Smoking, Hijab, and Gender Identity: Indonesian Muslim Women at Café Bars from Social Jurisprudence Perspective

Agency versus Insurgency

The corpus of miriam cooke’s writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women’s writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women’s bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular or Islamist, attempting to reconfigure the public sphere according to their vision.Women Claim Islam, which focuses on the rise of Islamic feminism in the Arab world, helps us understand how secular and religious women in contemporary Turkey respond to prevalent power structures and political ideologies. cooke (2001, viii) argues that dominant narratives of history, war, emigration, and exile have excluded women’s stories, leading Arab women writers to demand “to be heard and seen.” These writers have formulated complex identifications based on their multiple positionalities, criticizing global and national feminisms and Islamic power and knowledge systems that marginalize them (155).Much of the research I conduct in Turkey focuses especially on women who self-identify as devout Muslims. For much of the 1990s through 2010, the headscarf symbolized shifting ideological fault lines in Turkey (Secor 2005). During this period the state banned the wearing of this article of clothing in many government and public spaces. In other spaces, secularists maligned and marginalized women who wore it. From 1996 to 2013 I heard many accounts of how women’s practice of wearing the headscarf had initiated encounters and experiences that made them aware of the dominance of secular ideology not only on the streets but also in scholarship, in feminist activism, and with respect to their own bodies and family lives. All devised tactics to navigate the everyday geographies of secularism and several became actively involved in resisting this hegemony by producing alternative realities.In Women Claim Islam cooke (2001, ix) usefully defines feminism as “above all an epistemology”: “it is an attitude, a frame of mind that highlights the role of gender in understanding the organization of society.” Whether or not a woman self-identifies as a feminist, cooke argues that feminism “seeks justice wherever it can find it. Feminism involves political and intellectual awareness of gender discrimination, a rejection of behaviors furthering such discrimination, and the advocacy of activist projects to end discrimination and to open opportunities for women to participate in public life” (x). This emphasis on feminism as awareness, rejection, and activism is productive for thinking about how headscarf-wearing women have responded to opposing parties politicizing and instrumentalizing women’s dress and bodies in struggles for power and dominance. Pious women have strategically claimed identities as Muslim women while refusing to be depicted as the singular Muslimwoman—a term that cooke (2007) coined to criticize the erasure of differences among Muslim women and the emergence of an ascribed singular category where gender and religion become one. Turkish women, most of whom wore the headscarf, participated in demonstrations at the gates of universities and in city squares to criticize the headscarf ban from the mid-1980s. Realizing that most women’s rights organizations were aligned with secular state-sponsored feminism and did not consider the headscarf ban a violation of women’s rights, devout Muslim women either established new Islamic feminist organizations (Diner and Toktaş 2010, 42) or started working in human rights organizations. Several sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights, to no avail (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005).Focusing on the symbolism of the headscarf reduces this article of clothing to a representation of something else and erases the experiences of women and even the woman herself. Instead, the stories of women in my research illustrate how veiling is an embodied spatial practice that makes the body and shapes the experiences of women across the spaces they traverse (Gökarıksel 2007, 2009, 2012). In all cases, women’s stories reveal the intimate, embodied, and everyday workings of political power and the potential of women’s actions to expose and reconfigure that power. Indeed, women’s embodied practices, such as wearing the headscarf and identifying as devout Muslims, became crucial to their awareness of gender injustices. Their experiences helped many see and feel these injustices as products of secular nationalist political ideologies. This kind of awareness remains a critical element of their ability to challenge the reign of the Islamically oriented populist nationalism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regime as well.Women’s encounters with the state and broader cultural hegemony in public spaces produced a certain kind of feminist consciousness. For example, after deciding to wear a headscarf in college, Neriman found herself no longer able to pursue her university degree, disowned by her family, and rapidly losing her hair. Becoming pious and adopting a new style of dress and bodily conduct underscored for her an intimately felt sense of gendered injustice and initiated a critical approach to the making of bodies, everyday spaces, and the state (Gökarıksel 2009). Similarly, many Turkish women who wear the headscarf recount stories of feeling out of place in shopping malls (Gökarıksel 2007). Fellow citizens