Gender in contemporary Acehnese dayah: moving beyond docile agency?

Abstract

In this chapter I examine an under-researched area of Pesantren Studies by exploring debates about gender issues in contemporary Acehnese dayah (a traditional Islamic boarding school for the study of the Qur’an, Hadith and other classical Islamic texts, also known as pesantren).1 Research on dayah mainly focuses on the formal public domain (Amiruddin 2003) – the territory of men – at the expense of the private sphere, where women play important roles and participate in religious life. Data on women’s participation in the public sphere are even rarer, and consequently many accounts subtly imply that Muslim women have little substantial or active agency in public fields, particularly in relation to the religious public field where women are assumed to be marginalized. During 2008-11, I conducted research on women’s agency in dayah acrossseveral regions in Aceh, including Aceh Besar, Pidie Java, Bireun, and Aceh Barat Daya. I observed that new models of agency became available to women as a result of sociopolitical changes in the post-conflict and postTsunami period (i.e. after 2005). My analysis revealed inconsistencies in the ways Muslim women interact with Western-based gender ideologies that conservative dayah discourses reject. This inconsistency demonstrates how dayah women actively contextualize their roles in dayah as they negotiate with different discourses. Very little research has been conducted on how dayah Islamic institutions have engaged in negotiation processes with the influx of foreign gender discourses in the post-conflict and post-Tsunami era. I therefore examine how women’s agency in dayah has changed in response to these wider social changes. The women discussed in this chapter exercised what Saba Mahmood(2001: 2) has referred to as a form of docile agency whereby agency is ‘not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’. This model of submissive agency can be found in women’s lives in religious settings, such as mosque movements or other religious congregational groups or institutions, especially in Pakistan (Heighland 1998), Egypt (Mahmood 2005) and in Southeast Asian nations including Malaysia (Frisk 2009). The new gender discourses that penetrated post-conflict and post-Tsunami Acehmotivated some women from dayah to move beyond concepts of docile agency by contesting and resisting standard dayah gender discourses which are centred on male-defined notions of gender. Women’s ability to integrate dayah-taught docile agency with new forms of agency demonstrates that they are able to preserve dayah models of agency and at the same time accommodate social changes. Women who formerly concentrated primarily on their dayah started topursue more active roles beyond their dayah and religious congregational groups. Some dayah women leaders in Aceh have familiarized themselves with a more active model of agency through their engagement in women’s rights advocacy, anti-human trafficking, peace and conflict resolution issues, and anti-domestic violence campaigns. A female dayah leader won the Aceh Women’s Award in 2010 for her efforts in providing shelter and support for women victims of domestic violence (see Husin, this volume). In the 2009 general legislative election, some of these women stood for election, representing different national and local political parties. What needs to be questioned is whether women’s active participation inpublic politics has moved them beyond a form of docile agency. Initially, I assumed it had, particularly from my earlier research during 2008-9, but my conclusion was then challenged when I met with these women again during 2010-11 and learned that those who had participated in the general election in 2009 had decided not to do so again in the future, retreating from formal political life. They reasoned that it is better to concentrate on developing dayah instead. This chapter explores how the complex context of a post-conflict society, the implementation of shari’ah law and internationalization of Aceh in the post-Tsunami recovery process has affected and modified dayah women’s roles, opening up space for them to creatively form relevant modes of agency as situational.