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Kim ShivelySoutheast Asia, East Asia, Australia,
and the PacificRecent transformations in many countries of the
Asia-Pacific region, home to the world’s largest
Muslim population, have dramatically reconfigured
gender relations. In both Muslim majority and
Muslim minority nations, the complex interplays
between development (often state-led), consumer
capitalist culture, economy, polity, and religious
practice have had profound implications for women’s
and men’s everyday lived experiences, and for wider
processes of identity formation. Expanding educa-
tion, the entry of large numbers of women into
modern labor sectors, rapidly rising ages at mar-
riage, the decline of arranged marriages, changing
divorce rates, and birth rates declining well below
replacement level in a number of countries, notably
Japan, Singapore, and Thailand, have all meant
widening opportunities for some women, and
deepening exploitation for others. Women have
been important political actors, especially in their
engagements with states over issues of family law
and violence against women; but they have also
frequently found themselves placed ideologically
by state nation-building projects and media as
keepers of family and bearers of cultural and
national identity and honor (Ong and Peletz 1995,
Sen and Stivens 1998, Edwards and Roces 2000).
Although the so-called Malay World contains the
world’s largest Muslim population, it is often
treated as peripheral within discussions of Islam.
Muslims, however, account for over 88 percent of
Indonesia’s 220 million inhabitants, 65 percent of
Malaysia’s 23.27 million population, the majority
of Brunei’s 300,000 plus population, 14 percent of
Singapore’s 4 million population, and are a signifi-
cant presence in the Southern Philippines and
Southern Thailand. Indeed, Malay identity in
Malaysia and Singapore is synonymous with being
a Muslim. Outside the Malay World, in other parts
of Southeast Asia, in East Asia and in Australasia,
Muslims form important minorities (although Glad-
southeast asia, east asia, australia, and the pacific 351ney has counseled against understanding the con-
cept of “minority” to imply any simple idea of
marginality, 1991).
The intensifying Islamization of the last few
decades has had particular implications for Muslim
women, especially in the area of personal laws.
From the colonial period, issues concerning Mus-
lim women’s situation and Islamic family law have
formed a site of extensive social and cultural con-
tests in both the majority and minority societies of
the region, with divisions within communities of
believers between conservative and modernist, lib-
eral forces. Debates around polygamy and divorce
have been especial concerns. In Indonesia, Malay-
sia, and the Philippines, for example, colonial legal
apparatuses set up separate spheres for Islamic
family law, alongside the remnants of customary
law (adat) and the new civil laws. This often pro-
duced confusing, contradictory, and disparate legal
systems, with an overall lack of uniformity of laws
and their application (ADB 2002). It is notable,
however, that the everyday kinship practices of
most Muslim social groups within the Malay
World are in fact often strongly female-centered, in
contrast to dominant images of Muslim family life
in global discourses. Although the complexities of
modernity have greatly modified the underlying
bilateral and female-centered kinship patterns,
these continue to have significance.
Recent Islamization has also brought new sources
of identity and identity politics: in embracing a “re-
vived” Islam, many women have become impor-
tant new religious agents in their own right, and
shapers of contemporary local, regional, and glob-
alizing Islam. But women’s long-term significance
as religious agents, both acting as such, and in
instructing the young from generation to genera-
tion, has not been adequately recognized either in
political spheres or in scholarship.Muslim majorities
It is often argued that women in the Malay World
possess a degree of relative autonomy that con-
trasts with women’s experiences in East and
Southeast Asia: it is suggested that East Asian kin-
ship and family relations have tended to be more
male centered and patriarchal, whereas Southeast
Asian kinship has mostly been bilateral (kinship
links traced through both males and females),
according greater gender equality in inheritance.
These advantages are ascribed to women’s eco-
nomic importance in the precolonial economies of
the region. Such categorizations, however, can over-
simplify the complex histories of interrelationships