Perfecting Women, Family and Sexuality

Maznah Mohamad

In Malaysia, as in many other Muslim-majority nations today, it is Bureaucratic Islam, rather than violent, militant demands that is driving religion as a state agenda. In her study of Malaysia, Maznah Mohamad characterises the inordinate power of this bureaucracy as taking on elements of a ‘Divine Bureaucracy’, to denote its ability to straddle two compelling spaces – on the one hand, the ‘non-rational’ sacred realm, and on the other hand, the ‘rational’ designs of organised life. She argues that this Divine Bureaucracy seeks to define the ground rules and sanctions towards what it sees to be the perfection of Muslim life. This includes establishing elaborately correct rituals around worship, to ideal family formation, to the inculcation of spiritualism in the national education curriculum, and to the purification of money, accumulation and wealth.

In this lecture, Professor Mohamad will focus on discussing how the Syariah has been reformulated to embody a new Malay-Muslim masculinity and femininity. In doing so it has also re-defined Muslim-non-Muslim intimate and social relations in a plural society. Despite all these, Malaysia has several paradoxes. It has seen few openly violent racial-based conflicts, and gender inequality has not been its worst failings. But there are other egregious costs. Could this be due to the consolidation of a Divine Bureaucracy which is the definitive Islam of the present period, and how so? The lecture will address these questions and expand on Professor Mohamad’s analysis of Bureaucratic Islam in Malaysia.

Maznah Mohamad – Biodata

Maznah Mohamad, formerly Associate Professor of Malay Studies (till June 2024), is 2024 AKU-ISMC Guest Scholar. She also currently holds the position of Honorary Fellow at the Department of Malay Studies of the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS, she held the position of Visiting Chair in ASEAN and International Studies at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Canada, from January to December 2001. At NUS, she was first appointed as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow with the Asia Research Institute (ARI) in 2006. Her single authored books include The Malay Handloom Weavers: A Study of the Rise and Decline of Traditional Manufacture (ISEAS, 1996), Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia (Routledge, 2006), and The Divine Bureaucracy and Disenchantment of Social Life: A Study of Bureaucratic Islam in Malaysia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She served as Head of the Department of Malay Studies from June 2019 till December 2023. While serving as Head of Department she continued to be active in research by leading several research projects, which resulted in two forthcoming co-authored books: Visual Representation of Femininities of the Malay World: Camera, Chimera, Colonisation (Amsterdam University Press) and Sexuality and Islamic Spirituality in Early Malay Writings: A Textual History of Sex and Gender (I.B Tauris/Bloomsbury Press), both expected to be published by 2025.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Host or Publisher AKU-ISMC