verbally and even physically assaulted such women at parks and on the streets because of their dress (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016).Pious Turkish women insistently claim their rights and seek belonging in the city and nation. Today headscarf-wearing women are increasingly and more comfortably visible in the media and on the street in Turkey. However, new lines of exclusion and unfreedom have emerged. For example, during a focus-group discussion with self-identifying devout women in 2013 in Istanbul, when one woman praised the AKP government for taking steps to address discriminatory acts against headscarf-wearing women, another questioned her claim of new freedoms, citing the crackdown on the Gezi protesters as an example (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016). This conversation underlines that while Islamic feminists have certainly developed deep criticisms of state secularism and associated feminist movements, they still can do more to criticize the masculinist, Islamic populist politics of the AKP regime as well as to stand up for the freedom of all women and other oppressed groups.A sea change occurred in Turkey at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A neoliberal, procapitalist, and increasingly authoritarian Islamically oriented government led by Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP and a newly enfranchised Sunni Muslim middle class challenged secular hegemony over politics, economics, and public life. To an important degree, these Islamic political and economic elites have become the new hegemons. Their values, lifestyles, and ideologies have replaced the spaces, institutions, and cultural norms previously defined by secular elites. These drastic changes are especially visible in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, where the new elites constantly and sometimes violently contest the city’s pluralism. The 2013 Gezi mass protests were a significant flash point in the struggle over who has a right to the city and whose norms and values will govern it.Since the rise of Islamic government, pious and secular Turkish women have also had to develop tactics to live with and challenge the hegemony of Muslim nationalism (White 2013). Since the AKP lifted the ban against the veil, wearing the headscarf has ironically become almost an obligation in many places. Studies today find that women feel that they must cover their heads and publicly present themselves as observant Muslims to ensure access to jobs and for family social mobility and economic success (Toprak et al. 2009). Women who wore tank tops or short skirts reported being harassed on the street even during demonstrations to counter the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016 (Tahaoğlu 2016, cited in Korkman 2017, 182, and Başdaş 2017, 187).Islamic feminism developed a crucial voice against oppressive secular republican ideology and secular state feminism. Today Islamic feminists are uniquely positioned to oppose the new forms of Islamic masculinist hegemony of government that professes to represent the victimized devout Muslim majority. The AKP consolidated its power over a decade in government, moving it in a more religiously and socially conservative direction, especially after 2007. In late May 2013 a mass movement emerged to resist a government plan to demolish a central Istanbul park and its centuries-old trees, but it quickly spiraled into a widespread protest against the AKP government, its neoliberal policies and practices, its intensified imposition of an Islamic lifestyle, and its increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Similar protest sites developed in other cities throughout the country.In Istanbul many groups came together at Taksim Gezi Park, and some joined an encampment that lasted more than two weeks. Among them were anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims, including women who joined the protests to reject Erdoğan’s efforts to present himself as representative of all pious Muslims. Photographs of such women circulated widely. In one, a headscarf-wearing woman carried a banner that ridiculed the Erdoğan government’s legislation restricting the sale of alcohol: “It’s impossible to stand you when sober” (Ayık kafayla çekilmiyorsun AKP). The poster held by the woman standing next to her (also wearing a headscarf) read: “Standing together against fascism” (Faşizme karşı omuz omuza) (festigan.blogspot.com/2013/06/direnis-degil-uyanis.html).The presence at the demonstrations of headscarf-wearing women whose Islamic orientation was visibly marked was significant because Erdoğan consistently tried to present the protests as a return to the “tyranny” of the secular establishment. To illustrate this narrative, he and progovernment media circulated apocryphal stories of headscarf-wearing women being abused in Istanbul during the Gezi protests. The presence of visibly pious Muslim protesters at Gezi complicated such representations. On June 7, 2013, about fifty headscarf-wearing women marched to protest the harassment of headscarf-wearing women on the street and expanded their concerns to include forms of violence that target all women. This march ended at Taksim Gezi Park, where the marchers noted a lack of harassment. They asserted ownership of urban spaces with banners that read, “Taksim is ours, Çarşı is ours, the street is ours.” They enacted “a politics that refused the alignment of the headscarf