Women Shaping Islam

Reading the Qu'ran in Indonesia

Pieternella van Doorn-Harder

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252073175, 9780252030772
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092718
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian History

In the United States, precious little is known about the active role Muslim women have played for nearly a century in the religious culture of Indonesia, the largest majority-Muslim country in the world. While much of the Muslim world excludes women from the domain of religious authority, the country's two leading Muslim organizations--Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)--have created enormous networks led by women who interpret sacred texts and exercise powerful religious influence.
In Women Shaping Islam, Pieternella van Doorn-Harder explores the work of these contemporary women leaders, examining their attitudes toward the rise of radical Islamists; the actions of the authoritarian Soeharto regime; women's education and employment; birth control and family planning; and sexual morality. Ultimately, van Doorn-Harder reveals the many ways in which Muslim women leaders understand and utilize Islam as a significant force for societal change; one that ultimately improves the economic, social, and psychological condition of women in Indonesian society. 
 

PART 1

Indonesian Islamic Landscapes

1 Discussing Islam, Discussing Gender

A process is going on within our society of creating gender awareness and teaching alternative interpretations of the Qur’an that are inclusive of women. This new knowledge cannot be stopped. It is slowly spreading among the youth of pesantren and among members of Muslim organizations; eventually, it will trickle down into the high schools.

—Wardah Hafidz, Muslim activist for women and children’s rights

The work of the women of ‘Aisyiyah and Muslimat NU cannot be separated from their environment; it sustains continual conversation with local cultures, with developments concerning women’s position generated by the state, and with trends within Islam. Islamic opinions concerning the status of women are not static but are influenced by historical conditions and recurring or newly emerging debates about gender. This chapter surveys some of these constellations in places where they affect the activities of the women leaders. It tries to provide a roadmap situating the women within the forces they must respond to at all levels of work, grassroots and academic. These include influences from outside Indonesia, such as Middle Eastern culture and ideas. Inside the archipelago, Javanese culture shaped misogynistic ideas about women, while the state during the time of the Suharto regime reproduced a combination of Middle Eastern and Javanese culture to engineer a comprehensive theory about women’s roles and duties.

Discussing Islam

The Speech

“Indonesian Islam” is a complex and continuously developing concept that encompasses various interpretations of the holy texts. In June 1998, Dr. Malik Fadjar, the Minister of Religious Affairs, gave a speech to the Muslimat NU pointing out some of the challenges and changes facing Islam in Indonesia, especially where women were concerned. Not only was Fadjar the Minister of Religious Affairs, he was also a famous Muhammadiyah leader and former president of one of its largest universities in Malang. In five points, Fadjar summed up what he considered the building blocks of Indonesian Islam at the end of the twentieth century:

1. We have to look at Islam’s context, especially at its leaders, male and female, and at the leaders of its organizations. They come from over twenty provinces, each with his or her personal context and symbolism.

2. From the houses of worship we continuously hear the call to prayer. Even at the bus terminal there is a small prayer house, albeit dirty. Yet we cannot measure how much blessing it can bring.

3. Our Islamic educational institutions, beginning from the preschool [Bustanul Athfal] to kindergarten [Taman Kanak-Kanak], nowadays offer Islamic learning similar to that available at the mosques. Also the traditional Islamic boarding schools [pesantren] have become connected with the secular institutes for education. Even though 95 percent of the pesantren are private and independent, they now offer the public high school curriculum.

4. Our tradition can be witnessed when we celebrate feasts; these are the times when we hear Qur’an recital and preaching all around. Local delicacies for the feasts show how Islamic traditions are intertwined with local cultures.

5. In understanding our Islam, we also have to consider factors like economic growth, social mobility, and cultural expansion. Economic growth has given us things we never had before. It is global and can be witnessed everywhere. At the same time, Muslim women choose to wear a jilbab [full hair cover] instead of the traditional kerudung [scarf that is loosely draped over the head]. What is the significance of this trend? Social mobility brings youngsters from different Islamic backgrounds to the city. There they meet with others belonging to Muhammadiyah or NU; they worship together and forget about their differences. We now have cars and airplanes, which lead to cultural expansion. We become more efficient and practical. Even in the holy city of Mecca, coming out of the Al-Haram mosque, you walk into a McDonald’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Everything is now oriented towards efficiency and growth.

