Page 197 - Towards_a_New_Malaysia_The_2018_Election_and_Its_6146371_(z-lib.org)

182 David Kloos

contexts. Although this choice leads to a somewhat distorted view and a focus
on candidates who lost, it allows me to analyse the salience of professional
appearance as a shared conundrum among women Islamists.

Campaigning for GE14
When Amanah was formed in 2015, PAS celebrated the return to its status
as a ‘party of ulama’. However, in GE14 the party continued its policy of
nominating ‘women and professionals’, often announced jointly as such. In the
urbanised and industrialized state of Selangor, the party stated, nominations
consisted of ‘70 per cent professionals and 30 per cent ulama’ (Roslan 2018).
Compared to the elections of 2013, PAS’s total number of state and federal
female candidates rose from 22 to 36, including both professionals and gures
with religious backgrounds. ese numbers must be interpreted with care.
e rise in the number of women candidates becomes less impressive when
considering, rst, the fact that PAS, competing on its own instead of in
alliance with a larger opposition bloc, contested many more seats in 2018 than
in 2013 (meaning that the percentage of women candidates decreased rather
than increased), and secondly, that many women candidates were nominated
in places where PAS stood little chance, including, tellingly, the district
8
which Ustazah Nuridah Mohd Salleh, the head of Muslimat PAS, contested.
It should be noted also that an ongoing lack of women candidates was not
limited to Islamist, or even Malay-Muslim parties, but rather was a general
feature of GE14. Although I could not nd aggregate data on candidates’
educational or professional backgrounds, at least one newspaper noted that
women candidates overall seemed to have ‘impressive academic quali cations’
(arguably suggesting ‘more than men’).
9
Amanah, though born from the progressive ‘professionals’ faction in PAS,
invested in its religious credentials and neglected the agenda of advancing
women. Great fuss was made over the candidacy of the ‘ulama-like’ Nik Omar
Nik Abdul Aziz, one of the sons of Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, even though he
contested a seat in Kelantan where PAS was virtually unbeatable and some
of his campaign activities were actually focused on Selangor (see Hew, this
volume). e party elded ten women in state seats (out of a total of 104
nominations) and no women for parliament (out of a total of 34 nominations).
Hence, like other parties, it remained far from Pakatan Harapan’s own target,
following the norm set by the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), of 30 per cent
women’s representation. In Kota Raja, party president Mat Sabu replaced

This content downloaded from 139.80.253.0 on Fri, 06 Nov 2020 04:22:27 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms