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Personal Touch, Professional Style:

Women in Malaysian Islamist Politics

David Kloos 1

Seri Indah, Sunday, 29 April 2018. Ati listens attentively as the candidate
starts her speech. Like many Malaysians, she votes in the rst place for a party
or alliance. Individual politicians matter less. Yet it is candidates who present
their parties’ plans and persuade voters so it is di cult to disentangle the two
at an occasion like this, a ceramah kelompok (literally ‘group talk’, a campaign
speech in front of a specially targeted group or community) in a low-cost
housing area in the state constituency of Seri Serdang, Selangor. Ati, she tells
me afterwards, makes a living by preparing food for a hospital and other such
places. She manages but it is a precarious existence and life has become more
expensive, especially since the government introduced a goods and services tax
(GST) in 2015. One of the obvious problems, she explains, is that election
promises seldom materialize. And politicians are often untrustworthy. In
2013, she voted for Noor Hanim Ismail, the candidate for the opposition and
a politician of the Pan-Malaysian Islamist Party, Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS).
Hanim won the state election but, according to Ati, did little for the people
afterwards and was never seen again by the occupants of the ats in Seri Indah.
e politician who has come this time round is Siti Mariah Mahmud. Her
candidacy is special because, while Seri Serdang is a state seat, she is a national
gure (although many people in the audience confess to me afterwards that
they had not heard of her before). ‘Dr Mariah’, as she is commonly known, was
one of only two female members of Parliament (MPs) for PAS (representing
the district of Kota Raja, Selangor) until, in 2015, she left the party to help
establish Parti Amanah Negara (National Trust Party, Amanah for short), a

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