematic. Focusing on women workers, Sahabat Wanita connects partly separated discourses and movements, the women’s movement and the workers’ movement, and this puts them in a difficult position both in the non-gender-sensitive workers’ movement and in the feminist women’s movement: I think the issue of women workers is a very difficult one, because in the labour movement, the women are marginalised or their issues are not raised. In the women’s movement, their issues are not raised either or they are not given prominence. Women workers get the short deal in these two big movements. It’s actually a very difficult struggle. (Lilian, president of Sahabat Wanita, in Balleza 1999)

Actually, women workers’ activists have to conduct two parallel struggles: On the one hand, they started with a struggle to engender economic analysis and the workers and labour rights movements. On the other hand, they went on to become engaged in a struggle to include socio-economic hierarchies into a feminist analysis and into the concerns of a middle-class-defined women’s movement. Lilian said: “We in Sahabat Wanita brought in the issue of women workers and made sure that it is accurately reflected in the agenda” (Lilian, president of Sahabat Wanita, in: Balleza 1999). The arguments with the women’s movement also include debates about the question of how to relate to the state. This conflict also affected their work on the Women’s Agenda for Change, as Seok Teng, one of the Sahabat Wanita activists, criticised in a conversation: There are conflicts with the other women’s organisations. For example, when we worked on the Women’s Agenda for Change, there were major discussions about our relation to the state. WAO refused for a long time to sign anything against ISA. Now it changed a little bit; it is better now. And then some of the groups took the WAC and presented it to the government, but without consulting us. So it appeared as if we all agreed. But actually we had not. (Seok Teng, CAW activist, 23.04.04)


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CDC plays a special role within these conflict-ridden network relations. My first contact with CDC activists was at the above-mentioned workshop “Neo-liberal Globalisation and Women Workers” in April 2004. CDC was represented by Aneesa, one of their community organisers, and Sharmila and Amani, two female Indian factory workers’ activists who belong to CDC. Aneesa studies sociology. She is around 25 years old and was acting as an interpreter for the two workers activists who spoke neither Malay nor English. The second time I met Aneesa and Sharmila was at the “Consultation Meeting on Home-Based Workers in Malaysia”. This meeting was also organised by Sahabat Wanita in August 2004 and was described earlier in this chapter. The third time I met Aneesa was at the rally for World Habitat Day in October 2004. So although CDC does not have an explicit gender approach itself and does not consider itself to be a women’s organisation––as made clear in the discussion of the history of the organisation––the female activists maintain close links to organisations with an explicit gender perspective on labour issues such as Sahabat Wanita. Both CDC and Sahabat Wanita work as mediators between the feminist-oriented middleclass organisations and the non-gender-specific labour rights movement. 6.5.3 Globalising rights For Sahabat Wanita, both the analysis of social phenomena and strategies of action are very much embedded into global structures. Sahabat Wanita has strong translocal connections, and regional networking seems to be especially important. Lilian, the president of Sahabat Wanita, is the nodal point within these regional networks. Besides being the president of Sahabat Wanita, she is also a member of CAW, a regional organisation concentrating on the issue of women workers, and she represents the organisation in Malaysia. Their main office is located in Bangkok. Some of the CAW activities are carried out in Malaysia, for example, a workshop on “Neo-liberal Globalisation and Women Workers” with participants from Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia. CAW’s current programme officer is also a Malaysian activist who was one of the most active members of Sahabat Wanita. She moved from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to work with CAW. The connection to the Transnationals Information ExchangeAsia (TIE-Asia) is primarily not important in terms of the programme but rather in terms of financial support. TIE-Asia is a politically independent non-profit organisation that receives project funding from development and church-based agencies, participating workers’ organisations, and its network of activists. Its vision is to encourage and support the development of unions and democratic workers’ organisations. TIE does this in places where it is impossible for unions

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to exist, especially unions for women. TIE has offices in Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Lilian heads the Asian regional office in Malaysia, but there are no concrete programmes in Malaysia. Lilian represents three organisations in Malaysia: Sahabat Wanita with a more local, national scope, CAW with a more regional scope, and TIE-Asia with an even more global scope. She is part of a global community of female trade union activists and has participated in meetings with union activists from Chile and Brazil in Amsterdam, and with employees of H&M, the clothes retailer, from Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka that were organised by TIE-Asia. The importance of these translocal networks is due to the nature of the issues debated there: globalisation and social transformation. In her opening speech for the Workshop on “Neo-liberal Globalisation and Women Workers”, Lilian, acting in her role as a CAW activist, explained the connection between the issue and the strategy: CAW works in 14 countries, we have 30 member organisations. It was founded 25 years ago, because of the special phase of development, namely globalisation where the free trade zones split up the process of production. The production became very global. In this sense, globalisation was linking, was connecting the workers in different countries. This brought the necessity to meet and work together to resolve the problems together. So our regional network is a response to the globalised production in Asia. As production goes through different countries, the organisation has to go the same way. (Lilian, Sahabat Wanita activist, 27.09.04)

What is interesting here is that the local work is somehow subsidised by the regional and translocal work. Sahabat Wanita is a volunteer organisation and is financed only by individual donations. But, at the same time, Lilian is employed by TIE-Asia as a regional co-ordinator. With this income, she is able to maintain a small office plus library in a residential area. These rooms are also used as an office and meeting point for all activities carried out by the various organisations that she represents in Malaysia. Although less translocally connected to other groups, Alaigal and CDC make clear use of global documents. They use the pool of global development treaties to formulate their development vision. They use World Habitat Day to formulate their criticism of national housing policy. They also cite the international conventions that Malaysia has signed, like the Habitat Agenda 1992, Agenda 21, and the United Nations Resolution on Forced Eviction. These groups are critical of the fact that the policy followed by the government does not honour these international documents. As already mentioned, both groups formulate their criticism and their demands in the language of ‘rights’. And they make direct translocal references on the symbolic level to social movements in

6.6 Concluding remarks on Part Two: Multiple female counterpublics

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South America. Global icons of a revolutionary romanticism such as Che Guevara were extremely prominent especially among the predominantly young activists from Alaigal and the Community Development Centre (CDC), be they in the form of Che Guevara T-shirts, Che Guevara buttons on their jackets, or even Che Guevara posters in their homes. 6.6 Concluding remarks on Part Two: Multiple female counterpublics Based on the idea of multiple social spaces, public spheres, or multiple communicative arenas organised around specific social spaces, issues, and social actors (Fraser 1995; Calhoun 1997; Ryan 1997; Lachenmann 2004b; Spiegel rapp. 2005; Lachenmann 2008), the first aim of this chapter was to describe a third specific social space. This was the social space constituted by organisations of women workers, plantation workers, urban squatters, and other socially and economically marginalised parts of the population. The second aim was to analyse the modes of transformation within that space. The interface between these organisations and the state is highly conflict-ridden, especially through the organisations’ project to connect the political, social, and economic marginalisation of specific parts of the population with a general debate on development. This connection has been suppressed within the general celebration of Malaysian development gains. Women workers, urban squatters, plantation workers, and small farmers are confronted with the dominant public sphere where deliberation and decision-making processes are structured by power and domination. Within the dominant public sphere, there is little space for these groups to negotiate their local interests and their own ideas of a good life on equal terms with the dominant groups. The failure to mention the living conditions of plantation workers in major government papers on poverty is a telling example of the official strategy of preventing certain issues from becoming public concerns and thus of excluding these issues from public debate. To counter this neglect, the organisations discussed here have developed specific modes of constituting public spheres and modes of social transformation leading to the restructuration of public spaces. Among these strategies is the assistance to local communities in their interaction with plantation authorities or the state, be it in writing petitions or organising demonstrations, rallies, or blockades in the case of farmers or plantation workers who are facing forced eviction from the land they have been living on for generations. The historical development and change of the organisations’ orientation from tutoring pupils to organising active resistance supports the idea of the dual character of such subaltern counterpublics. “On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and

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regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (Fraser 1997, 124). This process of a widening discursive contestation against dominant definitions of subaltern identities, needs, and interests and the importance of subaltern counterpublics as “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs” (Fraser 1997, 123) is especially explicit for the discussed network of organisations. The discursive arena they have created provides them with the resources to create such counter discourses; to redefine their identities from ‘squatters’ to ‘urban pioneers’, from ‘helping housewives’ to ‘female home-based workers’, from ‘development obstacles’ to ‘agents of development’; and to reformulate their needs from development to ‘quality of life’. On the basis of such reformulations, these groups are able to negotiate their subaltern, anti-consumerist, and communalistic concepts of development more successfully in situations of confrontation with plantation management and state authorities. However, the case of the antiglobalisation organisations illustrates the multiplicity of ways for women to become public subjects as well as the ambivalences of these different ways. Within this space, women are mainly part of male-dominated working-class protest, and the project of engendering these struggles is extremely difficult. Alongside the anti-globalisation organisations discussed in this chapter, the two preceding chapters revealed a variety of women’s organisations in Malaysia with diverse and ambivalent positions within the process of negotiating gender relations and the meaning of religion and development. The social-work-oriented organisations provide women with space where they negotiate dominant gender relations and power structures in the family. On this everyday life level, they challenge not only dominant discourses and models of how a ‘good wife’ should behave but also polygyny. The goal of these locally embedded women’s groups is the empowerment of individual women and an immediate change in their lives. This should be achieved by giving women skills and providing knowledge about legal matters. However, it seems that this does not lead to participation in debates in the public sphere about existing laws and to any challenging of hierarchies and unequal entitlements in the process of knowledge production related to religious issues. Women’s organisations in the capital are more disconnected from the concrete local context and seek transformation of society through public debates and legal reforms. Working on a much more institutional level, organisations like the WAO and Sisters in Islam are actively promoting legal reforms of both civil and Sharia family law. These organisations constantly monitor the performance of the state as it fulfils its responsibilities with regard to gender equality. Within them, women claim their right to engage in a process of


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social transformation that categorically includes the transformation of laws. These women’s organisations strategically use symbolic means such as consumer culture and media as a potential way of constituting a new public space for debates about gender relations. The approaches oscillate, first, between the fear of cooptation and instrumentalisation of women’s and gender issues on the one hand, and the chance to provide women with possibilities for significantly improving their livelihood on the other; second, between the goal of reforming the law and the push for societal transformation on a rather abstract level on the one hand, and the urge to improve the economic situation of women on a very concrete level of everyday life on the other; and third, between different modes of negotiating women’s issues with the state, that is, between a critical engagement in order to foster political, legal, and social transformation on the one hand, and a close cooperation in order to integrate ‘unfortunate women’ into society on the other. The diversity of approaches is internally debated within the women’s movement and is embedded into a complex set of othering processes among the different women’s organisations. These contradictions and debates demonstrate not only an ongoing process of negotiation of gender relations and the meaning of religion but also different types of activism within different space and time frames. All types of organisation, however, contribute to the negotiation of gender relations and the meaning and range of Islam in a modern society like Malaysia. The discussion of the different networks of women’s organisations has strengthened the idea of multiply overlapping and competing social spaces with different stocks of knowledge and the idea of multiple and overlapping publics. This contrasts with the view of one single public from which women are excluded. Each of these networks is fighting its way into the public from a distinctive position in civil society, a “place of political marginality and social injustice” (Ryan 1997, 284). They, however, differ significantly in their power to “convince others that what in the past was not public in the sense of being a matter of concern should now become a matter of concern” (Fraser 1997, 129). Whereas the urban women’s organisations have been quite successful in establishing themselves as public actors in the negotiation of family law, the room for manoeuvre for the networks of women workers, urban squatters, plantation workers, small farmers, and the social work organisations in Kelantan is restricted. Seen against the background of these research findings, it becomes clear that to approach women’s participation in the negotiation of social transformation in terms of a dichotomy of inclusion/exclusion from the public sphere is in itself ideological. This is because this approach “rests on a class and gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public” (Fraser 1997, 116). These findings support the

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argument of feminist sociologists and historians who question the idea of a single and exclusive public sphere by pointing out that there are “plural public spheres and spaces” connected through multiple “links, overlapping, interfaces and mechanisms” producing a “multi-layered public sphere where knowledge is validated” (Lachenmann 2004b, 129). It also supports the view that the multiple competing counterpublics came into being simultaneously with the dominant bourgeois public and were related to each other from the very beginning of their existence (Ryan 1997). However, one must also take into account that the building up of these counterpublics has been an extremely conflict-ridden process, and that their existence is questioned permanently by other public actors whose public positions are bolstered by access to more power. Following the methodological paradigm that social spaces and parallel publics “should not be looked at as closed units” and that “knowledge is always produced and hybridised in interactive processes, in arenas whose boundaries are permanently shifting” (Lachenmann 2004b, 124), I suggest reformulating the dichotomy of factual inclusion or exclusion as it is argued by a number of feminist scholars (Landes 1995) into a relational and interactive process of debating the mechanism of publicness. Within these interactions, different actors try to achieve their legitimation to act as a public actor whose position is recognised by other public actors. Putting into practice the methodological concept of “interfaces of social spaces and knowledge systems” (Lachenmann 2004b, 128), Part Three of this study will be dedicated to working out those mechanisms and to empirically analysing the contentious interactions of different publics with regard to the boundaries of the public sphere and the question of who counts as a public subject in the Malaysian context.


Part Three Negotiating the Public Sphere in Local and Translocal Settings

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7.1 Facing systems of ignorance

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7 Mechanisms of Publicness: Dress, Cultural Belonging, and Education 7 Mechanisms of Publicness 7.1 Facing systems of ignorance For most women activists in the cosmopolitan women’s organisations, the concept of women’s and human rights and a strong feeling of global solidarity form the foundation of their commitment to the struggle for social transformation. Nevertheless, many of the activists’ narratives very vividly portray the experience of being confronted not only with ‘others’ who oppose the idea of women’s rights and social transformation in the sense of achieving gender equality and empowerment but also communicative taboos (Chapter 3). Before entering the world of the cosmopolitan women’s movement, these confrontations took place in the realm of family and friends, but once they become active in the movement and participate in the various activities, such confrontations take place in interaction with other civil society actors in the broader public sphere and become even more central to the activists’ selfunderstanding. By analysing such interface situations (see Chapter 2 on event analysis and interfaces), the aim of this chapter will thus be to discover the specific gendered constructions of ‘publicness’ and authority of knowledge with which the women’s activists are confronted in Malaysia; that is, to discover the way in which publicness and authority are established. By publicness, I mean the dimensions and criteria that an actor has to fulfil in order to be recognised as a fully legitimate participant in the public sphere. In September 2004, Sisters in Islam and the Women’s Centre for Change organised a training workshop with different Islamic NGOs in Penang, North Malaysia. The title of this workshop was “Gender Awareness and Women’s Rights in Islam”. As mentioned in the methodology chapter, this workshop was one of the few occasions where my request for participation and observation was denied by the organisers from Sisters in Islam with the explanation that my presence as a Westerner would suggest or re-enforce the participants’ perception of a link between the positions of Sisters in Islam and Western ideas and culture, and this would definitely make Sisters in Islam more vulnerable to attack in the discussions. Furthermore, the programme manager told me that she feared that it would intimidate the workshop participants if they had the feeling that an “orang putih”, a white person, was observing and judging them. These reservations about my participation were linked directly to the identity of the workshop participants, women who were organised in

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7 Mechanisms of Publicness the women’s wings of the most prominent and, as Ida (see Chapter 3)—one of Sisters in Islam’s staff members in Kuala Lumpur who was going to conduct the training—told me, “most conservative” Islamic NGOs in Malaysia. The participants belonged to the Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement ABIM38 and the Malaysian Islamic Welfare Organisation PERKIM.39 Even without my participation, this workshop was already expected to be very controversial, and some weeks before the workshop, Ida had told me about her worries concerning the reaction of the participants to Sisters in Islam’s position on women’s rights and Islam. “This is going to be difficult. Because the crowd is going to be tough. We have ABIM and PERKIM. So we have all these people, who, if I say something, will come back to me saying ‘But in the Quran it says this and that’. So I have to be careful.” The Islamic NGOs invited to join this workshop included, on the one hand, governmentsponsored Islamic NGOs such as PERKIM, which was formed in 1960 by the first prime minister of Malaysia who also acted as its president until his death in 1990. As Hassan argues (2003, 101), PERKIM is one of the government-sponsored Islamic NGOs set up by the Malaysian state to hinder the development of independent and autonomous Islamic organisations. It concentrates on welfare activities for new Muslim converts and is closely connected to the process of government-driven Islamisation. On the other hand, organisations that belong to the independent dakwah movement, such as ABIM and JIM, Jamaah Islah Malaysia, a religiously based organisation of Muslim professionals, were invited too. The relations between these groups and the women’s movement are very complex. Although PERKIM was part of the Coalition on Women’s Rights in Islam formed in 2003 and its “Monogamy, My Choice” campaign, the relation between the women’s organisations and JIM is more ambivalent. JIM has officially signed the Women’s Agenda for Change in the year 2000, and individual women from JIM defended SIS in the public against accusations of being un-Islamic, but, on other occasions, they had refused to network with Sisters in Islam, as Haslina, the second activist in charge of the workshop, had told me before it started. After having worked for Sisters in Islam in Kuala Lumpur during her time as a university student, 29-yearold Haslina is now the project officer at the Women’s Centre for Change, one of the most important women’s organisations in her hometown of Penang. “JIM refused to sit in the same platform with us, the Sisters, because they said we were against the tudung [Malay for the Islamic headscarf, AS]. So, they cannot accept that, and so they refused. They would prefer to work with other organisations rather than SIS.” In contrast to these groups, which could be described as belonging to the Islamic conservative mainstream (Hassan 2003), Sisters in Islam is a highly controversial organisation within the field of Islamic NGOs in Malaysia. Both Ida and Haslina were aware of these controversies, and expressed their worries about the outcome of the workshop. Although I could not participate in the workshop itself, I nevertheless travelled to Penang on the weekend on which it was being held, taking the opportunity to carry out some other interviews, and I met the two activists in charge

38 39

Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia Persatuan Kebajikan Islam Malaysia


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of the training after the workshop in order to get some information on how the event had worked out. Haslina, the young activist from Penang, gave me an account of the workshop and the questions raised by the participants: “The women from JIM were saying that, ‘I can accept what you explained about the law, how it was formed. But I cannot accept what you said about new interpretations of the Quran and Hadith. You don’t look like a Muslim to me, then how can you deliver all these ideas?’ She said ‘We cannot question these things, only certain people who have religious knowledge can do all these things.’ They want to help women in terms of Islamic principles, in terms of the Quran and Hadith, and for them, ordinary people cannot simply talk about that, like us coming from the women’s groups or from Sisters. They also said that the name Sisters in Islam was controversial for them, because they thought that the term ‘Sister’ comes from Christianity, because the nuns are called Sisters. And Christianity comes from where? From the West. Of course, the Malay will portray us like that. We are Western and all that. And another feedback that we got is our credentials; we did not study in al-Azhar or other Middle Eastern universities. So, most of us are Englishspeaking and then got our PhD or whatever from the US, UK, or another Western country. We are feminist and to be called feminist here is considered as a bad thing. So, people said that we are Westernised, that we are women, that we don’t wear tudung. They will always attack that. So, they had their own perspective, their own mindset, when they came to our workshop yesterday. It will be a long way for us to gain the credibility to talk about Islam and about interpretations of the Quran. At our workshop today, we got feedback like ‘You are a woman, you don’t wear tudung, you have coloured your hair and all that, you are not married, you are young, who are you to talk about Quran and Hadith this way? So, they always come to the image, people cannot see beyond that. They will see the dress first. That’s a Malaysian problem.”

Analysing Haslina’s account, it is striking to see that it was not so much the positions and the ideas of the different participants that were debated, but rather the legitimacy of women like Ida and Haslina or, as Haslina had put it, the “credibility” of a group like Sisters in Islam to participate at all in a public debate about issues related to religion. During the training situation, the legitimacy of the women activists and the credibility of their knowledge were constantly called into question by the other participants, because the women activists did not fulfil the criteria that would make them knowledgeable, respectable actors within the public discourse on Islam and women’s rights. According to other interviews, this workshop can be interpreted as a typical case of an interface situation between groups like Sisters in Islam, belonging to a cosmopolitan feminist movement, and other more conservative Islamic groups. The lack of recognition that the women’s activists from Sisters in Islam experience in these interface situations highlights the weakness of approaches to the public sphere which do not include the question of the gendered structuration

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7 Mechanisms of Publicness

of the public sphere and the gendered identities of public subjects into their scope of inquiry. One of the weaknesses of the concept as developed by Habermas is precisely the neglect of this question by assuming all actors to be automatically knowledgeable participants in the public sphere with equal opportunities to engage in a public debate without problematising the interactive mechanisms through which knowledgeable subjects are constructed (Lachenmann and Salvatore, reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005, 4, 15).40 Habermas especially highlighted the egalitarian features of the public sphere, defining it as a “realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed” and where “access is guaranteed to all citizens” (Habermas 2001, 102103). What in Habermas’ eyes was the constitutive new element of the bourgeois public sphere, which developed in the 17th century in contrast to the public sphere existing in feudal societies, was the fact that the status, tradition, or identity of the speaker no longer determined his/her position in the public sphere but only and exclusively the merit of his/her rational arguments (Calhoun 1997, 12 ff.). “The medium of this confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason” (Habermas 1989, 27). It was based on a “kind of social intercourse that far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether” (Habermas 1989, 36).41 This picture of an egalitarian and open public sphere where differences in status and other social identities were successfully bracketed has been criticised by both feminist scholars and scholars working on the public sphere in non-European contexts. Especially Salvatore and Eickelman have argued against neglecting the question of how authority of knowledge is produced and against a conception of the 40 This problem was discussed intensively at the workshop “Public spheres, Public Islam, and modernities” held from 24th to 25th of October 2002 at the University of Bielefeld. The Workshop was organised by the Sociology of Development Research Centre (SDRC) and took place in cooperation with the Italian sociologist and expert in Islamic Studies Dr. Armando Salvatore, who was invited by the International Graduate School in Sociology (IGSS) as a special guest and resource person. Armando Salvatore is a lecturer at the Institute of Social Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and formerly worked at the European University of Florence. The workshop was attended by approximately 25 participants. The presentations given by the guests, staff members, doctoral students, and post-doctoral fellows of the Research Centre were based on empirical fieldwork in Muslim societies and raised questions about the specific constitution of the public sphere in these contexts and the importance of political religion in a globalised world. Methodological issues such as comparative sociology and theoretical issues such as the classical concepts of the public sphere and social space were reproblematised and discussed from a critical postcolonial perspective, taking into account the historical conditions of processes of knowledge production which underlie these concepts (reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005). 41 Calhoun argues that Habermas’ emphasis on the egalitarian and emancipatory character of the public sphere and his neglect of processes of exclusion are based on his “attempts to recover the enduringly valuable ideal of the bourgeois public sphere from its historically contradictory and partial realisation” (Calhoun 1997, 4).


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public sphere as a space where ideas are “presented on their own merits rather than as emanating from such authorities as preachers, judges or rulers” including the assumption that “authority is vested in the public sphere itself” (Eickelman, Salvatore 2002, 96). Rather than discussing authority as an integral quality of the public sphere with which the speaker is awarded at the moment he/she enters the public stage, they propose seeing it as a highly conflict-ridden domain connected to the very constitution of the public sphere itself. Salvatore has argued explicitly for a re-problematisation of authority and knowledge in social theory and for the need to “disguise authority” when analysing collective deliberation or situations of communicative interaction (Salvatore, reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005, 16). Lachenmann also makes a plea to link theorising on the public sphere together with the production and negotiation of knowledge in multiple fora and platforms in the sense of a sociology of knowledge (Berger, Luckmann 1967; Schütz, Luckmann 1973). This connection is necessary in order to analyse how common or controversial knowledge is negotiated and produced not from an undefined social position but in the public sphere itself (reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005, 4). Taking peasant organisations in West Africa which are involved in negotiation processes about different forms of validity of knowledge with Islamic authorities as an example, Lachenmann highlights the importance of such negotiations for the very constitution of a public sphere (reported by Spiegel rapp. 2005, 4). Feminist scholars have pointed out that the concept of the critical-rational discourse and the rational argument were and are themselves structured by gender and other social inequalities. The contradictions and partialities of the public sphere are based on gendered power relations and a gendered construction of public and private spheres in which the public is defined as male and the private as female (Pateman 1989; Showstack Sasoon 1989; Landes 1995; Ryan 1997; Harcourt, Escobar 2002). They also point out the gendered production of “systems of ignorance” (Lachenmann 1994). In the context of development cooperation, Lachenmann has argued that under conditions of power imbalance—be it with regard to gender or with regard to colonial or postcolonial encounters—the interface between local and expert knowledge systems leads to the dequalification, illegalisation, and even expropriation of local everyday life knowledge and the construction of systems of ignorance where the local knowledge is labelled as inappropriate and insufficient (Lachenmann 1991; 1994; 2004b). Applying Lachenmann’s concept in the context of the constitution of multiple overlapping public spheres, I want to argue that systems of ignorance emerge not only at the interface between local and expert knowledge but also at the interface between various competing public spheres. In order to conceptualise these negotiations and to analyse how such capable and autonomous subjects are constructed, it is first necessary to connect the concept

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of the public sphere to the question of the authority of knowledge, and, secondly, to bring the issue of identity back to the debate on the public sphere. Although I agree with Eickelman’s and Salvatore’s demand to problematise the question of authority, I argue, however, that the authority of knowledge with which women’s organisations are confronted in Malaysia is not related only to specific positions such as preachers, judges, and rulers, but to gendered and ethnic structures of the social space. The training workshop on “Gender Awareness and Women’s Rights in Islam” described above shows how questions of authority of knowledge are highly relevant for the conflict-ridden negotiations about the modes of publicness in Malaysia. It also shows how such systems of ignorance are constructed against the critical voices of women’s organisations, and how this is reflected both in the conditions and presuppositions of the participation itself and in the very process of constituting legitimate public subjects with the right to speak and to be heard. What Haslina describes are processes of negotiation about how a citizen is constructed as a “fully capable and autonomous person to enter the rational critical discourse about the general interest” (Calhoun 1997, 3). The debate on women’s rights in Islam, as reflected in the workshop described above, shows how important the question of the gendered structuration of the public sphere is nowadays in a predominantly Muslim country like Malaysia. As discussed in the preceding chapters, the space for alternative imaginations and visions in Malaysia that might be formulated by civil society actors, especially by women’s organisations, is generally restricted by a strong developmentalist state (Chapters 3 and 6), on the one hand, and by a lack of civil rights and a semi-authoritarian mode of governance (Chapter 4) on the other. There are significant state interventions into the public sphere regulating which issues are allowed to be debated in public and who is seen as a legitimate participant in the debate. To argue with Appadurai, the space for the imagination of alternative visions of social change in this “pseudo-democracy” (Uhlin 2002, 154) is not just very limited. In this case, imagination is even being used by the state and other cultural forces to discipline and to control citizens. Additionally, the process of Islamisation, as it is taking place in Malaysia (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), is limiting space for alternative visions of Islam and for the organisation of a multi-ethnic society. This is especially true for women. Built into the very foundation of the public sphere, the gendered structuration is gaining a new relevance within the discourses, politics, and practices of a globalised Islamism movement including political Islam, dakwah movements, and Jihadic Islamic groups. These movements propagate the notion of a separate female sphere of discourse and social practice and locate the female body at the centre of their political discourse. Nilüfer Güle has argued for the Turkish Islamist movement that the


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female body “emerges as the most visible symbol of distinction from Western civilisation” (Güle 1996, 137) and thus forms an “intersection of political ideology and the power relations between the sexes” (Güle 1996, 136). In times of a globalised Islamist movement, this is equally true for the case of Malaysia. Within such a context, one could follow Eisenstadt’s (1999) idea of multiple modernities and argue that a distinct public sphere develops with specific notions of publicness. The workshop shows some of the ambivalent developments triggered by this distinct public sphere and the institutionalisation of separate female spaces as segregated public spheres. On the one hand, all Islamic movements and organisations do have special women’s wings. The participants in the workshop were representatives from Wanita JIM, the women’s wings of JIM, and Helwa, ABIM’s women’s wing. For other ethnic groups in Malaysia too, the establishment of separate spheres for women in masculine-defined political parties or unions has been the typical form of female public political agency. Despite the fact that women have the possibility to organise in these separate spheres, these female spheres are not public in the same way as the male spheres are, and have led to a decrease in women’s autonomy both in the private and public spheres (Othman 2005). The following incident from the General Annual Meeting of ABIM suggests that these gendered spaces within Islamist movements are, of course, not symmetrical in terms of power and authority. I had the opportunity to attend this meeting for one day in August 2004. The idea of separate spaces for men and women was highly present during the whole event. The seating of the participants in the huge conference hall was arranged by strict gender segregation. The right wing was reserved for men; the left wing, for women; and the middle wing was occupied by men in the first half of the rows in the front, whereas the rows in the back were occupied by women. Both spaces were separated by a buffer of two or three empty rows. Because we arrived a bit late, my research assistant and I found a place in the back of the middle wing, maybe six rows away from the male section. We were sitting inside the female space but relatively close to the gender border. During the morning coffee break, we went outside, and the gender segregation continued here as well. The landscape of tables was divided into separate areas for men and women which one could recognise by small paper signposts on the tables with the words lelaki, men, and wanita, women. Coming back to our seats from the morning coffee break, a woman from the organising team approached us and the other women sitting in our row telling us politely but firmly that we could not sit there because it was the men’s area. We observed what the other women did and moved five rows further back. What had happened during the coffee break was that more men had arrived and started to occupy the buffer rows, so that in order

