and social project in 1920s Malaya was by Malay Muslim male reformers and writers Syed Syeikh Al-Hadi and Zainal Abidin Ahmad, better known as Za'aba.[3] Although they advocated the education of women and girls as a means to women's emancipation, the Malay Muslim modernists, or kaum muda, stressed the importance of Islamic learning as a way of equipping Malay women with the skills to fulfill their primary role, as educators of their children.[4]

In the post-war years between 1946 and 1948, women from different ethnic groups mobilised against anti-colonialism and issues related to women's inferior status in occupied Malaya.[5] Although they were members of the female-arm of nationalist and communist parties founded by men, the women became more radicalised in their gender-oriented anti-colonial aims and eventually gained semi-autonomous statusThis spring America belongs to a Frenchman. Not some world-weary actor, voluble television chef or suave and elegant wine-maker, representatives of trades that on this side of the Atlantic are seen as France's prime contributions to civilisation. No, the Anglo-Saxon superpower is in thrall to a tousled, left-leaning, Parisian economist, aged 42, named Thomas Piketty, and his doorstop of a tome on income distribution in the western world.

Capital In The Twenty-First Century, all 685 pages of it, is the No 1 best-seller on Amazon – apparently the first time that anything published by the venerable Harvard University Press has attained such dizzying celebrity. No self-regarding dinner party in Washington or New York is worth its salt without a discussion of it. Last Friday, came the ultimate accolade of