People discuss their faith and moral values. These cannot be taught at school only but also belong in the sphere of the family and society. We now see a gap between school, family, and society. The women’s organizations continue to create new generations of religious leaders [who help bridge this gap]. My own children do not want to pursue further studies in religion. They want to study business and economics. We are facing growth, change, and renewal and constantly have to adapt our religious movements to the changing environment.¹

In this speech, the minister covered the range of challenges that are shaping the Indonesian Islamic landscape. Technological advancements and influences from the West and Middle East that affect economic growth and communications are gradually changing ways of thinking and bringing large parts of Indonesian society into processes of transition called “modernization” and “globalization.”² These complex and multifaceted processes are stimulated by, among other modern developments, the free education provided by the Suharto government since the 1970s. Cities and communities have become an amalgam of different stages of thinking and experience: past and present, local and global are interwoven. In rural places removed from the centers of advanced growth and communication, traditional life goes on. But many Indonesians now live in a world where they can go online in the cyber-café in the afternoon and attend a traditional wedding ceremony at night.

The dingy prayer rooms the minister mentions are still evidence of a vibrant faith. Since the 1980s, Islam in Indonesia has seen an unprecedented resurgence that is reflected in the increasing presence of mosques and prayer houses. Their number nearly doubled between 1973 and 1992.³ Since 1998, Indonesia has seen an increase in groups that advocate extremist forms of Islam and are changing the Islamic landscape.

These transitions greatly influence the lives of the women leaders, as they must be agents of change in guiding women on religious, practical, philosophical, and strategic levels. They not only influence styles of women’s personal piety but also guide them in matters concerning hygiene, nutrition, child rearing, politics, and economic development. In their sermons, they can introduce new ideas to the millions of women who listen to them via cassettes, at schools, or at the local mosque. Women leaders can reshape or reinvent rituals, working to make indigenous rituals that do not agree with the basic Islamic teachings into rituals acceptable to Islam.

Islamic schooling and the raising of children are among the most important areas of work of the Muslim organizations. From its inception, the reformist Muhammadiyah created schools with a curriculum that combined nonreligious and Islamic knowledge in the cities, while in the rural pesantren, religious topics were mainly taught. According to Malik Fadjar, these two poles of learning have become interconnected: formal schools have incorporated more of the informal religious curriculum, while the pesantren have adopted the formal curriculum of nonreligious subjects.

Finally, the minister mentioned the teaching of akhlak (morals and ethics) and the importance of the family in preventing problems such as drug abuse among the younger generations. Many Muslims perceive the youth to be in a permanent state of “moral crisis” and even “moral panic,” which in their view can only be remedied by proper moral teachings. Forming the moral and ethical attitudes of its members has always been one of the main goals of the Islamic organizations.

Generational differences also shape the new religious landscape. Students who grew up in a staunch NU or Muhammadiyah milieu meet on the neutral grounds of universities, where they join Muslim student organizations and get involved in discussion groups with students from different backgrounds. Modernization here can mean becoming a more fervent devotee of Islam and expressing this, for example, by joining an Islamist-minded group and wearing Arabic-inspired Muslim dress. Advanced education and the introduction of western ideas about gender roles have changed young women’s perspectives concerning the role of women in society and the household. The right of personal choice has become an issue, as young women increasingly favor choosing their own future profession or marriage partner. Up until the late 1970s, parents decided what their children would study and whom they would marry. These changing paradigms have opened up room for personal choice in the religious field as well. Muslims can choose which authority to follow. The organizations are not the only ones guiding the believers with fatwas and moral advice, and their women leaders are not the only moral voice women will listen to.

