CIA The World Factbook

YI: You have advocated for the introduction of sex education in schools. How has that been received?

Marina Mahathir: Well, I'm not the only one. A lot people have advocated for this and now I think the cry for it is much more urgent because of AIDS. I think the public is beginning to realize that if we don't talk to young people about HIV, then how on earth do we protect them? The problem is always in the delivery of this education. I think the Ministry of Education is now coming around to the idea that, yes, we need this. But the question is how do we do it? This includes the training of teachers, so that they can handle a lot of this very, very sensitive questions that kids are bound to ask, and making sure that they can answer with confidence and authority. And that's not easy to do. But as long as people think this needs to be done and they actually take steps towards it, I think we'll get there. But the other thing to impress upon them is the urgency of the matter. We can't take 10 years to do this, because we'll have a lot more people, young people with HIV by then. It's just got to be done.

YI: It's a regional problem too. The UN Secretary-General recently said that despite some progress, the HIV/AIDS problem continues to escalate in the world. What do you think should be the immediate priorities, at least here in Southeast Asia?

Marina Mahathir: I think the immediate priority should be a re-focus on prevention. Because in the past few years, everyone has been talking about treatment. Treatment is easy. It's about putting people in hospitals and giving them medicine, and then you see some progress. Prevention is much more difficult because you have to deal with all these difficult issues such as sex, drug use and all that. And we need this regional cooperation because a lot of this involves intra-country issues: migration, workers going from one place to another, and without this sort of cooperation, nothing will happen. It's something that has been talked about at the ASEAN level, that's in the ASEAN work plan. Still, nothing seems to move. I'm not sure why.

YI: You recently gave a lecture titled "Fatal Confluences: Islam, Gender and HIV/AIDS in Malaysia" which links the HIV/AIDS problem to the status of Muslim women. Can you explain?

Marina Mahathir: Well, I didn't mean to say that it is a matter of consequence, that when you bring Islam, gender and HIV/AIDS together that the result will definitely be fatal. But I wanted to make the link between the three, because there's a lot of people talking about Islam and gender and a lot of people talking about gender and HIV/AIDS. But not too many are talking about the three together. Now, we need to look at how people's perceptions of Islam influences how they behave, particularly for women, the gender roles that people think come from religion, particularly on relationships with men. Because a lot of this really makes women very vulnerable, even in marriage. A lot of women around the world are getting infected, even though they have one partner in their lives, and that's their husbands. And yet they're getting infected. And that's really because of the status of men and women in many of our societies, that men are free to do what they want and women are not. But how do women protect themselves? When they are unable to negotiate at all, when the power dynamics are completely unequal and they are unable to leave marriages which are unsafe, because there's nothing to support them outside. And a lot of this comes from beliefs about religion. Whether Islam actually says this or not is a different matter. It's how people believe that this interpretation affects them in this way. That's what I was trying to explore.

YI: In fact, many of your columns deal with Muslim women getting a raw deal in many ways, that they are going backwards. Isn't that a harsh assessment?

Marina Mahathir: It is harsh, it's true, especially for Malaysia, people call us very harsh because Malaysian women are, in fact, quite advanced. But we are in a situation now where we used to have very good laws, for Muslim women in the country. But they have slowly been amended, so that their rights have been eroded. In 1984, we had much better rights for Muslim women than we do now. And a lot of it is related to the personal law, which is detrimental to women, and arguably, not even Sharia-compliant. For instance, women's property, which they bring into marriage should always remain theirs. But the new law actually gives the husbands right over this property, especially should they divorce. And that's not in the Sharia. So what's happening? A lot of patriarchal notions that is coming from I don't know where, is creeping into what is called Sharia law. To me, that's an injustice not only to women but also to Islam, because we're giving Islam a bad name, by making it seem unjust. So, that's what I was talking about.

YI: Yes, in fact, you mention again in one of your columns that the tragedy of the Islamic world is that even in a supposedly modern country like Malaysia, the backward have the upper hand.

Marina Mahathir: This is because people are so scared of contradicting them, because they feel these people are ulama (religious teachers) and therefore they must, necessarily have more knowledge about Islam and therefore, who are we to say anything. And that's always the criticism if you say anything against these people. People attack your credentials. "Did you go to Al-Azhar?" "How much knowledge do you have?" Not the substance of what you say. It was the same with my critiques. They never actually dealt with what I was saying, more about my credentials. That's what makes people scared. They always say, "Oh, I don't know that much." But, why? And I think that's wrong because the first command in Islam is to read - iqra. So, we should all read and we should all learn. There's nothing that says this knowledge should be limited or interpreted for us by certain people. We all have access to the Qu'ran. We all have access to God. So, I don't see why certain people should be given the sole power to interpret, especially if they make us feel bad. I don't think Islam was given to us to make us feel miserable. And that seems to be the case, the way these people are interpreting it.