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Are Women Getting (More) Justice? Malaysia's Sharia Courts in Ethnographic and Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Michael G. Peletz
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Abstract

Religious law is commonly understood as deeply conservative and unfriendly to women, even when it is reform oriented and “this-worldly.” This essay challenges that understanding. It does so by engaging the practice and lived entailments of Islamic family law and gender pluralism in Malaysia, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted since the late 1970s. My research reveals that sharia courts are more timely and flexible in responding to women's claims than in decades past, and that these courts are more inclined to punish husbands who transgress sharia family law bearing on women. In addition, women nowadays have far more access to resources for negotiating marriage, its dissolution, and the aftermath. This is not to say that women and men experience marriage, divorce, or the sharia juridical field as social equals; they do not. But this situation is changing in ways that benefit women as long as they embrace increasingly salient and restrictive codes of obedience and heteronormativity. More broadly, the essay problematizes tensions and oppositions between Islamic law and women's rights that are the subject of considerable scholarly debate and contributes to our understanding of the complex entanglements of religion and law.

Type
Special Issue Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 652 - 684
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Monika Lindbekk, Tamir Moustafa, Dominik Müller, Arzoo Osanloo, Jeffrey Sachs, Patricia Sloane-White, Amanda Whiting, anonymous reviewers, and LSR editors for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Recent research in Malaysia was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Koninklijk Instituut for Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Emory University, and the University of Malaya (UM). At UM I am indebted to Ahmad Hidayat Buang, Azirah Binti Hashim, Raihanah Abdullah, and Siti Zubaidah Binti Ismail for welcoming me during the Fall of 2013 as Visiting Professor in the Department of Syariah and Law at the Academy of Islamic Studies and inviting me to participate in the UM research project on Islamic Law in Practice.

References

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