By Yoginder Sikand
Zainah Anwar is one of Malaysia’s most well-known public intellectuals. She is a founding member of ‘Sisters in Islam’, a leading Muslim feminist organization, of which she was till recently the executive director. She has served as a member of the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia, and is one of the most vocal activists in the civil rights movement in the country.
Anwar’s writings on Islam, mainly in the form of articles for the Malaysian press, reflect her longstanding involvement in the struggle for civil rights in her country, including, and especially, for women and non-Muslims. A major concern in her writings (as also her political involvement) is to critique conservative, and what she sees as reactionary, interpretations of Islam that impinge on the human rights, particularly of Muslim women and non-Muslims. In their place, she seeks to articulate alternate Islamic understandings that, in her view, reflect and champion what she sees as a fundamental principle of Islam: justice. Her point of departure in her critique of what she sees as unjust interpretations of traditional Islamic jurisprudence and theology and in her struggle to articulate alternate interpretations is the issue of justice.
Justice, Anwar says, is a fundamental and underlying aspect of Islam, and the God of Islam is a just one. ‘For me and my group, Sisters in Islam’, she writes, ‘it is an article of faith that Islam is just and God is just.
’ Hence, interpretations of Islamic theology and jurisprudence that are unjust, including with respect to Muslim women and non-Muslims, she suggests, are actually a violation of (her reading of) Islam. Being human constructions and not divine, they need to be challenged and critiqued and replaced with interpretations that are in line with the notion of justice., as she understands it.
Using justice as the fundamental criterion in critiquing received notions of Islamic theology and jurisprudence that she finds problematic, Anwar’s writings about Islam revolve around numerous themes, three of which this article looks at: the notion of religious authority in Islam; the desirability of the state legislating morality, and the associated issue of the ‘Islamic state’; and, ostensibly ‘Islamic’ laws in place in Malaysia that Anwar argues deny justice and equality to Muslim women.
Who Can Speak for Islam?
Central to Anwar’s academic and activist involvement with issues related to Islam is her insistence that she, as a Malaysian, a Muslim and a woman, also has the right to speak for and about Islam. This puts her immediately at odds with the conservative ulema, including official Islamic ‘authorities’, and Islamist ideologues, who presume to possess the sole right to interpret Islam, based on their claimed ‘expertise’ in Islamic matters.
Like any other text, religious or other, the Quran, Anwar writes, is open to a multiplicity of interpretations. ‘Islam does not speak’ on its own, she comments. Rather, it is human beings who, in seeking to interpret Islam, claim to ‘speak in God’s name’.
She further explains, ‘[T]he product of that human engagement with the divine text is not divine law, but human-constructed law.’
This is reflected in the fact of the existence of many schools of Islamic theology and law as well as in the multiple, often divergent and contradictory, prescriptions and rules in the corpus of traditional fiqh, a result of the ijtihad or personal interpretation of the fuqaha associated with the commonly-accepted fiqh schools. In other words, their theological formulations and their ijtihad were a human product, and, since all human beings, including the classical scholars, are both liable to err and are also shaped by their own social and historical circumstances, fiqh cannot be said to be synonymous with the Divine Will.
In this regard, Anwar argues that certain fiqh rules as well as certain interpretations of the Quran that militate against justice and equality, including for women and non-Muslims, which are in place in many Muslim countries today, including Malaysia, cannot or should not be considered to be beyond criticism, in contrast to what the traditionalist ulema, Islamist ideologues or state authorities might insist.
Taken together, all this means that the traditionalist ulema, the state religious authorities and Islamist ideologues do not have a monopoly over interpreting and defining Islam and the shariah. Anwar questions what might be considered to be the undue restrictions and unnecessarily cumbersome conditions that the traditionalist ulema have laid down for one to be considered to possess the right to speak on Islam, possibly to legitimize their own authority. She indicates that since Islamic laws in Malaysia impinge on all the citizens of the country, directly or indirectly, including non-Muslim Malaysians, Islam is too important an issue to be left to the ulema alone to discuss and interpret. As she puts it:
“When Islam is used as a source of law and public policy, then everyone has the right to talk about the subject. Public law, public policy must by necessity be opened to public debate, and pass the test of public reason […] Those who do not want anyone but the ulama to speak on Islam must realise that the only way to preserve the religion from public scrutiny is to take it out of the public sphere and keep it private between the believer and God. But when you proclaim that Islam is a way of life, Islam is the solution, Islam has all the answers, you cannot then tell everyone who disagrees with you to shut up because only you will provide the answers. That is tantamount to totalitarian rule.”
