Introduction: de-colonizing Islam and Muslim feminism

Abstract

This book is about Islam, female leadership, Sufism, power, sexuality and feminist praxis in the world’s most populous Muslim society – Indonesia. Analysis of the roles women play in one institution, the pesantren (a traditional Islamic boarding school for the study of the Qur’an, Hadith and other classical Islamic texts) and the ways in which it shapes their lives and identities is the heart of this volume. Each chapter explores some combination of these topics in one or more pesantren and/or the ways in which what we call ‘pesantren selves’ shape other institutions and discourse systems. By calling attention to the importance of gender in pesantren culture, wealso seek to advance a larger effort to de-colonize the anthropology of Islam and Muslim feminism in Indonesia. The chapters in this collection emerge out of post-colonial debates about feminism and Islam, particularly those articulated by the feminist anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (2001). In response to Edward Said’s (1978) seminal post-colonial work, Orientalism, Abu-Lughod (2001: 101) stated that it ‘was not meant to be a work of feminist scholarship or theory. Yet it has engendered feminist scholarship and debate in Middle East studies as well as far beyond.’ Regrettably, the dichotomization of the Arab East and the West and the flourishing of Arab feminism at the intersection of the two has established the hegemony of Middle Eastern (and South Asian) voices in feminist studies of Islam. Arabfeminisms, like Arab Islam, have been judged to be the authentic ones. Essentializing Islamic feminism along Arab, South Asian (diasporic) or Western lines threatens to form yet another hegemonic discourse. This raises concerns about women’s marginalization of other women, in particular that of Muslim women by Muslim women. The authors in this collection attempt to confront this hegemony by decon-structing categories that deny the authenticity of Indonesian Islams and those that enable the confusion of Arab, South Asian and Muslim feminisms. We consider the applicability of Western and Middle Eastern feminist theory to Indonesian cases. Pesantren and pesantren-based Muslim feminisms cannot be understood in isolation from the social, political and religious systems of which they are components. Similarly, the lives of the people who teach, learn and live in them are shaped, but not determined, by feminism and the pesantren experience. This volume illustrates a diversity of feminist voices in Indonesia thatremain largely unknown for three reasons: The first is that Indonesian scholars are less inclined to write in English than their Arab and South Asian counterparts (Blackburn et al. 2008). This is a legacy of Dutch colonialism. English has not been naturalized to nearly the extent that it has in former British colonies. The second is that many Indonesian feminists are more concerned with praxis than academic discourse. The third is that the Arab-centrism of Islamic studies and Western perspectives on Islam more generally, make it possible for Western feminists to ignore non-Arab Muslim discourse with impunity. Further, Western and European female anthropologists’ misreadings of non-scripturalist Islam as nominal in Indonesia prior to the 1990s contributed to the under-representation of Muslim women in scholarship on Islam and Indonesia, following typologies and paradigms established decades earlier by male scholars in the colonial and post-colonial literature (Smith 2008). The pesantren and feminist thought and practice emerging from it are notwell known except to a small community of specialists. One of our purposes in this volume is to work towards rectifying this situation. Our point is not simply that there are Indonesian examples or cases worthy of consideration, but also that the pervasive Arab-centrism of the academic study of Islam has led to the marginalization of Indonesian (and Southeast Asian) Islams and Muslim feminisms. This marginalization is the product of a colonial Orientalist discourse that views the Islams of the region as inauthentic because they differ from those of the Arab heartland. Here, the tropes of Western colonialism merge with the discourse of a new Wahhabi, and especially Saudi Arabian, cultural and religious colonialism that also views Indonesian and Southeast Asian Islams as inauthentic and confounds Islam with Arab culture. This is a double-edged sword because it allows scholars primarily concerned with Islam to ignore Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asianists to ignore Islam. This means that in the burgeoning literature on women and/in Islam, Indonesian and other Southeast Asian Muslim women are marginalized. There is a solid line of Western-derived discourse on Indonesian Islamthat began during the Dutch colonial period, continuing into the present,much of which focuses on the analysis of Javanese and Malay language religious texts (Drewes 1969; Florida 2000; Ricklefs 2006; Soebardi 1975). Yet, at least until recently, Islam has been less than fully visible in scholarship concerning Indonesian cultures and social life. Here, dominant paradigms rooted in Arab-centric perspectives on Islam minimize its impact on Indonesia. This view, which owes much to an alternative variant of Anglo-Dutch Orientalism and is forcefully articulated in the writing of Clifford Geertz (1960), led generations of ethnographers to neglect the study of Islam in the constitution of Indonesian personal and collective identities (Woodward 2010). Arab-centric perspectives on Islam in Indonesia further explain the lack offeminist inquiry into pesantren and Sufi orders affiliatedwith them. Until recently there has been relatively little scholarship on women and gender in pesantren and almost none on Sufism. This is also in part because pesantren and Sufi orders are patriarchal institutions that offer little space for women in public contexts. Zamakhsyari Dhofier’s (1999) study of the pesantren tradition in East Java provides a framework for understanding pesantren culture and especially the central role of the kyai (male Muslim leader) in its social structure. Kyai are charismatic Muslim leaders and scholars whose status within the pesantren is much like that of the king in a traditional Javanese state. The work by Saipul Hamdi, Asna Husin, Bianca J. Smith and Eka Srimulyani (in this volume) complements Dhofier’s by providing insight into the gendered aspects of pesantren and shows the important role women play in the reproduction of pesantren culture. Their work parallels that of other feminist scholars whose research on Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures describes Muslim women in leadership positions and the strategies they employ for resisting and negotiating with male dominance. Our focus on pesantren in this volume moves beyond the existing literature. Chapters by Mustaghfiroh Rahayu and Inayah Rohmaniyah include accounts of new forms of organization and study of Islam, including pesantren that are residential facilities for university students and others rooted in Salafi or Wahhabi teachings as well as traditional boarding schools. Chapters about Aceh and Lombok reveal the role of non-Javanese cultures in forming pesantren selves and lifestyles. By engaging with Arab and South Asian Muslim feminisms, we bringIndonesia into a transcultural debate about Islamic feminism. Indonesian Muslim women have been marginalized in these debates by tendencies to essentialize Muslim women in terms of Arab or South Asian women’s experience. Indonesian discourse on women and Islam differs from the Arab and South Asian varieties, due to cultural and political differences. In Southeast Asia human rights abuses and atrocities such as honour killings, dowry murder, female genital mutilation and public stoning are not practised. Feminist anthropologists have shown that bilateral kinship systemscommon in Southeast Asia afford women levels of social autonomy, economic agency and access to inheritance and land unknown in the Middle East (seeErrington 1990; Firth 1995; Karim 1995). These systems also contribute to the establishment of complementarities that value both male and female. This is not to suggest that Indonesian women are free from abuses that follow patriarchy, but that the stereotyped array of abuses and violent practices associated with Islam in other places are not present in Southeast Asia. This problematizes the assumption that Islam is the source of such abuse. It challenges Arab and South Asian Muslim feminists to further consider the cultural roots of patriarchal practice.