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Women in Malaysian Islamist Politics 175

and the interviews she carried out were sometimes quite di erent from mine.
Our experiences generally turned out to complement rather than contradict
each other. e chapter concludes with a plea for a comparative approach
to professional styles as a factor currently recalibrating the role of women in
Islamist politics in and beyond Malaysia.

Women and Political Representation in PAS

PAS has a long but poor history of female representation. In 2004, people
in Pasir Puteh, Kelantan, chose Kalthom Othman as their MP, making her
the second female elected representative for the party, after Khadijah Sidek in
the early 1960s. While Islamist movements generally are not known for their
openness to female leadership, the gap is still surprising in some ways. Khadijah
Sidek’s story points to the fact that women played a rather prominent, albeit
under-recognised role in early Malay (radical) nationalism; PAS has gone
3
through various ‘radical’ and ‘nationalist’ phases in its history. With regard
to PAS’s grounding in religious authority, Farish Noor (2014: 40) provides
the fascinating detail that the ‘third UMNO-led Ulama Congress’ in 1951, an
event that would lead eventually to the birth of PAS, was attended by ‘[m]ore
than two hundred ulama … with twenty female representatives from all over
the country’. He does not elaborate on these women’s role or on why this early
involvement did not translate, in subsequent decades, into a more central role
for women in the party structure or a larger number of women candidates
during general elections.
e sudden change in 2004 must be seen in the context of a transformative
movement within the party in the later decades of the twentieth century. In
the 1980s, a new generation of leaders inspired by the global Islamic revival
rejected the party’s parochialism of the previous decade and embraced an agenda
of religious renewal combined with a call for social, political, and economic
reform. PAS diversi ed its ranks and tried to appeal more to younger, urban,
and higher educated voters. It was in this period that the party ‘experienced
its rst major in ux of university-educated activists and intellectuals from the
local and foreign campuses’ (Noor 2014: 126). Complicating this quest for a
broader reach were internal ideological contestations and the tense electoral
competition between PAS and the ruling (Malay-nationalist) UMNO. In the
1980s and 1990s, both sides increasingly saw and presented the struggle for the
Malay vote as a struggle for the Muslim vote. Aware of the electoral threat PAS
posed in times of religious resurgence, UMNO in the 1990s came to project,
more than ever before, a certain Islamic style, combining a claim on ‘modern’

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