Since Malaysia is a democracy, Anwar argues, law-making must be a product of a democratic process. Laws cannot be imposed simply because the ulema believe them to be divinely-mandated. In this regard, she asks:
“Within the context of a democratic nation state such as Malaysia, can this process of law-making be the sole preserve of the ulama? Within the context of the changing realities of our lives today from the time the classical texts were written, shouldn’t the law-making process be conducted in democratic engagement, especially with those who are affected by these laws and policies?
”
The ‘Islamic State’ and State Regulation of Morality
In recent decades, under pressure from conservative Muslim forces and also as a result of what has been termed the race between the two largest Malay-dominated parties in Malaysia, the UMNO and the PAS, to ‘out-Islamise’ the other, the Malaysian state has expanded the power and scope of shariah courts in the country and has vastly expanded the religious bureaucracy, with the setting up of numerous well-funded Islamic institutions. Government-sponsored selective and often cosmetic ‘Islamisation’ is also evident in the growing tendency of the state to seek to control private behaviour and personal morality through the shariah courts, and by passing laws to control and sternly punish ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour on the part of its Muslim citizens.
Anwar speaks of this as reflecting an ‘obstinate obsession to regulate Muslims in every aspect of our lives.’
Some observers regard this as a sign of a gradual transformation of Malaysia into an officially ‘Islamic state’.
Anwar argues that the state must have no role in seeking to enforce Islamic morality in the private lives of its Muslim citizens. This is one of the main reasons for her opposition to the notion of an ‘Islamic state’ itself, for forcing its citizens to abide by shariah rules and punish transgressions thereof are seen as one of the principal duties of an ‘Islamic state’. Anwar provides several reasons for her opposition to this. Some of these are based on secular grounds, others on ‘Islamic’ arguments.
Firstly, Anwar points out, in practice, in Malaysia as well as other Muslim countries, such enforcement by state shariah courts targets women more often and more severely than it does men, especially with regard to issues such as ‘Islamic’ dress, the consumption of intoxicants and mixing with people of the opposite gender.
One of the main reasons for this is that ostensibly ‘Islamic’ laws that seek to regulate and punish what is regarded as un-Islamic behaviour are often drawn not directly from the Quran, but, rather, principally from the corpus of medieval fiqh, a human product that is characterized by biases against women (and non-Muslims).
Secondly, Anwar regards several such laws as a ‘violation of human rights’, and terms the punishments they prescribe as ‘cruel’, ‘degrading’, and ‘inhuman’.
They also, she adds, clearly violate Malaysia’s international commitments, including its acceptance of numerous international treaties on human rights that outlaw discrimination based on gender and religion.
Related to this is Anwar’s point that such laws go completely against the image of being a ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ Muslim state—indeed, the ‘model’ Muslim state—that Malaysia has tried so hard to cultivate.
Thirdly, many of the punishments that shariah courts lay down, which she terms as ‘draconian’, have no sanction in the Quran, but, rather, are based mainly on the cumulative Muslim jurisprudential tradition of fiqh, which, she argues, violate the letter and the spirit of the Quran in several crucial respects. Such, for instance, is the case with the law against Muslim apostates
, and the law that prescribes caning for Muslims who consume alcohol.
Fourthly, the very tendency of the state, the traditionalist ulema and Islamist groups to seek to control and regiment people’s personal behaviour through fear of punishment reflects what Anwar regards as an understanding of Islam which she considers as quite opposed to her own, which is based on the notion of a loving, kind and compassionate God.
As she puts it, such laws and punishments reflect a ‘seeming determination of those who rule in the name of Islam to project a misogynist, punitive and vindictive God’. But this, she insists, is far from the Quranic conception of what she terms ‘a God of kindness, compassion, beauty and goodness’, a God who enjoins ‘forgiveness […] and positive personal transformation.’
