What It Means to be a Muslimah: The Religious Orientations of Female Muslim Activists in Malaysia.
By Zaiti Athirah
“What are the discourses of Muslimah activists on specific marital issues in Malaysia today? What discourses guide their understanding of a woman’s role in Islam? What religious orientations underlie their discourses and understanding of specific marital issues and women’s roles in Islam?” These are the central questions posed by Syed Imad Alatas in What It Means to be a Muslimah, a work that explores the complex realities of Malaysian Muslim women navigating contemporary marital and gender-related challenges within the Islamic framework.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysia witnessed a resurgence of Islamisation, a period marked by renewed emphasis on Islamic identity and values. This Islamic revivalism, while driven by a sincere desire to uphold Islam as a comprehensive way of life, eventually extended beyond religious rituals and personal piety into the socio-political and legal domains. The formation of organisations such as the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM) reflected this spirit, as they promote the ideal of an Islamic state and influence policies concerning the Muslim family. As Islam became more entrenched in the nation’s legal and administrative apparatus, questions regarding the roles and rights of women within marriage and society inevitably became central to public and scholarly discourse.
Out of this milieu, emerged a neo-modernist Islamic thought, shaped by both reformist impulses and grounded religious scholarship. Muslimah activists today draw from this intellectual heritage to reclaim agency and reinterpret Islamic texts in ways that affirm gender equity while remaining faithful to Islamic principles. Their discourses are rooted in the Qur’an, hadith, and increasingly, the ijtihad (independent reasoning) of contemporary scholars, including local ulama who are sensitive to Malaysia’s unique socio-cultural context.
However, these reformist and feminist-leaning discourses are not without opposition. Salafi-oriented critiques, in particular, challenge the legitimacy of feminist interpretations of Islam, viewing them as external impositions that risk diluting the integrity of the religion. From a Salafi standpoint, attempts to “reinterpret” the Qur’an and Sunnah through the lens of feminism are considered dangerous innovations that compromise the divinely revealed nature of gender roles. Salafi scholars argue for a return to the Salaf al-Salih (the pious predecessors), maintaining that the Islamic legal and social framework already provides justice and balance between the sexes, and any perceived inequality is due to human failure in applying Islamic principles, not a deficiency within the religion itself.
Rather than outrightly dismissing Salafi concerns, the book argues that such perspectives often operate on a rigid, literalist framework that neglects the historical and cultural contexts in which the Qur’an and hadith were revealed and interpreted. Upon the interviews Alatas infers that the Salafi insistence on fixed gender roles risks conflating culture with divine prescription, thereby ignoring the lived realities of Muslim women in diverse socio-political settings like Malaysia.
The book’s central response to the claim that feminist readings are foreign impositions is to highlight the organic emergence of Muslimah activism within local Islamic traditions. Alatas draws on the idea of indigenous feminism, as advocated by scholars like Vivian Wee and Farida Shaheed, to show that Muslim women’s calls for reform are not always rooted in Western paradigms but in an contextual critique grounded in Islamic sources and methodologies. These women are not seeking to secularise Islam, but to challenge patriarchal interpretations that have calcified into orthodoxy.
Still, What It Means to be a Muslimah provides an important and sophisticated entry into these debates. It traces the intersection of theology, politics, and life as they operate to form definitions of Muslimah identity and rights in Malaysia. While more sympathetic to the reformist and neo-modernist positions, it is precisely this overlap with locally grounded feminist discourses that undermines more conservative analyses and makes the book pertinent to the study of Islam today.