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to maintain the distance between the two sections, the women’s section had to move back. Despite the impressive fact that nearly half of the participants attending the General Annual Meeting were women, this incident illustrates very clearly the secondary character of such female spaces which emerge as a consequence of gender segregation, and their inferior position in public. Othman even goes so far as to say that the “other logic of this Islamist notion of a separate female sphere is to contain, exclude, and silence women from participating in public spaces—thus ensuring women’s complete retreat from the public sphere (Othman 2005). A second ambiguity that the workshop on women’s rights in Islam revealed is the fact that the debate about the gendered conditions of publicness is not being carried out exclusively between men and women but, to a significant extent, between women themselves who belong to different social spaces. This means that the legitimation to engage in public deliberation along with the different concepts of ignorance are constructed and negotiated among women from different groups and movements. Women are not excluded per se from participation in the public sphere, but their exclusion is linked to the specific positions from which they pronounce their public statements. The workshop on women’s rights in Islam also demonstrates the fact that positing a binary opposition between the state and the civil society does not suffice to understand the public sphere in Malaysia, especially in the case of the public debate on gender relations. Such a binary view assumes that all civil society actors are equally carving out democratic space against an oppressive state, and it does not take into account the very different political orientations of civil society actors. Othman emphasised that “women groups were somehow situated outside this dichotomy of state versus opposition, as from a feminist point of view, there was no difference between the authoritarian state and the Islamist opposition concerning gender issues” (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005, 12). That is to say that the most important negotiations about the conditions for publicness and the gendered structuration of the public do not take place between the state and the civil society but among different civil society actors themselves. On the one hand, these are Islamist groups; on the other hand, groups of Muslim activists who push for a modern, progressive, and liberal Islam, using Islam as a tool to disseminate human rights and women’s rights. Both movements constitute competing global public spheres by drawing on very distinct notions of Islam and Islamic discourse (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005). The comments of the two Sisters in Islam members responsible for the training can be used to identify a set of mechanisms through which the publicness of subjects—that is, authority, credibility, and legitimacy—is constructed. Systems of ignorance, through which publicness is denied to certain

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actors, belong to those mechanisms. The refusal to participate in joint events and other political endeavours and the constantly repeated question “Who are you to talk about this issue?” are typical mechanisms for challenging the positions of public intellectuals and constructing their ignorance. In these interface situations, the identity of the speaker is no longer bracketed but placed at the centre of the debate itself. These gendered mechanisms of constructing public subjects, leading to the denial of participation and recognition in the public sphere, which were at work at the specific interface situation of the workshop on women’s rights in Islam and which are of general importance in Malaysian society, evolve around the specific discursive fields of dress, education, and cultural belonging and shall be discussed in more detail in the following section of the chapter. 7.2 “You don’t look like a Muslim to me”: Dress and authority of knowledge 7.2 “You don’t look like a Muslim to me” One significant gendered mechanism through which authority is constructed is dress. For the participants attending the above-mentioned workshop on women’s rights in Islam, only a Muslim woman who dresses according to the mainstream Islamic dress code is recognised as a public subject, and the physical appearance of the activists is used as an argument to question their authority. Within the last 30 years, the use of the headscarf has become widespread in Malaysia, and walking on the streets in Kuala Lumpur, one can see hardly any Malay women who do not use a headscarf of one type or another. The most common dress for Malay women in Malaysia is the baju kurung, the traditional female Malay dress which consists of a knee-length loose tunic with sleeves to the wrist, the baju, and the kain sarong, an ankle-length and also very loose-fitting skirt. The colours of the fabrics used for the baju kurung are amazing. Entering one of the numerous shops where these fabrics are sold, one is overwhelmed by the shiny materials, the bright colours covering the entire spectrum of the rainbow—pink, red, lime-green, purple, yellow—and the jungle-like floral designs with tendrils of tropical flowers and luscious leaves. The more expensive ones are made of silk, but the ordinary, less-expensive fabrics are synthetic. This dress is then combined with a headscarf, the tudung. The more fashion-oriented women make sure that the colours of the headscarf match the colours of the baju kurung, which is bordered with embroideries and fastened with jewelled brooches. The more religiously oriented women combine the baju kurung with a long headscarf, mostly in pale, unflashy colours, such as ochre, light grey, or white. Younger girls wear only a small headscarf which is combined with tight jeans and sporty long-sleeved shirts. Despite these differences, it is the standardisation

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of the female dress in term of Islamic dress and veiling that makes the predominant impression wherever one walks in Kuala Lumpur. Asma LarifBéatrix described the omnipresence of the veil in Malaysia “Whether in an airport, a market, a school or an office, it is rare to see a Malay women or a Malay girl without a veil. […] They are seen everywhere with their head adornment, even when they drive a car, ride a bike or a motorcycle” (LarifBeatrix 2000, 41). Dress takes over the function of an identity marker (Schlee, Werner 1996), as the standardisation of dress is linked to the clear definitions of how a ‘good Muslim woman’ should look. It manifests in the assertion of the workshop participants that only a ‘good Muslim’ has the right to participate in this kind of public sphere, and that it requires a certain type of dress to be a ‘good Muslim’. This has not always been the case in Malaysia, but is a phenomenon which has emerged in the context of the rise of a globally oriented Islamism or dakwah movement. The case of Dalina, a 55-year-old professor at the National University of Malaysia, shows how this movement has influenced dressing choices of individual women, and how these practices are related to women’s participation in the public sphere. Talking about the differences before and after the dakwah movement, Dalina focused particularly on the issue of dress. In the ‘hedonistic times’, she says with a subtle ironic undertone, dressing was “more fun”. Dalina tells me that she started to use the headscarf accidentally. In the 1980s, she had long flowing hair, but one day the hairdressers made a mistake “so that I looked like Diana Ross”. To cover up this accident, she put on a very light scarf for the next university meetings “more as a fashion statement than really for covering.” But then she realised that her male colleagues especially started to treat her differently, “with more appreciation” as she says. This experience made her continue wearing the headscarf, and the longer she wore it, the more she felt the difference in how she was treated in public. And from a “fashion statement”, the wearing of the headscarf slowly was transformed into a “religious and moral obligation” for her (Dalina, 15.09.2004). This process was concluded when one day Dalina rejected a friend’s invitation to a swimming club, saying that she could not wear a tudung and a swimming suit at the same time. At that point, she included not only her head but also her complete body into her religious and moral obligation to cover in public. How deeply this picture of the veiled women is rooted in Malaysian notions of modernity and normality is revealed in the following story, told by Dalina, about a recent meeting with an old friend from her studies in Great Britain. “When my friend and colleague from the UK came to visit me, I went to the airport to pick her up … with jeans and this loose scarf. And the first thing she said was: ‘Oh so modern.’ So there you see how the notion of modern changed. In the sixties, modern meant Western and not covering up. Nowadays, modern means being

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covered up very fashionably” (Dalina, 15.09.2004). The boundary between modern and non-modern that used to run between being not covered and covered, between Western and non-Western, now contrasts the different styles and practices of covering within a cultural community which defines itself as non-Western. With these discourses on the covered public female body as the background, the women at the workshop questioned the authority of Ida’s and Haslina’s positions. This was because they were neither covered nor followed any other aspects of an Islamic dress code. Haslina, who as a teenager had worn a headscarf, had already decided not to cover herself any longer some years before. At the time of the research, Haslina had long curly hair with some highlights and usually wore jeans and a T-shirt and incorporated no ethnic or religious symbols or references into her dress. Ida in contrast, had never worn a headscarf in her everyday life. Only when she studied at the International Islamic University was she obliged to cover while attending classes. Ida deliberately plays with different ethnic dress repertoires: Chinese, Indian, and Malay. Being denied the authority to speak on the grounds of the inappropriateness of their dress is a common experience for activists like Ida and Haslina. Maiza too (see Chapter 3), one of the most prominent women’s activists who belongs to the Sisters in Islam network, described a couple of other situations that show how the issue of dress worked as a mechanism to reject the authority of her knowledge. She has regular contact with groups like JIM through her work within the reformasi movement and the Barisan Alternative, a coalition of Malaysian opposition parties and groups to which JIM belongs. “Because of this relation, they would invite me to their talks, but they really did not know what to think about me. Because in their talks, they would regularly mention that a woman not wearing a headscarf could not be a good leader. And then they have me there, not covered. So I said: Do you know how many people think that I am a good leader? So, who are you to determine this?” (Maiza, SIS activist, 25.03.04). Maiza is confronted with the idea that only women who manipulate their physical appearance in an ‘Islamic’ way can perform valuable political leadership and can be vested with the authority to speak and be recognised by the public in this position. Her female relatives too, who are all covered, repeatedly asked her how it was possible for her group to refer to itself as “Sisters in Islam” without at the same time wearing the tudung. In contrast, the women’s organisations definitely constitute a special space where it is possible to break with these kinds of conformity, obedience, and standardisation that have emerged in Malaysia within the last 20 years. Out of the 10 Muslim activists with whom the biographical interviews were conducted, four were covered and six were not covered. Another incident that indicates the standardisation of dress

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was the surprise of some younger lawyers—both female and male—who were referred to Sisters in Islam by the Legal Aid Council for training on women and gender issues. Ida told me that on their first visit to the Sisters in Islam office, they were very confused at seeing so many uncovered women. “They did really not know what this was all about. They said: Ah, these women are not wearing tudung, so they can’t be Muslim!” These discursive negotiations among the civil society actors about the requirements for participating in public discourses are gaining in political importance because of the increasing tendency towards an institutionalisation of specific Islamic attire. Both Kelantan and Terengganu, the two states governed by the Islamist opposition party PAS, have introduced laws regulating the dress code for Muslim women. In 1990, shortly after PAS won the election in Kelantan, a guideline defining suitable male and female dress for sports activities was formulated, and the Kelantan football team was provided with a new outfit, consisting of long sleeves and trousers covering the entire body (Stark 2004, 61). In 2000, specific regulations were enacted concerning dress code for female civil servants but also for female workers in private industry. These required women to cover their body completely except for the face and hands (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004, 14). In particular, female factory workers were subjected to these new regulations on Islamic attire and fines were introduced for women who did not respect the dress code. These amendments, however, were not confined to Muslim women. Regulations affecting non-Muslim women were also introduced. In Kelantan, non-Muslim women are forbidden to wear skirts that are considered too short at their work place; and in Terengganu, the state even barred female tourists from wearing bikinis in 2002 (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004, 14). In Selangor, a state governed by the ruling party UMNO, three Muslim contestants in the Miss Malaysia Petite beauty pageant were arrested and prosecuted for indecent dress and behaviour in August 1997. This was the first enforcement of a law barring Muslim women from participating in beauty pageants that had been enacted the previous year by the state of Selangor. The three girls were sentenced to a 400 ringgit fine and would have been jailed for two months if they had been unable to pay it (Richardson 1997). As a result, a meeting of all the heads of state religious departments was convoked with the aim of streamlining guidelines and modes of enforcement on indecent dressing and behaviour among Muslims. This was done with the goal of formulating a nationally valid law (Sisters in Islam 1997). In November 2005, the issue of legal enforcement of a dress code at universities and institutions of higher learning was discussed in the cabinet (Sisters in Islam 2005a; 2005c). In contrast to the successful legislation of female dress on the level of individual states, attempts to legally control female dress on a national level have been less successful so far.

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Neither of the two debates resulted in the passage of any national laws. Still, it is a sign of the growing importance of the issue that it is debated as a possibility on the highest political level. This has to be interpreted as a consequence of a constant competition to prove their Islamic credentials between UMNO, the ruling Malay party which is supposed to represent a moderate and progressive Islam, and the oppositional PAS. In the area of education, however, there are certain exceptions to the free choice of dress. In the International Islamic University (IIUM), which was set up by the government under Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in 1983, all female Muslim students are compelled to wear tudung at all times, and non-Muslim female students also have to wear a headscarf during lectures according to the ‘IIUM Students’ Discipline Rules 2004’ guide book (Sisters in Islam 2005a). These incidents support Othman’s view (2006, 341). She argues that dress, especially veiling, has become a particularly sensitive and controversial issue in Muslim countries all over the world, because projects of Islamisation or movements aiming at Islamising local societies put special emphasis on the change in gender relations and the control of women’s bodies (see also Dannecker, Spiegel 2008, 15-18). The data also supports Güle’s ambivalent interpretation of the Islamic veiling which highlights that whereas the veil is indeed an active political statement of women against Western modernism, it simultaneously reinforces visual and sexual privileges “by objectifying the female body” (Güle 1996, 136). The data also support an approach adopted by Petra Dannecker and myself in which dress is viewed as “a symbolic code for communicating one’s status, cultural position and political orientation as well as the belonging to a certain community or group” (Dannecker, Spiegel 2008, 15). Being subject to shifting interpretations across space and time as current debates in Muslim countries and as part of the ‘social imaginary’, dress is an important means for constructing group boundaries and identities (Douglas 1970). But it is also an important means for constructing knowledgeable public actors and systems of ignorance between competing public spheres. 7.3 “The term ‘sister’ comes from Christianity”: Cultural belonging and authority of knowledge 7.3 “The term ‘sister’ comes from Christianity” Cultural belonging is a second mechanism through which authority of knowledge and publicness or ignorance of speakers is constructed. In the workshop on women’s rights in Islam, the Sisters in Islam activists were accused of being Westernised. Although Ida and Haslina had both studied in Malaysia, they were still associated with the overall image of Sisters in Islam as having a

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Westernised lifestyle. This was due to the fact that most of them had earned their degrees at Western universities. The arbitrariness of this argument becomes evident when the huge number of Malaysian students who obtained their university degrees through government scholarships is taken into account. Moreover, the charge of cultural alienation was based on the ambivalence of the English term ‘sister’, which was associated by the participants with Christian and Western culture. This, however, says much about the cultural and religious dichotomies organising the mental maps of the participants, because the Arab term for ‘sister’ which inspired the name of the organisation Sisters in Islam, has a long tradition in the Muslim world. Interestingly the English term ‘sister’ is also very prominent with globally active conservative Islamic groups who use the term to address women. In the Internet, one can find several web-pages, for instance, the “Sister Area” of the “Muslimways” web-page which has its offices in Saudi Arabia and the “Muslim Sisters Section” of the “Islamic-world.net” web-page, which is associated with a Malaysian Institution. Despite the prominent use of the term sister, even among conservative Islamic movements, the participants of the workshop use it to question the authority of the Sisters in Islam activists. In Malaysia, the argument of cultural alienation “functions as a disciplining ‘whip’ to portray the ideal of a pristine Islam, hence making the point that any project for gender equality or women’s participation in the public sphere is religiously inauthentic and illegitimate” (Othman 2005). The way in which the recommendation of the National Human Rights Commission to criminalise marital rape was discussed in public, damning it as culturally alienated and Westernised, is more evidence for the disciplining character of such arguments. Also the issue of interfaith dialogue, which is actively promoted by Sisters in Islam and other women’s organisations, is strongly opposed by a number of more conservative Islamic groups with the argument of cultural and religious alienation. In August 2004, SIS received a letter from an umbrella organisation of Islamic NGOs in which the representative of the Islamic NGOs accused SIS of being Westernised. He demanded that SIS should be considered anti-Hadith and therefore should be prosecuted for apostasy.42 At a discussion over the advantages and limits of foreign funding for NGO activities in Malaysia, one of the leading SIS activists pointed to the fact that a major problem for Malaysian NGOs was how foreign donors were perceived by not 42 On the issue of apostasy, see Human Rights Report by SUARAM (SUARAM 2002). The report highlights the very controversial issue of freedom of religion for Muslims in Malaysia, due to the connection of Islam to the status of Malay ethnicity made in the constitution. Conversion of Muslims to other faiths is not an individual decision, but is to be treated by the Sharia court as an offence against Islam. The few pleas that have been made have been rejected with the argument that being Malay does not allow for not being Muslim. In other cases, self-declared converts who ignored Sharia court orders were sentenced to three-year jail terms.


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only the Malaysian government but also the wider public. She argued that a cooperation of Sisters in Islam with the Open Society Institute founded by George Soros would surely have supported conspiracy theories about “Zionists” undermining Islamic organisations. A more recent event showed how real these fears were. Sisters in Islam were viciously attacked by an UMNO delegate at the party’s general assembly in November 2006 and accused of challenging and threatening Islam and the authority of Sharia courts with their programmes. The delegate was especially outraged about the fact that Malaysian organisations such as Sisters in Islam and the Penang Global Ethics organisation were influenced and funded by “Christian” organisations such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF) and the Global Ethics Project. He dismissed one of the leading figures of this Global Ethics Project as “a Jew from Germany”.43 The delegate went on to argue that The threat to the stability of Islam in Malaysia is not only from within but is also done very systematically and well-planned from outside, using the people inside, the Malays, the Muslims themselves. […] SIS concentrates on how to weaken the Syariah court judiciary system. […] The government must give special attention to these NGOs so they would not take advantage of our soft approach to destroy our religion and race. […] I suggest the government check the status of the KAF. (Yusop 2006)

These events are in line with Zainah Anwar’s observation that such “attacks and condemnations by Islamist groups and individuals against those who challenge the mainstream orthodox views usually take […] the form […] of undermining the legitimacy of the women’s groups to speak on Islam by accusing us of having deviated from our faith” (Anwar 2003, 6). Cultural and religious alienation is constructed on the basis of religious educational profiles of the NGO activists, their use of the English language, and their networks and contacts to foreign and international organisations. This linking of authority of knowledge to an exclusively constructed concept of cultural and religious belonging is problematic in a twofold way for the women’s movement in Malaysia. It is not just that Muslim women engaging in the project of women’s rights and gender equality are accused of being 43 This “Jew from Germany” is Hans Küng, a Catholic priest and theologian from Switzerland and a leading figure in the global interfaith dialogue. After studying philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Hans Küng went to the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, where he was professor for Catholic theology and was part of the Second Vatican Council which placed special emphasis on relations with other religions. Due to his radical position, he was deprived of his teaching permit by the German Conference of Bishops. In 1990, he founded the Global Ethics Project (Küng, Kuschel eds. 1993).

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culturally alienated and thereby denied participation in the public debate. The delegitimisation of an inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and inter-religious public sphere is also one of the most negative consequences of Islamisation occurring in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. In the case of Malaysia, Islamisation leads to the re-enforcement of separate ethnic spaces as well as to the strengthening and institutionalisation of ethnic boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims in all aspects of daily life. This creates special problems for a women’s movement that aims to establish solidarity on the basis of gender rather than along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. It has become especially difficult for non-Muslims to talk about issues concerning Islam and social change related to Islamisation. In this atmosphere, non-Muslim women are not recognised as public subjects who may legitimately engage in a discourse on Muslim women’s rights. Several of the non-Muslim activists interviewed for this study reflected on the problem of how to act in a public sphere that is so extremely laden with particularistic discourses: What’s happened now is that non-Malays have been excluded from arguments for the devising of policies, how they make policies. Non-Malays and non-Muslims have been excluded from that. They said, ‘Well, this is a discussion on Islam, so we are not going to include non-Malay because they don’t know about Islam.’ But at the end of the day, when you look at it, we are directly affected by whatever decisions are made. I think that people who are not Muslim are very weary of engaging with people on any Islamic topic. Simply because first they do think that they don’t have the right to interfere in religious discussions, and two, because they’ve never been asked. I think that’s a big hindrance. (Jessica, AI activist, 12.09.04) I think, I remember those days when there’s always this thing about what right did we have to speak for Muslim women. So we put a Muslim woman in front and let her speak. Now it is a bit different. With groups like SIS really making the kind of intervention and providing that kind of resource. The rest will then be able to say ‘No, we have been told that this is a matter of interpretation of the Quran or Hadith.’ Being a Muslim women’s organisation actually coming out and making the statement, they are a resource for others. But still I think that it is sad that we have to make this kind of distinction, because then we are basically doing the same thing again like the political parties who are divided along the racial lines. Each takes care of their own community. To some extent, that would be what happened if we buy into that only Muslim women can fight for her rights. I think we shouldn’t have to box ourselves in like that. But in reality, there’s always this thing about strategies. (Julia, WAO activist, 04.09.04)

The creation of separate NGOs for Muslim women can be seen as one solution to this dilemma. Although Muslim women in other Muslim societies, where


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religion is not that politicised as a marker of ethnic boundaries, can easily argue from a secular perspective and even refuse to argue from a religious one, it seems to be rather difficult for Malay women in Malaysia to adopt or to be heard from a secular perspective. This is because of the inflation of religious and ethnic identity. Maiza, who is active in Sisters in Islam but also in various multi-ethnic women’s groups, describes the omnipresence of cultural exclusivity and particularity as follows: In a country so divided along ethnic and religious lines, they often come and say: ‘How dare you do talk about that, you’re not even Muslim, or you’re not even a Christian, or even worse than that, maybe nothing. So you can’t do that. Who are you to talk about that?’ (Maiza, SIS activist, 25.03.04)

What she stresses in her remark is the synergy effect of the particularistic ideologies promoted by the different ethnic and religious groups. Particularism in Malaysia is not restricted to Islam, but an overall phenomenon in the culturalisation and racialisation of Malaysian society. On every official form that a Malaysian citizen has to fill in, ‘race’ and religion have to be stated. Even in the student dormitory where I stayed during my field research in Kuala Lumpur, I was given a form where besides my place and time of birth I had to declare my race and my religion. Being a foreigner, I had the privilege of leaving the respective fields empty. Aniza experienced the multi-ethnic public sphere when she started to work for the Women’s Aid organisation, one of the most prominent multi-ethnic women’s organisations. The following interview passage indicates some of the problems that a multi-religious women’s movement has to face: What was good in WAO was the fact that I got to see how other people see Islam, I had to deal with people who didn’t believe in Islam and who just dismissed it. Sometimes I felt as if I should have defended it more to be a good Muslim. But why should I defend it? Because it is true that the way it is being implemented, the Sharia law, affects so many women’s lives in a very negative way. The women who come to WAO, they were the ones who suffer the injustice. Some people call it the word of God, but, at the end of the day, it is injustice. I am very clear that it’s not an issue of the religion, but an issue of the implementation and interpretation. I became much more pragmatic when it comes to the question of religion. One thing is to believe in God and the other thing is the implementation. This country is governed in a way with its laws and policies that produces a lot of injustices and inequalities. And I am willing to be critical about it. And it’s WAO that had made me see that, because I meet other people from their perspective. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

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For Aniza, the experience of being part of an organisation that constitutes a multi-religious space is essential. The dialogue between women belonging to different ethnic and hence religious groups is problematic, especially between non-Muslims and Muslims. Frictions can arise if non-Muslims criticise Sharia laws as discriminatory practices. To be a good Muslim, Aniza should normally defend anything related to Islam against criticism uttered by anybody who is not Muslim. This is one of the major problems of the women’s movement in Malaysia, and arises from the politics of ethnic harmony promoted by the state. After the riots in 1969, the Sedition Act was amended. This penalises any comments on the issue of ethnicity that might be understood as an insult or could cause bad feelings among the members of one of the ethnic groups. This might prevent racism to a limited extent, but it also creates a society in which issues related to culture or religion are difficult to debate across ethnic and religious lines as general public issues. And because women’s issues and gender relations are defined as something belonging to the field of culture and religion, a constructive dialogue between the ethnic or religious groups is not easy— especially in Islamic discourse. However, it shows how Aniza and many women in Malaysia use these frictions to critically analyse their own religion, and how they willingly engage in a multi-ethnic debate on women’s rights on the basis of their gender identity. Actually, it is not astonishing that it is women’s groups that are actively engaged in interfaith dialogue and lobbying for freedom of religion in Malaysia. The distinction between the religion itself and the interpretation and implementation that Aniza makes is of fundamental importance in this context in order to maintain her religious identity as a Muslim while simultaneously debating the observance of women’s rights with other women from other ethnic and religious groups. The basis of such an approach is a new kind of knowledge embedded in the concrete everyday life experience of the women who come to seek assistance from an organisation like WAO. WAO assists battered women and runs a shelter. Also as a programme co-ordinator, Aniza gets very close to these women, having also been involved in telephone counselling. For Aniza, everything that goes against the well-being of these women has to be criticised. She deconstructs ‘the word of God’, or the fundamentalist approach, by raising the question of justice or injustice for ordinary women at the basis. 7.4 “We cannot question these things”: Education and authority of knowledge 7.4 “We cannot question these things” Finally, the third significant gendered mechanism through which the authority of a speaker is constructed is education, specifically religious education. For the

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participants of the workshop on women’s rights in Islam, one essential reason not to accept what the activists from Sisters in Islam proposed was their perceived lack of formal Islamic education. Sisters in Islam members were conceived as ‘ordinary people’ who were not entitled to participate in this public. Only a Muslim who has been educated in specific institutions is entitled to act as a public subject in the debate on women’s rights and Islam. This inner-Islamic discourse is controlled by traditional male religious authorities who claim to know the ‘true’ and ‘only’ Islam. It is part of the overall process of Islamisation. This process is characterised by a specific use of Islamic traditions and teaching which concentrates on the authoritative features of Islamic scriptures and jurisprudence, as Norani Othman elaborated at the Negotiating Development Workshop in Bielefeld (Othman 2005). This process has led to the perception of Islam mainly as a religion of law rather than of spirituality, a perception which the movement of political Islam is trying to maintain and expand. One way that this specific authoritative use of Islamic traditions has entered Malaysian society has been through the Islamisation of knowledge. The term Islamisation of knowledge was coined in 1977 at the First World Conference on Muslim Education in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and has been eagerly embraced by the Malaysian government. Two International Islamic universities were created in the aftermath of the conference: one in Kuala Lumpur, the other in Islamabad. Furthermore, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) was formed with offices in Islamabad, Kuala Lumpur, and Washington. As Mona Abaza has argued, Islamisation of knowledge is one of the major intellectual projects of Third-World intellectuals. Their aim is to indigenise and authenticise the social sciences in the era of globalisation by using a language of difference and fragmentation (Abaza 2002, 21). Despite the remarkable internal diversity of the ‘Islamisers’ of knowledge’s positions and arguments presented by Abaza,44 one 44 There are, for example, significant differences dividing the position of the Malaysian scholar S. N. al-Attas from that of the Palestinian scholar Isma’il Raji al-Faruqui, who were both leading figures at the First World Conference on Muslim Education. Mona Abaza writes: “Al-Attas stresses strong Sufi inclinations with intuition as a form of knowledge, while al-Faruqui expressed strong sympathy for fiqh”, the revealed doxa (Abaza 2002, 223). Fiqh is divided into the study of the religious sources and methodology on one hand and the implications for practical life conduct and laws on the other. There are four recognised juristic schools within the Sunni tradition which differ in their methodological approaches and their understanding of fiqh for the derivation of laws. The Hanafi School is especially prominent in Turkey, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Egypt. The Maliki School is dominant in North Africa, West Africa, and several of the Arab Gulf States; the Hanbali school, in Arabia; and the Shafi'i School, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, East Africa, Yemen, and southern parts of India. Because of a differentiation between sacred Sharia and non-sacred Fiqh, these different approaches and the differing conclusions they reach are accepted and not perceived as sacrilegious. The school followed officially by the government of Malaysia is the Shafi’i school. Abdullah bin Ahmad Badawi, the current prime minister of Malaysia, is a pronounced

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can extrapolate certain similarities and a common ground in their analysis of the contemporary knowledge production at the global scale. The assumption of a categorical incompatibility of Western and Islamic knowledge, of Western philosophy and Islamic tradition, or as Adil Husayn, a former Egyptian Marxist economist, has put it, an epistemological and conceptual break between East and West is at the core of the Islamisation of knowledge debate. Western knowledge is rejected because of its alleged epistemological alliances to secularism, its unlimited application of reason, the animalisation of the human being in Darwinism, and the atheism and materialism in Marxism (Abaza 2002, 224). Due to the historical dominance of Western philosophical and scientific traditions and the imposition of Western knowledge in the Islamic world, it was necessary to create ‘authentic’ Islamic knowledge and to establish ‘authentic’ Islamic institutions in all scientific realms to counteract these tendencies. As the locations of the institutions that were the outcome of the Mecca conference indicate, the Malaysian government has played a significant role in the Islamisation of knowledge debate and has developed an elaborated state discourse on science and Islam (Abaza 2002). In that sense, it is important to draw a clear distinction between so-called Islamist fundamentalism or oppositional Islam such as the Islamist Party PAS in Malaysia, which promotes a programme of social revolution, and the project of Islamisation of knowledge, which is promoted by state agents who are part of a government think-tank (Abaza 1996, 53-54). The Malaysian Islamisation of knowledge project has actually been one of the most important instruments used to de-legitimise the oppositional Islam, whose activists were mostly educated in traditional religious schools in the Middle East. Abaza argues that the Islamisation of knowledge project, which is pursued at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, is not very far reaching. Apart from an Islamic dress code for students, the curriculum bears a significant resemblance to any Western curriculum. Nonetheless, this state-driven project of the Islamisation of knowledge has been achieved and implemented only through a continuous institutionalisation of Islam, or as Abaza put it, through the emergence of an “etatised Islam” (Abaza 2002, 68). In the same way as the monopolisation of development by the Malaysian state has led to an increase in non-participatory decision-making processes on the definitions, aims, and means of social and economic development (Dannecker, Spiegel 2006), the increasing regulation of Islam by the state has re-enforced the existence of specific communicative taboos and exclusionary mechanisms within the public sphere. The Islamisation of knowledge has worked as a “normative fundament to politics and social restrucfollower. The Shafi’i school is considered to be one of the more conservative among the four Sunni schools.