Consequently, Anwar says, some of the harsh laws devised by the ulema regarding women and non-Muslims that are presently enforced by the state and the punishments they prescribe cannot be said to be in accordance with the Islamic spirit of justice and equality or to reflect the concept of a loving, merciful God in Islam. On the contrary, they are a gross violation of these principles. They reflect, she says, ‘Islamist supremacist thinking’, ‘an extremist ideology of hate’ and the world-view of those who are ‘bent on turning [Malaysia] […] into a theocratic dictatorship’, which can only fuel the fires of ‘Islamophobia’ and even lead non-Muslims to greater aversion towards Islam and its adherents, notwithstanding claims to the contrary that stress that Islam is a religion of peace and compassion
. In short, such laws, and the vision of Islam underlying them, are, Anwar argues, quite in contrast to her understanding of a just Islam. Furthermore, they do great disservice to the faith, ironically while claiming to uphold it.
Referring to enormous stress that Islamists, as well as conservative ulema, place on stern punishment, rather than on positive moral reform, through kindness and compassion, as a means to address and control what is regarded un-Islamic behaviour, she writes that this itself constitutes a betrayal of the Quranic spirit:
“[…] Muslims invoke the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful, numerous times a day as we say our daily prayers, read verses of the Quran, and before we start any action. Alas, all too often, this invocation of God’s name has become meaningless and has no relation to how we live our lives and treat others in the name of religion.”
Sixthly, Anwar argues that if the state were to regulate personal behaviour in the name of Islam in order to ensure conformity of Muslims’ behaviour with what it regards as the rules of the shariah, it would promote hypocrisy and might even threaten to turn Muslims against Islam itself. The state must not ‘extend the long arm of the law to what should be best left to the religious conscience of the individual,’ she stresses. The test of true faith, she explains, is that it, and the behaviour that it demands, must come from within, from the heart of the believer, from voluntary and willing submission to the rules of faith, rather than from compulsion by the state and religious authorities. The word ‘Islam’ itself, she points out, means ‘submission’ [to God]. It is not submission and conformity to God’s laws wrought by an external authority, such as the state or the ulema. Rather, it is something freely chosen and willed by the individual, free from external coercion. Naturally, then, if individuals were forced to display exemplary Islamic behaviour by the state and its agencies against their will, it cannot be said to represent true ‘submission’ or genuine Islam. Indeed, Anwar points out, such moral policing in the name of enforcing shariah laws has often had precisely the opposite result to that which was intended. Thus, she writes of the effect of such policing in Iran, which is probably the same, in several respects, as in Malaysia:
“Despite constant moral policing […] many Iranians say that the state’s morality laws have failed to create a more pious, moral and obedient ummah. One university professor said his students were far more promiscuous than they were during the time of the Shah. When simple pleasures in life (such as going out to a movie, a restaurant, having a walk in the park) are all forbidden if the couple is not married, then the natural alternative would be to get together behind closed doors and create one’s own entertainment.
“Wearing the hijab is compulsory in Iran, and yet […] [y]oung women are defying the rule by pushing their hijab as far back as possible and letting their hair fly out at the back. Twenty-six years of compulsory hijab law, designed to hide the evil temptations of a woman’s hair and shape, has created not moral obedience, but defiance. And because the defiance has been so widespread, Tehran’s moral police have largely given up enforcing the law.”
In other words, Anwar suggests, for the state to seek to enforce compliance with Islamic morality through law and by inflicting punishment for non-compliance ultimately defeats its own very purpose. ‘The more the religious authorities are bent on regulating our lives in the name of Islam, the more defiant Muslims will become’, she warns. Again invoking the Iranian experience, she writes:
“Malaysia must learn from Iran. When a government that rules in the name of Islam fails to deliver on the aspirations of the people, then this failure is seen as the failure of Islam. Widespread public criticism and defiance of rules and regulations to regulate the moral behaviour of its citizens and to suppress the thinking of dissenters have given birth to a reformist movement that brought women, young people, academics and religious clerics into the open to challenge the official Islam of the state. An Islamisation process that implements pre-modern conceptions of Islamic law which are so out of touch with the realities of Iranian lives today has led disenchanted Iranians to believe that Islam has no answers to the myriad problems and challenges they face
.”
As a believing and practising Muslim, Anwar readily agrees to the proposition that Muslims should abide by the teachings of Islam in their personal lives. But this, she says, must reflect and emerge from deep faith, and not out of compulsion or fear of the law. The role of the state in this regard is, therefore, limited. At most, she suggests, it can devise ‘more effective ways to teach Islam’ and ‘to imbibe Islamic values’ so that ‘obedience to God comes from a genuine act of faith, belief and submission’.
