Zainah Anwar - Malaysia

Zainah Anwar, Executive Director of Sisters in Islam (SIS), works on the rights of Muslim women within the framework of Islam to end discrimination against women in the name of religion while upholding the principles of justice, equality, freedom and dignity within a democratic state.

In this short interview (four minutes), she tells Global X the story of a woman who spent over seven years out of an eight-year marriage to try to get a divorce from her violent husband, even though he had already remarried and had children with his new wife.

Zainah Anwar, an optimist, hopes that her current work will become irrelevant in the next 10 years. She knows that the laws that Malaysia has inherited from the British need to be adapted to the new realties that women are now facing. She is convinced that "justice will prevail, because the realities of our lives are totally different from when these laws were first conceptualized."