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turing” (Abaza 1996, 58).45 If all knowledge is Islamised and every subject of public debate is converted into an issue of religious discourse, then the labelling of women’s rights activists as not possessing religious knowledge leads to the construction of systems of ignorance and to hierarchical relations within the public sphere. One constant experience of women’s activists, especially Muslim women’s activists, is of being accused of not possessing the sufficient religious knowledge to be authorised to talk about issues related to gender and religion. The case of Noraini, a young Muslim Amnesty International activist, illustrates this mechanism very clearly (see Chapter 3). Noraini participated in a training programme on violence against women that Amnesty International had set up for its volunteers in 2004. The whole training programme was organised as a series of six weekly sessions under different topics. These included ‘Women, Culture and Community’, ‘Women and Law’, and ‘Violence against Women’. After a heated discussion on domestic violence between the male and the female participants during the ‘Violence against Women’ session, the issue of marital rape was raised by one of the male participants. During the course of the seminar, he had argued that he was not convinced of the relevance and extent of the issue. The issue of marital rape had appeared in public debate in Malaysia just a week before. In a paper presented to the parliamentary select committee on amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and Penal Code in August 2004 (Fauwaz Abdul Aziz 2004), Abu Talib Othman, the chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission, SUHAKAM, had made the recommendation to categorise marital rape as a crime punishable under the Penal Code. At present, marital rape is not a criminal offence under Malaysian law, and the recommendation triggered an extremely heated and controversial debate. The Religious Adviser to the Prime Minister, Tan Sri Abdul Hamid Othman, stated that there was no need to make marital rape a criminal offence, because the “subject of marital rape, when a husband forces a wife to have sex against her will, was relevant only to non-Muslims” (New Straits Time 2004). On the same day, Mingguan Malaysia, one of two most widely read Malay language newspapers, published statements by Islamic scholars, muftis, and activists describing the recommendation of the National Human Rights Commission as “influenced by Western ideals and against Islamic teachings” (Moses, Chok Suat Ling 2004). During the AI workshop, the male participants argued against the recommendation of the commissioner saying that “one should not wake sleeping dogs”, and that people, obviously women, would become aware of something that they did not know about before and could abuse such laws to the detriment of men. This, 45 “normative Fundierung der Politik und der gesellschaftlichen Umstrukturierung” (Abaza 1996, 58). Translation from the German original by AS

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however, produced loud protest among the other participants, especially among the women. The outcome of this short conflict was the idea to raise a public debate about the issue of the criminalisation of marital rape with two groups: one in favour and one opposing it. Noraini, who studies law, decided to participate in the debate for the group that would argue in favour of criminalising marital rape. In the run up to the debate, she told me that she was very insecure about how she was going to argue, because she was sure that her opponents would raise the question of religion and religious knowledge in the discussion: I am sure that the point of religion is going to be brought up, and that would be my weakness actually because I don’t have a degree in Islamic studies, so they can say things like ‘You don’t know Islam’. Whenever you try to do something, if you don’t have a degree or substantive knowledge, they are going to say that you don’t know the religion. So, we cannot say anything because we will be deemed as going against the religion, while what we are trying to do is trying to help the Muslims themselves. I will have to meet somebody in SIS to ask them about the thing. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

The way authority is constructed is connected to the concept of ‘substantive knowledge of Islam’, which must be acquired by obtaining a degree in Islamic studies. The gendered construction of this concept becomes evident by looking at Noraini’s opponents in the debate: two young Muslim men who had also participated in the AI volunteer training on gender and violence against women, but did not possess this kind of formalised Islamic knowledge either. They did not have a degree in Islamic studies, but had studied business and computer science. But still, they were in a position to easily make the accusation of not possessing substantive knowledge about Islam. Women are automatically constructed as non-experts in the area. The case of Ida, Sisters in Islam’s legal officer, shows the complex and ambiguous role that ‘education’ and ‘knowledge of Islam’ play for the construction of authority in public. Ida had studied secular, codified law at a private University in Kuala Lumpur and had then started her work in the civil society sector as a legal officer in one of the multi-ethnic women’s organisations. But she soon became dissatisfied with her work. In the following quotation, Ida talks about her frustrating experiences with Islamic judges: Something that pissed me off was that I could assist my non-Muslim clients, because there is the law and everything. But when it came to Sharia law, I couldn’t help. Because the judges would use Sharia verses, which are very discriminatory towards women but which are not in the sections. And lawyers would come back to me and say: ‘Yes, obviously husbands can beat their wives’. That started my interest in Sharia law. Because if you talk to religious authorities and scholars, using human


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rights discourse does not work. There is no other way to use religious discourse. (Ida, SIS activist, 25.04.04)

During her work, she came to the conclusion that in the confrontation with the authorities of the religious courts, human rights arguments were not valid and not recognised by the religious authorities. Whereas, according to Ida, the mediation between the secular, codified law and a human rights approach went smoothly, the mediation between religious law and human rights approaches produced significant friction. Because of this frustration, Ida decided to adopt a ‘religious discourse’. She did a second degree in Sharia law at the International Islamic University, quit her work with the multi-ethnic women’s organisation, and started to work with Sisters in Islam. However, she talked extensively to me about the issue of knowledge: The fact that I do not have a so-called religious background of study, that has been brought up. That’s why when I use religious discourse, it is very important to tell them, look, I am not only familiar with the codified law, that is, the Hukum Syarak and the methodology of law making, but also with the basis of this law, with the Sunnah, with what the prophet said. And then I show them the unfairness of the codified law, and how it should be. I will have to point out to them that just because a person doesn’t have a so-called paper or qualification in Sharia Law, that doesn’t mean that the person could not study on her own, could not learn something through experiences, like me through my work. But normally, I cannot bring my experiences from the legal context to the whole religious discourse. That has worked sometimes, but when it comes to conservative groups, then they will still keep on going on about my qualification, that I do not know anything. (Ida, SIS activist, 25.04.04)

At this moment in the conversation, I was rather puzzled because I knew about Ida’s educational background and that she had studied at the International Islamic University of Malaysia. So I interrupted her, asking how anyone knowing about her educational background could possibly allege that she did ‘not know anything’. She replied: “Yes, I indeed studied at the IIUM, but I studied the legal aspect, not the Fiqh. And to them, this is a big difference.” Ida refers to the difference between her education in Islamic law and Fiqh, the system of Islamic jurisprudence practiced by the ulama, the traditional Islamic scholars.46 In contrast to students of (Sharia) law, for Fiqh students to achieve the status of an ulama, they have to undergo the complete curriculum of the 46 The term ulama refers to the class of Muslim scholars engaged in the several fields of Islamic studies and is derived from the Arabic word ilm (knowledge). Over the centuries, these religious experts have engaged in the project of elaborating an Islamic standard based on the religious sources and on transforming this norm into Islamic canon law (Elger 2001, 257).

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traditional Islamic educational system, which consists of language courses, logic, rhetoric, as well as theology and jurisprudence (Elger 2001, 105). Today, courses such as philosophy and Quranic hermeneutics are also included in the curriculum. Ida’s experiences with other more conservative Islamic groups and authorities show that, for her, a degree in Sharia law qualifies a person to publicly discuss women’s rights and Islam. The concept of ‘substantive knowledge’ is clearly linked to certain traditional educational institutions especially in the Arab world, such as the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. With SIS, it was actually a shock. It was more of a shock than with WAO. Because I thought: ‘Wow, there are also Muslims who feel this way … who are concerned about these issues!’ What I find special about it is that others have to accept the fact that there is so much diversity. We are based on Islamic thought, and you shouldn’t just ignore us or push us aside and say, ‘Well, they don’t know anything because they are not really religious experts or they don’t put on the tudung.’ You cannot just dispel their positions. Because the women in SIS are so rational. It cannot be that what they are saying is not right. (Ida, SIS activist, 28.03.04)

This passage gives an idea of how homogenised accepted positions on religious issues are for Muslims, especially for Muslim women. There is only a limited space for interpretations, perspectives, and visions of what it means to be a Muslim that go beyond the official teachings promoted by both the state and the religious authorities. For Aniza, it was already a positive ‘shock’ to meet nonMuslim women with opposing ideas at WAO, a multi-ethnic women’s organisation. But it was even more surprising for her to meet Muslim women who explicitly use Islamic thought and sources for a feminist project. The passage also shows the difficulties facing Muslim women in Malaysia who want to articulate their point of view and claim their right to participate in the negotiation of gender relations and gender issues. Their ideas are silenced because they are not accepted as legitimate participants in the debate about these issues, because—although many of them are educated in Islam to a certain degree—they are constructed as ignorant in not having a formal Islamic religious education, and because they do not conform to the religious canon. 7.5 Conclusion This chapter discussed three modes of constructing authority and publicness at the interface between different competing public spheres: dress, cultural belonging, and type of education. It became clear that different actors use these three dimensions to negotiate their status as knowledgeable public subjects. It is

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also clear that these dimensions are part of interactively produced systems of ignorance. Within these systems, non-dominant views on Islam and gender are constructed as non-knowledge, and their spokespersons—women’s activists— are constructed as ignorant and hence as non-public subjects. At the Negotiating Development Workshop in Bielefeld 2005, Norani Othman called attention to the fact that “the notion of Islam as a set of legal prescriptions and moral injunctions and hence a blueprint of a social order”, as found in Sudan, Malaysia, and Pakistan, is very captivating for “ordinary believers”, as it operates on a dualistic basis which leaves little space for alternative views. This is the “challenge that movements like Muslim feminists, who are engaged in local and global negotiations of women’s rights and development, have to meet” (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005, 4). The following chapter will analyse how this challenge is met by the young women’s activists, what practical and discursive strategies they develop to deconstruct these systems of ignorance concerning their public character and the authority of their knowledge, and how they construct new forms of authority and publicness based on gender equality.

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8 Constructing New Notions of Publicness

As Othman has argued, one essential condition for the women’s movement is to succeed in their project of “creatively participating or occupying public spheres locally, regionally and globally” (Othman 2005, 3). While doing so, they are constantly confronted with the intent to de-legitimise their participation in the public sphere by constructing systems of ignorance regarding their publicness and authority of knowledge. However, the different interfaces analysed in the previous chapter have to be interpreted as a constant effort by activists from SIS and other women’s organisations to constitute new and different modes of publicness. These challenge the established constructions of authority and mechanisms of de-legitimisation, as the following quotation from Maiza, a SIS activist, shows: For a long time, I did gender training. But I tried to avoid the religious part. Because I thought: who am I to talk about religion? They won’t even believe me. But it was a few years later when I realised that it really does not matter what you are, you can be as covered as you want: When that what comes out of your mouth is radical, people will say that you are a devil in hijab. Like they did with an ulama in Indonesia who 47 looks like Nik Aziz, but uttered very progressive stuff and was immediately banned. So finally, it’s not about whether you’re male or what you wear. It’s really about whether people think you are legitimate or not. So in the end, I thought, I cannot avoid these issues. (Maiza, SIS activist, 25.03.04)

This quotation shows the will of the activists not to accept being constructed as ignorant or non-authorised others in the public debate on gender relations and Islam. Producing public arenas or public spheres, civil society is a constituting force of publicness (Lachenmann 1993; Bierschenk, Elwert, Kohnert 1993). The following section will discuss some of the creative ways by which women’s activists enter the public sphere and deconstruct the dominant models of publicness. These are the reconstruction of dress (8.1), the reconstruction of cultural belonging (8.2), and the reconstructing of epistemic culture (8.3). As an 47

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat is currently chairman of the Islamist opposition party PAS and the Chief Minister of the state of Kelantan. He is usually dressed in the traditional manner of the Islamic ulama, with a loose white tunic and a white turban. He is known for his misogynistic positions.

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analysis of the interfaces with family members, participants of training sessions organised by the NGOs, or the state reveals, the negotiation of the concept of publicness is shaped by different discursive battles around highly contested sites, such as ‘state’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition‘, and ‘religion’. At these interfaces, activists gain the insight that a global concept of rights, be it women’s or human rights, has to undergo multiple processes of translation to become effective in the local context. 8.1 Reconstructing dress: “Islam is not about dress” 8.1 Reconstructing dress Having argued that the female dress is an important mechanism for constructing not only knowledgeable public subjects but also ignorant, non-public subjects through systems of ignorance, the question addressed in this section of the chapter is how young activists from the women’s organisations counter these mechanisms. How do they negotiate these notions, and what kind of alternative ideas of authority related to dress do they develop? To work out these renegotiations of the meaning of dress, the ‘dress trajectories’ of Haslina, Ida, and Aniza will be examined in greater detail. Haslina Haslina started to wear the tudung in the year 1993 at the age of 18, and she wore it for three years. When she was 15 years old, she became interested in wearing the headscarf for the first time. I believe from when I was small, I really wanted to be a good Muslim woman. And for being a good Muslim woman, I need to wear certain dress. The dress issue has always had a big impact on my life because, all this time, I have been taught that image is really important for being a Muslim. (Haslina, 15.09.04)

However, her mother was not covered at that time, and clearly opposed her daughter’s idea to cover up. The mother rejected her adolescent daughter’s wish to fulfil certain religious obligations and be a ‘good Muslim woman’ through her dress by arguing that it was still not the appropriate moment for her to start covering up: “She was really against it. She said, ‘You are still young, you should still be enjoying your life’” (Haslina, 15.09.04). Haslina took her mother’s position on the issue into account and postponed her decision, while never losing track of her idea. In 1992, after finishing school, she left her hometown Penang and went to Kuala Lumpur to study General Arts at University Malaya. Because her family was a bit uneasy about Haslina going to Kuala Lumpur alone, a city which they perceived as an “evil town where people

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do bad and sinful things” as Haslina says, she lived—as do most of the female students—at a student hostel on the university compound. Here, at the university campus, Haslina came in contact with Islamic student groups. At that time, 60 % to 70 % of all Malaysian university students belonged to the dakwah movement with varying degrees of commitment (Anwar 1987). Haslina’s roommate, who was already in her third year, was well integrated into the networks of these “more conservative groups” (Haslina, 15.09.04) and started taking Haslina to the group meetings, Quran readings, and prayer sessions. For Haslina, this group seemed to reflect her own religious understanding: “Finally I could live the feeling that I had since I was small. Now I had the opportunity to join this kind of group and to be a good Muslim woman” (Haslina, 15.09.04). Moving to Kuala Lumpur and getting in contact with the dakwah groups on the campus was a first important turning point in Haslina’s life. At last she was able to independently organise her everyday life according to her ideas about how to be a good Muslim woman. After some months, she started wearing the headscarf without informing her family. Besides her strong desire to be a good Muslim, wearing the headscarf also provided her with a strong feeling of moral security. “I felt that I was already protected from all these bad things happening in society. Wearing the tudung I was on the safe side” (Haslina, 15.09.04). She relates that she felt so good about herself that she even started to “judge people who didn’t wear a tudung” and to persuade other friends from university, whom she describes as being “more open and also more modern in terms of dress”, to wear the headscarf, but without success. This capacity of the “guardian of morality” (Anwar 1987, 34) over other students plays an important role in the identity of a dakwah girl on campus. To the more committed dakwah students, it is part of their habitus, to “call [the other students] … to Islam, to make them realise they have gone astray and advise them to come with you along the right path” (Anwar 1987, 34). Haslina highlights the independence of her decision to cover up, and talks in detail about the conflicts that arose when her mother found out that she was wearing a tudung: I didn’t get my mother’s or my family’s permission. I just did it. So, when the semester break came and I went back, my mother was just very surprised to see me, actually she was very shocked to see me like that. But she couldn’t change it. She said to me that she didn’t wear tudung because it was not her time yet. So, she said that after my brother would marry and after having performed her haj, it would be a must for her to wear the tudung. It would be weird if people go to haj and after coming back, don’t wear it. She thinks that when you get your daughter-in-law or son-in-law, you feel that you need to show that you are … you wear the tudung in order to show that you are already old. (Haslina, 15.09.04)

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As other cases indicate as well, the mothers did not question the institution of a special dress for Muslim women or reject the tudung out of political reflection in the first place, at least not in their conversations with their daughters. For the mothers’ generation, wearing a headscarf was not perceived as a general duty for a Muslim women regardless of her age, but rather as a symbol for a specific stage in the life cycle of a Muslim woman, namely of being a mature and older woman. This also includes the association of the headscarf as something that entails a drastic change to everyday life and symbolises the distinct stage in the female life cycle opposed to youth and opposed to ‘joy’. After having performed their haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of the activists’ mothers wear the tudung as a sign of having fulfilled this religious duty. The interviewed activists constantly repeated that their parents had become more religious, in the sense of being more conscious about the performance of the religious rituals and other forms of religious everyday practices such as dress, after performing haj. The headscarf as worn by teenagers and young women as a manifestation of the concept of the ‘good Muslim woman’ represents a significant break with the practices of their parents, but also with the practices of their peers at this time. Haslina related that most of her female friends only began to wear the headscarf at the request of their husbands after they were married. Despite the initial disapproval of her mother, Haslina wore the headscarf during her time at university. But then in her final year, in order to complete her minor subject, she had to attend a practical training. Besides other offers, she saw a SIS advertisement for the post of assistant researcher in a research project on women’s experiences with Sharia law. Without knowing anything about SIS, Haslina was interested and attracted, because she associated the name ‘Sisters in Islam’ with her own search for religious renewal. However, her first reaction to the SIS activists she met was rather reserved and sceptical: So, at first Zainah came and Nik Noriani, and the first thing that came through my mind was ‘How strange, they call themselves Sisters in Islam but they don’t portray themselves as Muslims from the way they are dressed. So, never mind, I just complete my thing’. So, when I worked there, I listened to all the problems of Muslim women and I started to think by myself: ‘Is this Islam. Is this the real Islam?’ and at the same time, I read a lot of material from SIS resource centre, SIS press statements, letters to the editor, and other newspaper cuttings with information from outside the country on what is happening out there. It was really the point for me to start to think about myself as a Malay woman, as a Muslim Malay woman in Malaysia. So, and I read also about SIS’s position on dress. And all this contradicted the way in which I had been brought up about dress. So, after a year, I just could not bear myself wearing tudung because I felt that this was really a big hypocrisy. Islam is not about dress; other religions ask you to do good. Working with SIS, I felt I can be a good Muslim without wearing the attire and all that. That’s why I wanted to


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wear tudung because of Islam, to be a good Muslim. So, I decided to wear it. Then, after realising that the tudung had nothing to do with Islam, it’s not part of Islam, but is actually an Arab dress, I thought: ‘Oh, my God, I cannot live with this kind of dress anymore. I need to take off my tudung. I cannot live with that hypocrisy’. (Haslina, 15.09.04)

The internship at SIS was the second significant turning point in Haslina’s life, which brings her to break with a whole set of her former practices and beliefs. Influenced by the new perspectives and knowledge gained during her internship at SIS, Haslina re-examines her way of practising her religion. The old way as practised by the dakwah movements appears to her to be very superficial, with the issue of dress symbolising this superficiality. After three years of wearing the tudung, Haslina decides not to dress in the ‘Islamic’ way any more. And again, this causes serious quarrels with her family, especially with her mother, but also with friends: When I decided to take off my tudung, things started to be in conflict with my mother. When I wanted to wear the tudung, my mother said she didn’t want me to wear it; but when I took it off, she had already gone to Mecca and performed her haj. So, my mum cried when I took off my tudung. She said ‘What will people think about me when you take off your tudung? Why do you do this to me?’ She was very concerned about what society would think of her as a mother whose daughter takes off the tudung. They just couldn’t accept that I took off my tudung. So, all this was hard for me. Because it is OK for you not to wear the tudung in this society, not to wear it at all. But to wear it, and then to take it off again, this is very difficult. All my friends, all people that I knew would ask me about it. So, sometimes when I saw them somewhere I tried just to run away. That was a very difficult time to face. (Haslina, 15.09.04)

Other activists have also gone through similar processes. They started wearing the headscarf as a bodily practice of being a good Muslim and later reached a point where they rejected it as a superficiality. Noraini, who had already worn the headscarf as a small girl, took the decision to take off the tudung when she was studying in Great Britain. I used to wear the scarf, but then I felt that something is wrong. I wore it when I was quite young in high school. I felt that this is what women are supposed to wear. It is demanded by the religion, so I should follow. But then I felt somehow, my conscience told me that something was not right, but still I wore it for years and years and years. For me, wearing the scarf is discriminatory, because guys can dress as Western as they want, and they see themselves as a good Muslim. But the identity of a Muslim country or of a Muslim family … it is all up to women to carry that identity. The wearing of the scarf imposes a certain notion of prohibition of some

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8 Constructing New Notions of Publicness actions. Especially during my times, a lot of girls wore the scarf out of guilt. They are driven by guilt. The scarf is imposed by others. The imposition of the scarf was based on Hadith rather than on the Quran itself. It is said in the Hadith that the Prophet […] visited heaven and hell. And in hell he saw a lot of women, who did not cover their hair and all their hair would be burned one by one. In the same Hadith is mentioned that the majority of hell residents will be women. But, on the other hand, the Prophet is so well known for being very practical and using psychology. It is so out of character to foresee the future and have already concluded: ‘O sorry you women, you will be in hell.’ This is psychologically wrong. This is like demoralising already. Moreover, some men feel that they are superior to women because there is less chance for them to go to hell. So I rejected all this, my consciousness told me that it is wrong. So I decided to take the tudung off. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

For both Haslina and Noraini, taking the tudung off was a public statement showing that they agreed with neither the image of women produced within the type of Islam surrounding them nor the instrumentalisation of the female body in relation to collective identities. The inclusive or exclusive mechanism of the headscarf and the power that is inherent in this mechanism becomes especially visible at the moment of taking it off. Noraini’s story is one most characterised by conflict. Coming back from Great Britain without the headscarf was the trigger for a severe and immediate quarrel with her mother: When I came back, my mother got very angry when I told her that I was not going to wear the veil anymore. She did not speak to me for one week. She reminded me that it is a sin, and that I would not go to heaven if I did not wear the scarf. In her eyes, it is the law. And so I decided to wear it again.

After not having worn the tudung for nearly two years during her stay in Great Britain, she yielded to her mother’s psychological pressure and started to cover up again. At the time of the research, she had been wearing the tudung for nearly one year. Observing her, I always had the impression that she felt extremely uncomfortable and uneasy with the headscarf and was always extremely relieved to come home and to be able to take it off. Haslina’s case shows, on one hand, the diversity of meaning connected to the practice of wearing the tudung in Malaysia. For her mother’s generation, it is a marker of a specific stage in the life cycle of a Muslim woman related to the haj. For the dakwah women and girls, it is part of the practice of being a good Muslim woman, regardless of age. For still others, it is a sign of being married. Thus, the negotiations of these meanings are especially relevant for gender relations—especially relations between mothers and daughters. Haslina’s case


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also shows how the discussion of Islamic dress is especially related to a critique of a ritualistic concept of religion. Ida Ida’s case could not be more different. Ida says that she was raised as a ‘modern girl’ especially concerning dress: “I was not a person who wore baju kurung all the time. I wore my pinafore, I wore my school skirt, and for physical education, I wore my shorts.” For Ida, the baju kurung stands for Malay tradition which she contrasts with her own ‘modernity’. Baju, she explains to me, means cell or prison and kurung means dress. “So it is a dress that imprisons you.” This notion of modernity as freedom from traditional restrictions was also reflected in the dress habits of her mother whom she describes as being rather Western-oriented and as a ‘very sexy women’ when she was younger. But then, Ida could perceive a slow but constant change in her mother’s lifestyle. Religion became more and more important to her, also influencing her way of dressing. “Already before performing haj, when she grew older, she first used a loose shawl, and then she started using the tudung”. Ida is the only one among my Muslim interviewees who never covered herself. The only times she wore a tudung was when she studied at the International Islamic University where it is obligatory for women to cover. She talks very sarcastically of this period and the compulsion to wear a headscarf. At the university, I had to wear tudung. I needed hours to put it on, because if you don’t do it right, it just falls off, or it slips around, into your face, to the sides or to the back. I hated it, I felt so uncomfortable. It was so hot inside and it also covers your ears so I really felt locked in.

Nowadays, Ida wears a variety of different ethnic dress styles. I repeatedly saw her dressed in the shalwar kammez, the typical Pakistani dress, consisting of a pair of loose trousers and a blouse. She also wears blouses in the Chinese style and also Western clothes, even mini-skirts. And she is very conscious about this flexibility and cultivates it as a sign of tolerance and openness. Sometimes, on special occasions, for official conferences or when visiting her relatives, she also wears the baju kurung, the typical Malay dress. In a conversation we had about identities—that day Ida was wearing a miniskirt—I stressed the fact that one can have multiple identities and activate them depending on the context. Ida replied in a very affirmative way: “Oh yes, aren’t we all bloody actors? When I go to my aunties’ house, I dress differently, I put on my baju kurung, and I sit like a very nice lady and I eat in a very cultivated way.” While talking, she ironically performed her lady-like ‘self’ with highly exaggerated female gestures and postures. Although Ida relates that there was never a direct request by her mother

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to wear the tudung, the expectations that her mother had concerning Ida’s dress changed significantly after performing haj. Her mother did indeed try to convince her to wear at least the baju kurung instead of Western or other nonMalay ethnic dresses. “My mother started to buy materials for a baju kurung and show them to me, insinuating all the time: ‘Why don’t you wear baju kurung?’ But I said: ‘No, it’s too hot’”. Ida summarises her approach to the issue of dress as follows: I am very secure in my Malay identity. It’s my dressing, my culture of this softness of Malay women, this fluidity of it, and this softness of it. [...] To me, I could be wearing skirts one day and tomorrow I will be wearing Pakistani dress; and next time, I will be wearing baju kurung. [...] Another thing that I love about my culture is that Malays have always been very fluid regarding religion. We came from mysticism, Hinduism, Islam. We have always been fluid. (Ida, SIS activist, 20.04.04)

Malay culture in this context stands for flexible boundaries concerning gender and religion, since especially the system of gender bilaterality in Malay adat (Karim 1992, 11) produces “fluid, loose interlocking social networks, egocentric ties and diffusion of role and status concepts in relation to gender” (Karim 1992, 8). Aniza Aniza’s case also reveals the processes of how the veil is structuring the spaces accessible to women. She put on the Islamic dress in 1989 at the age of 15, and took it off in 1994 after wearing it for five years. Nowadays, Aniza wears mostly Western clothes, trousers, even jeans, with loose T-shirts or blouses, and she has a rather short haircut. For special, more formal occasions, however, such as conferences organised by the women’s organisations, I could observe her wearing a mixture of Malay and Pakistani dress, consisting of a knee-length blouse and a pair of trousers. In 1986, at the age of twelve, Aniza expressed for the first time her wish to dress according to what she perceived to be the expected and appropriate way for a good Muslim girl. Aniza’s mother, whom she describes as practising a “post-independence lifestyle” with a lot of British and other Western influences and as being quite conscious concerning fashion matters, did not wear the tudung at that time, and made a clear stand against her daughter’s wish to wear a headscarf. On the one hand, Aniza suspects that her mother did not agree with her idea because it contradicted her own lifestyle. “My mother was actually quite trendy-wendy, She would have different clothes for every wedding. So, people would look up to her and at what she was wearing this time. I think that it challenged her a little bit that her daughter wanted to


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wear the tudung, and she didn’t want to.” On the other hand, her mother argued that it was a very serious decision. Once Aniza had decided to wear the tudung, she also would have to change other aspects of her life, and that it would not be easy to take it off again. Friends also told Aniza that wearing the headscarf meant changing one’s habits. For instance, she could not continue with the ballet classes she was taking, and she could not go to parties anymore. This made her doubt the meaning and consequences of wearing the tudung, and finally she decided to postpone wearing it, because she wanted to continue her familiar life, including ballet and parties: I had not thought about how much it would affect my life. I just thought I could somehow embrace it, and then all the other aspects of my life would just follow. I didn’t even consider quitting ballet. I just wanted to continue with my life as it was. Because there were already restrictions put on me by my mother, by my friends, and then why should I restrict my social life because of this garment? At that time, I just thought ‘Why can’t I carry on the way I am’. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

When she was 15 years old, she met a cousin who wore a headscarf and “just carries on her normal life”. This convinced Aniza, and she started wearing tudung, because she “felt like expressing myself in this way”. Although Aniza comes from a religious family, she attended a “Christian school”. This school, nowadays a national school, was founded by missionaries during the British colonial period and continues to be run by Catholic nuns. What Aniza liked about this school was that the nuns emphasised the importance of women’s contribution to society. A lot of Malay middle-class parents send their children to Christian schools, because of the supposedly high standard of education. Up to the time when Aniza started covering herself, she had participated in all the school traditions and neither her parents, the Catholic nuns, nor her Muslim religious teacher had raised any objections. She participated in the collective prayers in the morning, in the singing of school songs with a more or less explicit Christian background, and in the ceremonies at the end of the school year. On this occasion, every student was given a candle. Aniza was even elected to fulfil a representative post. However, when she started to wear the tudung, the situation changed dramatically. Referring to the reaction of her religious teacher, she says: He said: ‘You shouldn’t take part in these activities anymore. All these are Christian influences. You shouldn’t, because you are a Muslim now, wearing your tudung. You shouldn’t be carried away.’ And I said like: ‘But this is school tradition’. I mean how can you just not participate? But I thought, if I didn’t wear it, I would be less Muslim. So, I wore the tudung until I was about 20 years old.

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After Aniza started to cover up, her mother began to wear a headscarf too. Aniza’s explanation for this is her mother’s concerns regarding what people would say about her if she were to continue to be uncovered while her daughter was covered. Aniza adds that, nowadays, her mother has become more religious than before, putting a great deal of emphasis on religious rituals and dress code. Aniza partly tried to reject the demands and criticism of family, friends, and religious authorities. This rejection caused her a great deal of conflict. Finally, after wearing the tudung for five years, she decided to take it off again: And I just tried to carry on being the way I am, but it was other people who had this expectation of me. You should be more this, you should be more that, you shouldn’t be going to this kind of places, you should be doing certain things. I think they saw it as something else, whereas I just saw it as a garment. It doesn’t make me any more faithful, but it was certainly an expression of myself as a Muslim that I wanted to make. At the end of the day, I thought I would just take it off. I mean if you look at, for example, the contrast between places like Iran and Indonesia. They all are dressed in the same black purdah, you know, that has no shape and is just black. But our dress here is more expressive, you get curves, you still cover up, but the style is not fixed. On the contrary, it is most colourful, and is certainly much more vibrant here and expressive as well. But, that’s beautiful. That kind of diversity should be allowed, but actually more and more women are being criticised because of that. You cover up and then it’s not good enough just to cover up. Then you should wear certain colours, wear certain clothes. When it comes to the female bodies, it never ends. That’s quite disturbing, this obsession with how Malay Muslim women should dress.

