Female Sufi guides and the Murshida fatwa in Indonesian Sufism: Murshidas in a Sufi order in Lombok

Abstract

Abstract This article contributes to the wider historicity of female Sufi spiritual guides by engaging Indonesian examples about which very little have been written. While women can and do hold different levels of rank and leadership in Indonesian Sufi orders (tariqah), usually among all-female congregations, this article examines a very rare example of a woman in a public leadership position overseeing an entire tariqah network inclusive of male and female disciples. Across the Sufi world, it is not common publicly to find women in official positions of leadership as spiritual guides based on a predominant and normative, but fractious, understanding that males are authentic guides with authority to initiate disciples. Keeping with this understanding, the Indonesian national body that governs the correctness of Sufi orders has since 1959 maintained a fatwa that bans women from holding head leadership positions as spiritual guides of the highest rank known by the title Murshida, which is the female counterpart to the male Murshid. We explore the conflation of Murshid with leader and subsequently problematize it in terms of gender when the Murshida rank is not separated analytically from the male Murshid. Arguments suggest that in practice the rank and roles of a Murshida in Indonesia are diverse and culturally situated and thus take on different understandings across socio-political contexts. Further to this, the article has two major aims: one is to historicize the place of the Murshida in the broader Indonesian context through an anthropological examination of contextual meanings this rank and title carries in practice as opposed to the strict fiqh understanding (which is masculinized in the male Murshid as a Sufi order’s legitimate guide); and the other aim is to document ethnographically the contestation within a Sufi order, Hizib Nahdlatul Wathan, on the island of Lombok in eastern Indonesia which had a Murshida as its formal leader and spiritual guide from 2005 to 2019 and who continues to hold the Murshida rank together with claims to inherited sainthood.