with unconditional support for the AKP government, and call[ed] for a broad feminist alliance to fight violence against all women” (Gökarıksel 2016, 236–37).Following Gezi and the corruption scandal that threatened Erdoğan’s close circle in the winter of 2014, the AKP government continued to amass power and suppress critics. The unsuccessful coup attempt of July 15, 2016, fueled a widespread government crackdown on its opposition facilitated by the declaration of a state of emergency. The government arrested and detained thousands of people and canceled the passports of many more. Most of these people were associated in some way with Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement, which the government accuses of orchestrating the coup. However, among the detained are also critics of the AKP, pro-Kurdish activists, academics who signed a peace petition, and members of parliament from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). For years Erdoğan voiced ambitions to change the parliamentary system into a presidential system that gives the leader more executive power. After the coup the parliament proposed a referendum on this issue for April 16, 2017. The results are widely contested, although Erdoğan declared victory.Women’s voices, Turkish and Kurdish, were crucial leading up to the referendum. They challenged what they aptly called “one-man rule” and urged everyone to vote no. Among these were devout Muslim women who wore a headscarf and even the çarşaf. Their voices questioned ethnic and religious divisions that extend the ruling party’s power. They challenged the narrative that the AKP is ruling on behalf of all devout Muslims. They expressed a clear message that being religious does not mean supporting Erdoğan unconditionally and pointed to ongoing and expanding injustices. These women voiced their opposition despite strong measures to silence any dissent.cooke’s work on Islamic feminism opens up productive avenues for understanding women’s awareness, positioning, and activism. The work draws attention to the ways in which women who may not necessarily identify as feminist are indeed feminists—and may be uniquely positioned to expose and subvert masculinist narratives and ideologies. They do so even, or perhaps especially, in repressive environments where their bodies, dress, and everyday practices become targets of political ideologies and when cultural and political hegemony is manifest through their bodies. In Turkey such women have challenged secular ideology and encouraged moving away from authorized state feminism toward more plural feminisms. Today their voices are crucial for questioning the encroaching authoritarianism of an Islamically justified ideology.cooke (2007, 140) notes how central Muslim women have become to political discourses and cultural production about the Middle East and Islam:In the twenty-first century, Muslim fundamentalists, neo-Orientalists, Western feminists and Muslim and non-Muslim states are all arguing about what is right and wrong for the newly visible Muslim women. More and more Muslim women are joining the fray. Recognizing their centrality to their society’s self-conception, they are looking for ways to affirm themselves. Many are embracing and performing a singular religious and gender identity even if their lives are as varied as the innumerable cultures they inhabit.The increased visibility of Muslim women, cooke argues, generates a primary identity in which gender and religion become inseparable and gain ascendance over other identity categories. Such reductive labels serve conservative right-wing politics at home and abroad: “The Muslimwoman erases for non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims. This erasure of diversity is mirrored within Muslim societies . . . where the Muslimwoman becomes the emblem of the purity of her community” (cooke 2007, 142).These dynamics continue to structure how others see and represent Muslim women as well as how they see and represent themselves. Identifying a diverse “Islamic culture industry” that includes fashion, literature, and products for Muslim women (Gökarıksel and McLarney 2010), cooke, Ellen McLarney, and I collaborated on the “Marketing Muslim Women” project, which examined the production, circulation, and consumption of images, commodities, and narratives concerning Muslim women in the early twenty-first century. The related JMEWS-sponsored conference led to the publication of a special issue of the journal that I guest-edited with McLarney. The essays focus on the negotiation and redefinition of what it means to be a Muslim woman “through or in reaction to the images, narratives, and knowledges about Muslim womanhood constructed in the marketplace.” We argue, “As Muslim women stake out their own positions, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism” (2). The political implications of this engagement continue to be crucial.cooke (2007, 153) encourages us to examine how women form and negotiate their gender and religious identities in complex times. Such a project remains important as the image of the Muslimwoman continues to circulate, even wrapped in the US flag in an iconic response to Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric and policies. cooke’s research provides us with the critical tools we need to perform double critique that questions given categories, develops grounded understandings of agency, and recognizes the aesthetics of politics.