For Aniza, this reflection on the meaning of the tudung is an essential part of her interest in women’s issues and the gender order. What is the symbolic meaning of the headscarf for the woman who wears it, and what is its symbolic meaning for others in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society? And what real changes does it bring for the woman who wears it? Is it only a garment, with no other consequences for everyday life, or is it more? For her, it is “only a garment”, as she says, without any greater importance for her everyday life. Aniza emphasises that, from her perspective, the headscarf per se is neither oppressive nor restrictive; the restrictions come from the expectations of other people which force her to enter into a constant negotiation between her own interpretation and the dominant interpretations. She says that she would even wear it again, if the others would not automatically associate other expectations concerning her general lifestyle. For Aniza, it was an expression of something she possessed already, of her ‘being Muslim’, which she thought should be expressed through a certain kind of dress. But it did not stand in contrast to any of her old habits. But others, her mother, her friends, the Catholic nuns at her school, and her religious


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teacher, all of them perceived it as a very strong symbol implying a significant change in her personal lifestyle and in her interactions with others within a multireligious context. For her friends, it meant that certain bodily practices like ballet and a certain type of Western-oriented youth culture like parties were no longer appropriate. For the religious teacher and also for the nuns, it represented a symbol of “being a real Muslim”. This implied that she could not participate in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious space in the same way as before. For them, it meant entering into a new stage of being Muslim, being a ‘real’ Muslim now who moves in separate social spaces. 8.1.1 Between political uncovering and the apolitical garment What all the cases have shown is that far from being only a matter of personal piety, the headscarf becomes a fundamental practice through which the ‘private’ female body is converted into a public subject. Interestingly, the young Muslim activists’ dress trajectories are not simple uni-directional stories of rejecting the tudung, but are embedded into the ambivalence of appropriation and rejection of an Islamic dress code. For them, breaking with the established gender order went in both directions. First, there was the decision to wear the headscarf, and later, the decision to stop wearing it. Before rejecting the headscarf, they had appropriated it very enthusiastically as teenagers—even against the will of their mothers. Especially Aniza’s case makes clear how the decision to wear the headscarf restructures several other ways of moving in public. The tudung is a symbol that restructures a whole set of interactions; the woman who decides to wear it is perceived differently, and she is expected to act differently. It restructures, on one hand, the relation of the female body to the public, and, on the other hand, the relation between the different religions and different ethnic groups. It is a signal that stands for more pronounced ethnic and gendered boundaries that are not as permeable as before. Aniza’s story exemplifies how the meaning of such a ‘garment’ is socially constructed and negotiated on an interactive, social level, and how powerful this socially constructed meaning is. Aniza feels that her own individual interpretations of the headscarf’s meaning are defeated by the dominant interpretations with which she is confronted. In that sense, the headscarf constructs a specific female publicness, for which it is a basic condition and a prerequisite for being recognised in the public sphere. Especially the conflicts that emerged when the young women decided to take off the headscarf show the normative force inherent in the headscarf, rendering the aspects of fashion and the degree of individual faith that can be expressed through the type, colour of dress, and varying styles of adornment, rather

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secondary. Interpreting the head covering as a signal of “social correctness or conformity and obedience” (Larif-Beatrix 2000, 45), the decision to take it off is a political act. Their reflections on dress have thus to be interpreted as negotiating the models of publicness that are available for Muslim women in Malaysian society. The three young women develop a set of different modes to negotiate and redefine the meaning of the Islamic dress code and hence of publicness associated with this dress code. With her statement that “Islam is not about dress”, Haslina performs a redefinition of the relation between Islam, body, dress, and publicness which goes hand in hand with a reshaping of the relation of the ‘inner depth’ of religious beliefs and the ‘outside surface’ of expressions and practices. Her former picture of the headscarf was that of a moral obligation associated with the idea of a ‘good Muslim woman’. She saw it as a practice that protected her from sin and gave her security against the constant threat of not going to heaven, and as a symbol that expressed her inner religiosity. This picture was transformed significantly. Haslina detached the meaning of being a good Muslim from the dominant bodily practice of veiling and relocated it in the very realm of her ‘inner’ consciousness. The headscarf is reinterpreted as a sign of superficiality and hypocrisy, a superficial image that is only an obstacle to real inner religiosity. Aniza too had perceived the headscarf as a way to express her religious commitment during her time as a dakwah girl. Today, she sees it as an obsession with “images”. Whereas it was ‘deep’ before, it is hollow and shallow now. This redefinition of the headscarf and the Islamic dress as something ‘superficial’ is especially interesting in comparison with research done on dress practices of young Islamist women (Werner 1997). Within the Islamist discourse of these young women, superficiality is usually associated with the uncovered body that needs beautification. The veil is a way out of this Western superficiality and objectification of the female body (Werner 1997, 99 ff.). Turning the argument upside down, like Haslina and the others do, is, on the one hand, an inversion, whereas, on the other hand, it maintains the hierarchies between the ‘surface’ and the ‘inner depth’ of religious commitment. For both Ida and Haslina, this inversion is a highly political issue. Whereas before, wearing the headscarf provided a feeling of protection, it is now perceived as a sign of fear and guilt, and not wearing it as a sign of personal freedom and courage. Both perceive the headscarf itself as a discriminatory practice, and no longer wearing it is an act of liberation and a public statement. When Ida talks about the inconveniences of wearing the headscarf—the heat, the difficulties in fixing it, and the restricted sense of hearing—she makes explicit her understanding of it as limiting women physically from participating in the public realm. But other items of dress assigned to women such as the baju


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kurung, which she translated as the “dress that imprisons you”, are also perceived as reducing women’s room for manoeuvre in public. For both, not dressing according to the Islamic dogma is a publicly visible sign of protest against and alienation from a concept of religion and gender relations that for them represents inequality and discrimination of women. It is a symbolic move, in the same way as wearing a headscarf was a public sign for them before. Despite a changed religious and political framework, the young women perceive their bodies as political agents and producers of meaning. However, it is not the religious body or “Islamic body” by which the soul is controlled in order to be “purified for the other world” (Güle 1996, 136), but a political cosmopolitan body which strives to be made public. This cosmopolitan body is marked by aesthetic as well as by culinary cosmopolitanism. A second mode of constructing new concepts of publicness related to dress and body is the culturalisation of the headscarf. From the former understanding of the headscarf as an integral part of Islam, the universality of the Islamic headscarf is deconstructed by reducing it to the expression of one specific culture, namely Arab, as Aniza’s case indicates. Haslina also focuses on the differentiation between universal Islam and the particular Arab culture. Both women, who had earlier embraced the veil as a sign of a universal Islam, now reject the headscarf as an object that is culturally alien to Malay culture. This opposition to ‘Arabic-inspired’ attire, especially to the headscarf, includes the preference for a more ‘Malay’ style which is considered to be more colourful and feminine. Re-negotiating the meaning of the headscarf means converting the genuine religious symbol into a particularistic cultural practice, which can then be rejected on the basis of this cultural otherness. Highlighting the difference of their Malay identity in contrast to Arab culture does, however, not contradict a strong notion of universalism on the side of religion. The positive orientation towards Arabic countries as a role model for Malaysian society, which is typical of the Malaysian process of Islamisation, is particularly opposed by most of the female activists of SIS or other advocacy groups. SIS, for instance, officially supported a fashion show organised by the Malaysian government with ‘traditional’ Malay dress for women (Dannecker, Spiegel 2008, 16). However, this position was immediately criticised by other civil society actors who perceived this event as part of the ethno-nationalist politics of the Malaysian government (Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005). Ida also formulated her rejection of the tudung in very strong culturalist language. But whereas Haslina and Aniza use the distinctiveness of their particular Malay ethnic belonging and the demand to de-Arabise Islam as a tool to de-legitimise fundamentalist claims, Ida focuses more on the cultural fluidity of Malay traditions and their interconnectedness to other cultures. Whereas

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Aniza’s and Haslina’s use of culture and ethnic belonging is an exclusionary one, in the sense of ‘where there is one culture there cannot be another’, Ida juxtaposes different cultural modes of actually transgressing perceived cultural boundaries. The ‘fluidity’ that Ida highlights, and that contains certain features of a trans-ethnic habitus, stands in clear opposition to the cultural chauvinism that is typical of Malaysia. Ida’s demonstrative performance of a trans-ethnic, cosmopolitan dress mix, which is supplemented by other elements of a transethnic habitus concerning food, music, and social networks, stands for a second mode of opposing the dominance of an ‘Arabic’ Islam and countering the ‘imprisonment’ of the female body in Malay and Arab culture. A third mode is the de-symbolisation and de-politicisation of the headscarf, which is explicit in Aniza’s position. She is the one who most radically disconnects the headscarf from any symbolic meaning. Talking about the headscarf as a garment without further meaning, Aniza tries to totally depoliticise the issue of dress, and explicitly disconnects questions of cultural and religious identity from the headscarf and from the female body. Aniza detaches the headscarf and the female dress in general from any political message, and locates it in the realm of personal lifestyle and beauty. However, the central topics in her narration are the situations where such an interpretation encounters severe resistance. Haslina’s, Aniza’s, and Ida’s ‘dress trajectories’—appropriating and rejecting the headscarf—become sites of re-inventing tradition and culture. In order to legitimise their participation in the public debate without a headscarf, the young female activists redefine the concept of the headscarf as an ‘obsession with images’. They employ practices of cultural othering (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007) or reconstruct the meaning of the headscarf from a condition for female bodies to become public into a question of personal taste. In all three cases, new notions of publicness are constructed. Arguing with Jean-Francois Bayart, clothing becomes “a point where political battles crystallise, a site where compromises between the protagonists in these battles are negotiated, and a major locus of social innovation” (Bayart 2005, 206). 8.2 Reconstructing cultural belonging: “Before patriarchy, women were the leaders” 8.2 Reconstructing cultural belonging For activists involved in the negotiation of women’s rights, ‘culture’, and ‘tradition’, questions of cultural belonging (Geschiere, Nyamnjoh 2000, PfaffCzarnecka 2005) or authenticity become especially significant sites where publicness and the boundaries of such rights are negotiated. Arguments of

8.2 Reconstructing cultural belonging

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cultural and religious belonging and authenticity have an immunising effect on claims for social transformation and exclude transformative positions from the public debate. Both Muslim and non-Muslim activists are equally affected by these politics of belonging. How do women’s activists and women’s organisations counter those reproaches of being culturally alienated? And how do they transform their position from culturally alienated and thus not publicly accepted actors into a position as legitimate public actors? Aniza Aniza reflects a lot on her cultural orientation. And the two identities between which she oscillates are her Malay and her Muslim identity. In her life course, these different identities had different weight. She describes her upbringing as “very much Malay”. When she was a child, she says, her Malay identity was much stronger than her Muslim identity. “I felt Malay first and second Muslim, and that created a special identity in terms of knowing who you are, in terms of how you live your life and what the expectations are”. However, as she grew older, her orientations changed, and within the general trend of Islamisation, she became more oriented towards her Muslim identity. She describes this trend as follows: “Today, people would say that the Muslim identity comes first because you are servant of God in the first place’”. Being part of this general orientation toward Islam and toward the cultural sources of Islam, she had given her sons Arab names. Aniza has three little boys between two and four years old. However, she has since distanced herself from Arabic culture. Today, only two years after the birth of her youngest child, she comments very critically on her name choices: I think that I have made some, not to say mistakes, but some wrong decisions in terms of naming my children. I gave them very Arabic names rather than Malay names. I chose Arabic names with special meanings like ‘leader’, ‘happiness’, a prophet’s or a scholar’s name, or the Arabic term for heaven. There is still a lot of influence, but I am beginning to be more aware of the fact that now I need to identify myself as a Malay first and then as a Muslim. I don’t think I have to identify myself as a Muslim. You don’t have to question me about it. Also because we live in a society which is predominantly Muslim ... maybe if I was living elsewhere, being in the minority, I may have to make that form of statement about the identity of being a Muslim. But here I don’t think I have to do it. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

Her wish to put more emphasis on her Malay identity is very strong, and several times she stresses the special meaning that her “Malay identity” has for her. Here again, as already mentioned, Malay tradition and adat stand for the “value of balance, flexibility, interchangeability and fluidity” (Karim 1992, 9). And she

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deplores the “ties between Islamisation and Arabisation” which she observes, and the fact that most Malays today feel more attracted to Arab culture than to their ‘own’ Malay’ traditions. At the same time, she highlights the coherence of Islam and women’s rights and rejects the accusation of being culturally alienated and Westernised: I am so amazed that people really think that SIS is just influenced by Western thinking. That is really annoying because it’s just not true. Those rights are given within the spectrum of what is written in the Quran. It’s just that you really have to move with the times and have to think about it and apply it. People just seem to be stuck in this other kind of thinking. Things are not getting better if our thought, our thinking doesn’t change, and I think that is the challenge right now. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

Haslina In the case of Haslina, the rejection of Islamic practices related to Arab culture is even harsher, as the following statement shows: I don’t want to become Arabic in order to be a Muslim, I want to be able to keep my own culture and be Muslim at the same time. A lot of Malaysians are forgetting that we are Malays; some are forgetting that culture and religion are separate. I really do not want to become naïvely Arabic to prove that I am a good Muslim woman. (Haslina, 10.10.04)

The separation between religion and culture that she demands also led to a situation in one of our conversations where she criticised me for using the term ‘Islamisation’. She suggested that I should use the term Arabisation instead. “What we have is a process of more and more Arabisation, and Malay culture is more and more reduced”. During the entire time of my research, I realised that the term Islamisation was not used very much by the women’s activists in Malaysia, but this was the only occasion where this different use of the term became the subject of a conversation.48 Also Haslina upholds the idea that there 48 The discussion on the term ‘Islamisation’ came up again at the workshop “Negotiating Development: trans-local gendered spaces in Muslim societies”. One of the Malaysian participants argued against the term, saying that before independence, politics, nationalism, and Islam had already been very closely intertwined [in Malaysia], and that this link did not automatically lead to a monopolisation of the public sphere by Islamic discourse—as we can witness in contemporary Malaysian society. She continued by saying that it is rather something in the quality of the debates and discourses that had changed significantly in the last few decades. Taking into account these historical developments, she suggested a conceptual distinction between two notions of ‘Islamisation’. Firstly, ‘Islamisation’ in the sense of a “revival of Islam” or an extension of Islam into areas which were not defined by religion before, like the banking, business, and education sector in Malaysia. And sec-


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was a distinct Malay Islam which was “very much blended with Malay culture”, and that this Malay Islam was much “softer” than the Arab Islam. And she criticises the orientation towards Arabic-inspired religious practices very strongly: When you embrace Arabic values, for instance, if you can speak Arab, if you dress in an Arabic style, then your status will be higher, people will admire you and look up to you. The Malays try so hard to be like Arabs. And they don’t even know anything about Arab countries. Because the Arabs, they fornicate, they drink, they are worse than the Malays. But Malays just have this image, without knowing anything.

This quotation particularly reveals the inversion of the accusations with which the women’s activists are usually confronted and through which they are constructed as ignorant subjects. Not only are Malays who include Arabic cultural practices into their repertoire accused by the young female activists of being alienated from their original Malay culture, but also doubt is cast on the supposed closeness of Arabic culture and lifestyle to the Islamic moral ideals, and Arabs are accused of being immoral. This negation of and comparison with Arab culture is a major cultural technique that activists use to situate themselves in an increasingly translocal space. However, in comparison to what Stauth (2000)has discussed as a global dualism between processes of othering and counter-othering between the West and the Islamic world, where the symbolic formations of the othering discourses of the others are employed for selfdefinition, this case shows a clear fragmentation of this dualist discourse, including ‘traditional, ‘local’, and ‘national’ features as part of the comparison. As has already become clear in the section on dress, the practices of cultural othering play a significant role in the negotiation of new modes of publicness. The practices of cultural othering that the women’s activists pursue are, however, not restricted to the issue of dress, but constitute a complex arena in which the issue of cultural belonging is negotiated. This section has managed to show the development of discourses of counter-othering in more detail. The ‘unmasking’ of an Islam which claims to be globally and universally valid as one partial interpretation by a specific ethnic group, namely Arabs, is the basis of this counter-othering and goes hand in hand with a new assertive Malay identity.

ondly, ‘Islamisation’ in a sense of a “rise of conservatism” when it comes to “men’s and women’s public and private spheres” (reported by Nageeb, Sieveking, Spiegel rapps. 2005, 28).

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Activists at the interfaces The following quotation, coming from an interview with Mira, an Indian Malaysian women’s rights activist who works in a project on violence against women especially for women from Indian descent in Malaysia, explicitly addresses the question of cultural belonging in the context of training situations and shows a first strategy to break exclusionary definitions related to authenticity: We cannot go there and directly talk about domestic violence and ‘women’s rights’. Because a lot of people, even the women, believe that violence is part of our culture, and that women’s rights don’t belong to our culture. We have to go very slowly asking ‘Do your children have birth certificate, identity card? Is your marriage registered? Does it have to be that way? Is our culture a culture of violence? Do we have to accept it?’ So we just keep it throwing back to them. (Mira, 02.08.04)

Mira works in the suburban areas of Kuala Lumpur where her organisation has established ten community centres. The so-called community consists of former plantation workers of Indian origin who had been relocated from the plantations to newly built apartment blocks on the periphery of Kuala Lumpur. During the community meetings and workshops, Mira often has the experience that ‘women’s rights’ are rejected as alien to local culture and tradition. Even ‘violence against women’, which served as an entry point for the women’s movement at the national public level (Chapter 4), becomes a difficult issue at the very local level. The justification of the subordination of women in terms of tradition and culture is a common phenomenon not only in Malaysia but also on a global scale. Confronted with their construction as ignorant subjects at the interface with the local population, activists and NGOs develop different strategies in order to “bring the conventions back home” as one of the activists said. First, the ‘threatening’ term ‘rights’, which might be conceived as alien to local culture and tradition, is avoided and localised through translation into everyday experiences of women, such as the registration of marriage and the birth of children in the example quoted above. Activists spoke about the translation into “magic words” such as health and citizenship, which would not be as heavily contested as ‘women’s rights’. At a volunteer training on violence against women organised by AI, which I attended as a participant observer, I witnessed how this approach is put into practice. At the beginning of the training, neither the term “rights”—be it women’s or human rights—nor any international human rights convention were mentioned by the trainers. Instead the morning session started with a game where the trainers asked provocative questions connected to popular discourses like ‘Should there be a death penalty for child rape? Should


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gay marriage be allowed? Are men better bosses? Should abortion be legal?’ or ‘When a women says no, does it mean yes?’ and the participants had to move to certain areas in the room which had been assigned to the different response options (yes, no, don’t know). Especially the issues of the death penalty and gay marriages were very controversial, and most of the participants said that “rapists deserve the death penalty” and that gay marriage should not be legal because it is “not natural and not for procreation”. After this session, there was a group discussion where the concept of gender and sex was worked out and another session where the participants had to write down the consequences for society of the discussed differences and the causes of these differences. A significant proportion of the participants mentioned religion, culture, and tradition as causes of gender discrimination. It was only in the late afternoon session that one of the trainers made the first connection to a universal concept of human and women’s rights when giving a presentation on the history of human and women’s rights conventions. During this presentation, she made a huge effort to connect the content of the international treaties to the issues raised by the participants. She presented the Women’s Agenda for Change (Chapter 3) as a way that “we Malaysians can take ownership of the convention”, and emphasised that “it was written by Malaysian women”. She highlighted the fact that this agenda was no simple adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action, but that there were significant differences between the initial Beijing Platform for Action and the Malaysian Women’s Agenda for Change. “But what difference is there between the Malaysian text and the global one? Of course, there are crosscutting things. But what does the Malaysian have that the global does not have? It has its own chapter on women, culture, and religion because here in Malaysia, culture and religion are very important”. Later on, she related the existence of the special chapter on women, culture, and religion to the comments the participants had made about the causes of violence against women: “And as you have seen, a lot of you put religion and culture on the board as reasons for discrimination and violence. And some of you cited examples of people who had experiences of discrimination. Doing this you brought the conventions back home.” Breaking up culturalist rejections of the concepts of ‘women’s rights’ or ‘human rights’ by showing that the content of international treaties and concepts does not indeed differ from the local understandings is practised by many human and women’s rights activists in their seminars, workshops, and conversations with local people addressing women’s rights, human rights, Asian values, or torture. For instance Maiza, a SIS activist with extensive experience in training workshops on gender issues, says that one of her main arguments with which to reject the notion of particularistic rights is that “there is no Eastern style of rape or Western style rape”, and that one does not “have to be from the West to

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understand what rape is”. Also Joseph, an AI activist, talks about connecting local understandings and global concepts. During training workshops, going through the different rights granted in the International Human Rights Declaration, he quite provocatively addresses the question of cultural particularisms of human rights: Actually, if I discuss human rights with people on the ground, those who never heard about human rights but who want to learn about it, what I do is to say: ‘This is the universal declaration of human rights. Tell me one thing that Asians don’t deserve! Are you saying that the freedom from torture is a Western right, that we Asians can be tortured?’ And they say: ‘No, we can’t. Human rights for Asians cannot be less than for Americans’.

In the context of the Asian values debates which were strongly promoted by the former Malaysian Prime Minister, the human rights organisation SUARAM initiated the formulation of a Malaysian Human Rights Charter: There were a lot of discussions among civil society organisations and how we could condition policy. In the debate about Asian values versus human rights we came out with our own charter of rights. We had a lot of consultation and then discussion. We found it very important for Malaysians to define and determine what is important to us, in terms of protecting and promoting human rights. And then we can compare and look at the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and see how different it is. That was a very useful exercise because we found out that actually it’s not different. Whatever is important to Americans or to Europeans or the Arabs is also important to people in this part of the world. (Andrea, SUARAM activist, 30.03.04)

Breaking up culturalist rejections of the concepts of ‘women’s rights’ or ‘human rights’ means, in this case, questioning the cultural otherness of ‘Asians’ and constructing universal interpretations of women’s and human rights. Another feature of this approach is the strategic re-invention of the terms tradition and culture, as Mira’s question on whether her Indian culture was a culture of violence indicates. Some of the activists use historic examples to uncover different traditions in order to empower women and to grant them the legitimacy to struggle for their rights. At a training session on ‘Gender, Culture and Community’, which AI organised for its volunteers, an activist working mainly with Indian plantation workers had been invited to speak about his work with socalled grassroots communities. He presented his method for “putting things in their way” and focused especially on the sources of tradition. In his presentation, he argued that several instances of cultural and “racial” contact, such as the earliest ancestral migrations of Indo-European peoples to India around 2000 B.C. and the influence of patriarchal religions such as Brahmanism, Christianity, and


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Islam, led to changes in what was until then Asian “mother-centred cultures” and traditions. Before that, there were no traces of a male god, it was all about matriarchy. Women led the army, the hunting team, they were leaders of clans, they were judges, priests, religious leaders, decision makers, and law makers, and there were even female deities. We showed this to our women groups to show them that before patriarchy, they were the leaders and to give them empowerment. (male community activist, 08.09.04)

The argument followed by the Indian activist contains popularised elements from theories of matriarchy which arose in the 19th century as part of a general development of evolutionary approaches.49 Although this argumentation has significant mythological features, it represents an outstanding method for demanding women’s rights without going against ‘tradition’. Similar to the argumentation of the two young female Muslim activists about the Arabic origin of the headscarf, the discrimination against women is culturally othered in this case as well, and tradition is constructed as a site where gender equality can be asserted. Historicisation is used by many activists as a typical strategy for breaking the authority of tradition, especially tradition which has become institutionalised in texts, be they religious or legal, and going on to construct alternative forms of tradition. Questions about the historical origin and the constructed social character of traditional practices and laws are central elements of many workshops and training sessions organised by NGOs, as the following quotation by Mira indicates: So, we bring it to them and say: ‘Who made the law? How does it happen that they are there?’ We say ‘Laws are made by human beings, you know. We can totally get rid of them. It can be rewritten. It can be changed. Who said that the men must be consulted, that the legal right over a child is with the man, but the mother can do all the care and control?’.

The same strategy is applied in the context of religious texts, as the following quotation from a SIS member shows: 49

Johann Jakob Bachofen and Friedrich Engels are among the most prominent scholars who developed the idea of early matriarchies that were structured in matrilineages, did not control sexuality in the same restrictive way as patriarchal societies, and whose economies were based on communitarian structures (Bachofen 1897). However, in recent anthropological studies, the idea of mothercentred and mother-originated cultures has been largely debunked as a myth and replaced by research on gender-symmetrical and -asymmetrical societies (Lenz, Luig 1995).

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8 Constructing New Notions of Publicness The basic idea of our training is the formation of Islamic family laws. We ask: ‘How did they come about?’ We also look at the Quran and ask how it was compiled; we look at Hadith and ask how Hadith were compiled and how all these things became laws and how the law is affecting our lives. (Ida, SIS activist, 28.03.04)

This popularised sociological approach to tradition as being socially produced implies not only questioning the authority of certain contents of culture but also re-interpreting culture and history from a female perspective. The women’s movement questions the authority of who can determine what the traits of a specific culture are, and what the content and meaning of culture is. This strategy aims at analysing, questioning, and re-defining the content of the ‘culture’ which one specific group, composed mainly of men, promote in order to maintain power relations, and at renegotiating the content of a specific culturally defined identity. It consists in arguing that women’s rights are within the realm of cultural authenticity, and that they are even ‘more traditional’ than gender inequality and discrimination because they are rooted far back in time. This strategy moves within the boundaries of a new global discourse that relates publicness with the claim of cultural authenticity. 8.2.1 Between appropriation and rejection of cultural otherness In conclusion, there are significant ambiguities within the reconstruction of cultural belonging in the context of negotiating publicness which takes the form of discourses of counter-othering. Generally, dominant icons such as ‘Islam’ and ‘tradition’ are not rejected, but their content is redefined by historicisation and translation. For Muslim women’s activists, the re-discovery of their Malay identity serves as an alternative frame of interpretation of religion and—alluding to Malay nationalism—also gives them a more legitimate position in the public discourse. Instead of being ignorant heretics, they turn into advocates of Malay tradition. Cultural otherness becomes the source of their resistance and their new constructs of public legitimacy. On the other hand, the women’s activists dealing with human rights challenge culturalist rejections and question their cultural otherness promoted in the government discourse on Asian values. Cultural universalism is the source of their resistance and their new constructs of publicness.

8.3 Reconstructing epistemic culture

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8.3 Reconstructing epistemic culture: “Do we need a degree in Islamic studies?” 8.3 Reconstructing epistemic culture The analysis in Chapter 7 has shown that the question of epistemic culture is one significant mechanism through which conservative and Islamist forces strive to monopolise the public discourse. Confronted with such intent, the activists attempt to develop new forms of legitimate knowledge. How these new forms of knowledge are negotiated will be analysed using the educational trajectories of some of the activists. Daliha Daliha works as the library and resource officer at SIS. Her parents were religious teachers at a public primary school, but are now retired. She tells me that she grew up very religiously, and that her father sent all his female children to a religious secondary school. She studied sociology and anthropology at the International Islamic University. Then, because of the economic crisis, she added a master’s degree in library science. She started working in a private academic institution as a library officer, but that was not challenging enough for her, she says. Looking for new perspectives in her life, she started working in the NGO sector, first with a regional women’s organisation in the area of health and reproductive rights and then with SIS because she felt the necessity to concentrate more on national issues. Entering the discursive space constituted by SIS was a significant turning point for Daliha as far as the question of epistemic cultures. And it had been a turning point for Haslina to become acquainted with the positions of SIS concerning her perspective on Islamic dress. Daliha very strongly contrasts the culture of knowledge dissemination and the source of authority and publicness that she knew from the Islamic University with the one that she has got to know within SIS: At the Islamic University, they preach a very conservative Islam. Most of the universities in Malaysia try to produce graduates who don’t know how to challenge the lecturer, who don’t know how to think even when it comes to issues which are subjective like Islam and any other religious thoughts. They just follow what has been prescribed by their lecturers. I can say that religion has been taught as a dogma in almost all religious faculties in our higher learning institutions. The things we do at SIS have never been taught there. They believe that Quran is a book of Law. By the way, I don’t believe that Quran is a book of Law. Quran is the book of guidance, and the law that has been derived nowadays is the interpretation from the Quran. And they can simply argue that, oh, because it is stated in the Quran, therefore we can’t go against what has been given. Yes, the fact is unchangeable, but the interpretation should be translated and implemented within the context—especially

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8 Constructing New Notions of Publicness in the current situation. So that you can claim that Quran is suitable from the Prophet’s time until the end of the day. Because we will try to put all these changes in the context, and this is what you are supposed to do. But the conservatives and the traditionalists, they object to this kind of idea. Of course, you cannot change the holy text, but you can change the interpretation. This has not reached them. They want to Islamise everything. They teach sociology and economics and then want to put in Islam. I studied sociology and anthropology at the Islamic University. So they provide you with a narrow view, and then when you get in touch with groups like SIS, then you open up your mind. I can say that during my college time, I have never been exposed to this kind of idea. So, you just believe what you are supposed to believe, because what you believe is something that will affect your exam results and your grade. So, it’s a pity. But, I can say that thank God, I am no longer in the darkness, and thank God for being part of SIS and I am exposed to these new ideas about progressive Islam. (Daliha, SIS activist, 15.03.04)

The confrontation between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between the time before and after working for SIS, is very strong. ‘Their’ epistemic culture is characterised by repetition of already established knowledge and by very hierarchical structures of knowledge generation in which the lecturer has the sole authority to produce valid knowledge. The style practised at the Islamic University, but also in other educational institutions in Malaysia according to Daliha, is about memorising and not about creative thinking. She also criticises the Islamisation of knowledge promoted by the Malaysian state as narrowing intellectual possibilities. ‘Her’ epistemic culture instead is characterised by an openness of mind and by the project of interpretation. This project is the creative discussion about the meaning of religious texts. The most important feature of this openness is the fact that religious texts can be and have to be interpreted not only within the social and historical context of their revelation but also within the contemporary context. Proceeding from the ‘conservative’ and ‘traditionalist’ to the ‘progressive’ epistemic culture is described by Daliha as a process of enlightenment, as moving from the darkness to the light. Daliha promotes the renunciation of a religion as a dogma in favour of religion as a field of interpretation. Ida The case of Ida, who is one of the most vocal SIS members today, illustrates the intent to feminise Islamic knowledge through the translation of gender issues into religious discourse. The difficulties that Ida experienced as a lawyer with the Islamic judges have been mentioned already in Chapter 7. Out of these conflicts and miscommunications, she abandoned her human rights approach, opted for a religious approach in the public debate, and started to study Sharia law at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur. She had the idea of entering


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the “centre of Islamic knowledge” and the expectation of a “vibrant” atmosphere. Nowadays, however, Ida distances herself very clearly from the culture of knowledge production that she experienced in the International Islamic University. In the beginning, she was very impressed by the beauty and the quality of the orientalist architecture. But what she encountered in the classrooms was a different reality: Coming to the International Islamic University was a bit of shock, because what they practice is a spoon-feeding method, there is no tutorial, and questions that have been put in the class are not answered in a manner where you engage with the student. It is always a put-down question. ‘This is the law and you have to take it’, and never allowing discourse, never allowing alternative interpretations, and never allowing progressive interpretation. So, that was a real disappointment to me. (Ida, 20.04.04)

Her own approach contains the tension between a specific local form of spiritual feminism and a consciously applied strategy. On the one hand, Ida calls herself an “Islamist” and highlights “her Islamist way of thinking” in the sense that fighting for women’s or also homosexuals’ rights has to do with moral and religious ideas of justice. She sees Islam as a progressive and inclusive religion that grants rights and recognition to all minorities. When I talk about women’s rights, then I have to talk about Islam, because this is the basis. I use religious discourse all the time. I am so Islamist in my thinking. I don’t like to be named as moderate Muslim. That sounds so horrible. Progressive is all right, but I think Islam is progressive anyway.

