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A storm is brewing within the ranks of women's groups in Malaysia. In her regular newspaper column, Marina Mahathir, the daughter of the former prime minister,has compared the lives of Muslim women to black South Africans under apartheid. Her comments were a direct critique on the recently introduced Islamic Family Law Amendment which she described as being regressive. Her arguments were labeled as insulting and shameful by conservatives. But others say she was only articulating the reality of women's lives across Malaysia.
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Presenter / Interviewer: Emily Bourke
Speakers:
Zainah Anwar — Representative of Sisters in Islam, Malaysia
Vizla Kumaresan — Representative of Women's Aid Organization, Malaysia
Farah Abdullah — Representative founding director of the Muslim Professionals Forum
Bourke: Marina Mahathir is just one a number of women who believe the new Islamic Family law in Malaysia discriminates against women.
Zainah: The law reform process for non-Muslims, people of other faiths, has moved towards the principles of equality and justice for men and women while the law reform process with regard to the Islamic family law has moved towards discrimination against women, so what she is talking about and what we are talking about as well are two sets of laws governing the citizens of Malaysia, but with two different sets of standards.
Vizla: In Muslim family law, while the mother has custody over the children, the guardianship always falls to the father. and that's one of the things that women's groups have always been fighting against. We want equal guardianship for both mother and father, as it exists in civil law. But when it comes to the financial aspectswith the recent amendments, it makes access for men to financial security easier. They can force their wives to choose between maintenance and division of property, while in civil law, women get both.
Bourke: Zainah Anwar, from Sisters In Islam, says money is now the prevailing consideration for Muslim women contemplating divorce.
Zainah: We don't have problems with women giving men equal rights to the property if there is equal right to divorce, equal right to marriage, equal age of marriage, and equal right to inheritance. But when everything else, so many other parts of the family law are unequal to women and privilege men. how can men, when it comes to property, suddenly demand equal rights?
And, of course, women are angry because women in Malaysia today are working, earning money, acquiring assets, and many women are married to irresponsible men, so they are worried. We are getting letters from women fearing that their husbands, who have not worked or contributed to the acquisition of the assets, will want to claim a share of matrimonial assets upon divorce.
Bourke: Farah Abdullah has labeled the apartheid remark by Marina Mahathir as deplorable. And she dismisses any criticism of the Islamic Family Law as misplaced, ill-informed, and unjustified.
Farah: We Muslim women feel very insulted that we have been compared like that. I have been asking people who know her [Mahathir] to ask her and her friends to go and study the sacred texts to really see whether these amended laws are really regressive. And if they really studied the sacred texts and find out whether it is against the teachings of the holy Qur'an, they would find the law actually makes it difficult for men to take a second wife, and on property distribution is fairer — but they didn't study the law — they just jumped on the bandwagon and said "Rah rah rah."
Bourke: While some women's groups are quietly confident that the laws will gradually be amended, Zainah Anwar, from Sisters in Islam, says she is determined to ensure the values of justice and equity before the law are upheld in Malaysia.
Zainah: We are not going to keep quiet anymore, and not allow people to use religion to discriminate against us and to silence us, and intimidate us and put fear into the public mind that we don't have a right because we are not experts and we don't have a right to say anything on matters of religion. It's not only the scholars who can speak out. We're saying that when Islam is used as a source of law and public policy, then every citizen of a democratic country has a right to speak up on these matters.
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