For Muslim women, covering aurat has clearly been commanded in Al-Qur’an. Therefore, most Muslim women wear Jilbab to do so. Although Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country and in recent years, more fashionable Jilbab designs have been growing in Indonesian Muslim fashion market, yet, not all Muslim women wearing Jilbab. This study examines how well the Theory of Planned Behavior works in predicting Muslim women’s intention to wear Jilbab. This article proposes that Muslim women’s intentions to wear Jilbab are influenced by their attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and together with perceived personal outcome. By using purposive sampling method, a representative national sample of 200 Indonesian Muslim women has been participated in a face-to-face survey about this topic. The findings confirmed the robustness of the Theory of Planned Behavior by indicating that both attitude and subjective norms significantly brought positive effect in predicting intention. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that perceived personal outcome and perceived behavior control appeared to be ineffective determinants. Therefore, the study result also slightly deteriorated the robustness of the Theory of Planned Behavior in the context of predicting Indonesian Muslim women’s intention to wear Jilbab. We present our findings, suggestions for future research, and potential limitations. The implications of this research for marketing practitioners are also discussed.

The experiences of spirituality during pregnancy and child birth in Indonesian muslim women

The paper analyzed the intention to travel alone in the perceptions of Muslim and non-Muslim women regarding travel constraints, motivation, perceived behavioral control, negotiation, and openness. Based on the existing literature, hypotheses were formulated and tested through structural equation modeling based on data from 574 valid online responses. Purposive sampling was applied to collect 278 responses from Muslim women and 298 responses from non-Muslim women, all from Indonesia. The results revealed the different direct influences between travel motivation and travel intention in Muslim and non-Muslim models. Constraints were found to have an insignificant impact on travel intention in both phases. All other proposed hypotheses were found to be significant. This paper contributes to the emerging research on Asian solo female travel and discusses practical implications for the travel industry to cater solo travel market.

ABSTRACTRecently, Indonesian Muslim women successfully convened the world’s first congress of women Muslim scholars (KUPI). This is only one segment of the story of Indonesian Muslim women. There are many narratives regarding Indonesian Muslim women and their diverse agenda. This article focuses on what has been brought by KUPI into a broader discussion of Islam in Indonesia. Drawing on intermittent offline research predominantly conducted in Jakarta and online research from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that KUPI, with its symbolic preferences, has strengthened the voices of civil Islam in Indonesia. KUPI has productively generated global attention due to its progressive emphasis that women can be ulama. However, there are other women’s voices of Islam and gender that are robust, particularly due to their rigorous use of information and communication technology. At the same time, this might be seen as promoting conservatism. Within the local context, this ideological position that is contrary to KUPI has gained more traction. Additionally, this article argues that progressive and conservative Indonesian Muslim women feature not only in the democratic pluralism of religious expression in the Indonesian offline and online spheres but also in the ongoing intricate interplay between Islam, civil society and gender equality.

Islam in Indonesia is culturally very different from that in the Middle East, particularly related to a tradition of greater freedom for women in public places. In Indonesia, there are many women entering public and political arena and even women are seeking and achieving unprecedented power and influence in public life. However, there are some barriers from religion and culture that give burdens to women to express their political views and to involve in public life. Very often women who want to enter politics find that the political and public environment is not conducive to their participation. This paper discusses cultural, religious, and political factors of the difficulties faced by Indonesian Muslim women to participate freely in public and political lives. This paper looks at how women’s status in cultural and social structure influences the involvement of women in political activities. This study is a philosophical investigation of the value of culture, religion, and politics to Indonesian women in democratic practices. With the use of intensive reading of books and other information sources, together with policy document analysis, the study aims to explore the problems and possibilities of putting the visions of democracy into practice in contemporary Indonesian women, to explore the nature of culture, religion, and politics in Indonesia in influencing women’s political activism, and to understand both the status of Muslim women and the dynamics of Muslim societies in Indonesia. This paper concludes that women are still under-represented in public and political institutions in Indonesia. The long struggle of women’s movement for equal rights has not been easy due to the cultural and religious reasons.

Islam in Indonesia is culturally very different from that in the Middle East, particularly related to a tradition of greater freedom for women in public places. In Indonesia, there are many women entering public and political arena and even women are seeking and achieving unprecedented power and influence in public life. However, there are some barriers from religion and culture that give burdens to women to express their political views and to involve in public life. Very often women who want to enter politics find that the political and public environment is not conducive to their participation. This paper discusses cultural, religious, and political factors of the difficulties faced by Indonesian Muslim women to participate freely in public and political lives. This paper looks at how women’s status in cultural and social structure influences the involvement of women in political activities. This study is a philosophical investigation of the value of culture, religion, and politics to Indonesian women in democratic practices. With the use of intensive reading of books and other information sources, together with policy document analysis, the study aims to explore the problems and possibilities of putting the visions of democracy into practice in contemporary Indonesian women, to explore the nature of culture, religion, and politics in Indonesia in influencing women’s political activism, and to understand both the status of Muslim women and the dynamics of Muslim societies in Indonesia. This paper concludes that women are still under-represented in public and political institutions in Indonesia. The long struggle of women’s movement for equal rights has not been easy due to the cultural and religious reasons.

