Last month, in a speech he made addressing Fatayat and Muslimat, NU’s two women’s organizations, Yahya said, “NU does not need to go along with various gender ideologies developed from other cultures.”

He continued: “I remind Fatayat and Muslimat, don’t get involved in feminism.”

This Wednesday, Yahya reiterated his call, saying that Muslims should only follow Islamic ideas and creeds.

“These many isms, including feminism, did not grow out of Islam, [they grew] outside the Islamic tradition. I always tell everyone that NU is Islam, and we have to ensure that Islam is the motivation,” he said during a media briefing to announce the organization’s centenary.

Yahya went on to say that if Muslims wanted to campaign for equal rights, they should draw their inspiration from Islamic teachings and not feminism.

“If you want to think about women, you need to use the perspective of Islam. [...] If we follow feminism as a mere ideology, we will have endless debate,” he told reporters.

Referring to his decision to install female activists and politicians on the organization’s central board, such as East Java Governor Khofifah Indar Parawansa and activist Allisa Wahid, the daughter of the late influential NU cleric and former president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, Yahya said they had been recruited simply on the basis of their qualifications and not their gender.

“They all have the capacity that I don’t find in male NU members. It had to be them, and this was not a matter of [meeting a gender] quota,” he said at the time.

Yahya has received much criticism over his earlier statement, which some activists have blasted as “anti-feminist”.

Julia Suryakusuma, director of the Gender and Democracy Center at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education and Information (LP3ES), said the NU chairman’s statement was indicative of a phobia for both the West and feminism.

“This phobia creates an a priori rejection of feminism, which in the end is about gender discrimination, and the source of gender-based violence,” she wrote in an opinion piece published on Feb. 1 in The Jakarta Post.

Read also: Gus Yahya Staquf’s volte-face on feminism?

Last December, shortly after she was inaugurated as Fatayat chair, Margaret Aliyatul Maimunah vowed she would campaign for bringing Muslim women out of their domestic lives and into the public realm.

“Women should all realize that their existence is valuable and they should not remain only in the domestic sphere,” she said in her inaugural speech.

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