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186 David Kloos

used for visits to sacred graves and other religious sites). ese visits were an
important element in her team’s e orts to win over fence-sitters and to build
her image, or ‘personality’ (personaliti), as some campaigners call it. e team
struggled, however, to combine the stando sh expert and caring gure in the
same image. ‘In the village’, assistants told her, it was important to ‘try and
touch people’. us, she spoke little about party or policy and concentrated
instead on listening to people’s concerns. She also brought stethoscope,
sphygmomanometer, and packets of medication so she could combine these
conversations with brief medical examinations. While I saw something
decidedly touching about these encounters, the obvious challenge was to make
the whole thing look genuine. Ha dzah found it tiring, she confessed to me
between houses. While she believed both gender and profession worked to
her advantage (‘I’m used to house calls, so this is like a second nature to me’),
it was also clear that she was more comfortable giving speeches than ‘doing
ziarah’. e campaign leader told me this was the only area—‘whom to speak
to, what to say, how to behave’—in which she really needed their advice.
at awkwardness brings me back to the ironies implicated in women’s
candidacies. As noted, for PAS and Amanah, elding women professionals
kills two birds with one stone. It engages party members and voters critical of
overly conservative interpretations, but it is also partly a branding exercise, a
way to show that these parties are inclusive with regard to gender and secular
education. at merely symbolic aspect helps to explain these women’s often
unpropitious placements and approaches. Dr Rosni Adam, for instance,
although second in rank in Muslimat PAS, was elded in an area of downtown
Kuala Lumpur where the composition of the population left PAS little chance
of winning, regardless of candidate. Amanah’s Dr Ha dzah Mustakim,
perhaps the most vocal candidate when it came to the need to strengthen the
role of women in politics, campaigned in a place where religion was deemed
important, yet to maximize the contrast between her and a competitor known
for her outward piety, she de-emphasized her own religious knowledge,
which is actually impressive. Also ironic is the tendency in Malaysia, not
exclusive to PAS and Amanah, to have women compete against women.
While a female elected representative thus becomes the certain outcome in
some constituencies, it also means that capable women eliminate each other.
According to some of my interlocutors, this tendency is a problem because
it decreases women’s opportunities to change people’s perceptions and the
electoral landscape by showing that they can take on, and defeat, men. As one
of Ha dzah’s assistants told me—surprisingly, because following on a brutal
critique of their competitor Rohani’s sugary image and ‘lack of vision’—
elding women against women ‘is just a bloody waste’.

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