"People like Us" in Pursuit of God and Rights: Islamic Feminist Discourse and Sisters in Islam in Malaysia

Abstract This paper attempts to critically situate the discourse of Islamic feminism and its activist incarnations such as the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam within an analytical framework that seeks to look beyond the all-too-common trope of "multiple modernities." The paper examines the conditions of possibility enabling such groups and discourses, looking in particular at the modern nation-state, and the imbrications of social discourses of rights and religious discourses of individual belief within this state. I argue that the repertoires of reasoning called forth by Sisters in Islam partake in the objectifying rationalities of the Malaysian state when it comes to religious knowledge, with this knowledge now situated as a legitimate object of civic, legal and state intervention. Keywords: Islamic feminism, Sisters in Islam, Malaysia Introduction In this paper I want to explore several important aspects of "Islamic feminism," a discursive and increasingly political movement which has attracted much Western academic and media consideration in recent years, through a case study of one Islamic feminist non-governmental organization--the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam (SIS). The growing attention to Islamic feminism has been largely situated, at least post-9/11, within a policy context of looking for what is construed as a "moderate Muslim" voice, a voice which espouses secular-liberal understandings of key values such as equality, pluralism and human rights. (2) On the part of the Muslim participants of this project is a keen desire to show how such values, far from being alien to Islam, are in fact the necessary implications of the religion "rightly understood" (see, for example, Sachedina 2001, Kamali 2002, Esack 1997, and Abou El Fadl 2001, 2002, 2004). (3) This position is far from new, enjoying a genealogy going back to early 19th century Muslim reformers in the Middle East or the so-called "Islamic modernists" (see Kurzman 2002 for an overview). Scholarly discussions of these reformist trends and their most recent incarnations such as Islamic feminism invariably seek to locate such projects within a "multiple modernities" paradigm. They highlight how the struggle of Muslim women for their rights from within a religious--rather than an ostensibly more uninteresting, or at least less problematic, secular--framework works to "Islamize modernity," "modernize Islam" or more often both at once (see Badran 1995; Burgat 2003; Cooper 1998; Esposito 1996, 2001; Majed 1998; Moghadam 1993, 2005, 2007). These analyses rightly focus on how such struggles are at heart interpretive and epistemological--they call forth a reengagement with the most important texts of the Islamic tradition with an eye toward uncovering their "true" meanings, which are then shown to be in agreement with the reigning liberal consensus of what constitutes justice, equality or freedom from oppression. Missing from such analyses, however, is a consideration of how such engagements do not merely work to produce new understandings and meanings of what Islam "says" (on women's roles, human rights, gender equality, etc.), but also how the repertoires of reasoning called forth by Islamic feminists involve radical reconceptualizations of the authoritative production and transmission of religious knowledge as well as what constitutes such knowledge in the first instance as new conceptions of religious "belief" and texts are formed and articulated. Islamic feminists are participating in fundamentally different regimes and relations of knowledge and power than the historical male jurists and exegetes they position themselves against. Understanding how this is so helps us to see that when we speak about "Islamizing modernity" or "modernizing Islam" it is not a question of taking a pre-given conceptual "container" (Islam, modernity) and "filling" it with novel content (-izing it), but rather of constituting new relations to texts and their contexts, and new normative imaginings of what these relations should consist of. …