On the other hand, she highlights the strategic character of her religious approach: Yes, you can use human rights discourse. But when you deal with ulama or with Muslims in general who want to be identified with an Islamic identity, you cannot use this discourse anymore. Then it is the matter of adapting their methodology, and manoeuvring it in their ways. Because, after all, what you want is for everybody to feel safe expressing their own ways of confession, and to tell that to their government so that no one would be excluded or deemed as infidel. (Ida, 20.04.04)

Aniza But it is not only the Islamic University which stands for the etatised and institutionalised Islamisation of knowledge associated with the “old” type of authority. Actors who belong to the oppositional Islam, such as ABIM, are also portrayed as having the same very restrictive epistemic culture. Aniza even talks

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about the “ABIM style” of epistemic culture to describe the knowledge generation practices she rejects: The ABIM style is just a lot about: ‘You must read the text as it is, because it brings you close to God’. But is not about reading the text and what it really means and how you interpret it. So, there is a very big gap there. When I was a child, we had to learn Arabic because it is the language of the Quran, but not because it would enable you to interpret the Quran. It was all about reading the text, just reading. In terms of how the intonation and the tune is supposed to be. But for me, everything was very much like window dressing. It is about how people see you performing your life as a Muslim, how you do your prayers five times a day, how you read your Quran. All that was really cosmetic, but the inside is just something else. (Aniza, SIS activist, 20.08.04)

When Aniza talks about her religious upbringing, she distinguishes between two types of epistemic culture related to religion. The cosmetic one she equates with the dakwah movements like ABIM. The superficiality of this type is characterised by a specific ritualistic approach to religious texts and practices, such as the use of the Arab language not as a means of communication and understanding but only as a means to achieve the correct pronunciation of the Quran, and an emphasis on visible bodily practices like praying five times a day. The critique of the emphasis on the Arab versions of the Quran is especially strong in the NGO circles. Several activists complained that during their childhood religious education, they were taught only to memorise the religious texts in Arabic without understanding their meaning. Sumptuous decorative verses from the Sunnah and the Quran written in golden Arabic letters are actually very popular in Malaysia. As indoor decoration, framed prints of such verses are quite common. In several of the university offices I visited, the walls were adorned with such decorative prints. Cars are often decorated with Quranic verses printed on blank CDs and fixed on the rear view mirror. Typically, the owners of the shining CDs with the decorative prints could not tell me the exact meaning of those verses, but would only refer to their origin in the religious text and their significance as a talisman. It is especially remarkable that the terms Aniza uses to criticise the so-called ABIM style are radically altering the meaning of both ‘deep’ and ‘superficial’ religious knowledge. What was promoted by the dakwah movement as a counter-project to Western superficial lifestyles is deemed as a consumerist attitude by Aniza, as the term “window dressing” suggests. What was meant to show the deep religious commitment of the religious activists and something to anchor this commitment in the structure of everyday life is reinterpreted as a “cosmetic” approach and an obsession with symbols lacking any attachment to the “inside”.


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The importance of the “inside” that Aniza emphasises lies in an autonomously achieved knowledge of the content of the religious texts and the application of this knowledge at interfaces with authorities of the religious courts or with other more conservative Islamic groups. ‘Religion’ itself becomes a specific site for the negotiation of women’s rights and the definition of publicness through new female religious knowledge. Women’s rights are being translated into religious language itself. 8.3.1 Between feminisation of Islamic knowledge and de-Islamisation of the public sphere Ida is an example of the new trend of ‘Muslim feminism’ or ‘Islamic feminism’ (Mernissi 1992; Mernissi 1996; Barlas 2002) to be found not only in Malaysia but also in other Muslim countries. In Malaysia, this position is being advanced especially by SIS. Because of the institutionalisation of religion through family law and the increasing politicisation of religion in the public sphere, it seems necessary for Muslim women activists to develop a specific form of agency that reflects this situation and enables them to communicate successfully with the religious authorities. In a presentation at the Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10 in Bangkok 2004, Nurhuda, another SIS member, called this strategy “adopting the language of the enemy”, a strategy chosen in order to deconstruct the discriminatory discourses and practices that are legitimised by certain interpretations of religious texts. The discourse on Muslim feminism emerges in a context where religious arguments are not only very prominent but also powerful, and where, to a significant extent, only arguments deduced from religious texts are recognised as valid knowledge. Although in these empirical examples, ‘Muslim feminism’ takes the form of a consciously chosen strategy, it must also be seen in a broader context as one way of being feminist which has developed historically in Muslim societies within the framework of Islam. One SIS activist reported about a small circle of friends who gathered regularly in one of the reading and discussion rooms of the most popular bookstore in Kuala Lumpur located in the famous KLCC mall at the feet of the Twin Towers. There, they would read and discuss the religious texts from their own perspective: We wanted to understand it for ourselves. We started with the first Sura and referred to as many reference articles and books as possible about that Sura. So everybody had to do their homework and find the respective articles so that we knew what the different scholars are thinking. And so we could form our own opinion. (Ida, 20.04.04)

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Among the SIS activists, it is common to read English or Malay translations of the Quran. This generation of autonomous religious knowledge through reading religious sources in their own local language is one of the strategies of the activists to establish alternative forms of knowledge and to achieve a public authority. This strategy of challenging the monopoly of knowledge production of both traditionally established centres of Islamic thought in Arabic countries, such as the al-Azhar University in Cairo (Abaza 2002) and the newly established institutions that are promoting an Islamisation of knowledge in an authoritarian style, is institutionalised on the level of the programmatic work of SIS in two ways. First, they propagate the feminisation of the Islamisation of knowledge. The grounds for such new forms of authority of knowledge are mainly arguments embedded into the ambivalence existing between cultural and ethnic particularism and universalism, as the following quotation reveals: We want to beat conservatism in religion. Some kind of people, let’s say Arabs, they feel that they know the right Islam. Because the Prophet came from their origin, the Quran is revealed in their language, in the Arab language. So, if you are not Arab, you have no qualification to interpret the Quran. We try to beat their argument, to challenge their argument. When you are a Muslim, whether you are Arab or nonArab, your ability to understand the Quran and to interpret the Quran is always equal to that of all other believers. (Daliha, 24.08.04)

As already shown for the issue of dress, the deconstruction of the supposed universalist features of the current trend of Islamisation as facets belonging to a particular culture, is essential for the construction of new forms of authority of knowledge relating to epistemic cultures. The quotations from the SIS member Daliha reveal the criticism of the Arab monopoly on interpretation and on the question of how Islam should be practised and lived. She calls for an Islam that can be independent from Arab culture, and clearly supports the point of view that her own ‘local’ ways of interpretation are as valid and legitimate as any other Arab interpretation. Legitimacy is not bound to the practice of the Arab language. She exchanges the ‘false universalism’ of Arab-inspired Islam for a new true universalism embracing diversity based on a non-culturalised and nonethnicised Islamic Ummah. Second, beside the feminisation and de-ethnisation of Islamic knowledge, there is the approach that calls for a de-Islamisation of the public sphere. This is formulated by Aniza: “It’s OK that a group of women who are not fluent in Arabic, who didn’t come from the University of al-Azhar, read the Quran and see it in their own context because they are working with women. It does not make it less valid. Because it’s women working for women.” In Aniza’s eyes, groups like SIS do not gain their legitimacy just from religious education and


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knowledge. The knowledge that legitimates Muslim women’s groups to participate in the public discourse and to challenge dominant interpretations and practices is their own experience and analysis of injustice and inequality as women and their daily work with women at the grassroots. She bases her claims to join the debates on gender issues in the public sphere not on profound theological knowledge but on the fact that women are affected by the religious rules. However, bringing in female experience as a basis for social transformation and for the constitution of modes of publicness outside a religious discourse is a perspective that is only partially appropriated by women’s activists who are part of the discursive spaces formed by SIS. Noraini, the AI volunteer who participated in the debate on marital rape, expressed a critical attitude towards the strategy adopted by SIS of arguing within the religious framework (see Chapter 3). She was very sceptical about the value of such arguments, because she said that the opponents could always find other verses in the holy texts which, in the end, would bolster their arguments. She calls instead for a dereligionisation of the public sphere, and several times expressed her inclination towards more secular and more non-religious gender approaches. In the following quotation from Noraini, this claim becomes clear: Why is it when we say something, people who don’t agree, simply say that we don’t understand the Quran? Does that mean we are supposed to be trained or have a degree or whatever in Islamic studies before we can actually act on something that we want to do for society? That is something that I do not agree with.

At the same time, while she was preparing the debate on marital rape, Noraini felt impelled to appropriate some of the feminised religious knowledge, and to use the religious discourse generated by SIS in order to argue with her opponents. Well, I haven’t read that and I need actually to look at that, because I saw that there are always people who are trying to say that other people’s views on certain topics are wrong because they don’t understand the religion. This happens a lot. How are they going to say that we need to study the religion? Because from what we all know, religion is suitable for all ages. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

Others, drawing on their experience of exclusionary definitions of knowledge and publicness formulated in the language of religion, opt against any religious discourse at all. At one of the SIS study sessions, I talked to a middle-aged Malay woman who sat next to me during the presentation. After initial small talk, where we shared our ideas about the speaker, she was very eager to talk to

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me about her criticism of the approach chosen by SIS and about her own trajectory of acquiring autonomous religious knowledge: I don’t agree with Sisters. They want to change Islam, but I think you cannot change Islam. It says in the Quran and in the Hadith that you should be covered, I read it, except your face and hands. There is only one Islam, and this is a fundamentalist Islam. Because you cannot change Islam. You cannot change the words written. I am Malay, but I am no longer a Muslim. You won’t find many Malays like me. In my 20s, I thought: ‘OK, I am Malay, so I should go along with my religion, because that’s the way it is. I will find it some day’. Then in my 30s, I felt the need to learn more about it and I started reading the Quran; and now in my 40s, I reject it at all. Because I don’t like this idea of superiority. There are so many different faiths. All of us are born into their respective faith, and you won’t reject it because it is the one belonging to your family, be it Christian or Muslim. So why should there be a God that is only for one of them? Religion separates us from so early on. I think there should be more humanism, not so much religion, because humanism can unite us.

She concluded her remarks delivered in a very low voice, almost whispering to make sure that nobody else could listen into our conversation, by imploring me half jokingly, half seriously not to tell any of the SIS activists about our conversation and her position on religion. All of the activists referred to in this section have attended a number of educational institutions related to the production of publicly recognised knowledge. They reflect not only on the style of knowledge creation and on the epistemic culture of those institutions, but also on the society as a whole which produces the exclusion of women. They claim independent spaces for knowledge creation, and, in doing so, create a new epistemic culture themselves. They renegotiate the authority of knowledge as related to Islamic education and the social distribution of knowledge. But they go even further and reject the old sources of legitimacy and authority, such as Arabic or formalised Islamic education, and construct new sources of authority such as social engagement and experience on the one hand and reflection and analysis on the other. What is developed in these quotations is a new type of legitimate everyday knowledge, knowledge that takes into account diversity and goes beyond the formal criteria of ‘traditional’ Islamic jurisprudence. This type of knowledge, which gives legitimation and authority (Salvatore 1997) to groups such as SIS to participate in the public discourse and to challenge dominant interpretations and practices, is based on their own everyday life experiences of injustice and inequality as women and their own engagement in the cause of social transformation. It is also based to a significant extent on their translocally shared knowledge and experience with women’s organisations in other Muslim

8.4 Conclusion

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countries and social scientists (for translocal networking, see Chapter 9). The validity of religious knowledge is assessed from this socially embedded standpoint. 8.4 Conclusion The empirical material presented and discussed in this chapter indicates the ambivalent nature of the re-negotiations of publicness in the central fields of dress, cultural belonging, and epistemic culture. It shows that the struggle of women’s movements to enter the public sphere is related to the re-invention and re-construction of tradition and cultural identity. These efforts, however, do not produce a uniform discourse, but rather a multitude of often contradictory positions and practices which oscillate (1) between political uncovering and the apolitical garment, (2) between the appropriation and the rejection of cultural otherness, and (3) between a feminisation of Islamic knowledge and deIslamisation of the public sphere. In all fields, questions of authenticity have been raised by the women’s activists in order to counteract exclusions based on different concepts of authenticity. The positive orientation towards Arabic countries as a role model for Malaysian society, which is typical of the Malaysian process of Islamisation, is particularly opposed and othered by most of the female activists of SIS or other advocacy groups as a process of cultural alienation. This implies the ongoing processes of re-inventing and re-constructing Malay cultural identity. For the majority of the women activists in the middle-class-oriented advocacy groups, the ‘Malay way’ of practising Islam and arranging gender relations stands for more personal choices, for being less rigid and less asymmetric, and for more open to dialogue with other ethnic or religious groups. In this way, gender equality is traditionalised and historicised in the local culture, while other types of gender relations, which are perceived as being more rigid, are alienated by labelling them ‘Arab’. However, these cases show that giving the discourse on Islamisation a culturalist twist is not unproblematic, and that social movements can get caught in an authenticity trap. In Malaysia, one risks being instrumentalised in the ethno-nationalist politics of the government, as the example of the ‘traditional’ fashion show suggested. Unlike women from the advocacy groups, most women in the local social work organisations, especially in Kelantan, draw on a very religiously defined local ‘Muslim’ identity which is not associated with fluidity, but instead with the drawing of clear boundaries between different ethnic and religious groups and with a strong sense that established religious authority must not be challenged.

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The preceding analysis showed that the appropriation and localisation of the global concept of women’s and human rights is shaped by different discursive battles over contested issues such as ‘dress’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition‘, ‘knowledge’, and ‘religion’. These negotiation processes, however, are obviously not only restricted to the local or national level, but are also shaped significantly by the fact that all the civil society actors presented in this chapter are, to different degrees, part of global networks. The following chapter will deal with the significance of translocal networking for the negotiation of rights. It will focus particularly on the practice of translocal interaction and comparison.

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9 Negotiating Rights within Diversity: Translocal Networking and Comparisons 9 Negotiating Rights within Diversity

As shown in the preceding chapters, global development concepts––violence against women, gender, habitat––and the relevant UN declarations play a significant role for civil society organisations in Malaysia. However, concepts corresponding to a Muslim translocality, such as female dignity, are also highly relevant (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6). The concept of rights––be they women’s or human rights and the respective Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)––is of central importance for the women’s movement. However, the meaning of these major concepts is neither static nor uniform. It is subject to manifold negotiations at the local level which lead to a diversification of the discourse on rights50 while negotiating the meaning of publicness and constituting public spheres (see Chapters 7 and 8). The localisation of the global concept of rights is shaped by different discursive battles around contested sites such as ‘state’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition‘, or ‘religion’ and the negotiations on alternative concepts of publicness. Within these sites, the boundaries of rights are negotiated, and new forms of meaning and translations emerge. These localisations are shaped by the process of contesting gender, rights, and development discourses put forward by the strong developmentalist Malaysian state that promotes Islamisation and is moving towards an increasingly authoritarian political system. These negotiation processes, however, are not restricted to the local or national level, but are shaped by the fact that all the civil society actors presented in this chapter are to different degrees part of global knowledge flows and networks on both a personal and an organisational level. Chapter 3 highlighted the biographical importance of transcultural mobility and interaction for the emergence of reflective techniques among the young activists. In this last empirical chapter, the analysis will focus on the translocal practices and 50

A similar argument is made by Nageeb for the context of Islamisation. She argues that translocal gender activism in Muslim countries leads to a diversification of local discourses on Islam. The different discursive versions of Islam range from a so-called ‘progressive Islam’ and a ‘reformist Islam’ to an Islamist version of Islam. Simultaneously, the diversification of discourses on Islam goes hand in hand with the diversification of development visions and gender concepts in Muslim countries (Nageeb 2008c).

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experiences that the activists have acquired within their specific professional fields. The underlying question is how and through which practices activists are doing globalisation: networking, comparing positions, adopting conventions, travelling to conferences, and participating in workshops. Moreover, the analysis intends to shed light on the following questions: How do activists situate themselves within a translocally connected movement? How do they perceive and construct cultural differences and unity? How do they reflect on diversity and sisterhood? How do they manage to build up solidarity? How are postmodern approaches reflected? And, finally, I want to analyse how translocal practices and experiences of difference flow back into local approaches of the women’s organisations. 9.1 Transcultural interactions at international conferences: The AsiaPacific NGO Forum 9.1 Transcultural interactions at international conferences During the first weeks of my research in Malaysia, it soon became clear that the activists I was interviewing not only worked with international conventions but also maintained networks on a regional and international level. They regularly travelled to workshops and conferences outside Malaysia or organised such regional conferences in Malaysia themselves. A significant number of the younger activists had already participated in such events, and physical mobility within Asia, but also on a global scale, played a significant role in their lives as activists. Aniza, the SIS activist, had travelled to the World Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995, to workshops on ‘Women and Islam’ in Nigeria together with Maiza, and to Lebanon together with Daliha (see Chapter 3). Ida had travelled to the World Social Forum in January 2004 in India and to a seminar on fundamentalisms organised by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Germany. Ramani, one of WAO’s social workers, had travelled to the Philippines to a conference on human trafficking. Mary and Fariza, two other WAO staff members, had travelled to Japan. This trip was also related to the issue of trafficking in women. In March 2004, during my first field stay, I was very happy to learn that the regional follow-up conference for the Beijing process, the Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10, was going to take place in Bangkok in August 2004. I decided to travel to Bangkok and participate in the NGO conference so that I could observe the participation of the Malaysian activists attending it. I was thereby applying a multi-sited approach in the sense of following the actors to the different spatial sites of their social space as discussed in Chapter 2. In 2000, at the 23rd session of the United Nations Assembly, the Member States agreed to undertake a global review process of the Beijing Platform for Action. This was signed by 189 governments at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China in 1995. This review process would be based on intense dialogue between national governments and the UN Commission on the

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Status of Women and include the evaluation by the UN Commission of National Plans for Action, of national CEDAW reports, and of a specifically generated standardised questionnaire given to national governments in order to assess their advances in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Besides the obligation of every government to report to the CEDAW committee, the responsibility for the review process was assigned to the regional UN commissions who could decide relatively freely how to organise this process on a regional level. The countries of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) agreed to deliver a comprehensive regional paper, which was supposed to be formulated at the Asia-Pacific High Level Intergovernmental Meeting in Bangkok in September 2004 and would then flow into the Commission’s 2005 session on the “Review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly”. The Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10 was the response of the regional Asian-Pacific women’s movement to this official Beijing +10 global review process and was initiated by the Asia-Pacific Women Watch (APWW) with the support of a core group of regional women’s organisations.51 The convener group, which was constituted in February 2004, was composed of representatives of 24 regional, sub-regional, and national networks of women’s organisations from 19 countries, with a clear dominance of activists from India, the Philippines, and Thailand. The leading women’s activists of the Asia Pacific region expressed severe criticism of the fact that the UN would be the leading figure in the review process of the BPFA. This was due to the danger of reformulating and watering down the progressive language of the document. However, the movement conducted several regional meetings and came to the conclusion that “the women NGOs from Asia and the Pacific cannot ignore the upcoming UNESCAP intergovernmental meeting, which is part of the global process for Beijing + 10. […] They agreed that women’s organizations should not let go of the role that they have played so well over the past decades in advocating women’s interests and in shaping mainstream development perspective. The women’s movement needs to keep their presence felt, their information heard and their views considered as governments in Asia-Pacific and worldwide assess their progress in implementing the BPFA and the Beijing+5 Outcome Document.” The Asia-Pacific women’s movement had successfully participated and influenced the Beijing process in the past. The “Yellow Book”, for example, which compiled the results from the Asian and Pacific Regional Symposium of NGOs on Women in Development held in Manila in 1993, became the major NGO lobbying tool for the regional inter-governmental preparatory conference in Jakarta in 1994. This Yellow Book was also largely integrated into the Platform for Action at the 39th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of 51 Those playing a special role included the Center for Asia Pacific Women in Politics (CAPWIP); Isis International – Manila; Asia Pacific Women, Law and Development (APWLD); DAWNSEA; Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW); South Asia Watch; East Asia Forum; Central Asian Women’s NGOs; and Southeast Asia Watch (SEAWATCH).

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9 Negotiating Rights within Diversity Women. “To the NGOs, this was a particularly exciting development because an NGO document had never before been considered as an official input for a UN preparatory meeting”.52 When the Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing +10 finally took place in Bangkok in July 2004, two months before the official intergovernmental meeting, 800 women from all over the Asia-Pacific region gathered at the Campus of the Mahidol University to discuss the advancement of the implementation of the BPFA, to identify key issues that needed to be tackled in the future, and to formulate recommendations for the governments in the region. According to the UN definition of the Asia and the Pacific region, women from very different regional contexts came together: women from South Asia (e.g. India, Iran), Southeast Asia (e.g. Indonesia, Philippines), East Asia (e.g. China, Korea), and Central Asia (e.g. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan). But women also attended from Western (e.g. Turkey) and Northern Asia (Russia) along with the Pacific region (Fiji). Among these 800 women, there were also nine Malaysian activists. These included Lilian from Sahabat Wanita, the women workers’ organisation (see Chapter 6); two volunteers and one social worker from AWAM; the programme officer, the administrative officer, and a US American intern from the WAO; one leading activist from SIS (see Chapter 4); and also Malaysian representatives from transnational women’s organisations such as the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW) or the Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW)—all based in Malaysia. Among these nine Malaysian participants were three activists from the older generation, who hold leading positions in their organisations, are key persons in regional and global networking, and have a long personal history of involvement in the regional and global women’s movement. The majority, however, were younger activists, the second stringers of the organisations, some of them already with some international experience; others with no experience at all on the level of international conferences and networking. One of the AWAM activists said: “I wanted to know in depth about Beijing. You know, we heard a lot about Beijing ... but what is it really about? So, I thought this is a good experience to see what it is all about”. The female activists from Malaysia––Muslim (Malay) women, women of Indian descent (Hindu), and women of Chinese descent (Buddhist, Taoist, or Christian)–– participated in different sessions. They participated as Malaysian women in an Asian context, linked together with a lot of other women from other Asian countries of all religions through their work on the same issues: violence against women, the Convention on the Elimination on all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and women workers’ rights. These issues were the basis for translocal discursive platforms and translocal spaces: At other sessions, they participated as Muslim women, on the basis of a common identity and common experiences as Muslim women with other Muslim women from other countries. In this sense, the forum was a symbol for the regional translocality of the Asian women’s movement in its entire diversity. And they not only participated in the workshops as part of an

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http://ap-ngo-forum.isiswomen.org/insidepages/main/background.htm

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interested audience but also worked as resource persons or even as workshop organisers: ARROW organised a day-long workshop on health reforms, IWRAW (the global partner of the WAO) organised a workshop on CEDAW, and CAW organised several workshops on ‘women and informalisation of work’.

What goes on at such a conference? It is a space for intense transcultural interactions leading to processes of comparison between one’s ‘own’ experiences and those of ‘others’, between what is considered to be one’s ‘own’ identity and an ‘alien’ identity, between the self and the other. For the actors, the comparison of their own spaces with different spaces is fundamental for positioning themselves in an increasingly globalised and translocalised social world. These kinds of comparison, present in the everyday conversations of the people, obviously contain information about these other places, but, more than that, they express their very concept of ‘here’ and ‘now’ (Spiegel rapp. 2005). This comparison of similarities and differences between their situation and those of others (Hannerz 1996, 50) is based on a process of analysis in Schütz’s sense of “making things explicit” (1972) at the moment of the intersection of distinct knowledge systems. Transcultural comparison, as an interactive and highly reflexive process of self-perception and knowledge about the perception by others, produces global frames of reference where the self-perception is preconstituted on the basis of one’s knowledge about the way in which one is perceived by others (Stauth 2000, 88). But translocal comparison is even more than just a practice of positioning and self-description within a translocal frame of reference. It is itself a practice of creating translocal social spaces. Comparison connected to a reshaping and reinterpreting of meaning is one form taken by the process of localising a new or global pattern within translocal knowledge-scapes such as the women’s movement. Collective social identities in translocal spaces are “constructed exactly when individuals compare and contrast themselves and their situation with those ‘others’” (Long 1996, 44). 9.2 Between national diversity and global sisterhood One of the numerous workshops held at the Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10 in Bangkok was about “Current Issues and Challenges in Crisis Intervention Work on Violence against Women”. At this workshop, women’s groups from Fiji, the Philippines, Nepal, New Zealand, and also the three representatives of AWAM from Malaysia presented their organisations, approaches, and concrete activities. In a first step, the women shared their concrete local experiences as well as the problems and challenges they face in their local contexts, and they made explicit reference to their

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national identity. Activists from Fiji heavily criticised the allocation of state resources to services that are extremely conservative and the increasing imposition of Christian fundamentalist beliefs on service providers for women. Malaysian representatives, social workers from AWAM, focused on their networks with other institutions, hospitals, the welfare department, and other NGOs, and talked about the experiences of women’s groups in lobbying for a domestic violence act. Activists from Nepal identified economic dependency as a main reason for violence against women in Nepal. This was reinforced by state policies through polygyny and a lack of civil and property rights for women. The representatives from New Zealand referred very emphatically to their specific local and cultural conditions. They defined themselves as ‘indigenous’ women and presented their ‘warrior strategy’ for fighting violence against women on the basis of traditional female power. They closed the session by singing a song in their local language. During the discussion, the participants agreed that the aim of the workshop should be to develop a common ‘feminist approach for crisis intervention’ and made clear that in spite of the very different contexts–– Christian fundamentalism, traditional marriage systems, indigenous cultures, etc.––the underlying problems were similar. The Nepalese activists argued: “Everywhere the problems and the causes are the same. Because we are women. Maybe the degree of oppression is different, but the situation is the same”. Another participant from Taiwan expressed her solidarity with all other participants saying: “We want to help all our sisters in the world. We are all in the same situation”. All these cases are examples of specific local knowledge on specific locally embedded issues. This common identity, as women, was reinforced in the language of sisterhood. The diversity of experiences in the Asian region was transformed into the collective identity of ‘sisters’, who collectively formulate demands to governments. These demands are grounded in their local experiences. The outcome of the workshop was a list of joint recommendations for all governments of the region:

Governments must fund and establish programs to politically, socially and economically empower women. They should implement programs to reinforce awareness of women’s rights and introduce platforms to cultivate social empathy towards victims of violence. Governments must provide free and comprehensive intervention programs that will address the multiple needs of victims, increase funding and provide infrastructure for services. Governments must introduce legislation that enforces gender equity in property rights and citizenship rights and provide access to interim AVOs in all states as mandatory protection for victims of violence.