This does not mean that Anwar is necessarily opposed to any role of Islam in making laws and policies. She does admit the possibility, provided, she says, that the use of shariah rules and principles to make laws must pass ‘the test of “civic reason”’ and is ‘subject to safeguards within the framework of constitutionalism, human rights and citizenship’ as well as international law. Advocates of Islamic law and their critics should be able to freely and publicly debate the merits or otherwise of their respective schemes without any fear or hindrance.
Islam and Women’s Rights
One of Anwar’s main concerns, as reflected in the work of ‘Sisters in Islam’ and in her writings, is to critique misogynist traditions, beliefs, customs and laws in the name of Islam and to develop and articulate a gender-just Islamic theology and jurisprudence. As in her critique of the tendency of the state to intrude into people’s lives in the name of enforcing ‘Islamic morality’, her critique of misogyny and patriarchy in the name of Islam is based fundamentally on her insistence that Islam, if correctly understood, stands for equality and justice, including for women. This leads her to claim, ‘[T]here is no contradiction between faith and feminism.
’ ‘Women’s demands for equality and justice’, she insists, ‘are rooted in the Islamic tradition’.
‘I am proud that as a Malaysian Muslim feminist, I see no contradiction between my religion and my feminism,’ she claims.
‘[T]he problem is not with Islam’, she adds, ‘but with patriarchal Muslims, who hide behind the sanctity of the divine message to perpetuate men’s perceived superiority over women.’
Anwar develops this argument through reference mainly to the Quran, with very limited recourse to the corpus of Hadith and fiqh, whose authenticity is contested by many Muslims themselves. She highlights the fact that man-made, patriarchal fiqh, which developed in a particular social and historical context, which has been wrongly taken to be synonymous with the Divine shariah, is a major cause for attitudes, beliefs and so-called shariah laws that heavily militate against gender justice and which are not in accordance with the Quran’s stress on equality and justice for all human beings, including women.
It is patriarchal fiqh, she writes, rather than Islam per se, based simply on the Quran, that underlies a slew of ostensibly ‘Islamic’ laws in place in Malaysia today that are patently unjust and unfair to women, she stresses.
The law, Anwar writes, must reflect current social realities if it is to remain relevant and socially useful and live up to the basic Islamic imperative of justice. In this regard, she opines that much of the corpus of traditional fiqh, including several legal prescriptions that discriminate against women and which have the force of law in Malaysia today, does not resonate with contemporary Malaysian social reality, which is characterized by high levels of women’s literacy, general awareness and participation in the workforce. There is, she remarks, an ‘utter disconnect between laws and practices that discriminate against women and the realities of women’s and men’s lives today.’
As she puts it, these discriminatory laws, ‘seek to preserve a world that no longer exists’, and they continue to ‘insist on a legal framework where men will always be superior to women’ as ‘leaders, protectors and providers’, even if all this ‘flies in the face of reality’. She argues that these laws reflect ‘narrow-minded and outdated understandings and interpretations of culture and religion that no longer have bearing to the realities of women and men’s lives in the 21st century.’ Since these laws do not reflect or correspond to contemporary Malaysian social reality, Anwar argues, they must be changed and replaced by laws that do. If they were to remain in force, they would hamper the progress of Muslim society. Besides, they would lead to gross injustice, ironically in the name of ‘Islamic justice’, and so would also constitute a gross violation of one of the principal bases of Islam. They would also cease to have practical relevance and meaning for most Muslims themselves
.
Islam, Anwar avers, is not the cause for Muslim women’s subjugation, although, she stresses, patriarchy in the guise of Islam, or patriarchal, misogynist interpretations of Islam, are a major factor. She appeals to women (and men committed to gender equality, which she sees as a Quranic mandate) to interpret the Quran on their own, freed from the baggage of centuries of male-centric interpretation and juridical thinking of the almost wholly male ulema. In the process, she articulates the need and the possibility of what she regards as a more authentic understanding of the faith, so that, as she puts it, ‘Islam can be a source of empowerment, not a source of oppression and discrimination’ for women, a ‘source of liberation’ and ‘no longer an obstacle to equality’ for them.
This project requires a critical re-reading of the cumulative and historical Muslim theological and jurisprudential tradition. A fundamental starting-point or underlying guiding principle for this re-reading, Anwar says, is the conviction that Islam upholds and stands for justice and equality, including for women. The classical jurists might have been right in their time and context, but, then, that time and context are long gone, but the legal logic of the protecting providing male and the subservient female remains. What justice means today, in the context of the 21st century, she argues, must form the basis to regulate the relationship between men and women. Using justice and equality as the basis for this new reading of the Quran would reflect not just the true intention of the text but would also be in conformity with the ‘social and political realities’ of today’s context, where it is now widely recognized that ‘there cannot be justice without equality’, including for women.
