Going beyond the Universal-versus-Relativist Rights Discourse and Practice: The Case of Malaysia

This chapter argues that foreclosing the universal-versus-relativist debate in gender studies as a deadlock is an act of epistemological violence. The local vision that potentially impacts the global practice of women’s rights suggests possibilities of moving forward beyond the deadlock of the universal-versus-relativist debate. In doing so, Malaysian faith-rights-based activists deconstruct competing claims of ascendancy arising from the “truth” of religious texts versus the “universality” of rights discourses. The chapter focuses on the provisional link between the categories of rights and religion within the context of faith-rights-based activism in Malaysia. It outlines the global vision of women’s rights that is universalized and secularized; and the local practice of women’s rights that reconstitutes cultural relativism as particularizing women’s rights in order to ground it in local contexts. The local practice of women’s rights is revolutionary in its insistence on the principles of universality and indivisibility, from a gendered lens, and from a postcolonial one through spiritualizing rights and politicizing religion.