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Governments must enforce systems to ensure accountability and to prevent impunity of perpetrators of violence, including state perpetrators, such as police and armed forces. NGOs and governments must introduce gender sensitivity and empathy building programs and include these in the curriculum when training healthcare workers, doctors, police, and legal officers. Governments and NGOs must implement community programs that will build community empathy for victims, address women’s rights to education, and raise awareness on the impact of harmful traditional beliefs and practices. (Asia Pacific Women Watch 2005)

The workshop “How to use the CEDAW Reporting Process” on the CEDAW convention and the process of writing shadow reports was another example of this kind of transcultural interaction and comparison. It was organised by IWRAW Asia Pacific. At this workshop, two examples, Malaysia and Mongolia, were presented to international participants from a variety of countries including India, Japan, Korea, Nepal, New Zealand, and Pakistan, to name but a few. One of the CEDAW committee members at UN level, the Korean women’s rights activist Heisoo Shin, was present at the workshop. Julia, one of the activists from WAO (see Chapter 3) who played a leading role in the organisation of the CEDAW process in Malaysia, informed the participants about the progress of negotiations with the government. The discussion focused on the ambivalent relations that the different local women’s organisations have with government and state institutions. On one hand, participants raised the question of how powerful the convention was as a tool to pressurise government and what possibilities of sanctions were connected with CEDAW. On the other hand, they raised the question whether a global convention like CEDAW was related to their own local work and to their own local issues of concern, such as women workers’ rights or handicapped women’s rights. At this workshop, networks between the Malaysian activists and Heisoo Shin were established with the result that Shin accepted the invitation to come to Malaysia and participate at the National Conference on CEDAW, giving advice on how to make a shadow report—a report made by independent civil society actors as a corrective to the official government report—more effective. Both examples show how Malaysian Women’s groups are connected to a global network of women’s organisations through the use of CEDAW and the terms of women’s rights and VAW as the framework for their work. Both workshops exemplify the negotiation processes taking place at the transcultural space of the NGO Forum on the relation of what is perceived by the activists to be global and local, and what to belong to their own cultural identity and what to

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that of the others. The first example shows how the transfer of knowledge within translocal networks among women’s organisations⎯one of the main aspects of translocal networking⎯takes place. Specific local knowledge on specific locally embedded issues is exchanged, and a body of knowledge with multiple local sources is created. This multiplicity of sources is articulated within the ambivalent discourse on ‘diversity’ and ‘sisterhood’ and is manifested in the practice of comparison. At this workshop, the diversity of experiences in the Asian region was transformed into the global identity of ‘sisters’. These ‘sisters’ collectively formulate locally grounded demands to governments. In this case, the idea of a shared experience of ‘oppression’ served as a foundation on which to construct such a common identity as sisters. The second example sheds light on the process of discovering the links and connecting elements between the local work and local struggles of women’s organisations and a global instrument like the CEDAW convention. Two interesting processes can be observed in such spaces. First, local knowledge, local visions of women’s rights, are fed into a translocal think-tank, a translocal knowledge pool, which then provides the material to develop instruments that can be applied and transferred to a multiplicity of diverse local contexts. This is the example of the feminist approach to the issue of violence against women and women in crisis situations. Second, global concepts and issues are localised, and the possibilities and the range of such a localisation are negotiated. In this space, a new identity is built. This is the identity of Asian women connected by a concept of sisterhood based on diverse experiences. This identity clearly challenges ethno-nationalist identity constructions in Malaysia, where, traditionally, social spaces are clearly structured by ethnicity, and women were traditionally organised along ethnic lines, in ethnic organisations, and in ethnic parties. The participation in such political events produces new forms of sociability which “transcend the belonging to a religiously defined network and can be analysed as the “‘landscapes of confluence’ of different kinds of local and global networks” (Salzbrunn 2007, 7). As the preceding description of the two workshops indicates, the translations and mediations between cultural diversity and global sisterhood were negotiated very smoothly by the participants at the NGO Forum. Tensions were solved within the communicative processes during the sessions, but no fundamental opposition was expressed against the use of joint political instruments. On the contrary, activists used the language of sameness and sisterhood in a very emphatic way, and the conflicts and cleavages that had dominated former women conferences, not only between activists from the North and South but also between indigenous women and urban feminists, were not very pronounced. Notably at the women’s conference in 1975 in Mexico, women


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activists from the South and from indigenous movements had blocked the notion of global female solidarity. They saw this idea as a product of Western/Northern postcolonial hegemony in defining the goals and strategies of women’s struggles worldwide. The idea of a global patriarchy and universal structures of male power and especially images of Third-World women as victims of such structures were rejected by a growing number of women’s activists and scholars from the South. Among them was Gayatri Spivak with her famous sentence “I am not a sister” (Spivak 1994; Mohanty 1994; 2003c). The rejection of hegemony and the emphasis on particular identities and independence had been channelled into the idea of multiple feminisms based on the multiple experiences women make. This found its expression in the statement of the Senegalese women’s activist Marie-Angelique Savané at the World Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980 “Despite all differences we believe in sisterhood” (Wichterich 2000, 258). This idea of multiple feminisms was then mainly further developed and promoted in the publications of the Southern-based network DAWN (DAWN 1985). The trend towards a reduction in confrontations between North and South, which could be observed at the World Women’s Conference in Beijing 1995 (Lachenmann 1996), and the translation of this dual opposition into a framework of multiple feminisms was accompanied by a pluralisation of identity politics and a fragmentation of women’s movements on a national level. Separate movements emerged, for example for Muslim women, Dalit women, indigenous women, black women, and lesbian women (Wichterich 2000a). Both discourses⎯that based on difference and that based on sisterhood⎯were observable at the NGO Forum in Bangkok, but they were not perceived by the participants to be in an opposing, conflict-ridden relation. Difference and sisterhood were perceived more as different spaces which interacted in a creative and fruitful tension. The conference was opened by one of the Thai organisers with the metaphor of “women weaving their worlds together”. She had brought a beautiful piece of colourful woven fabric to illustrate this process and its outcome. During the whole conference, one could observe an emphatic accentuation and celebration of cultural diversity and difference, as indicated by the presentation of the Fiji women which was loaded with culturalist language. This celebration of difference was practised independently by both the participants and the organisers of the conference. During the entire event, a significant proportion of the participants dressed in their respective colourful national costumes and appeared as national delegations, making them easily recognisable to the other participants by their dress. Throughout the conference, one could observe many of these national groups of women activists gathering in a corner of the entrance hall and performing

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various cultural presentations for the other participants. These included performances of Korean drumming, Indian singing, and Fijian dancing. Other activists surrounded the performing groups, accompanying their songs and performances by clapping their hands and applauding enthusiastically after every song. The Indian delegation even took over the microphones at the podium after one of the plenary sessions for an “Indian Women Caucus” and performed a number of Indian songs for the audience. But the celebration of diversity was also built into the logic of the conference itself. Cultural performances were included as part of the conference programme. Especially at the ‘Goodbye Dinner’ on the last evening, all participants were asked by the organisers to come in their national dresses. Even two of the Malaysian activists who had dressed in a Western style throughout the conference came to the dinner dressed in the Malay female dress, the baju kurung (see Chapters 7 and 8). When I asked them about it, they said that they had brought their dress for special occasions. There was also a cultural exhibition in the hall where a significant number of women’s organisations presented their work. This also displayed local handicraft items which could be purchased by interested activists. Cultural diversity was displayed on a multiplicity of occasions, but functioned more as a resource for cosmopolitan political practice and joy than as an argument for questioning common political aims and strategies. Cultural diversity, expressed in dress, music, songs, food, and handicrafts, was used to give the event a festive character and as a practice that individual activists applied to emphasise their appraisal of the event. Or, the other way round, the local repertoire of dress that each of the women’s groups would use in their home context to express festivity turned into an expression of cultural diversity and a celebration of diversity. I also observed this practice at a workshop on “Women and Neoliberal Globalisation” organised by CAW in Kuala Lumpur, where the participants from Malaysia and Sri Lanka were dressed up for the workshop sessions wearing saris, beautiful baju kurung and headscarves, as well as eye-catching jewellery. After the workshop, in the evening when the women gathered in the hotel lobby to go shopping, they had changed the style of their clothes. The Sri Lankan women were dressed in a Western way, wearing Tshirts, jeans, and sneakers. The Malaysian women had changed their appearance too. Some of the participants who had worn baju kurung and a loose headscarf during the workshop were now not veiled any more but dressed in casual Western style. Generally, the process of negotiation between diversity and sisterhood proceeded very smoothly. The idea of multiple feminisms complementing each other had been adopted by the majority of the activists. In the majority of the sessions I attended, there were no angry discussions about this issue. However,


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there were two groups at the forum that resisted any unobstructed integration into these politics of difference/sameness and broke with the notion of solidarity and sisterhood, although in very different directions. These two groups were ‘Muslim women’ and ‘young women’. Their contestations of the unruffled relation between diversity and sisterhood politics did not remain undisputed. 9.2.1 Rejecting sisterhood: Young women The group that was lobbying most vocally for the recognition of its particular situation and the need for particular policies at the NGO Forum was the ‘young women’. Especially revealing of the articulations of multiple feminisms was the final session of the NGO Forum. At this final session, the official statement of the NGO Forum and the summaries and recommendations for each of the 12 areas of concern of the BPFA53⎯which had been discussed throughout the sessions and workshops and presented in the form of short written statements by key activists of the respective area⎯were presented to the plenum. These statements were forwarded for discussion in order to work out a preliminary report of the NGO Forum. One by one, the summaries were presented, and especially the different ‘marginalised groups’ not belonging to mainstream feminism⎯lesbians, indigenous women, women with disabilities, and young women⎯took the opportunity to have their specific situation documented in the report. This led to the amendment of half of the articles with enumerations of those groups at the end. The article on “Women & Violence” now concluded with the sentence: “Further, there is also a lack of recognition of the needs of marginalised groups, including indigenous women, Dalit women, women with disabilities, refugees, IDPs, women in post-conflict situations, women in the informal economy, lesbians and transgender persons”. The section on “Women & Power and Decision Making” was amended with the sentence: “This impacts especially on women from minority groups, women in conflict and post-conflict situations, refugee women, women with disabilities and indigenous women”. Also the section on “Institutional Mechanisms”, which originally ended with the statement that gender mainstreaming policies adequately respond to the diverse needs of women, was amended by the addition of a specification of such diverse needs: “…including inter alia the specific needs of young women and girls, 53 A. Women & Poverty, B. Education & Training of Women, C. Women & Health, D. Women & Violence, E. Women & Armed Conflict, F. Women & Economy, G. Women & Power and Decision Making, H. Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women, I. Human Rights of Women, J. Women & the Media, K. Women & the Environment, L. The Girl Child.

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indigenous women, refugee women, migrant women, women in conflict and post-conflict situations, women with disabilities, lesbian women, the aged and women who are discriminated against on the basis of their class, religion, race, ethnicity or occupation” (Asia Pacific Women Watch 2005). The session ended with the presentation and discussion of the general statement of the NGO forum which focused on the achievements and global challenges of the Asia Pacific women’s movements. First, there were some minor amendments such as the integration in the sections about the “criminalisation of political dissent” which were accepted by the plenary without any major debates. But then, after a series of smaller interventions, a young woman, who presented herself as representing the group of “Young Women” at the NGO Forum, chimed in and declared in a very fierce way that this statement did not reflect the particular social reality of young women, and that they had been sidelined throughout the entire conference. They demanded a rephrasing of the first paragraph of the statement which included the phrase “We, more than seven hundred women from various women’s movements in the Asia Pacific region …” (Asia Pacific Women Watch 2005) to “We, over seven hundred women and young women …”. This demand did not get the approval of the plenum, and this led to a heated debate with the ‘young women’ threatening to boycott the statement and the conference. It took 15 minutes to persuade the ‘young women’ to agree with the statement as such and add a special declaration instead. This special declaration, which appeared in the conference report among other specific declarations, gave special attention to the issues of “rights to personal choice, autonomy and expression of individuality, sexuality and sexual orientation” (Asia Pacific Women Watch 2005). 9.2.2 Rejecting diversity and claiming sisterhood: Muslim women The second group which did not integrate itself into the smooth translation from diversity to sisterhood, and which partly rejected the discourse on “Women weaving their worlds together”, were ‘Muslim women’. These were, as the discussion of this issue will show, women whose identity is reduced to their religious affiliation to Islam. However, the case of the “Muslim women” is more complex than that of the “young women”. Alongside the issue-based spaces, there were also spaces which brought women, among them Malaysian activists, together on the basis of their ‘Muslim’ identity. Among the seven plenary sessions at the NGO Forum, there was one with the title “Asian Women in Muslim Societies: Perspectives and Struggles”, with a keynote speaker from Pakistan, a member of the network Women Living Under Muslim Laws


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(WLUML), and commentators from Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, and Turkey. These different women from a variety of Muslim countries debated the consequences of political Islam and women’s rights in Islam. Doing so, they also negotiated the meaning of the label ‘Muslim women’. Interestingly, nearly all speakers at this plenary session commented critically on the topic, and challenged the idea of “singling out” Muslim women because of their religion. Farida Shaheed, the main speaker from WLUML, began her presentation with the following critical remarks: First, let me extend my very special thanks to the organisers of the AP NGO Forum who, when I expressed my reservations and concerns about a session on Women from Muslim Societies, gave me this opportunity to explain my unhappiness at the singling out of one category of women on the basis of a religious identity, even though I am part of an international network called Women Living Under Muslim Laws. I feel very unhappy that women are singled out because of their religion. Especially with Islam […]. It creates the image as if Muslim lived in a separate world. But this is not my reality. And who are these Muslim women anyway? And where are they? In Senegal or in secular Turkey? The Muslim world is divided by race, gender, class, development. Even within Asia, the traditions are so diverse that is difficult to agree on the basic fact of who is Muslim and who not. Most Muslim Asians have never heard about female genital mutilation and are shocked by this practice. Yet this practice is being promoted in some African countries as an Islamic tradition. Women of the Arab world, however, are shocked about the widespread practice of dowry in Southeast Asia, because this to them is completely un-Islamic. (Farida Shaheed, WLUML, 01.07.04)

This plenary session made it clear that ‘Muslim women’ are a category of global concern. In recent years, the categories of gender and Islam or Islamic culture have developed into one of the most contested sites for the negotiation of global development concepts. “Muslim women” are among those groups of women who claim to be pursuing their own feminism. The organisers of the NGO Forum organised this session in response to this global discourse, and with the intention of giving space to such an important specific feminism. In this case, the process of transcultural comparison had produced a global frame of reference within the dichotomy of Western and non-Western cultural patterns (Stauth 2000, 88). The keynote speaker Farida Shaheed, however, refused to accept this category, because it reflected the global dualist discourse on the West versus Islam. She pointed to the fact that only women of Muslim faith were experiencing this isolation. The argument that the Pakistani keynote speaker brought forward was that treating ‘Muslim women’ as a separate group meant being part of the dichotomist oppositions dominating the global political discourse. Both Islamist groups and “Western fundamentalists à la Bush” were criticised for creating the

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picture of homogenised groups with the consequence of leaving no freedom for personal choices about dress, religious practices, and interpretations. Instead, as the above quotation shows, she stressed the diversity of the so-called uniform category of ‘Muslim women’ as well as the political importance of the concept of ‘diversity’. She called attention to not only the heterogeneity and fragmentations among Muslim countries⎯that is, different regional Islams⎯but also the social differentiation of so-called “Muslim women” by “social structures, by political systems and cultures, by ethnicity and race, by natural, technological and economic resources, and differing histories” (Farida Shaheed, 01.07.04), and she worked out the absurdity of talking about “a Muslim world”. Talking about “Muslim women” and focusing on religion would also weaken the position of secular women’s groups in the respective countries. In that sense, WLUML “offers a textured alternative to the strictures of universalism and political paralysis of post-structuralist particularism” (Balchin 2002, 27). The other speakers also engaged in the project of deconstructing the category of “Muslim women” by applying the tool of diversity. Nurhuda, the Malaysian participant, spoke about the “window of opportunities” created by ‘diversity’, and the Iranian speaker talked about ‘diversity’ in relation to the diverse approaches to religion in the Iranian women’s movement: Islamist women fighting against imperialism, Muslim reformist women fighting for democracy, and secular women fighting for the separation of state and religion. However, the Malaysian SIS representative adopted a slightly different position in her paper. She said that for her as a Muslim woman—that is, she defined herself as “Muslim woman“⎯it was impossible to leave religion aside in her struggle for gender equality. “When you want to fight your enemy, you have to know the language of the enemy”. Furthermore, the speakers offered several examples of how, at the global level, conservative forces such as the Vatican and Islamist leaders cooperate in limiting women’s rights. In the summaries and recommendations of the Bangkok NGO Forum, ‘conservatism’, but also ‘fundamentalism’, ‘identity-based politics’, ‘militarism’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘patriarchy’ are named as the social forces that a women’s movement must face and counter-act (Asia Pacific Women Watch 2005). Islamisation or Islamism, however, is not mentioned as a political force. The social space that these women constitute, based on their identity as ‘progressive women’, is constructed in opposition to this complex syndrome. This partly deconstructs the dichotomising discourse between Islam and the West. It refuses to accept the equation of Islam with fundamentalism and its identification as the religion that oppresses women. A global dualist discourse on the West versus Islam is rejected and opposed by a distinction between modernist and progressive thinking, on the one hand, and


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conservative, fundamentalist thinking in all religions on the other. Furthermore, ‘diversity’ is perceived as an instrument against homogenised versions of Islam and gender relations at the national level. The strategic use of the diversity concept re-opens the public debate about the question of what is the content of the label ‘Islamic’ and who has the authority to define this content (Salvatore 1997). Conferences like the NGO Forum in Bangkok and networks like WLUML provide national women’s organisations with arguments, evidence, and knowledge to bring this question to centre stage and to insist on the fact that women and women’s organisations are equally legitimate producers of relevant and valid answers to this question. This also includes the construction of new progressive visions of Islam, visions of Islam and religion in general that are enhancing women’s rights. This vision of a new Islam, made by women and interpreted by women, was brought forward especially by the speakers from Malaysia and Indonesia who were criticising the male monopoly on the interpretation of the holy texts over the centuries and calling for an involvement of women in this kind of knowledge production. These different dimensions of diversity were brought up again during the discussion after the presentations: by women who rejected the Islamists’ project to homogenise women’s diverse forms of dress into only one female Islamic attire and who defended their own personal, often culturally and religiously mixed, culture of dress. However, there were also ‘Muslim women’ who did indeed claim to represent a particular form of feminism. Activists from Iran participated in the debates of the NGO forum with an especially controversial attitude. In the final session of the conference, one of the Iranian activists raised her hand to speak: “We have heard much about lesbianism and sexuality. But please have in mind that in our Muslim countries, this is regarded as immoral. And it is not accepted. So please don’t focus on this topic, and please also take up our voices.” A similar critique had already been articulated by one of the Iranian delegates during a discussion of sex workers. She said in a quite angry way: I am very surprised to hear so much about the rights of sex workers. Sex work is exclusively a discrimination which only serves the pleasure of the male. It is only for the men. But instead of ending this discrimination, we are talking about the rights of sex workers. I am very concerned and surprised by this!

Looking at the issue that separated both the young and the Muslim women from the mainstream women’s movement at the NGO Forum, it was striking that both defined themselves and their particular position to a significant degree through the issue of sexuality, although in different directions. As already mentioned for the young women, the question of generation was related explicitly to the issues of sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual autonomy and the lack of

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commitment within the mainstream movement to addressing these issues. Some of the Muslim women also drew boundaries on these issues, but rather by demanding more morally grounded approaches and rejecting the politicisation of sexuality. Likewise, the question of whether the category “Muslim women” was a sign of global hegemonic discourse or an independent form of feminism and identity construction was hotly debated, and re-emerged in the final session. During the discussion on the section on “Women & Violence“ following the intervention of other marginalised groups who wanted to be mentioned separately in the text of the summaries, an activist from Pakistan also asked for the microphone. She asked for the inclusion of Muslim women in this list. For her, mentioning “Muslim women” meant being visible within the conference report. The next speaker however, an activist from Indonesia, protested against the inclusion of the category “Muslim women”, advising, like Farida Shaheed, against singling out a particular religion: “We want to improve the situation of all women!” A third speaker from Iran demanded that there should be a statement in the report that culture and religion of the respective countries must always be respected, because otherwise especially Muslim countries would feel that it discriminated against them and they would be unable to accept the outcomes of the conference. Iranian women’s activists also intervened against a central sentence in the statement. This sentence named religion before ethnicity and caste as new repressing forces in the region. The activist criticised that this would throw a bad light on religion, and that the repression had nothing to do with religion itself but with the political use of it. In the amended statement, the sentence reads as follows: “These forces play on ethnic, communal, caste and religious identities and seek to eliminate democratic spaces, pluralisms and voices of dissent”. During the discussion following the presentations of the plenary session on Muslim women, there were several interjections by activists who rejected the discursive junction of religion and ‘women’s oppression’ and located themselves within religion and within progressive thinking: “‘Religion is only used for oppression of women.’ Please change this vocabulary. There are thousands of women who seek for equality through religion” (activist from Iran). “We only talk about religion restricting women’s rights, but there are also rights given to women by religion, like inheritance rights, but nobody talks about that” (activist from Bangladesh). This example reveals some of the ambiguities of a diversity concept used for political purposes. It shows how a space like the NGO Forum enables women to create new discursive orders that transcend global dichotomies. The category of “Muslim women” was renegotiated and opposed by the category of “women against fundamentalisms”. Within this negotiation process, three arguments

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could be identified: First, there is a struggle for women’s rights within the language of Islam. This went hand in hand with the accentuation of particularity and was especially pushed by the women’s activists from Iran. They pointed out that the specificity of Muslim countries should be reflected and respected, and they demanded the recognition of their particular voices throughout the whole conference. Second, there is a struggle for women’s rights in a global framework within a framework of political agency (women against fundamentalisms) and the rejection of culturalist concepts in a postmodernist language. Within this discourse, the category “Muslim women” is treated as a form of ‘zombie’-like recurrence of the much-debated category of the “Third-World women” which had been attacked by postcolonial feminist scholars from the South. Third, there is the strategic appropriation of religious language in the fight against Islamism, a position which is located in-between the other ones. This reflection on a strategic appropriation of a religious political framework is applied by translocally and cosmopolitically oriented women activists who move in a space where the public discourse is predominantly defined in religious terms, and public deliberation is only possible in a religious language. Nageeb reported the position of a Sudanese women’s activist who, referring to the forms of political activities under an Islamist regime, said: “When you are surrounded by the ocean, then you have to learn how to swim” (see also Nageeb 2004, 188). 9.3 Bringing diversity and translocal comparison back home: Political dimensions of diversity 9.3 Bringing diversity and translocal comparison back home How is the concept of diversity woven into the political programmes and strategies of the women’s organisations? The concepts of ‘diversity’ and the practice of networking and comparison are locally employed to counteract Islamisation projects. The struggle for a reform of Islamic family law in Malaysia illustrates this process. SIS is part of the international solidarity network WLUML. WLUML emerged in the mid-1980s and cultivates and formulates diversity in order to provide a possibility of exchange among women’s organisations and individual members in more than 70 Muslim countries (Balchin 2002; 2007). Hamima, a Malaysian activist, expressed her view about the value of being part of such translocal networks: What we did first was to compare different Sharia laws in different countries. In Malaysia, in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh. And what we saw was that the Sharia law was different in each country. Even here in Malaysia, you have different Sharia in different states. So how can this be divine? We wanted to show that Sharia is not divine, because a lot of people argue that. (Hamima, SIS, 14.09.04).

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Also the keynote speaker at the plenary session on women in Muslim countries at the NGO Forum in Bangkok, the above-mentioned member of WLUML, referred to the importance of experiencing and politically applying diversity in the negotiations of women’s rights: The fact of denying women’s rights and agency on the ground of religion was the reason that WLUML was established in 1986. It concentrates on laws that are said to be Islamic, but not on Islam. The network recognises that women are ignorant about the sources of the customs and laws that are applied to them, barely know their legal rights, and often lead their battles in isolation. WLUML wants to break this isolation and the myth of one homogeneous Muslim world by sharing information on how laws said to be Muslim often vary significantly from place to place, by making known the life and strategies adopted by women, and by linking diverse women’s initiatives not only to each other but also to the global women’s movement. Women suffer all manner of oppression on the basis of collective identity, but we believe that the most debilitating form of oppression that we suffer is not even to be able to dream an alternative reality to the one that is imposed. We as a network encourage women to dream by our existence, by our personal choices. Networks provide alternative reference points of women in Muslim contexts who live, think, and act differently. They provide the possibility to dream. We are a living proof that alternatives exist. (Farida Shaheed, WLUML, 01.07.04)

The comparison of existing Sharia laws in different Muslim countries is used to deconstruct the notion of one divine law. The diversity is interpreted by both women as a sign that the respective laws are not essentially ‘divine’, but the result of human thought and interpretation—making it possible to also subject them to transformation. Women’s organisations in Mali, the Philippines, and South Africa, where reforms of the personal law were under discussion, were using their networks and the practice of translocal comparison through WLUML to gain access to alternative practices and to formulate countervisions on the basis of such a comparison (Balchin 2002, 27). A recent example of how the discourse on ‘diversity’ is implemented can be seen in the first issue of the SIS bulletin (Sisters in Islam 2005b), which is dedicated completely to the issue of reforming Islamic family law. A great part of the bulletin contains comparisons of different national Islamic family laws from countries such as Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Turkey, and of the reforms based on an egalitarian approach to which these laws have lately been submitted. One of the bulletin articles refers to a current debate about forced marriage in Malaysia. The question raised is whether a woman could be forced by her wali, her male guardian, to marry a certain man without her consent. The article reports that a Malaysian university professor supported this position, arguing that “a Muslim father can force his daughter to marry a person of the family’s choice


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against her will, and that this marriage would be legal and binding in Islam” (Sisters in Islam 2005b, 3). It is also reported that the Islamic Family Law Enactment of Kelantan, which was put into practice in 1983 (see Chapter 5), allows the possibility that a woman can, under certain circumstances, be married without her consent. The article deconstructs the argument that a forced marriage is in line with Islamic teaching by giving contradictory examples. The bulletin, for instance, mentions that Saudi Arabia’s top religious authorities have banned such a practice and that Islamic family laws in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Syria also prohibit forced marriage. The main question is formulated in the following way: “If the laws of so many countries ban forced marriages, why have the professor and the Kelantan Islamic Family Law Enactment allowed the practice to continue?” The answer lies in the differentiation between Sharia, “the infallible and unchangeable law revealed to the Prophet” and the Fiqh, the “interpretation by man” (Sisters in Islam 2005b, 4). That means a practice such as forced marriage is not based in “infallible and unchangeable law”, but is rather the result of the integration into Islamic jurisprudence of “conceptions of women’s roles from pre-Islamic Arabia and other patriarchal civilisations” (Sisters in Islam 2005b, 3). The argument of ‘interpretation’ and the translocal comparison of legal practice open the way for rethinking and reforming Islamic family law on the basis of new interpretations. SIS also planned to organise an art exhibition on women in Muslim art with contributions from several Muslim countries. The activist in charge declared diversity and comparison to be the main concepts behind the idea of an exhibition: We try to get paintings from all Muslim countries: from Iran and the Middle East, from Muslim communities in China, and from Indonesia and Malaysia. Actually, our idea it is to show the diversity of the Muslim world, because Muslim is not only Arab. We want to show the diversity. So there will be paintings of women showing Muslim women in their diversity. (Nazia, 01.04.2004)

For the CEDAW process, ‘comparison’ and ‘diversity’ are also used to open up room for manoeuvre. The organisers of the workshop “How to use the CEDAW Reporting Process” at the Asia–Pacific NGO Forum on the Beijing Platform for Action +10 in Bangkok encouraged participants from Muslim countries to look at the reservations made by other Muslim countries and to compare these reservations with the ones their own governments had made. The organiser of the workshop highlighted the fact that the responses to CEDAW among the 41 Muslim state parties who have signed and ratified the convention were very diverse. There are partly Muslim countries that ratified the convention without any reservations, such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso,

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Cameroon, Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In contrast to these countries, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey and also Malaysia have only signed with substantial reservations, arguing that it is in conflict with Sharia (Ali, 2002, 66). In a national context where reservations are made with the argument that to accept those articles would go against Islamic traditions, this type of knowledge can serve as an instrument to question these so-called Islamic traditions. In June 2006, 18 books all relating to issues of Islam or religion in general, were banned by Malaysia’s Ministry of Internal Security. These books included local publications in Malay as well as international publications in English by well-known scholars such as John Esposito, a professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. In reaction to this ban, more than 100 civil society activists wrote an open letter to the Ministry of Internal Security and organised a press conference on the matter. It was reported that in the discussion, one of the leading SIS activists brought up the argument of comparison in order to question the ban of the books. She “questioned whether these books were ‘able to disrupt peace and harmony’ as alleged by government officials given that some of them have been available for more than five years.” She continued by saying that “these books are not banned in other Muslim-majority countries, there isn’t consensus reached among these Islamic nations that they should be banned, so what is the reason to ban them here?” (SEAPA 2006). WLUML carried out comparative research on different Sharia laws in different Muslim countries in order to question the sacred character of these laws and to open up room for manoeuvre. Within the CEDAW process, different country reports are compared in order to learn about best practices. Global development concepts and the respective treaties and mechanisms are positively appropriated by the Malaysian women’s NGOs as tools for gaining power in the process of negotiation with the government and other conservative groups. Building up diversity is a tool against fundamentalism. The Islamists’ language of homogeneity, their claim to be the only authentic source of knowledge, and the unquestionable status of Islamic law because of its supposedly divine character are called into question by networks of women’s organisations. With the diversity of Islamic traditions inherent to these networks, they challenge the logical basis of such homogenising claims. When policies are formulated in the language of Islam, when national laws are amended by arguing with Islam, then these networks of women’s organisations from different Muslim countries can show that there are other Islamic traditions, that there is a diversity of Islamic traditions. In this particular case, it is diversity which is used as a tool against Islamist homogenised versions of Islam and gender relations at the national


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level. Islamist and fundamentalist groups would like to stifle public debate over the question of what is the content of the label ‘Islamic’ and who has the right to define this content. Networks like WLUML provide national women’s organisations with arguments, evidence, and knowledge to resist this attempt, to bring this question to centre stage, and to insist on the fact that they are equally legitimised to produce relevant and valid answers to that question. Individual activists also make use of the practice of translocal comparison in order to increase their room for manoeuvre in the negotiation of gender relations and women’s rights, as the debate on the issue of marital rape organised by AI (see Chapters 7 and 8) has shown. Noraini, one of the participants who argued for the criminalisation of marital rape, explained to me how she would argue during the debate: How am I going to argue? Well, I am looking into examples from various countries who actually are implementing the marital rape offence. I want to see what the authorities over there say. Maybe we can use that as our points, also cases and studies done by research organisations abroad. Because, you know, the thing is that, over here, we haven’t converted marital rape into an offence yet. So, we probably can’t get enough materials right. (Noraini, AI activist, 07.09.04)

The frame of comparison that Noraini had in mind was Western countries, especially Great Britain, where she had lived and studied for some years. Because there is not enough knowledge on the issue produced locally, she considered it necessary to bring other externally produced knowledge into the debate. However, this frame of reference of translocal comparison⎯Malaysia versus Western countries⎯was immediately challenged by other AI activists participating in the debate on marital rape who were representing the position against its criminalisation. In a conversation between Noraini and her male opponent before the debate, she said that she would offer many examples from other countries to back up her argument that marital rape was a crime. At this point, the other activist already became cautious and asked her from which countries her examples would be. When she answered that they would come, for example, from Great Britain he responded: „Oh no, come on! This is the issue. We are talking about Malaysia here. We are talking about home, so you can’t come with examples from Europe. Because here the social conditions are very different from that in Europe. Social conditions in Asia are very special” (Normaan, male AI activist, 07.09.04).

After this conversation, she commented to me that she would still use examples from other countries, because “with examples from other countries, we can

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pressure our own government”, but that she was planning to contact SIS to see if they had any supporting documents about other Muslim countries. This small example shows that the practice of translocal comparison faces significant limits, and that the definition of the scope of the translocal space that can be constituted by comparison is negotiated interactively and antagonistically at interfaces with other civil society actors. The differences in the perception of which comparisons are allowed and make sense relate to different mental maps of what is perceived to belong to one’s “own world”. Instead of constituting a global space that links North and South, West and East, within which Noraini located herself through the choices of her comparison, the translocality to which Noraini is in the end forced to refer in the debate is a Muslim translocality. Within the interaction at the interface, the initial scope and structure of her translocal mental map has been reshaped by other concepts of translocality. But what are the outcomes of these comparisons? The mental maps of the women activists are reshaped, not only as two-dimensional maps of the relevant world, but also in a three- dimensional way, including the hierarchies between the different places which are part of the comparison. This vertical structuring of the mental maps, however, is very complex and leads to the repositioning of Malaysia⎯their own country⎯in different ways. On the one hand, there are activists who accentuate the vertical ‘downgrading’ of Malaysia in comparison with other countries. At a meeting with other NGO representatives, an activist from SIS who has frequently travelled to Africa, to countries with Muslim majorities or minorities such as Senegal or Nigeria, commented on the way she saw the engagement with women’s rights in the different regions: “In Africa, they are more advanced than here, they have 30 percent of women in leading positions, also in the political parties. Africans are far ahead, Asians are terrible, and US is as bad as Asia: Gender issues? ‘No way!’ Respecting women’s rights? ‘No way!’”. In contrast to this vertical downgrading of Malaysia within global hierarchies, there is also the opposite process: upgrading within the hierarchically structured mental maps of a global world. Several activists related that when attending conferences abroad, the confrontation with the situation of women from other countries led them to positively re-evaluate the status of women’s rights in Malaysia. For example, the Malaysian activists who participated at the NGO Forum in Bangkok and met women from other Muslim countries expressed their ‘happiness’ to be Malaysians. In a conversation between two Malaysian participants, one of them, when commenting on their experiences at the NGO Forum in Bangkok, said: “When we were there in Bangkok, when we heard all these stories from Bangladesh, from India, from Iraq, our thoughts were always ‘Thank God that we live in Malaysia’. We are so


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thankful, because we realised how oppressed they are. That is my impression. How lucky we Muslim Malaysians are”. Her friend and colleague agreed with her: “It is not to say that we don’t have problems. We have our own problems as well. But the problems we live with, such as domestic violence and all that, we can still do something about it.” They related the fact that they had more room for manoeuvre to negotiate women’s rights because Malaysian women were more vocal because of their good education. Both activists emphasised the quality of the Malaysian education system and the equal ratios of women’s participation even in higher education. Indeed, the current enrolment rates of girls are equal to, or even exceed, those of boys at all levels of schooling (Economic Planning Unit: Prime Ministers Department 2005, 23). However, both activists also discussed the differences between Malaysia and Indonesia concerning the possibilities of women’s organisations to engage in a “reinterpretation of the Quran”. They had met an activist from Indonesia and were very impressed by the projects of Indonesian Muslim women’s organisations, such as the compilation of a Counter Legal Draft (CLD) on Islamic law and the associated campaigns on monogamy. This CLD had been worked out by a team around Dr. Siti Musdah Mulia⎯the first woman to obtain a doctorate degree in the field of Islamic political thought from the State Islamic University of Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta in 1997⎯in her position as an officer at the Ministry of Religion (Siti Musdah Mulia, 2005).54 She recommended major revisions of Indonesian Islamic law such as a ban on polygamy and forced marriages, as well as raising the legal age of marriage for girls. At the time of the NGO Forum in Bangkok, the compilation of the CLD had just been completed and had received enthusiastic public support in Indonesia⎯in 2006, the government even presented plans to ban polygyny for all Indonesian state officials. The Malaysian activists were full of admiration when they spoke about these projects, and complained that, in Malaysia, similar campaigns were not possible because of the lack of commitment from the government. In relation to the ‘campaign for monogamy’, they argued that because most of the Malaysian ministers had second wives, the campaign had not been supported at a high political level. In terms of the room for negotiation and manoeuvre related to the reinterpretation of Quran, Malaysia was downgraded within the process of translocal comparison. The statements from Daliha, a SIS staff member, who participated in a training workshop on “Islam and Gender” in Lebanon with other participants from Indonesia, the Lebanon, the Philippines, Tanzania, and Yemen, reveal the 54 Beside her job as a government officer, Mulia is also the chairwoman of Muslimat Nahdlatul Ullama (Muslimat NU) which is the largest Islamic social organization in Indonesia.

