The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: Nurturing Exclusivist Interpretations of Islam in the Malaysian Home

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This study was born of a decade's participant observation of rural women in the southwest of Peninsular Malaysia. It was apparent to me that they dealt with a particularly patriarchal society by establishing power in the privacy of the home by wielding religion as the tool of choice to exert control over their offspring and spouse. Subsequent research into the possibility of rural mothers and mother-figures perpetuating more conservative or exclusivist interpretations of Islam in the home took a different turn, however, when I realized that this state of affairs already exists in urban Kuala Lumpur and its outskirts.

After more than three years letting this stew on a back-burner and after several failed attempts to put forward the hypothesis that mothers could possibly be vectors of terror, it became clear that it is highly taboo in Southeast Asia to posit that a mother-figure could be anything but pure and perfect. However in 2017, the first woman with links to the Islamic State (IS) was arrested in Singapore; subsequent media coverage of similar arrests in Malaysia and Indonesia enabled the acceptance for publication of an article which had previously been deemed “rather difficult content”. In May 2018, the Surabaya family suicide bombings shocked the region and the rejection of this theory for being “offensive to mothers” dissipated.

The question at hand is whether mothers use religion in the private sphere of the home to expand personal power and social standing, and whether that could lead to increased normalization of “hateful extremism”.

Initially meant to focus on just rural women, interviews with informants broadened the quest to Kuala Lumpur and its wealthy suburbs. The perpetuation of exclusivist and intolerant views amongst mothers and encouragement to engage in the defence of the greater Islamic cause, or at least to carry out “financial jihad” (jihad bil mal), was already in motion. From the city's tertiary centres of learning, a new “empowering form of Islam” not unlike that described as “female jihadism” (EUROPOL 2019) is sent back to rural villages through students and fresh graduates with a mission to recruit disenfranchised “sisters” to the cause.