Kelab Taat Suami/Obedient Wives' Club

Last week I was talking to a friend and somewhere in the conversation she said "Well it looks like she's joined the kelab taat suami (club of subservient wives)" and I thought she was using a very witty metaphor until lo and behold, she sent me a link to this article:

‘Obedient Wives Club’ in Malaysia says good sex a must for happy marriage, healthy society

The KIT/OWC was started by members of the Global Ikhwan Group in Malaysia, which started a Polygamy Club last year. GIG in turn has links with Al-Arqam, a sect banned in Malaysia for having allegedly deviated from Islamic teachings.

I found several Malaysian blogs with comments on this and it felt like everyone had given their two cents' worth. Even AWARE and PPIS from Singapore have denounced it and right now everyone's watching these few families who are setting up a Singapore chapter of this club.

So what is this club all about? Certainly it has an exclusive membership - Muslim women only, possibly in polygamous marriages. A specific kind of Muslim women - conservative, perhaps financially insecure.

The social situation in Malaysia is different, and economically too, but I'm racking my brain trying to think why Singaporean women would want to open such a club. I can only come up with the following:

1. These women sincerely believe it's a God-given command to be obedient to their husbands. If their husbands take care of them materially and emotionally (the husband's duty), they have no reason to not be obedient (the wife's duty). If the husband is less than perfect, then sabr (patience) is the answer to all troubles in this world.
2. Talking about marital sex with a good purpose (building a good marriage and preventing social ills) is a way to circumvent our society's taboo on talking about premarital or marital sex.
3. It's a simple, universal answer (good sex) to complex problems (divorce, gambling, adultery, domestic violence, prostitution), and everyone loves a simple answer.

But what are the implications of thinking like this?

1. Women carry the entire burden of abovementioned complex problems. Already people say Muslim women are the source of fitna (chaos) in this world. Need I say more? 
2. Men are essentially shallow, sexual creatures, with no desire for emotional intimacy or intellectual stimulation with their wives. Muslim men already can divorce much more easily than Muslim women, and "bad sex" is added to the list of reasons for divorce that don't require proof.

And anyway, this is not special to Malaysia/Singapore or Islam. There are 'Submissive Wife Projects' in the "West" too! 

One is the Issacharian Daughters/Wives newsletter, which promotes girls to live with their family (not going to university) and helping their father's work until they are married, whereupon they start helping their husbands.

This is the blog of Dana, married to a "wonderful, Godly, patriarch", with her own thoughts about being a 'submissive wife'.

My take on this is that if a woman wants to be an obedient wife, go ahead. If she wants to be an equal partner to her husband, that's fine too. But let's not put unfair burdens or stereotypes on each other.
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P/S: Polygamy is not actually a contradiction to this club's mission. Some said that if a woman could satisfy her husband enough he would not go looking for other women. But polygamy (or specifically, polygyny) is allowed for Muslim men, and does not fall under adultery.

Seeing difference differently.

Recently I met a Chinese friend (let's call her Ann) who was in Europe and she remarked that she was getting a lot of racist remarks on her appearance (speculating that it was possibly due to her recent very 'Chinese' haircut) here in Holland. I looked at her and thought to myself, that's nothing new for me.

My ethnic appearance (call me brown, yellow, olive, or sawo matang) has been commented on for maybe a third of my life. It's nice to be taken for a local in some regions like Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia), but surprisingly it also happened to me in France and surprise, here in Holland - no thanks to their colonial histories. The French occupied Indochina during WW1 and the Dutch were infamously in the New East Indies for 400 years.

When I was studying in Grenoble, I could speak French so many people thought I was simply first generation French. And here, there was a large flow of Indonesians after WW2, and more recently migrants from Suriname (another Dutch colony, independent since 1975) of Javanese ancestry, who migrated to Suriname during the late 19th and early 20th century.

So for Ann, she had not been made conscious of how her ethnic appearance, because in Singapore the Chinese form the majority. At best, there could be Burmese foreign workers hitting on her. (The Bangladeshis tend to hit on the Malays and Indians, haha.)

Relatedly, she also voiced her unhappiness with the anti-PRC-migration sentiments in Singapore, leading up to the elections. When I asked her if she liked having bus drivers that couldn't speak English, she said, I don't hate immigrants - my grandmother was an immigrant.

The difference though, is that if our grandmothers migrated to Singapore now, hers could stay and would get PR or citizenship served on a silver platter, while mine would be mistaken for a domestic worker and treated like third-class citizens.

Sociologist Ruth Frankenberg wrote in her article "When we are capable of stopping we begin to see” in the book Names We Call Home, that "privilege is the (non) experience of not being slapped in the face." 

http://www.entersingapore.info/sginfo/images/People.jpg

It is not only people from the dominant race and class in a country that have advantages over working class people and minorities, but those of us with privilege often don't or can't see how these differences matter. When those with more privileges do not see these different circumstances, they help to in fact, reproduce race and class disparities.