Religion, nation and mother-love: The Malay Peninsula past and present

Synopsis This paper explores cultural contests around parental custody, religion and ethnonationalism in Singapore and Malaysia through the examination of some key episodes both past and present, in particular the famous case of Maria Hertogh, or Nadra. Political battles around this 1950 child custody case at the heights of the institutions of religion and state led to large-scale rioting in Singapore, which has reverberated to the present. The paper then analyses the later high-profile Jacqueline Gillespie case in the 1990s and some recent cases involving religious freedoms within Malaysia in which child custody became key issues. A core interest is the ways in which women, mothering – and children – are at the epicentres of important intersections of religion and nation; yet the gendered – and ‘childed’ – dimensions of these cultural contests appear to be regularly downplayed in scholarly and official history accounts, with most emphasis on the macro level of nationalist and /or ethnonationalist politics. It is argued that paying attention to the ways that ‘family’, the ‘domestic’, ‘intimate’ and structures of feeling can be seen to configure these events and operate as drenched symbolic structures can greatly enrich understandings of the forces at work.