When the government implemented new Islamic Family laws in 1987, little did it know that the ripple of that action would eventually create the force that is Sisters in Islam (SIS) today.
Enacted in 1984, the laws were proving problematic to Muslim women seeking legal redress for their marital woes. Concerned by these growing complaints, a small group of women lawyers and their friends-academics, journalists, analysists, lawyers and activists-came together under the Shari’a Subcommitee of the Association of Women Lawyers (AWL) to discuss the matter. Their initial meetings were held in the house shared by Zainah Anwar, a former journalist and senior analyst who would later spearhead SIS as its first Executive Director, and Nor Faridah Ariffin, then President of the AWL.
The group’s continued discussions increasingly made clear that the origin of such anti-women laws stemmed from contentious interpretations of the Qur’an, and their focus expanded to include broader concerns that pointed out clearly the need to re-read the Text to ascertain for themselves what was actually written. An added impetus at this time was the campaign by women’s groups to make domestic violence a crime – the Islamic Centre (Pusat Islam) of the Prime Minister’s Department had thrown a spanner into the works with its damaging claim that Islam Permitted husbands to beat their wives.
By 1989, the group had evolved into a core of eight wiomen who founded what was to become Sisters in Islam. They began to meet every week to study the Qur’an closely, especially verses used to justify domestic violence and gender equality in general. At these weekly meetings, the founding members discovered that the Text showed that women’s struggle to lead lives of equal worth and dignity to men was clearly located within Islamic teachings.
This discovery opened up a world of Islam that was based on the principles of compassion, equality, justice and love. It enabled SIS to take the unequivocal position that men and women were equal in Islam, that a Muslim man did not have the right to beat his wife, that polygamy was not an inherent right in Islam but a contract permitted only in the most exceptional circumstances, that one male witness did not equal two female witnesses…and a great deal more.
The group wanted to shared with others that it was not Islam that oppressed women but male-centric interpretations influenced by cultural practices and values of a patriarchal society. In 1990, a ruling by a Shari’a Appeals Court judge provided an opening:
In a rare decision, the judge forbade a husband from taking a second wife, deeming him to have failed the four conditions for polygamy stipulated in Islamic Family Law. Joining the ensuing debate, the founders of SIS wrote to major newspapers under the name ‘Daughters of Islam’, taking after a group they had met at a women’s meeting on ‘Reading the Qur’an for Ourselves’ in Karachi, Pakistan. When that letter was published in The Star newspaper to enthusiastic response, rival paper The New Straits Times requested a modified version of the Letter to the Editor under another name. Thus, in 1990, the ‘Sisters in Islam’ were born.
More validation came in 1991 with the launching of two booklets by SIS: Are Women & Men Equal Before Allah? And Are Muslim Men Allowed to Beat Their Wives? Datuk Napsiah Omar, then Minister-in-charge of Women’s Affairs, attended the launch during a one-day public forum. She was joined by more than 200 women and men from civil society groups, academia, the government and the business community.
Recognising the importance of advocacy for law reform and engaging with the larger issues of Islamisation and the challenge of change and modernity, SIS began to submit memoranda to the Malaysian government and to initiate collaborations with international scholars of Islam.
In 1992, the group held its first national workshop on ‘The Modern Nation State and Islam’. The following year, it submitted a memorandum to then-Prime Minsiter Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad containing religious, legal and socio-historical perspectives contesting provisions in the proposed Kelantan Shari’a Criminal Code (hudud law). In 1994, SIS issued another memorandum arguing that the Domestic Violence Act, which specified civil punishments for domestic violence, should also protect Muslims.
To build their own capacities, SIS members started taking weekly lessons on the Qur’an, Islamic law, social change and modernity from renowned Egyptian reformist scholar Dr Fathi Osman, then a visiting professor at the Law Faculty of the International Islamic University.
SIS then expanded its activism in promoting fundamental liberties guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, as its mission of ensuring justice for Muslim women and men was (and still is) very much part of the larger human rights and democratic movement in the country.
By 1998, SIS’s work, which had hitherto been voluntary and conducted without the facilities of an office, took on a more permanent aspect with the establishment of a small office headed by Zainah Anwar and Sharifah Zurah Aljeffri as Co-Directors.
That year, SIS organized a workshop inviting the authorities and other stakeholders to alert those in power to the realities Muslim women faced on the ground, and thus to provided the basis for discussing necessary legal and procedural reforms. Among the participants were the National Council of Women’s Organizations, the Women’s Affairs Division of the Prime Minister’s Department, and Pusat Islam.
To enlarge is support basse for an Islam of justice and equality, SIS ran public education programmes-from study sessions for Muslim women that later included men and people of all faiths, to training sessions, public fora and talks.
SIS also branched out into advisory services when it set up a legal clinic in 2003, offering advice and counseling through e-mail, fax, letters, telephone and face-to-face meetings. The legal clinic served more than 1,700 clients in its first three years of operations. SIS also started a pioneer research project on ‘The Impact of Polygamy on the Quality of Family Life in Malaysia’.
Today, more than 20 years after its founding, SIS’ programmes have grown both in Malaysia and at the international level.
The group has embarked on a project of global Islamic family law reform, research and advocacy. Called MUSAWAH, this global movement for equality and justice in the Mulsim family was launched in February 2009 to bring together women’s groups in many Muslim countries. MUSAWAH works to organize, network, build support and share knowledge and strategies to develop a more egalitarian and just vision of Islam.
And it all began with a simple question of faith: if God is just and if Islam is just, why do laws and policies made in the name of Islam create injustice?