In this way, Islam can be made more relevant and meaningful in people’s lives today, something which Anwar suggests traditionalist understandings, steeped in patriarchy, cannot any longer do.
Just as the classical jurists were guided by the social and political realities of their age in their understanding of the Quran, Anwar says, Muslims today should seek to approach the text keeping in mind the present context, where gender justice has become an undeniable imperative. On this basis, Anwar argues for Muslim women to study Islam on their own, and, on that basis, to critique what she regards as the patriarchal interpretations of Islam and shariah that the traditional ulema, including state religious authorities, uphold and enforce. In doing so, such women can formulate alternate understandings of Islamic theology and jurisprudence that ‘uphold the principles of justice, equality, freedom and dignity in Islam’ that are markedly lacking in traditional interpretations, particularly with regard to women. In this way, Anwar suggests, Muslim women in the 21st century can help in the process of developing more contextually-relevant understandings based on the ‘realities and experience of women’s lives today’, something which is sorely lacking in traditional understandings.
For the continuing relevance of Islam in people’s daily lives, Anwar suggests, understandings of the faith must address contemporary demands, concerns and social realities, including transformations in women’s roles and statuses, and must not remain static, frozen in the mould developed by the medieval classical scholars. Understandings that reflect the social realities of the times of the classical interpreters, characterized by deep-rooted patriarchy, can no longer be acceptable to many Muslim women. If such understandings, which are reflected in laws that deny Muslim women equality and justice, are not challenged and changed, the very relevance of religion in people’s lives, Anwar points out, might well be called into question. Thus she warns:
“Today’s women will not accept that Islam actually promotes injustice and ill- treatment of half the human race. Today’s women are challenging the values of patriarchal society, where power and authority reside exclusively with the husband, father, brother to whom the wife, daughter and sister owe obedience. For too long, men have defined for us what it is to be a woman, how to be a woman and then to use religion to confine us to these socially constructed limitations that reduce us to being the inferior half of the human race. We are believers, and as believers we want to find liberation, truth and justice from within our own faith. We feel strongly we have a right to reclaim our religion, to redefine it, to participate and contribute to an understanding of Islam, how it is codified and implemented–in ways that take into consideration the realities and experience of women’s lives today.
“Today’s Muslim women in a country like Malaysia that is fast modernising and industrialising will no longer accept their inferior status, not even when it is justified in the name of religion. Times […] are changing. We live in an era where women are educated, travel the world, hold positions of power and responsibility in increasing numbers. Today in Malaysia, 70 percent of the students enrolled in public sector institutions of higher learning, are girls. The female labour force participation stands at 47 percent and is rising. It can only be expected that women, with increasing knowledge and education, with economic independence, will gain more confidence and courage to speak out in the face of injustice. If the injustice is committed in the name of religion, then today’s women will go back to the original source of the religion to find out for themselves whether such a great religion could indeed be so unjust to half of its believers
.”
It is not that Anwar regards ‘Islamic feminism’ as the only key to Muslim women’s liberation. She recognizes that in Muslim-dominated countries such as Malaysia it is essential to operate within a broad ‘Islamic’ paradigm, articulating Islamic arguments for gender equality, because people’s consciousness as well as public discourse is heavily influenced and indelibly shaped by Islam. She also sees this as something mandated by her own faith in Islam, as a believing Muslim. At the same time, she believes that it is important to ground the Islamic arguments for reform within the broader framework of human rights principles, constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination, and women and men's lived realities today. For Islam to remain relevant as a source of law and public policy in a modern democratic state, the religion cannot be isolated from the context of 21st century and its dominant ethical values, that of democracy, human rights and women’s rights, Anwar repeatedly asserts. The readiness with which she and her colleagues in Sisters in Islam work together with other civil society actors, including secular feminists, human rights activists and inter-faith groups, for common goals, such as justice and equality for women and religious minorities, is seen by many as a model of Malaysian leadership and a celebration of its rich pluralism.
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Qur’an is the holy book of Islam, as the word of Allah and a miracle. The Qur'an has been created miraculously as a revelation from Allah (God), as a perfect copy of what was written in heaven and existed there from all eternity.
