The best of you are those who are best to their women.” How did it get twisted? – A study of the bureaucratisation of Islam and women's development

• Main Author: Nurin Nazurah Saifudin
• Other Authors: Walid Jumblatt Bin Abdullah
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Social sciences::Political science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/157180
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Countries where Islam plays a prominent role in defining their political identity tend to produce poorer outcomes in women’s development. This phenomenon is observed where countries with bureaucratised Islam such as in Malaysia and Indonesia, tend to rank low on UN’s Gender Development and Inequality Indexes. Hence, the research question this project explores is as follows: how and why does bureaucratised Islam impede the development of Muslim women in Islamic Southeast Asian countries? This paper delves into how different manifestations of bureaucratised Islam affect women, by comparing Malaysia that has more formally bureaucratised Islam, with Indonesia where Islam is not formally institutionalised as part of the state mechanism. I argue that formally bureaucratised Islam impedes women’s development to a larger extent due to its more restrictive scriptural interpretations, which adversely affects a woman’s material outcomes. This study fills a research gap by focusing on Southeast Asia, given that many studies on bureaucratised Islam and women’s development have been concentrated in the Middle Eastern and North African region.