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Women in Malaysian Islamist Politics 177

cadres, including Hajjah Jamilah and Dr Mariah, left PAS to join the Parti
Pekerja-Pekerja Malaysia (the Malaysian Workers’ Party, PPPM). e latter
was reformed and rebranded as a party for progressive Islamists and renamed
Parti Amanah Negara. As part of a new opposition alliance, Pakatan Harapan,
Amanah became one of the winners of GE14.
e remainder of this chapter analyses women politicians’ roles in terms
of what I have called the mutual constitution of religious authority and
professional expertise (Kloos 2019). How, and to what extent, do contemporary
cultures of professionalism break ground for women as religious authorities
both in and beyond formal religious and political settings? e intersections of
gender, religion, and class signify changes that fall largely outside the purview
of electoral politics. Yet these categories are also at the basis of powerful (or
convenient) labels—such as ‘women’ or ‘professionals’—and thus subject to
contestation between Islamists and others, between PAS and Amanah, and
within each of these parties. Nominations and campaign strategies, both
in GE14 and in previous elections, reveal the ‘female professional’ as a site
of struggle, open to appropriation and strategic deployment by parties and
individual politicians, both male and female, across the political and ideological
spectrum. e next section elaborates upon this idea of the female professional
as a contested gure by contrasting it with the idea of the politician as preacher.

e Politician and the Preacher
Mariah Mahmud was born in 1958 in a small town in the northern state
of Kedah. She grew up in what she calls a ‘typical Malay family’. By this
she means that her family had long earned their living predominantly from
farming and that religion was ‘at the core’ of their life. Her mother, who
studied at the famous Islamic reformist Al-Mashoor school in Penang, was
‘very religious’. Her father, the son of an imam, took on various voluntary
tasks in the local mosque and a religious school besides his main work as a
teacher and headmaster in a secular school. Mariah was the rst person in
her family to obtain a tertiary degree and the rst woman in her family to
pursue a professional career. e New Economic Policy (NEP), an a rmative
action programme aimed, among other goals, at the social and economic
uplift of ethnic Malays, particularly in rural areas, enabled her to study in one
of the country’s most prestigious girls’ schools, the English-medium Tunku
Kurshiah College in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. Subsequent degrees from
Cairo University and King’s College in London paved the way for a career
as a doctor, lecturer, and head of department at the National University of
Malaysia Medical Centre.

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