This study aimed to explore the understanding of Indonesian Muslim women regarding jihad, radicalism, and terrorism. The study found that women have an understanding that terrorism is all forms of adverse action, carried out in a structured and grouped manner. They understand that all forms of terrorism activities usually have goals to be achieved and are based on religious or ideological understandings that are considered correct according to terrorist groups. Muslim women try to minimize this Islamophobia through improving understanding for themselves, their family, and community. The involvement of Muslim women in supporting counter-terrorism can be one of the strategies to create an atmosphere of peace in the community. Muslim women realize that the perpetrators of acts of terror in carrying out their actions sometimes act in the name of religion, even though there is no religion, including Islam, that legalizes the killing of fellow human beings and actions that cause damage to the environment. Therefore, one way to counter-terrorism according to Muslim women is by improving the mindset starting from themselves and their family. A person's actions originate from the mindset, which is why the mindset must be fixed first, before preventing the doctrines of misguided notions.

In Indonesia, as the highest Muslim population country worldwide, patriarchy systems are correlated with Islamic norms and values used for controlling human behavior, including the relationships of men and women. Addressing this issues, Muslim women try to expand their capabilities by migrating to Hong Kong as migrant workers. This research aims to study Indonesian Muslim women in Hong Kong based on their gender identity and religious value. A qualitative method was used. Applying purposive samples, research focused on Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong who joined a Muslim community. Research found that women’s transformation is strengthened by gender and religion, which used for reinforcing as Muslim Indonesian migrant worker activities and Muslim women community practices among Javanese Muslim women at Hong Kong. Research found that migration roles as a part of Muslim women new value, which is give a flexibility for Muslim women for working abroad as the transformation. In addition, Muslim women transformation in Hong Kong not only interpreted as individual norms but also manifested in collective activities during their leisure time in Hong Kong for strengthening Muslims women identity.

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.

The number of Asian female solo travelers, especially in the Muslim women travel market, has increased significantly due to the changes in social structures and women empowerment. However, Muslim women face unique travel constraints related to gender, social responsibilities, cultural norms, and religious practices, which need to be negotiated when attempting to travel alone. This constraint negotiation process of Muslim women should gain more attention in tourism literature. Thus, the study aims to examine the relationships between travel constraints, negotiation strategies, motivation, and intention to travel alone among Indonesian Muslim women. The structured survey was distributed, and 484 valid responses were collected. The data were then analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results confirm the significant effects of travel constraints on negotiation and travel intention. The moderating roles of travel motivation in the constraint negotiation model are partly supported. The finding of this paper provides insights into the perspectives and travel behavior of Indonesian Muslim women. The results may lack generalizability but offer an opportunity for future studies to further explore the relationships between the proposed constructs. Practically, providers of tourism services should create suitable offerings to meet the distinct requirements of female Muslim travelers.

