Chapter 6 turns from the political spectacle to popular understanding of the cases. I draw upon open-ended interviews, focus group discussions, and original national survey data to explore the various ways that the cases were understood across religious and ethnic communities. The data suggest that the political spectacle conditioned popular understandings of the cases. More consequentially, the sharp binary frames reinforced a popular understanding that Islam and liberal rights are in fundamental tension with one another. The second half of the chapter turns to the efforts of Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian NGO that works to deactivate these binaries and expand women’s rights from within the framework of the Islamic legal tradition. I examine the challenges they face and the strategies they pursue in overcoming the rights-versus-rites binary that is now deeply entrenched in the popular imagination.

This chapter is part of Constituting Religion: Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State, published by Cambridge University Press, 2018.