Laman SIS:

http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/Veranda/7502/ atau http://talk.to/sistersinislam/

[taiplah sendiri - malas nak buat :)

Mereka gunakan ayat quran dan hadis untuk mengiyakan pandangan mereka. Yang hairannya dia tak jumpa ayat yang menyuruh bunuh orang murtad! Mereka ni tak belajar sejarah kalifah Abu Bakar (ra) ke?

AL Quran bukan boleh diambil buat dalil sebarangan untuk derive hukum. Kena ada ilmu bahasa arab, nahu, asbabun nuzul, mantiq, nasikh wal mansuh, dan lain2 lagi ilmu quran. Begitu juga hadis, ada banyak ilmu hadis - termasuk ilmu rijal sekali. Bukannya balik belajar oversea terus nak takwil quran supaya lebih sesuai dengan fesyen ....

Sisters In Islam adalah (NGO), didaftar 1993 sebagai SIS Forum (Malaysia) Berhad, satu syarikat berhad melalui jaminan.

Cuba baca rencana Time di bawah. Punyalah sesat mak we ni.... Bawah sekali disebut anak diktator tua yang menjadi penyokong mereka.

TIME International

April 8, 1996 Volume 147, No. 15

TROUBLE IN PURDAH

With fundamentalism rising, Malaysia's sisters in Islam fight their religion's pro-male traditions

ANTHONY SPAETH

Good women," says the Koran, "are the obedient." That is a concept Aminah, a career woman in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, has struggled against for years. After her husband lost his job in 1994, he started beating her every month until she surrendered her paycheck. Aminah sought counseling from relatives, filed two reports with the police, and finally asked the local Shari'a, or Islamic court, to dissolve her marriage. Her request was rejected. Clerks and clerics alike told her to go home and be obedient. She obeyed.

Such traditional attitudes are finding new strength in Malaysia, which is seeing a growth of once marginal fundamentalist Islam. Fighting this trend is a small group of Malaysian women who are anything but obedient. They call themselves the Sisters in Islam, and their sights are set on those elements of the culture, particularly its customs and traditions, that are holding Malaysian women back in the march into the modern age. The group--a prominent journalist, a writer, an artist, a lawyer, an Islamic scholar, a sociologist and two women's-rights proponents--is only eight strong. But their pamphlets, books, letters to the editor and public conferences have had impressive reach, particularly among counseling services and agencies dealing with abused and abandoned wives.

"It is amazing how many young women say they have heard of the Sisters in Islam," comments Ivy Josiah, executive secretary of the Women's Aid Organization in Kuala Lumpur. "They finally feel like someone is looking out for their interests." Islamic scholar Amina Wadud, a co-founder of the Sisters who is now living in Richmond, Virginia, says the group wants to shine light on the "dark corners of Islam," particularly the religious-based maltreatment of women. "We don't question the Koran," Wadud insists. "What we question is 1,400 years of exclusive male interpretation."

When Malaysia gained independence in 1957, calls for a strict Islamic state were rejected in favor of a quasi-secular system that respects non-Muslim religions and continues today. But fundamentalist sentiment has risen since the 1980s: the Islamic Party Pas is one of the country's major opposition political groups, with its strength concentrated in the eastern state of Kelantan. Even the ruling United Malays National Organization has been forced to highlight its conservative credentials. At the same time, however, Malaysia has grown ever richer, its buildings taller, its discos rowdier. Women are working in factories and offices and driving to supermarkets in Malaysian-made Proton subcompacts, promising many a crash into the barriers between Islam and feminism.

The Sisters formally banded together in 1990, the year Pas won control of the Kelantan legislature. Among the first laws pushed through by chief minister Abdul Nik Aziz was one requiring rape victims to produce four eyewitnesses or face adultery charges; the statute was overruled by the central government. But Aziz has banned alcohol, co-ed amusement-park rides and unisex beauty parlors, and billboards across the state feature cardboard scarves pasted around female faces. Aziz says his fight is not against new excesses. "If modern means alcohol, drugs and free mixing of men and women," says the chief minister at his humble residence in Kota Bharu, "those are centuries old." Norani Othman, the Sisters' sociologist member, does not disagree. "Muslim men think the root of all evil is women," she says.

The Sisters have focused on the implementation of Malaysia's family laws, in particular the divorce and polygamy statutes, which vary from state to state. Some 10% of Muslim men in the country practice polygamy, and an untold number manage to abandon wives and escape alimony by crossing into more conservative states such as Kelantan.

On the national level, the Sisters are fighting for greater protection of abused wives. "There is nothing in the Koran," says member Rose Ismail, an editor at the New Straits Times, "that says a man can beat his wife." Malaysia passed a stringent domestic-violence law in 1994 but in deference to conservative Islamic politicians, has declined to enforce it. "We know there is a problem," admits Abdul Hamid Othman, minister for religious affairs in the Prime Minister's department. "We just need time to study how to implement it."

The Sisters have supporters in high places, including the daughter of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Marina, and they'll need them. The Koran specifically warns against women with a tendency to rebel. Its advice: "Admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them." The tricky question is what constitutes rebellion in a late 20th century Malaysian female. Says Zainah Anwar, a writer and a Sister:

"I want to be a woman, a good Muslim and listen to the B-52s loud. I don't see any contradiction in that."