| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 東南亞研究所 === 101 === In the 1970s there was a wave of Islamic revivalism throughout the world. This upsurge provided an impetus for the Islamic euphoria in Malaysia—the dakwah milieu. The revival of Islam caused a breakdown in the Malay customary laws and values of Malaysia, including Malay’s kinship bonds, family patterns, and gender order and relations. Meanwhile, various Islamic organizations blossomed in Malaysia—i.e., Darul Arqam, ABIM, Ja’maat Tabligh.
This paper focuses on a club named the Obedient Wives Club (OWC), which was established by a group of highly educated Muslim women from Darul Arqam on 4th June 2011. The OWC elite Muslim women promote Islam as din (way of life) where members practice to revive the spirit of Islam and promote Muslim’s submission to God. They stress that a Muslim woman should be obeyed to her husband. They agree that polygamous marriage helps to fulfill husband’s sexual desires, keeping the husband from straying and curbing social ills such as prostitution, abortion and divorce etc.
The Obedient Wives Club caused a great deal of controversy in Malaysian society. The OWC elite Muslim women are regarded as backward, conservative and victims of a patriarchal religion. However, previous research into Muslim women in Malaysia has tended to explore the problem by paying no attention to the particular social context in which the women live. The absence of Muslim women’s voice in mainstream studies has inevitably caused the emergence of the Obedient Wives Club to be seen as a new and strange phenomenon, contradictory to the prevailing concepts of modernity.
This paper employs text analysis methods, and also conducts in-depth interviews with eleven OWC elite Muslim women, aiming to clarify that the emergence of the Obedient Wives Club is inextricably linked with the wave of Islamic revivalism occurred in the late-1960s and 1970s. Secondly, this paper also shows that the OWC elite Muslim women’s life of piety is, in fact, their ‘conscientization’ experiences towards the Islamic way of life. In addition, the OWC elite Muslim women have preserved their agency and autonomy by negotiating with their husbands’ authority in their everyday life. Their decision to be ‘Islamized’ creates an ‘ideal home’ that provides inner and outer support for them, thus enabling them to react to the malaises that occur in modern societies.
Instead of seeing them as an oppressed group, the OWC elite Muslim women, in fact, have embraced their subjectivity in everyday life. They enter the historical process as responsible subjects, becoming individuals who know, and search for, self-affirmation.
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