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process of vertical upgrading of Malaysia through the knowledge that she obtained in her interactions with women’s activists from the other participating countries during this training workshop: Lebanese and Tanzanians, even though they are Muslims, they are very different. And also other Southeast Asian countries, they are not really advanced. But Malaysia, yes. We are advanced. We have come to the point that the wife has the right to considerable property. But in some countries, the concept is still new. They still have early marriage. But in Malaysia, it is a minor problem, and it only happens when it deals with poverty in a very rural and remote area where the parents have no resources to support their daughter. Then they will ask someone to marry their daughter at a younger age. But it is a very unusual issue now. But in some countries like in Yemen, which is still not developed, it is still common because they want to get rid of poverty, and the best way to do this is to find someone who is rich in their country or village even though this person might have three wives already. So if you want to get rid of poverty, you have to sacrifice every other thing. And even in Southern Thailand, it was so depressing when these women shared their problems about dowry with us. (Daliha, SIS activist, 15.03.04)

Daliha compares the situation for women in Malaysia with the things that she learned from the other participants about the situation of women in their countries, and she re-configures her mental map. Using the language of “advancement” and “development”, Malaysia is clearly located on the top of the vertical and hierarchical structures. She clearly relates the issue of women’s rights to the issue of property rights and poverty. In her eyes, economic development and the reduction of poverty are influential factors for women, and many of the problems that women have to face are caused by poverty. In Yemen, an ‘underdeveloped country’, young girls are married because of the difficult financial situation of the family. This positive result in comparison with other countries is interesting. The reflection is on economic development, but not on the process of Islamisation itself. In a way, one could interpret this as part of the official government discourse. The language of sisterhood is foiled by the language of economic “advancement”. 9.4 Bringing sisterhood back home: The CEDAW process in Malaysia 9.4 Bringing sisterhood back home Around 40 Malaysian women from different ethnic backgrounds—Malay, Chinese, Indian—are gathered in a seminar room in one of Kuala Lumpur’s pleasant, airconditioned hotels. They are representatives from different women’s organisations from Kuala Lumpur, but also from Penang and Kota Bharu, who have come to attend the National NGO Conference on CEDAW. This conference was held by the

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WAO and the NCWO on the weekend of the 21st to 22nd of August 2004 in Kuala Lumpur. At the conference, the shadow report produced by a smaller group of women activists was presented to the broader public of Malaysian women’s organisations. The introduction to the shadow report describes the aim of the conference as “to raise awareness on how NGOs can use the CEDAW convention and the treaty reporting process in their work and the linkages between advocacy on the national and international level” (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004). The conference was opened by one of the main organisers with the words: “If we all work together, we have like 100 years of experience.” After giving a short introduction on CEDAW itself to the plenum, each chapter of the thematically organised shadow report55 was discussed by smaller working groups. The participants were asked to document their corrections and amendments to the presented chapters in order to identify emerging issues in their respective field, and to formulate specific recommendations to the government. Later, the results of the smaller working groups were presented in plenary. During the entire conference, women activists stressed the importance of the convention in general but also repeatedly that of the NGO shadow report as well: “The convention is the tool in areas where we have difficulties at the national level, areas that we already work on but that we need to push forward”. “This is our report. We can highlight what is missing in the government report. That’s why we have to put in the reviewing of national policies. If we don’t say it, they don’t do it”. “We are the ones who have to bring in the gender issue. We have to push the ministry to work on it. We as women have to test the government”. Referring to the UN conference on Women in 1995, one activist said: “In Beijing, the government agreed to 30 % of participation of women in the public sector. We make the government responsible, and we can accelerate this process.” The concept of rights was very prominent in the debates. One of the activists stated: “We should use strong words. We should not say ‘Women should be allowed to do this or that’. We should say ‘Women have the right to do this or that’”.

The National NGO Conference on CEDAW is a good example of the dynamics of localising global concepts while negotiating women’s rights. CEDAW, which was approved by the UN general assembly in 1979, is one of the most important international treaties for women’s organisations worldwide. State parties who sign and ratify the convention are obliged to document their efforts to put the contents of the convention into practice, and, every five years, they have to present a report on this to the CEDAW committee located in New York (Ali 2006). During the time of the research, CEDAW was of special importance for 55 1. Definition of Discrimination; Law, Policy and Measures to Implement the Convention, 2. Sex Roles & and Stereotyping, 3. Trafficking & Exploitation of Prostitution, 4. Political Participation and Public Life, 5. Citizenship, 6. Education, 7. Employment, 8. Health, 9. Social & Economic Rights, 10. Rural Women, 11. Equality in the Law, 12. Equality in Marriage & Family Life, 13. Violence Against Women (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004).

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women’s groups in Malaysia, since the government had presented a draft of the long overdue and much anticipated report. Malaysia had ratified CEDAW in 1995, but with several limitations in the application: First, the Malaysian government only signed the treaty with important reservations to some of the articles, especially those concerning Sharia law; second, it was not passed as an act through parliament, which means that it has not been integrated into national jurisdiction; and third, it was only in 2004, six years after the initial report was due, that Malaysia’s government undertook efforts to report to the CEDAW committee. The increased willingness of the Malaysian government to honour its duties concerning the reporting process demanded by CEDAW is one facet of the generally growing importance of global concepts like ‘women’s rights and gender issues’ in government policies. Since the Asian economic crisis, the Malaysian government is increasingly integrating the international human and women’s rights discourse into its policies (see Chapter 4). The NCWO, the national umbrella organisation for women’s organisations, initiated the process of writing an NGO shadow report in 2003, which then was co-ordinated by IWRAW Asia Pacific and its local partner, the WAO, which is explicitly undertaking the project of localising CEDAW in the Malaysian context. Shadow reports are supposed to provide an alternative view and a corrective to the reports presented by the respective governments. Being produced by civil society actors, they can take up issues that have been neglected in the government reports, or criticise the way in which issues are presented in these official reports. The CEDAW committee in New York takes the shadow reports into account when evaluating government reports, and even confronts government delegations with the critical issues raised in the respective shadow report. This is designed to guarantee that committee members can “assess the accuracy of state reports” (Ali 2006, 64). In Malaysia, a first meeting with interested groups and individuals was held in Kuala Lumpur in January 2003. Around 30 activists and academics participated in the meeting in order to discuss which issues needed to be covered and possible authors. The participants identified ten key areas in line with the articles of the convention and even added one, violence against women, which is of central importance for the work of women’s organisations in Malaysia (see Chapter 4). The original body of the convention contains no such separate article on violence against women. At this meeting, the participants agreed that the shadow report should be a collective paper with individual people from different NGOs writing separate chapters in the areas of their expertise. This first meeting was followed by several smaller group meetings of authors in which critical issues of the shadow report were shared.


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The activities of the NGOs pressured the Ministry of Women and Family Development to present an initial government report in February 2003. The Ministry invited civil society actors, mainly representatives from the NCWO, to give comments and feedback to the draft government report. In May 2004, the government distributed an initial copy of the final government report. Julia, a young Eurasian lawyer from Kuala Lumpur who was one of the main activists of the CEDAW process and one of the main organisers of the national conference, described this process of communication among the different NGOs and authors as being very fruitful. For her, not only is the shadow report in itself an important tool for the women’s movement, but the entire process of negotiating its meaning in interaction with other women’s groups is also of the highest importance. This is the NGO report. I think it’s interesting that one person could have written the report. We could have got one person to do the research, to gather the data from all the groups, that person could have sat down six months and the government could have looked at it. I think it really could have been a good report. But at the end of the day, that is not the point. It has been quite a process for us. Of course, you have ten different people working on different sections which takes a long time. Everyone has their own stuff, that’s why we had a delay. But the whole idea is that these ten people in whatever areas, whatever organisations, they work with that. This actually should spill into their work or at least their organisation, that perhaps never looked at CEDAW before and suddenly says ‘Oh yes, we are working on this CEDAW project’. (Julia, IWRAW, 28.08.04)

This cooperative element in the process of writing a shadow report is an important facet of constituting a social space. Apart from legitimising the endeavour, the organisation of the shadow report writing as a collective process was a strategy to disseminate the contents of the convention and also to foster networking among the women’s organisations working in very different areas. For Julia, the fact that activists from various NGOs wrote the different sections and related their work to the content of the convention was already one important step to put the convention into practice. Although it seems to have been difficult, those involved felt that the process of interaction and networking was even more important than the quality of the resulting texts. This accentuation of the aspect of networking has to be contextualised within the landscape of women’s organisations in Malaysia. According to the structure and the content of CEDAW, a broad variety of topics are treated in the NGO shadow report and discussed at the national conference: education, religion, rural women, politics, health, work and employment, violence against women, and others. This combination of topics and cooperation of women’s NGOs crossing thematical borders has been rather atypical of Malaysia, as the

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case of the rather short-lived National Women’s Coalition created in the 1980s suggests. The National Women’s Coalition was created as a counter-organisation to the mainstream NCWO and meant to be a broad network linking urban-based women’s organisations with grassroots groups fighting for land rights, indigenous women, and women workers. But the coalition did not last very long and was not very successful. Instead, networks based on specific issues have been very successful and more durable in Malaysian civil society, such as the Joint Action Group on Violence against Women, the Coalition on Women’s Rights in Islam, Malaysians against Moral Policing, and the Coalition Article 11 on Freedom of Religion. CEDAW, however, served as a connecting framework for local organisations, and created a platform where women’s organisations collectively discussed a wide range of important issues concerning women and gender. Furthermore, the conference was the result of a process which constituted a space for the women activists to present themselves as knowledgeable experts in their areas, as was suggested in the above-quoted opening remarks of the conference organiser regarding the 100 years of experience through cooperation between women’s organisations. Several times, the activists pointed to the fact that it was the responsibility of the women’s movement to monitor how the concepts of gender were used and appropriated by the government institutions in order to identify or prevent any instrumentalisation of the concepts that would go against the needs of women. In the shadow report and during the conference, the state’s gender concepts and the report which the government handed over to the CEDAW committee were discussed in detail and then partly challenged and deconstructed by the women activists. This deconstruction started with the definition of discrimination given in the government report. It had questioned and reformulated one of the basic fundamentals of the convention, the concept and definition of discrimination. Despite the fact that the term discrimination is defined in detail in the text of CEDAW itself,56 the report by the Malaysian government states that “there is no clear definition of the term ‘discrimination” (Ministry of Women and Family Development 2004, 14). Instead, it offers a new “Malaysian perspective” on discrimination. This new definition of discrimination, as “treating women differently than men to the detriment of women” (Ministry of Women and Family Development 2004, 14) is sharply criticised by the women’s movement as being less complex and insufficient to cover all dimensions of discrimination 56 “The term discrimination shall mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on the basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic social, cultural, civil or any other field” (CEDAW, Article 1, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.htm).


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against women (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004, 2). Primarily, the “Malaysian perspective” formulated by the government contains the acknowledgement of local traditions and cultural values which may conflict with international standards of women’s and human rights. “In Malaysia, there are customary and traditional practices that make a distinction between the role of men and women in the enjoyment or the exercise of their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.” (Ministry of Women and Family Development 2004, 14). Although the government report does, to a certain extent, question these ‘traditions’ which might contain discriminatory tendencies, the culturalist undertone prevails and dominates the CEDAW report. Thus, the government report points to the fact that the Malaysian constitution guarantees basic human rights standards, which “take into consideration Malaysia’s multi-racial society and are within permissible national values, traditions, religions, customs, social and economic conditions”. This line of argument is also found in the Eighth Malaysia Plan, one of the most important national development documents, which states explicitly that all women’s advancement has to be “consistent with Malaysian values, religious beliefs and cultural norms” (Economic Planning Unit 2006). This relativisation of the universality of the concepts of women’s rights, equality, and discrimination is criticised severely by the women activists who underline the fact that “these values, as currently controlled by men, act as an impediment to the elimination of persisting gender inequality” (NGO Shadow Report Group 2004, 8). According to the women activists, the argument of cultural difference made by the government is interpreted as a strategy to maintain the power of men and hence discrimination. During the national NGO conference on CEDAW, women activists pushed the notion of women’s rights in a very self-confident and offensive way. The critique of the formulation that women ‘should be allowed to do something’ and its replacement by the assertion that women had the ‘right to do something’ indicates the rejection of a vulnerability approach and the growing importance of a rights-based approach. This remark alludes to the critique that women should be conceived as active subjects and participants of development, and neither as passive receivers of benefits that the government gives them nor as vulnerable victims. The same issue was raised by women activists criticising formulations like “protecting” or “defending the rights of minority groups and women”57 or “respecting women’s rights and dignity” (Ministry of Women and Family 57 This formulation is one of the guiding principles of the concept of Islam Hadhari introduced by the Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi in 2004, a concept that formulated development goals in a religious language (http://www.pmo.gov.my/website/webdb.nsf/vIslamHadhari/7ADA18205EDC7C6C482570830032B 65E).

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Development 2004, 14) as they appear in a wide range of government documents about gender and development. These formulations, according to the critique, assume that minority groups and women already had acquired their rights, which then only needed to be protected (Shuib 2005). This, again, according to the critique by women activists, not only undermines the idea of social change but also produces the image of women as victims. At a seminar organised by the Ministry of Women, Family, and Community Development (MWFCD), women activists called for the replacement of the above-mentioned formulations by the concepts of “gender mainstreaming and empowerment” (Shuib 2005, 11). This plea for strong language on rights is a remarkable fact, because, on other occasions, women activists had reported that they preferred to avoid such strong language within the local context in order not to provoke the charge of being too Western-oriented. In this transnational context of the CEDAW reporting system, however, this ‘strong’ language is preferred. At this national level, NGO activists perceive the shadow report and the whole CEDAW process as a tool to put pressure on the national government. The Convention is appropriated by the local NGOs as an instrument of empowerment within their negotiations of women’s rights and gender equality with the state. The process of writing an NGO shadow report for the CEDAW committee became an important interface between the women’s organisations and the state. This shows the mobilising character of global imaginations “inspiring social movements to seize control over their immediate but also their more distant worlds, challenging the mythology of an inexorable, runaway world” (Burawoy 2000a, 29). During the conference and the discussion about the separate articles, there was always a lively exchange between Malaysian activists and Heisoo Shin, the Korean CEDAW committee member whom they had invited to this national conference at the NGO Forum in Bangkok. On the one hand, the Korean CEDAW committee member was informed about the campaigns of the Malaysian women’s movement, on the other, she pointed to specific issues that should be included to the report and to the procedures of how the shadow report had to be written, so that the government could be made responsible and gaps could be addressed by the CEDAW committee. The negotiations of global concepts and the difficulties of using and applying global concepts in a local context were quite evident in these exchanges. Several times, discussions arose around different notions of gender equality and around the question whether international standards would be applicable to Malaysia in the daily work of the NGOs. This discussion had first emerged in the context of education and how pregnant teenagers were treated by state institutions. The role of the Sekolah Tunas Puteri—special institutions which take in pregnant schoolgirls—was discussed within the group working on


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the article on education. It was criticised that these ‘homes’ are not considered schools, but rather as places of moral re-education, because they do not follow the regular school curriculum and are not under the Ministry for Education, but under the Ministry for Welfare. It was agreed by the group that young pregnant women should have the right to stay at their own school and to go back to their old school if they wish so. It was also highlighted that there should be no difference in treatment according to the ethnicity of the girls. It was demanded that the national school curriculum should apply to the Sekolah Tunas Puteri in dealing with all pregnant teenagers regardless of their ethnicity to ensure that they are not treated as delinquents. They should have the right to return to a normal school after their delivery. When the group presented to the plenary, one prominent activist alerted the group to not be too uncritical with these institutions. We have to question these institutions, we have to be careful not to legitimise them, because there, pregnant girls are marginalised and treated as delinquents. We even have to be careful with our words, if we say they have the right to go back to a normal school, we are promoting the idea that they are not normal. (female activist, during the discussion, 22.08.04)

Another important SIS member replied: “But a lot of these girls want to leave their schools, because they are ashamed, they want to go somewhere else where nobody knows them. So we should not take away this possibility” (female activist, 22.08.04). This discussion revealed a conflict between the personal feelings of the women and abstract notions of gender equality. The same issue came up again during the discussion on the age of marriage, an issue that was debated very controversially. In Malaysia, the minimum age of marriage for girls is 16; for boys, 18. During the discussion on the article on law, the Korean CEDAW committee member had already reminded the assembly to remember the claim to raise the age of marriage for girls, because the lower age of marriage for girls has consequences for their education and their careers. This issue was taken up again within the discussion on family laws. One activist working with indigenous women in Sabah, Borneo, interestingly an Australian women, remarked that, in her eyes, it is only harmful for young girls to raise the age of marriage. She argued that those who want to marry late will do this anyway, and those who become pregnant and are caught in a difficult situation, would be in an even worse situation if they were not allowed to marry. This produced quite loud protest among the other activists and led to the following discussion:

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9 Negotiating Rights within Diversity Activist A: The age of marriage for girls has to be the same as for boys, because this is according to human rights standards and we have to raise human rights standards in Malaysia. Activist B: But then you make life difficult for kids with difficult lives already. The practice is so different. I know so many cases from my work. If we do not allow them to get married, then what will they do if they get pregnant? If they can marry, at least they are still part of their society and community; but if not, they have this stigma and are excluded. Heisoo Sin: But there should not be any difference between men and women. And a child should not get married. And under 18 everybody is a child. Activist C: If there is this stigma, then we have to work on the stigma. And promote contraceptive measures. But the age has to be the same. Activist D: We have to take into account the different situation in East Malaysia. Here we find a high percentage of low-age marriages. And this has to do with customary law. Activist C: But then we have to think about it. We have to decide whether we say: OK this is their tradition and that’s why it should continue, or whether we say: it is wrong according to human rights standards. Activist B: I have to have standards, but I have to address reality as well. And reality is different. This is my experience. Activist C: But what is our aim? Protecting them? Empowering them? Or patronising them? It is difficult to look on it from outside, without running the risk to do it with an arrogant gaze, on customary law for instance. Activist B: We should also have in mind that the concept of childhood is very changeable. So also the age is changeable.

This discussion shows the difficulties in localising universal concepts such as gender equality in the case of marriage age. The arguments brought forward by the activists contrast mainly two positions: universal global standards versus particular local social reality. The Korean CEDAW committee member clearly thinks within the logic of the global convention and the framework of gender equality. She demands that the age of marriage should be the same for girls and boys. Likewise, Activists A and C share her opinion and refer to international human rights standards. Because the same age of marriage is a human rights standard, it should be applied in Malaysia as well. The other position, taken up interestingly by an Australian activist, argues from a local grassroots perspective. From this perspective, the adoption of international human rights standards might be detrimental for young women, because it does not reflect their local everyday life experiences. The first position urges a transformation of institutions, which implies that such legal transformations have an impact on the local social reality in the long run. The second position aims at immediate help for young women within the context of their local everyday life. This might include approaches that contradict universal human rights standards. Another aspect of

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this discussion, especially in the ideas of Activist C is the question of how to deal with local cultures and their rights to particular local practices and values. Within these networks, which are built up through the process of writing the CEDAW report, knowledge of different levels is put together. Local NGOs use the convention to reorient their work in the light of its structure, writing their reports about their respective article of the convention. At the same time, the NGO activists involved in the process of writing bring their specific local and sectoral knowledge into the global process: knowledge that then goes up to the CEDAW committee and with which the government is confronted at the session with the committee at the UN headquarters in New York. The knowledge produced is also disseminated within the networks of a global women’s movement as country examples which serve other national women’s movements as a background for argumentation and for comparative knowledge creation. As this analysis has shown, a global convention such as CEDAW and the underlying concept of women’s rights is appropriated by local women activists as a tool to deconstruct the state’s culturalist stand on gender equality and to challenge the notion of victimisation and vulnerability of women. The convention also serves as a platform for increased networking on the local and translocal level and strengthens the negotiating power of women’s organisations within the local context. 9.5 Conclusion “Global imaginations reconfigure what is possible, turning globalisation from an inexorable force into a resource that opens up new vistas” (Burawoy 2000a, 32). The aim of this chapter was to illustrate how translocal practices in the case of Malaysian women’ organisations constitute spaces for alternative visions of development, gender equality, and women’s rights. The empirical examples described provided evidence for the constitution of translocal spaces on a regional level and on an intra-religious level in Muslim countries. The analysis of empirical material showed that translocal public spheres are built up through a multiplicity of distinct social practices: through women activists who travel to international conferences and seminars and who create new translocal social spaces and publics, and through concepts which travel in networks among women’s organisations, thus constituting what Appadurai calls new translocal ideoscapes (1990; 1991). Within these translocal spaces, different notions of difference and diversity, sisterhood, and solidarity are negotiated. First, by the practice of translocal comparison and networking, women’s activists create regional translocality by

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building up diversity: as a tool against fundamentalism, within a postmodern emphasis on multiple identities (Parpart, Marchand 1999, 18). In the light of postmodern feminist approaches, the self-defined difference is perceived as a quality which has to be defended. The practice of translocal comparison can be identified as a strategy of women activists to create a new discursive order that transcends local and global dichotomies. Malaysian NGOs make explicit use of translocal comparisons, links, and networks, as they refer to examples from other countries to reflect upon their own situation and to ground their demands. A prime example is the organisation SIS when it compares different Sharia laws in different countries to question their sacred character or when it organises art exhibitions to show the diversity of women’s everyday realities in Muslim countries. Additionally, within what is conceived of as the CEDAW process, different country reports are compared in order to produce diversity. Within a limited democratic space, translocal networking between civil society actors and the celebration of diversity at a global level constitutes a crucial practice for enhancing the room for manoeuvre of local actors vis-à-vis an authoritarian state and hegemonic identity constructions. For the Malaysian women’s movement, networks based on a regionally defined Asian or a religiously defined Muslim identity that link them with women’s movements in other countries play an essential role in the transfer of counter-knowledge, local empowerment, and the strengthening of women’s agency. However, diversity is not only the source for respect, but also the source for superiority within the process of reshaping mental maps. Second, the practice of translocal comparison and networking leads to the building up of sisterhood and unity within regional and intra-religious translocalities: as a means to counteract state power and as a basis of common action and common imagination. One of the activists expressed the value of networking in the following way: “Networks give us the possibility to dream”. Networking is one way for civil society actors to enlarge their space for imagination (Appadurai 2000), and global conventions, treaties, and concepts are important instruments to pressure governments to change their policies. Within this dimension, cultural difference is questioned and countered as a tool to maintain male dominance and difference. This can be seen in the case of the category of “Muslim women”, which is perceived as a tool of hegemonic oppression and as a label constructed from outside. Not everybody wants to be different. Transcultural interactions make room for the elaboration of translocal visions of Islam and women’s rights and the construction of new identities that oppose the ethno-nationalist identity politics in Malaysia. The construction of new identities such as ‘women against fundamentalisms’ or ‘global sisterhood’ reflects these new translocal visions of Islam, development, and women’s rights.

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10 Conclusion: Translocal Knowledgescapes and Transnational Public Spheres 10 Conclusion

10.1 Creating female counterpublics The preceding chapters have shown the multiple ways in which social spaces are constituted through the activities of women’s organisations and activists in Malaysia as they position their agendas in contested public spheres at the local level. I have traced three partly overlapping public spheres created by specific subaltern groups against the dominant public where they were constructed as non-legitimate and non-knowledgeable public actors: the counterpublic of urban advocacy women’s organisations, the complementary public sphere of semiurban social work organisations, and the public of resistance of socialist-oriented women’s workers organisations. The aim of this chapter will now be to condense the empirical complexity in the sense of developing an empirically grounded theory and to “drum some reality into theories of globalisation” (Burawoy 2000b, 341) (see Chapter 3). This will be done by working out the underlying modes of constituting social spaces and translocal public spheres (Lachenmann 1998b; 2002; 2004b; Nageeb 2005; Dannecker, Spiegel 2008). Several modes of political action which create gendered spaces and lead to the restructuration of the public sphere can be detected from the empirical data. These are 1) the popularisation of feminist concepts and theories by specific use of media, 2) the practice of connecting different fields of knowledge, 3) the redefinition of places, 4) the redefinition of culture and tradition, and 5) the establishment of translocal networks. Before these modes are discussed in detail, it is necessary to focus on their distinct relationship to the dominant public. The female public constituted by the network of urban-advocacy-oriented women’s organisations in Malaysia has provided women with an alternative political space beyond the male-dominated system of political parties and a misogynist state where women were assigned only supportive roles to male political activities and so-called women’s issues remained rather secondary or were instrumentalised for Islamisation purposes. Within this alternative space, women were able, in the first place, to cultivate different political practices and their own, clearly gendered, visions of a common good (Stauth 1998; Salvatore 2001). However, beyond being only complementary in nature, this sphere

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proposes a clear counter-vision to the male-dominated public as it explicitly aims to transform and challenge the very foundations of this dominant public via legal reform, critical engagement with state institutions, the use of general public media such as newspapers, the redefinition of urban places, and the politicisation of consumption—as will be discussed later. These women’s organisations see their power as a power of definition and of the negotiation of rules and norms, and they follow a culturally innovative strategy (Müller 2000, 10). The case of the female sphere as constituted by the network of social-workoriented women’s organisations in the Malaysian semi-urban periphery (Kelantan) differs from this in significant ways. It is characterised by a higher degree of interconnectedness between state and civil society actors and is based more strongly on the Islamic idea of segregation and complementarity between female spaces and male spaces. This Islamic concept of gender complementarity gives women the legitimacy to gather in single-sex female spaces, but these female spaces are clearly subordinated to male spaces and are not connected to the concept of equal public female agency. The parallel spaces constituted by women’ organisations are much more hidden, and negotiations on gender relations in Kelantan do not take the form of an institutional fight between women’s organisations and the state, but rather one of everyday negotiations on an individual level between women and their family members at home and at court, albeit strengthened by women’s activists. In contrast, the social space constituted by organisations of women workers, plantation workers, urban squatters, and other socially and economically marginalised segments of the population is based very much on the notion of “fight”. The public constituted by these organisations explicitly threatens and challenges the political, social, and economic foundations of the Malaysian state. Here, the interface between the civil society organisations and the state is extremely conflict-ridden, not only on a discursive level but also on a very concrete level of violent and suppressive disciplinary measures by the state. It is a public created in situations where the very basis of the livelihood of women workers, urban squatters, plantation workers, and small farmers has been called violently into question by evictions and labour fights—situations very distant from the ideal form of public deliberation in the bourgeois public sphere as it evolved in Europe in the 19th century (Habermas 1989). To counter this violence, the organisations referred to in this study have developed specific modes of constituting public spheres and modes of social transformation. These include providing assistance to local communities in their interaction with plantation authorities and the state by, for example, writing petitions or organising demonstrations, rallies, and blockades.

