TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Gender jihad, the burqa-bikini and religious conservatism
Abaya, burqa, niqab and hijab
Change Size
A
baya, burqa, niqab and hijab. Iniquitous symbols of female religious subordination, where human fallibility supersedes divine design.
As Muslims observed Idul Adha last week, who paused for Siti Hajar as her husband sacrificed their son in an act of divine obedience?
God's words absolute. Hajar's faith resolute. But a mother's heart must have cringed.
Where was Hajar's emotional narrative, given the Koran's "reverence to the womb that bore you" and Prophet Muhammad's designation of "paradise under a mother's feet"?
Perhaps still lurking in the shadow of seventh-century Mecca. Veiled in ignorance and cultural insularity.
Nuryamin Aini, a lecturer at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University's Sharia School in Jakarta, says Hajar's muteness may be the result of "the *quiet* trust of a mother to her child and husband".
"Or due to her inability to defend *speak for* herself," she says in the journal Swara Rahima, referring to Hajar's position as a once-banished second wife.
Except for the bedroom and maternity room, the keepers of heaven are marginalized in Islam's discourse.
It began with misogynistic Arab clans, then the mosque. Finally women were edged out of politics and leadership altogether. Hajar was the first victim of post-Muhammad Islamic history, which turned an egalitarian faith into a patriarchal monolith.
Umm Waraqa, Sayyidah Nafisah: prominent female imams and scholars of their time, but mere footnotes in Islamic history.
The shaping of Islam's paradigms (sharia) was bereft of female inquiry as men and Arab tradition defined Islam for women. Modern Muslim feminists and female clerics, the likes of Fatima Mernissi or Amina Wadud, continue to be perceived as curios or immoderate.
Today sharia abounds, beyond the borders of the Middle East, from Sudan to parts of Indonesia, yet still adopts the same cultural defects of its point of origin. Religion as a truncheon of political conservatism. Islam hijacked as the raison d'*tre of terrorism.
The end result: a mix of backwardness and incomprehensibility that blights the religion of peace and places women in legal peril.
Like Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, fined in August for wearing pants in public, or Aisha Duhulow, the girl damned by a Somali sharia court a year ago and stoned to death on charges of adultery.
In Indonesia things are not as bad. Yet.
But 21 regions - Cianjur and Indramayu in West Java, Enrekang and Maros in South Sulawesi, Pesisir Selatan in West Sumatra, and Aceh province, among others - have issued (sharia) bylaws discriminatory to women, whether on mandatory hijab or aspects of social behavior.
As Kemala Chandra Kirana, chairwoman of the National Commission on Women, says, "It isn't an issue of agreeing or disagreeing with the jilbab *hijab*, rather a case of freedom of women's expression."
The latest imposition of further conservatism in Acehnese bylaws regard dress, including the prohibition of pants for women.
Musdah Mulia, head of the Indonesian Conference on Religion and Peace, says, "*The bylaws* don't make people morally conscious, they only make them hypocrites.
"How can you punish someone based on a 19th-century law that wasn't even around during the Prophet's time?" adds Musdah, the 2009 recipient of the Il Premio Internazionale La Donna dell'Anno (International Prize for the Woman of the Year).
Some have fought back by reviving liberal Islamic voices at the fore. Others reconciled modernity with wacky concoctions such as the burkini (the burqa-bikini bathing suit).
But surely there is a simpler hidden lesson when understanding that Islam's most tolerant, peaceful and finest example, the Prophet Muhammad himself, was raised without a father.
Despite the tradition of Islamic scholarship and the renowned history of women in Indonesia's independence struggle, women here are overdue in their gender jihad.
Of the 21,500 pesantren (Islamic schools) in the country, an insignificant number are led by women or have, if any, senior females teaching male students.
Acknowledged female clerics are too few among their countless male counterparts. Most still cater to gender-specific congregations.
Who among them has endeavored to emulate Egyptian Kariman Hamzah who this year became the first women to complete a Koranic tafsir (interpretation) recognized by Al-Azhar scholars?
Empowerment through existing religious structures is not novel. Sinta Nuriyah, the wife of former president and NU chairman Abdurrahman Wahid, several years ago initiated women's centers through the pesantren network.
It might raise evolutionary awareness, but its success is questionable.
Women cannot rely on the acquiescence of set institutions to accommodate change. Like any revisionism, critical thinking - "women's lib" - challenges existing structures of authority.
How far are traditionalist pesantren clerics willing to emasculate themselves?
More than just wrestling the chauvinistic interpretations of Islam, there is a larger cost at stake.
If the rise of conservatism and religious terrorism is often attributed to a radical fringe permeating through religious schools, then inclusion of a gender-conscious tafsir may offset extremist vehemence.
Complacency breeds complicity.
It's time women reclaimed their position as equal voices in Islam.
Not by waiting, but taking the mimbar (pulpit) to preach that prayer is no less hallowed from a woman's mouth.
