Daughter of Ex-PM Rues Plight of Malaysian Women

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In Malaysia, the daughter of the country's longtime ruler has poked a proverbial stick in the eye of the establishment. She compared the fate of Muslim women in Malaysia to that of blacks in South Africa during Apartheid.

As NPR's Michael Sullivan reports from Kuala Lumpur, Marina Mahathir's comments have upset some people in her country, in part because much of what she says is true.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN reporting:

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Marina Mahathir can be as provocative and combative as her father Mahathir Mohammad, the autocratic prime minister who ruled Malaysia for 22 years. Mahathir took great delight in tweaking the West, while at the same time guiding his country to economic prosperity.

His daughter Marina is outspoken in her own right: a longtime AIDS activist, often at odds with her father's government, a woman who readily acknowledges her recent allusion to Apartheid may have shocked many and was meant to.

Ms. MARINA MAHATHIR (Daughter of Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad): I guess you could say I'm trying to irritate people, but my basic point about it was if you have a country where there's two different sets of laws for two different sets of people and one of those laws is disadvantageous to the people it's for, then that's just like Apartheid.

SULLIVAN: Over the past three decades, the Malaysian government has made great strides towards gender equality when it comes to non-Muslim women, mostly ethnic Indians and Chinese. But Muslim women, Marina Mahathir says, have gone backwards. The newly amended Islamic Family Law, she says, gives Muslim men even more power, more power when it comes to polygamy, more power when in divorcing their wives, even by SMS text messaging, and more access to women's property too.

Ms. MAHATHIR: In every other area, Muslim women in this country are doing very well. We have women ministers, bank governors, chairmen of the securities commission, businesswomen galore. So, externally it looks wonderful, and I won't argue with that. We are far better off than most Muslim countries. But I am telling you, the women who are ministers, if their husbands decide to marry some young hottie and, you know, sends an SMS to divorce her, so there's absolutely nothing she can do about it. Being minister is not going to protect her.

You know, so this personal law matter a lot, matter a lot.

SULLIVAN: Malaysia likes to project itself as a modern inclusive Islamic state. And in many ways it is. But is also a state in which the country's religious conservatives wield extraordinary power. The former prime minister, Marina's father, ceded them that power, because he needed the Islamic vote.

But he did so reluctantly and with good reason. In the years since, the religious conservatives' power has grown so much so that even talking about religion is sensitive. Marina Mahathir was reminded how sensitive when she submitted her column for International Women's Day and got this e-mailed reply from her editors.

Ms. MAHATHIR: I saw an e-mail that said, this one's a little bit tough, so we can't use it, can you do something else? And that's the first time they've ever said that to me, ever. And I always thought that, you know, I've gotten away with so many things over the years, you know, this one should be okay. And then they tried to kill it.

SULLIVAN: Several days later it finally ran, minus the final two paragraphs, where she suggested not a little sarcastically that the Ministry of Women be split into two: one branch to work to ensure non-Muslim women continue to move forward, the other to work in her words, "to gag and bind Muslim women more and more each day."

Marina Mahathir worries that the religious conservatives are gaining ground, not just in Malaysia, but all over the Muslim world. That view is shared by her friend and colleague Zainah Anwar, who heads the Malaysian NGO, Sisters in Islam. But where Marina tends to see Malaysia's glass as half empty, Anwar sees it as half full. Her proof, under pressure from Sisters in Islam and other groups, the Malaysian government has now agreed to review the newly amended Islamic Family Law. Even better, Anwar says, that review is being conducted by the Attorney General, not the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Ms. ZAINAH ANWAR (Director of the Malaysian NGO, Sisters in Islam): You know, we are for the first time involved as equals with Muslim and all the other conservative groups. Just as they have the right to speak out, we have the right to speak out and we argue our point. And the Attorney General has skillfully handled the meeting. And I don't think we would have gotten this far if it remained under the authority of the Religious Department.

SULLIVAN: As a result, Anwar says, the battle between what she calls the progressive liberal forces and the religious conservatives is now being fought in Malaysia, at least, on a more level playing field.

Ms. ANWAR: So you could see, as half empty, that the conservatives are getting stronger and all that. Or you could see that actually what is happening is the silent majority that is now organizing, that is now speaking out and that is now claiming their right as citizens, as believers, you know to engage with the religion.

SULLIVAN: The current Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi, is sympathetic to that argument, in part because he too has an outspoken activist daughter. But Marina Mahathir worries about what the final draft of the Islamic Family Law will look like after it is debated in Parliament.

What we want, she says, is an entirely new family law based on the principles of equality and justice. She acknowledges that is a distant goal, but not an unattainable one.

Michael Sullivan, NPR News.

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