What stands out in the minister’s speech is that he envisions a moderate Islam, one that allows women to play important public roles. This attitude is unique to Indonesia; in most Islamic countries, especially those in the Middle East, Islamic resurgence often means reducing women’s roles to the domestic sphere.

The Muslim women’s organizations face the challenge of designing effective programs that suit Indonesian Islam in the twenty-first century. When they started over fifty years ago, their goals seemed simple: to spread Islam among Indonesian Muslim women and children, and promote development by designing simple self-help projects. At that time, the basic religious education of Muslim women and children was their main task. Now organizations such as the Muslimat NU must act not only in the face of rapid societal changes but in the many new venues those changes create. Ibu Sjachruni, the organization’s chair from 1979 to 1995, expressed this predicament: “We are marking time [jalan di tempat]; we never seem to move forward; we have to address the urgent problems surrounding us before it is too late.”⁴

The remark resonates with many active women leaders within Indonesian Islam. Society moves around them at a dizzying speed and sometimes with deplorable results. Since Suharto stepped down, Indonesia has witnessed many incidents of ethnic and religious violence. The economic crisis of the late 1990s caused grinding poverty in a nation that had lived in relative comfort for three decades. Indonesia’s youth are overwhelmed with images from western TV programs that portray greed, infidelity, and free sex as the norm. Muslim leaders dread the use and abuse of drugs as a problem with the real potential to destroy Indonesia’s youth. A growing array of Islamic discourses vie for young people’s attention. In a vital effort to strengthen community, female religious leaders try to help women from different walks of life to come to terms with these new challenges for themselves and their families. At the same time, they try to help them discover how to be agents of change that can transform society for the good of women and men.

Women leaders are also involved in shaping the evolving debate about gender in Indonesia. Broadly speaking, the development of the discourse on gender and Islamic feminism in Indonesia took place in three stages. Grassroots movements focusing on illiteracy, basic education for women, and charity started in the early twentieth century. They produced the second stage of different types of women’s activism that ranged from educational to human rights programs. The final stage is the development of an academic discourse on women’s rights. This is shaped by women’s studies programs in the state and Islamic universities and through writings of women activists, including writings about Islamic sources, especially Islamic law as applied through the Fiqh.

History: In the Footsteps of Kartini

The daughter of a Javanese regent, Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904) is considered Indonesia’s first female advocate for women’s rights. She was among the first indigenous women to be allowed to attend the Dutch elementary school, and she briefly ran a small school for girls herself. In letters to Dutch and Indonesian friends, Kartini regularly mentioned the importance of education for girls and the predicament women faced because of the customs of polygyny and arranged child marriages. Kartini died very young in childbirth after her arranged marriage. Her letters became famous in 1911, a few years after her untimely death.⁵ Around the same time, the Dutch colonial government, moved by increased awareness of the plight of the indigenous population, started to implement its so-called Ethical Policy that opened Dutch education to larger groups of the Indonesian population.

Railways were built at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with faster transportation, the increased use of the printed word helped spread new ideas rapidly throughout the archipelago.⁶ The number of girls attending school was rising, and separate schools for girls were opened.⁷ Between 1913 and 1918, women’s associations such as Putri Mardika (The Independent Woman) came into being and lobbied for education for girls and were concerned with issues such as child marriage, forced marriage, polygyny, trafficking in women and children, and prostitution. Most of the women active in these associations were of noble birth or from the upper classes.⁸ At the same time, religious organizations such as the Sarikat Islam and Muhammadiyah created sections for women, among them ‘Aisyiyah, that appealed to middle- and lower-middle-class Javanese women.

Although most of the women’s activities were on the local level, during the first decades of the twentieth century the women’s movement was divided into two currents: secular-nationalist and religious-nationalist. Both movements regarded women as a vital force for national and/or religious development and eventually for the independence struggle. National coordination started to become evident in 1928 when about six hundred women representing thirty women’s associations gathered in Yogyakarta for the fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Indonesian Islamic Landscapes
• Part 2: Women of Muhammadiyah
• Part 3: Women of Nahdlatul Ulama
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index