Reviewed by: Muslim Women and Sport Christina Kwauk (bio) Muslim Women and Sport edited by Tansin Benn, Gertrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad. London: Routledge, 2010, 296 pp., $168.00 hardcover. Sport, usually described as a male preserve, has become a yardstick of gender equality and an arena in which women’s rights are championed and challenged. Often though, (Western) advocates, fans, and feminist scholars assume sport to be an endeavor pursued by women with shared gold-medal dreams and common gender-based sociocultural obstacles to overcome; differences in religious identity and cultural values are ignored in favor of the view that sportswomen share a universal sport agenda. The increased visibility of elite Muslim sportswomen wearing the hijab in international sport competitions reminds us, however, of the nonuniversality of women’s experiences and values. The topic of religion, women, and sport, therefore, opens up a unique area for expanding discussions on gender equality, women’s empowerment, and social change by challenging scholars and popular audiences to question deeply held assumptions about women’s identities, bodies, and public roles in society. Expanding this discussion, Muslim Women and Sport, edited by Tansin Benn, Gertrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad, is a timely collection of sixteen essays that highlights the diverse experiences and realities of Muslim women participating in sport. The volume is a product of an international meeting on the sporting opportunities of Muslim women held in Oman in 2008, and it represents the diverse perspectives, experiences, and research of its twenty-three contributing Muslim and non-Muslim authors. Muslim Women and Sport makes three important contributions to scholarship in this area: first, it gives voice to Muslim women athletes, coaches, teachers, and leaders who have been silenced, marginalized, or gone unseen in physical education and sport studies—a field dominated by non-Muslim Western researchers; second, the volume challenges negative stereotypes and assumptions about Islam, Muslim women, and sport by offering alternative, “woman-friendly” (32) interpretations of Islam, and by making a compelling case for the compatibility of Islam and women’s sport; and third, Muslim Women and Sport expands the analytical potential of gender analysis by recognizing the significance of religious identity and embodied faith as factors shaping the choices, values, and experiences of Muslim women participating in sport. Specifically, Pfister’s chapter aptly employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to frame a theoretical discussion on the sociological and political significance of different “body projects” and body practices for women who have been socialized in Muslim cultural practices, and the chapters on the Muslim diaspora make insightful contributions to understanding how central women’s bodies, and the control of these bodies, are in mediating the complex relationship among Islam, women, and sport. [End Page 186] The book is organized into four parts, with part 1 (chapters 1–3) providing a comprehensive overview of the underlying concepts and debates framing the entire volume. It also introduces the “Accept and Respect Declaration” (the first product of the Oman meeting), which states that “Islam is an enabling religion that endorses women’s participation in physical activity.” The declaration also recommends that “people working in the sport and education systems accept and respect the diverse ways in which Muslim women and girls practise their religion and participate in sport and physical activity,” including their “choices of activity, dress and gender grouping” (5). These points inform the foundational assumptions held by the authors in the remainder of the book—namely, that the religious values of Muslim girls and women must be respected, and that inclusive sporting environments can be created without religious transgression. The remaining three sections provide an encyclopedic representation of the history and contemporary status of Muslim women in sport in thirteen Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East serve as the sociocultural and political context for most of the volume, including Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Oman, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Branching out to other Muslim-majority countries in southeastern Europe and North Africa, two chapters provide snapshots of Muslim sportswomen in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Morocco, respectively. Finally, three chapters cover the Muslim diaspora in Denmark, Germany, and South Africa. It should be noted that...

Human agency is a basic human right. Just as humans are entitled to basic human needs, they are also entitled to agency i.e. freedom of choice. Human dignity is centered on this simple fact. Sometimes cultures and religions have infringed upon this basic right. In Kenya, for instance, Muslim women continue to be conflicted between upholding their basic rights as human beings, and adhering to their religious expectations. This conflict mostly manifests in matters related to sexuality and gender roles. While some Muslim scholars have asserted that human rights principles are at the heart of Islam, others have devalued human rights arguing that they are foreign, and western propaganda intended to destroy Islam. Muslim women in Kenya are caught in this dilemma. In this article, I explore the possibility of negotiating agency and human rights in a Muslim context. I draw illustrations from surveying and interviewing thirty Muslim women from Kenya, to highlight the challenges they face, as they attempt to claim human rights. It is my argument that human rights are human entitlements, which are compatible with Islamic teachings. Muslim women should be able to negotiate agency and human rights entitlement within Islam.

The main objective of this paper is to assess the impact of digital technologies on the entrepreneurial output of Muslim women in Indonesia. Using a questionnaire, we collected data from Muslim women entrepreneurs involved in digital entrepreneurship in Depok city. We applied multiple linear regression to analyze the data. We found that the use of e-commerce platforms and internet services affects positively the entrepreneurship growth of Muslim women in Indonesia. However, online payments have been found non-significant because of awareness of risk and security towards online payment system. One of the limitations of this research is the size of the sample. Obtaining data from Muslim women entrepreneurs was very difficult. Again, the case under study is limited to one country. Therefore, it is recommended for future research to use a large sample size and include more countries. Indonesian government should implement tax reduction policies in order to improve the growing sector of Muslim women entrepreneurs, which can help them to become empowered in society.