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These results deliver new opportunities for theorising the constitution of different types of public sphere and the interplay of multiple public spheres. Much of the recent literature on the public sphere indeed goes beyond the idea of only one encompassing public sphere and proposes the existence of multiple public spheres (Calhoun 1997; Fraser 1997; Ryan 1997; Lachenmann, Dannecker eds. 2008). Nancy Fraser’s contribution to this discussion is especially inspiring. While accepting the existence of a dominant national public sphere, she simultaneously points to the existence of multiple “alternative subaltern counterpublics”. These are created by actors holding a marginal position within the political field in terms of their social, material, and political resources. Women in different contexts—the urban context in Kuala Lumpur, the semi-urban Islamic periphery in Kelantan, and the context of precarious working conditions—clearly belong to those actors in a marginal position compared to the dominant public sphere. Within these discursive spaces, counter-discourses are circulated and oppositional claims and identities are formulated. These counterpublics do not exist in isolation from the dominant public sphere, but are, as could be shown, involved in permanent negotiations about the meaning of the common good. Habermas, who has also been criticised for his idea of one public sphere, now recognises his overdrawn emphasis on the public sphere and states that “it is wrong to speak of one single public sphere […]. A different picture emerges if from the very beginning one admits that coexistence of competing public spheres and takes account of the dynamics of those processes of communication that are excluded from the dominant public sphere” (Habermas 1997, 425). This notion of exclusion, however, cannot be one of radical disassociation and disconnectedness between the dominant and the non-dominant publics, but one that is negotiated interactively at specific interfaces. The analyses of such interface situations in Chapters 7 and 8 have revealed three different tropes around which such negotiations of publicness are organised in Malaysia—dress, knowledge, and cultural belonging—and shown the conflict-ridden character of such tropes. The construction of publicness is thus related to the construction of knowledgeable and legitimate public subjects and to the conflict involved in establishing and countering multiple systems of ignorance through popular modes of political action (Bayart, Mbembe, Toulabor 1992, 29 ff.; Bayart 2005, 185-225) related to dress, knowledge, and cultural belonging. The new concepts of dress range from political uncovering, which goes hand in hand with the culturalisation of the headscarf, to the wearing of the headscarf as an apolitical garment. The new concepts of cultural belonging range from positive appropriation to rejection of cultural otherness. Finally, the new concepts of knowledge range from the feminisation of Islamic knowledge to the de-

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Islamisation of the public sphere. It is these battlefields of the public where, according to Habermas, not radical exclusion but “the same structures of communication simultaneously give rise to the formation of several arenas where, beside the hegemonic bourgeois public sphere, additional sub-cultural or class specific public spheres are constituted on the basis on their own and initially not easily reconcilable premises” (Habermas 1997, 425). Little is said, however, about what these multiple public spheres look like, what different features they show, and through which modes of political action they have been created. By analysing the histories of the different spaces and the interactions with the dominant public sphere, it has been possible to trace three specific types of publics—counterpublics, sub-publics, and publics of resistance—with partly common and partly distinct modes of political action. These will be discussed in the following sections of the chapter. 10.2 Modes of political action and of constituting public spheres 10.2.1 Creating alternative media spaces The three publics analysed in this study differ especially in their use of communicative formats, be it in their internal communication or in their communication to the wider public. Both the urban advocacy groups as well as the organisations of subaltern resistance have created their own media spaces in opposition to mainstream media. Creating one’s own alternative media spaces is a characteristic of larger social movements (Olesen 2005, 430). Because of the difficulties of publishing in mainstream media, they have, for instance, set up their own publishing houses where they regularly publish monthly newsletters and small journals and have even published their own books (SIS, Alaigal, and CDC). However, only the urban women’s organisations make use of both their own media spaces and mainstream mass media. In addition to the strategy of creating alternatives, this could be seen as a strategy of adaptation, “a strategy aimed at making movement messages fit dominant news standards” (Olesen 2005, 430). The urban women’s organisations use the local and national mass media such as popular television programmes and the radio to create a societal basis for debating gender relations. They also publish ‘letters to the editors’, memorandums, or other columns in national newspapers on a regular basis and give press conferences to bring their issues into the public sphere. Even though space for civil society is limited in Malaysia (Weiss and Hassan 2003a, 2003b), these organisations have technological possibilities as well as established networks with representatives from the media that enable them to communicate

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their agendas. Neither social work organisations nor organisations of subaltern protest have been able locate themselves in the field of mainstream media in a comparable way. They almost exclusively use their own alternative media spaces such as internal newsletters or their own journals, and these are distributed cautiously within the closer circle of activists. With regard to the use of new information and communication technologies, the three types of organisation differ significantly. Only the urban women’s organisations have their own Internet presence, that is, their own websites where they provide the Internet user with rich information on their activities and numerous publications. Neither the social work organisations nor the organisations of subaltern resistance have an own Internet presence comparable to the urban women’s organisations. For both types, communication with the wider public takes different forms. The social work organisations have not created their own media spaces, and their communication with the wider public takes predominantly individual forms, for example, at the Sharia court sessions of the women who are being counselled by the organisation. For the organisations of subaltern resistance, the communicative formats connecting them with the wider public take not only collective but also even more precarious forms like blockades, rallies, and demonstrations. For the urban advocacy women’s organisations which engage in translocal networking, the Internet is of increasing importance as a medium for communication and a strategic tool for negotiating gender relations (Youngs 1999; Spiegel, Harig rapps. 2002). Since the geographical expansion of communication both during and in the aftermath of the UN Decade of Women between 1975 and 1985, women’s organisations worldwide are increasingly using the new communication possibilities to connect different localities, to transcend the diversity of local realities and negotiate differences (Wichterich 2000a), and to engage intensively in translocal networking via the Internet. The strategic intersection of both mediated and faceto-face forms of communication and the combination of both alternative media spaces and adaptation to mainstream media is an outstanding feature of transnational public spheres (Olesen 2005, 431). 10.2.2 Connecting different fields of knowledge The research indicates the importance of links created by women’s organisations across different knowledge spaces and knowledge carriers (Lachenmann 1996; Holthaus, Klingebiel 1998; Ruf 1998; Wichterich 2000a; Müller 2005; Davis 2006). New public spaces where gender relations can be successfully negotiated are constituted through connections with carriers of ‘traditional’ and ‘local’

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knowledge such as traditional religious authorities, and with carriers of ‘modern’ knowledge such as universities and development organisations. On the one hand, urban women’s organisations such as Sisters in Islam regularly invite lecturers working at the International Islamic University and religious scholars belonging to a progressive Islam both within Malaysia and also from Indonesia or Pakistan to their internal study and training sessions. On the other hand, the women’s organisations maintain close relationships to national universities through programmes of internships, lectures, etc. But in comparison with women’s organisations in other Muslim countries such as Senegal or Sudan (Sieveking 2005, 2008; Nageeb 2008b), the interfaces between women’s movements, Islamic scholars, and academic institutions take a particular form in Malaysia. In Senegal, for instance, the efforts of women’s organisations to create a shared discursive space with activists of Islamic movements can be seen as an expression of the intention to translate technocratic state policies on gender equality into a popular frame; and in Sudan, networks with Islamic authorities are used as a means to defuse the tense relationship between women’s organisations adopting global gender discourses and the Islamist state. Hence, whereas in many cases, Muslim women’s organisations still depend on networks with renowned Islamic scholars which provide them with a legitimate basis for acting in the public sphere, the Malaysian organisation Sisters in Islam has, over the years, managed to establish a significant body of knowledge and expertise on women and Islam itself by conducting its own research on, for example, polygyny. Furthermore, Sisters in Islam and other urban women’s organisations have an extremely high degree of academisation of gender activism in the field of women and Islam. Leading feminist activists in Malaysian women’s organisations belong to the national and international epistemic community engaged in research and publishing on women, development, democratisation, and Islam. For the other two groups of organisations analysed in this study, practices connecting different fields of knowledge are not so pronounced. Socialwork-oriented women’s groups in Kelantan are rather a long way away from the field of academic gender studies and, unlike the urban advocacy organisations, they do not conduct and publish their own scientifically oriented research. However, they are closer to mainstream development concepts and practices— through their intense connection to the state—and are increasingly able to draw connections from these concepts to the level of everyday life. Women workers’ organisations connect the rather old-fashioned Marxist and socialist thinking prevalent in the trade unions and other socialist parties with gender theories. The connection of different social projects plays a significant role within women’s movement. “Women’s struggle for agency within other struggles is often the


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catalysts for women’s movements” (Antrobus, Sen 2006, 146). However, neither of the two types of organisation possesses the resources to institutionalise this connection in the same way as the urban women’s organisations. Building alliances with different fields of knowledge certainly plays a significant role in positioning gender discourses and women’s activists in the public sphere. By building these alliances, gender-epistemic communities as well as women activists are no longer isolated communities, and gender discourses become more and more integrated into different fields of knowledge. 10.2.3 Redefining places In all the three spheres, women’s organisations and female activists are engaged in specific place-based politics. In the case of the women’s organisations in Kelantan. it is especially the home, in this case understood as a specific set of interactions and relations between wife and husband, that is one of the major domains of place, and they redefine it within the politics of place (Harcourt, Escobar 2002; Harcourt, Rabinovich, Aloo 2002). This redefinition of the home is part of a specific form of resistance. “If one cannot resist by placing oneself outside dominant structures and discourses, one can nonetheless displace oneself within them” (Moore 1994, 82). In the case of women in Kelantan, redefining place takes the two forms of (1) challenging interactive patterns that are constitutive for the meaningful construction of a place (the home) (Bourdieu 1977) and of (2) virtually displacing themselves within the symbolic gender order. But places which have emerged out of modernisation processes and which stand for development and modernity such as shopping malls, universities, and international development organisations are also redefined, as in the case of urban advocacy organisations. Women’s organisations and women’s activists strategically occupy specific places which are highly loaded with symbolic meaning within their local context. Urban women’s organisations like to use seminar halls provided by local hotels for their workshops, training sessions, and conferences. By doing this, they transform these places of leisure and consumption into political places as well. The places that semi-peripheral social work organisations and organisations of subaltern protest use for their activities directed towards broader publics differ from this significantly. The groups of subaltern resistance in the truest sense of the word occupy open rural and urban places such as local settlements and streets with their demonstrations, rallies, and blockades. Furthermore, all the organisations have created their own places of withdrawal, regrouping, and internal training: their offices. Whereas the social work organisations do not occupy open places in the same way as the urban

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advocacy groups or the organisations of subaltern resistance, they have additional places not only for the cultivation of critical discourse but also and especially for the cultivation of alternative economic practices: the herbal garden and the tailoring workshops. These places of discourse and practice become significant places where alternative knowledge is created. Places themselves become the object of women’s politics, revealing that places are not fixed units, but are contested and reconstructed by the intersection of global and local processes (Massey 1994, 1-16; McDowell 1999, 2-6). This redefinition of places has to be considered as one important mode of constituting spaces for the negotiation of gender relations and gender equality within a global frame. Within globalisation processes, the importance of such specific local places does not vanish; “concrete places” do not “disappear under the unavoidable advance of things global” as Harcourt and Escobar have rightly pointed out (2002, 7). On the contrary, places are used strategically to ground claims for gender equality: within consumerism and middle-class culture and within local religious traditions or translocal movements of Islamic revival. By giving globalised places like malls or media centres new meaning or by using traditional places, women’s organisations are contributing to the reshaping of public spaces and to the process of social restructuration at both the local and the global level (see also Dannecker, Spiegel 2006, 2008; Nageeb 2007). 10.2.4 Redefining tradition and culture Harcourt and Escobar have aptly pointed out that women’s movements have been entering the social public sphere “in redefining what counts as political”, and that “at the heart of the politics of place, is a challenge and renegotiation of what is discussed and valued in public” (Harcourt, Escobar 2002, 9). Appadurai has also argued that the collective imagination of alternative forms of social transformation, of “new designs of collective life” (Appadurai 2000, 6), is the main emancipatory force that globalisation brings. However, the ways in which issues can be politicised and negotiated in the public sphere and how alternatives can be imagined are shaped by social and cultural contexts. For the urban activists from Kuala Lumpur, the negotiation of gender relations takes the form of a confrontation between different life-worlds with different perceptions of the relation between the local and the global. The negotiation at such interfaces leads to the elaboration of techniques and practices of translation and mediation, as the emic concepts of ‘magic words’, ‘bringing the conventions, such as international human and women’s rights treaties, back home’, or ‘putting things in their way’ show.


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All these approaches aim to re-interpret the authority of culture (PfaffCzarnecka 2007), tradition, and religious and legal texts in order to create new forms of authority of knowledge. For the women’s organisations in Kelantan, negotiations are based on an ambivalent concept of female agency being constituted in a triangle of Malay notions of female strength, independence, and beauty; global Islamic notions of female dignity; and global feminist notions of female empowerment. Based on these different creatively combined sources, women in Kelantan are indeed able to develop symbolic resistance (Scott 1985) to discourses of female economic and social dependency and to create female subjectivities beyond dominant constructions of being a “good Muslim wife”. Being embedded in a totally different social context and not possessing the same resources as women’s organisations in Kuala Lumpur, this symbolic resistance stands for a specific mode of social transformation within a restrictive social space via the creation of female spaces of reflection and learning connected to the everyday life of women. However, the data also suggest that due to the increased global connectivity to which women’s organisations in Kelantan are also subject, a self-concept of a transformative public female agency is beginning to emerge. For the public created by the organisations of subaltern resistance, the process of broadening discursive contestation against dominant definitions of subaltern identities, needs, and interests is especially explicit. The discursive arena they have created provides them with the resources to create such counter-discourses, to not only redefine their identities from ‘squatters’ to ‘urban pioneers’, from ‘helping housewives’ to ‘female home-based workers’, and from ‘development obstacles’ to ‘agents of development’ but also to reformulate their needs from development to ‘quality of life’. Such reformulations enable these groups to negotiate their subaltern, anti-consumerist, and communalistic concepts of development more successfully in a conflictridden and suppressive interface with plantation management and state authorities. 10.2.5 Translocalising networks, issues, and bodies Political practices that break up the boundedness of place, bodies, and agency play an important role in the process of creating transnational public spheres. The organisations studied here actively work on the translocalisation of networks, issues, and bodies. Translocal networking is, as the three cases have shown, an important mode of constituting spaces in which the negotiation of gender relations takes place. Social networking between activists and women’s organisations is, of course, not a new phenomenon, and it is more than a mere

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linking and connecting of women’s organisations (Klein-Hessling rapp. 1999). It is a form of social organisation used for the mutual exchange of information, ideas, strategies, and knowledge as well as for common action (Müller 2005). Networking is based on different concepts of globality. On one side, it is the “transnational character of problems” (Uhlin 2002, 158), such as the global capitalist economy in the case of the women workers organisations and the global rise of religious fundamentalism in the case of SIS, which leads to cooperation between different local organisations in translocal networks. On the other side, groups who define the problems they deal with exclusively in local terms such as the social work organisations in Kelantan increasingly develop notions of transnational solidarity based on communication, networking, and cooperation with like-minded groups in other countries. Generally, the civil society organisations analysed in this study have developed a variety of networking practices. One of these is the use of global conventions and concepts from the global development world for the negotiation of local issues. In each of these publics, the global concept of rights is negotiated and localised in distinct ways. In the urban feminist advocacy women’s movement, women’s rights are interpreted as gender equality in the context of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and a global discourse on violence against women. Opposing a statecontrolled notion of economic development, the female factory workers’ movement translates women’s rights into women workers’ labour and livelihood rights with the notion of “quality of life”. It could be shown that within a limited democratic space, global concepts and conventions are perceived by the local civil society actors as a crucial instrument to enhance their room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis an authoritarian state and hegemonic ethnicity- and religion-based identity constructions; a perception which is clearly embedded into glocalised life-worlds of urban-based women activists. Among the social-work-oriented women’s organisations in Kelantan, the concept of women’s rights is translated into the notion of women’s dignity. In all three spheres, travelling feminisms (Thayer 2000), consisting of theoretical and more general discursive elements, are appropriated and localised by knowledgeable local actors possessing diversified local stocks of knowledge and different logics of action. However, the practice of translocalising issues does not lead to a homogenisation and universalisation of knowledge through the unidirectional transfer of global or alien concepts to the local level. On the contrary, I have been able to demonstrate that local women’s organisations, such as the urban advocacy organisations engaged in the CEDAW process, create specialised knowledge on a specific locally contextualised area, such as on women and law or on women and political participation. Moore argues that this two-way flow of


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knowledge not leading to a universalisation of knowledge is nowhere more evident than within social movements engaged in “creating and/or amassing, and then transmitting specialist knowledge. […] What is particularly interesting about the specifically local or located knowledge generated by the activities of interest groups is that it is generalizable as a technique of knowledge, or, if you prefer, as a kind of analytics” (Moore 1996, 10). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women can be seen as such a global technique of knowledge production in the field of gender and development. Whereas women’s organisations work on their own locally and nationally defined issues, they use the global communication channels provided by international conventions to put pressure on their own governments and to challenge state-promoted development and gender models. This understanding of “global feminism” as a technology to create knowledge rather than a coherent body of fixed knowledge is also sustained by several studies on the travelling of originally US-American feminist publications on women’s sexuality and health (Thayer 2000; 2001; Davis 2006). These studies have argued that in the process of translating and adapting these publications to other cultural contexts, it was not primarily the specific contents that travelled but “how the original collective [of women’s activists in the United States, AS] wrote the book. […] It was the method of knowledge sharing—and not a shared identity as women—that appeared to have global appeal” (Davis 2006, 87). Translocal comparison has to be seen as an additional global technique of knowledge generation which gains political importance especially in the context of growing religious fundamentalism on a global scale (see Chapter 9). “The relationship to social movements in the South to globally mobile meanings is neither a matter of simple imposition of alien concepts, nor of totally autonomous local innovation, but rather an ongoing process of negotiation with distinctive moments” (Thayer 2000, 208). The result of such processes is knowledge that is “simultaneously local and global” (Moore 1996, 10). Making sense of the global in that way has led to the localisation, transformation, and integration of the concept of rights into different frames of reference. And each of these counter-discourses connects the local and the global in a specific way, thus leading to a multiplication of meanings throughout globalisation processes, a process which could be best described by the concept of heteromorphisation coined by Wimmer: “Globalisation is a non-linear process that includes phenomena that may be described as bifurcations; similar developments occurring in the economic or political sphere give rise to different transformations in the cultural sphere, and vice versa. Globalisation may therefore lead to heteromorphisation of the global social system” (Wimmer 2001, 439). Heteromorphisation points to the fact that closer connections with

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new political global concepts may produce counter-tendencies in the political and cultural fields which are not to be subsumed under the label of a hybrid variant of a global theme (Wimmer 2001, 452). In addition to the practice of taking up and creating globally travelling concepts, travelling activists also contribute to breaking up the boundedness of place, bodies, and political agency. Studying and attending regional and global conferences abroad, as well as organising such workshops and conferences with women’s activists from other countries in Malaysia, is a major source not only for the reflective capacities of individual activists, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 9, but also for the development of new local collective practices in the women’s movement. Through this mobility, the representatives of women’s organisations become brokers and mediators in channelling information along and between the local-global scales. On a national level, they try to establish issue-based networks with organisations which are not actively part of the ‘global net’ in order to negotiate and popularise global development concepts and visions (Dannecker, Spiegel 2008). With this complex set of translocal practices—translocal networking, travelling concepts, and travelling actors—the organisations discussed here are contributing to the emergence of different types of translocal social spaces and transnational public spheres (Olesen 2005) which cut across state borders: regional Asian spaces of workers’ solidarity, global spaces of feminist solidarity, and religiously bounded spaces of believers. All these spaces, which are not territorially bounded but characterised by a relative spatial flexibility, intersect at specific points and produce multiple synergy effects. The complex methodology elaborated in Chapter 2—spatially minimising the research site to the offices and to events, while simultaneously stretching it beyond the national boundaries and temporally extending it by the use of biographies—has proved to provide an adequate grasp of these ongoing processes. 10.3 Empirically grounding … 10.3.1 … translocal agency of women The first research dimension was that on translocal agency of women (see Chapter 1). With my research, I have been able to criticise a naïve antiglobalism—present in many feminist writings on the relation of gender and globalisation (Wichterich 2000b; Rowbotham, Linkogle eds. 2001; Mohanty 2003b)—in an empirically grounded way. Such a critical view on anti-globalism is shared by authors such as Davids and van Driel and their research team

10.3 Empirically grounding …

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(Davids, van Driel eds. 2006). The criticised publications on gender and globalisation share a view on globalisation as a “nightmare scenario” (Young 2001, 46) to which women are subjected and against which they can, at best, develop only local forms of resistance. Mohanty even argues for an intrinsic relation between feminism and a position of anti-globalisation (Mohanty 2003a, 529). Globalisation is equated with global capitalism and oppressive processes of global economic restructuring—obviously an important aspect of globalisation, but definitely not the only one—while masking and excluding other processes such as the creation of global knowledgescapes for social movements and of new public spheres through the negotiation of gender concepts on a global level. The emergence of translocal forms of female agency and the enlargement of room for manoeuvre that this agency brings about tend to be ignored in these approaches, or they are seen as merely a form of resistance against globalisation but not as an integral practice of globalisation. The Globalized Woman (Wichterich 2000b) is mainly depicted as a victim of globalisation processes. My research, however, has shown that this uni-dimensional approach of portraying women as victims of globalisation processes is not appropriate. The globalised woman is also using the global dimension as a fuel for her own project of negotiating gender equality: she is the urban activist who travels to conferences and who self-consciously formulates demands to her government on the basis of global concepts; she is the woman who succeeds in managing her family court case with the solidarity of other women and enforcing her “rights” against her husband; and she is also the worker who, on the basis of sharing her experiences with other female factory workers from other countries, is able to develop a translocal frame for local action. “Globalisation cannot be reduced to an inexorable force; it is also a process in which we participate; it is a process embedded in imaginations we construct. It opens up opportunities as well as closes them down” (Burawoy 2000b, 349). 10.3.2 … the transformation of identities The second research dimension related to the transformation of identities (see Chapter 1). Each of the discussed movements, with their specific modes of constituting public spheres, is itself highly ambivalent and inconsistent towards the process of localisation. While taking up global conventions and constructing global sisterhood, the urban women’s movement simultaneously counters the increasing globalisation of Islamist positions by the positive appropriation of a discourse on traditions and autochthonous culture (for the global problem of autochthony, see Geschiere, Nyamnjoh 2000). While reworking the notion of

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women’s rights and empowerment into very local versions of female beauty and translocal Islamic notions of women’s dignity as an opposition to a Western discourse of women’s equality, women’s groups in Kelantan simultaneously take up concepts of female vulnerability which allude very well to a Western development discourse, and they are also eager to build global connections. While rejecting globalisation as an oppressive and destructive process and constructing new concepts of local, self-sufficient communities, the women workers’ movement at the same time creates a translocal or global movement as a counter-strategy to global problems. These inconsistencies and ambivalences are related to a constant process of negotiation between micro-identities and global identities within translocal spaces; a constant process of transforming micro-identities into global identities and vice versa, as Appadurai has stated: “The central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual efforts of sameness and difference to cannibalise one another and thereby proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular” (Appadurai 1996, 43). All the groups studied here use specific global identities based on sameness—global feminist sisterhood, Islamic Umma, women workers’ international solidarity—to attack specific micro-identities— ethnic chauvinism, Arabisation—which are labelled as being narrow-minded and discriminatory. Simultaneously, they use micro-identities of difference—Malay culture, Kelantanese culture, or local community—to attack specific forms of global identities and processes—global Islamism, Western dominance, economic globalisation—which are perceived as a threat to local traditions. “People’s awareness of being involved in open-ended global flows seems to trigger a search for fixed orientation points and action frames, as well as determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries” (Geschiere, Meyer 1999, 2). All actors discussed in this study switch situationally between claiming particularism and universalism, and their specific location within the translocal space is characterised through this constant tension between these two opposing poles. For the urban cosmopolitan movements, the use of the local has a strong strategic connotation as an argument against different competing translocalities. For more locally embedded movements situated between different translocal discourses, this process of switching includes adding and choosing elements from different sources: both moral categories from Islamic translocal discourses and the power of networking from highly organised and institutionalised women’s movements. What I encountered throughout my analysis of the empirical material was the growing strategic use, but, at the same time, the growing dis-use of culture, the “emphatic underlining of difference” (Hannerz 1996, 52) on the one hand and the emphatic rejection of difference as the


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example of the “Muslim women” in Chapter 9 illustrates on the other. Whereas culture is indeed the “locus of collective rights to self determination” the denial of a certain culture can also be a source of rights. Instead of conceiving the global as flux and flow, and the local correspondingly as the receiving and fixing end, the local appears as the place from which politics of fixing and flowing emanate (Davids, van Driel 2006a, 2006b). The contrast is not predominantly between purely local and purely global actors—of course, there are differing degrees of intensity of translocal or global connections—but between different politics of how to relate to the global and how to engage in the construction of the global. To which global flows people relate and which flows they block is part of their agency. In that sense, my research empirically grounds approaches on the dialectics of flow and closure in globalisation (Geschiere, Meyer 1999; Davids, van Driel 2006a, 2006b). Geschiere and Meyer argue that “in a world characterised by flows, a great deal of energy is devoted to controlling and freezing them: grasping the flux often actually entails a politics of ‘fixing’—a politics which is, above all, operative in struggles about the construction of identities” (1999, 5). The result of such ambivalent identity politics is new forms of cultural and social bricolages, understood as the product of “sticking together or strategic combining of cultural fragments” (Long, Villarreal 1996, 191). This indicates that the growing interconnectedness of civil society actors at a regional Asian or global level has not produced uniformity or homogeneity, but on the contrary, as the different forms of localisation of women’s rights have shown, interaction, comparison, and diversified patterns of response at local levels (Long 1996, 39). In that sense, Featherstone suggests conceiving global culture “not as a common culture, but as a field in which differences, powers struggles and cultural prestige contests are played out” (Featherstone 1995, 14). 10.3.3 … the emergence of multiple transnational publics The third research dimension touched upon the transformation of social spaces and public spheres in globalisation (see Chapter 1). As discussed above, different modes of political action and of social transformation have led to the restructuration of national public spaces. At the same time, the civil society organisations also contribute to the emergence of translocal social spaces and transnational public spheres (Olesen 2005). These transnational public spheres are created through a complex set of translocal practices—translocal networking, travelling concepts, and travelling actors. Three different translocal publics emerged from the data: a regional Asian public of workers’ solidarity, translocal

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publics of feminist solidarity, and religiously bounded publics of Muslim activists. Each of these transnational publics is based on specific identity constructions: on a class identity, on regional Asian identity, or on religious identity. Projecting the idea of the counterpublics to the transnational level, the data indicate that the result of such complex translocal practices is rather a plurality of overlapping transnational publics (Olesen 2005, 420) than one single global civil society (Uhlin 2002; Batliwala, Brown 2006). As shown in Chapter 9, Malaysia’s civil society is linked to this diversity of transnational publics which intersect at specific points. Concerning the relation of transnational and national spaces, Burawoy argues that “the dense ties that once connected civil society to the state are being detached and redirected across national boundaries to form a thickening global public sphere” (Burawoy 2000a, 34). However, what typifies the social movements under study is not the complete detachment of political practices from local or national political spaces, but the specific interplay of national and transnational publics and of local/national and translocal political practices (Olesen 2005). The organisations discussed here maintain translocal networks and do indeed create and sustain transnational publics. However, their social action is in no case totally decoupled from local and national circumstances. All organisations are shaped to a significant extent by the impact of different policies of the Malaysian state on their options for organising themselves and participating in the process of social transformation. Translocal strategies and activities are always rooted in local or national concerns. A good example of this entanglement of local and translocal spaces and practices is the concepts of diversity and sisterhood created and debated at translocal levels (see Chapter 9). Through the practice of translocal comparison and networking, both concepts are employed locally to counteract Islamisation projects: as a tool against fundamentalism within a postmodern celebration of difference and multiple identities (Parpart, Marchand 1999, 18) or as a means to counteract state power and as a basis of common action and common imagination. The concept of rights (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6) is only meaningful for the diverse movements because of the entanglement of global frames and specific local interpretations and “the complex ways in which local forms of knowledge and organisation are constantly being reworked in interaction with changing external conditions” (Long 1996, 50). The synergetic combination between local/national and translocal/national political practices is what characterises the new translocal publics. As already indicated in the section on the redefinition of place, this points to the complexity of transformations that the local undergoes in translocalisation and globalisation processes. Whereas social spaces can indeed no longer be


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equated with physical space, they are not totally detached from physical space either. Indeed, translocal publics are characterised through a relative spatial flexibility and cannot be delineated by geographical space. Both local and national spaces of action are being transformed in the process of globalisation. However, “they are not being eroded or otherwise made irrelevant” (Olesen 2005, 435). Throughout the process of globalisation, the local or localities are partially disconnected from spatial boundedness and become a “dynamic interface of different forces within the globalisation process” (Dannecker et al. 1998, 4). One of the central processes occurring at this dynamic interface that leads to the creation of translocal publics is the transfer of knowledge within the women’s organisations’ networks. Borrowing Appadurai’s notion of global landscapes formed by different global flows, and adding a new ‘scape’ to the five landscapes developed by him—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996, 33)—I propose to speak about translocal knowledgescapes. These social movement’s knowledgescapes are created through the circulation and integration of everyday and expert knowledge on the one hand and through the circulation of imaginations on the other. Imagination in the global world is: No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses, whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity) [but an] organised field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organised practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. (Appadurai 1996, 31).

Imagination is no longer confined to the domains of art, myth, and ritual, but is part of the everyday life of ordinary people (Appadurai 1996, 5). The social movements studied here are an example of how imagination works at the global level and how the practice of imagining different social worlds is accelerated by increased translocal connectivity. Focusing on the social practice of translocal comparison, I have been able to empirically ground what Appadurai has grasped as the project of individual and collective actors “to annex the global into their own practices of the modern” (Appadurai 1996, 4). The practice of comparison as analysed in Chapters 3 and 9 entails a comparison of real experiences with imagined ones, but also a comparison of one’s own experience with other “charters for new social projects” (Appadurai 1996, 6) that circulate in the translocal networks of social movements. As Henrietta Moore

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has argued in a self-critical way, anthropologists have long thought that local knowledge produced by local actors refers only to the local setting; that they are only “local theories” and not “comparative ones”. “The implicit assumption was therefore that the theories of non-Western peoples have no scope outside their context” (Moore 1996, 2). This study has been able to show that the increasing global connectivity and networks produced by women’s organisations have led to the emergence of comparative theories at the local level. And what is even more far-reaching, the study has been able to show that through the process of constructing such comparative theories and comparative knowledge, women’s activists succeed in creating translocal public spheres.

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Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

Media and Public Spheres

Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia

Transnationalization of Public Spheres

Public Spheres After Socialism

Contested States in World Politics

Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics

Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities

Identity Politics in Deconstruction

Global Communication and Transnational Public Spheres

Culture, Identity, and Politics

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Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity, and Representation

Judicial Activism Reconsidered (Essays in public policy)

Contested social orders and international politics

Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace

Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Identity Politics in India and Europe

Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Public Opinion in State Politics

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Language, Power and Identity Politics

Language, Power and Identity Politics

Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services

Development beyond Politics: Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Career Opportunities in Politics, Government, and Activism, 2nd Edition

Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Religion and Global Politics)

Identity Politics Reconsidered

Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

Media and Public Spheres

Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia

Transnationalization of Public Spheres

Public Spheres After Socialism

Contested States in World Politics

Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics

Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities

Identity Politics in Deconstruction

Global Communication and Transnational Public Spheres

Culture, Identity, and Politics

Culture, Identity, and Politics

Culture, Identity, and Politics

Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity, and Representation

Judicial Activism Reconsidered (Essays in public policy)

Contested social orders and international politics

Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace

Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics

Identity Politics in India and Europe

Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan

Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Public Opinion in State Politics

Cultural heritage and identity politics

Language, Power and Identity Politics

Language, Power and Identity Politics

Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services

Development beyond Politics: Aid, Activism and NGOs in Ghana (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Career Opportunities in Politics, Government, and Activism, 2nd Edition

Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (Religion and Global Politics)

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