Reviewed by: Gender and Islam in Southeast Asia: Women’s Rights Movements, Religious Resurgence, and Local Traditions ed. by Susanne Schröter Jane Monnig Atkinson (bio) Susanne Schröter, ed. Gender and Islam in Southeast Asia: Women’s Rights Movements, Religious Resurgence, and Local Traditions. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. 335 pp. As the first edited volume on gender and Islam in Southeast Asia, this book has the ambitious aim of documenting how Muslim women in that diverse region are engaged in current debates involving Islam and women’s rights. Readers seeking an ASEAN catalog of issues pertaining to gender and religion will be disappointed. Instead, this volume concentrates on the four historically majority Muslim areas of the region: Indonesia, Malaysia, Mindanao, 1 and Thailand’s southernmost provinces (Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala, and Satun). The result is a generally well-integrated and insightful contribution to scholarship on gender and Islam in the Malay Muslim region of Southeast Asia. Schröter’s introduction presents a cogent overview of gender and Islam across the archipelago, with close attention to distinctive histories of each of the four areas covered in the book. (This review will concentrate primarily, but not entirely, on the essays pertaining to Indonesia.) It is well established in the literature that gender hierarchies across the Malay Archipelago are not rigidly defined. For all of recorded history, women have played important roles in the economic and social life of their communities. And yet, as is widely documented historically and ethnographically, there are typically highly valued forms of power or prestige that are culturally defined in ways that make them more accessible to men than to women.2 Islam has often operated as one of those powerful domains to which men have had privileged access. At the same time, Islam also teaches that women and men are both equal before God. Islam has developed and flourished for centuries in this part of the world, where gender constructs and dynamics offer a striking contrast to those that obtain in the religion’s birthplace. These contrasts are very apparent to Southeast Asian Muslims, who have long engaged in negotiating these differences through periods of reform and revitalization of their faith. This volume provides valuable insight into [End Page 121] contemporary engagement of these issues by Muslims representing a wide range of perspectives on Islam and its implications for gender roles and relations in society. The last several decades have seen profound changes in Southeast Asia, including—but by no means limited to—the collapse of Indonesia’s New Order government followed by decentralization and democratization, as well as the wave of Islamic revitalization that has been transforming politics and public culture across the region. Schröter highlights what these changes have meant for women and how Muslim women are responding. On the one hand, there are Muslims, both women and men, committed to gender equality in both their faith and their nations (all of which have ratified CEDAW, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women). On the other hand, there are conservative and neo-orthodox Muslims, both women and men, who regard gender inequality as religiously mandated. Essays in this book present effective expositions of both these camps. And at the same time, they demonstrate Schröter’s point that Muslims of the region cannot be neatly sorted into these two discrete and opposing categories. A variety of factors help to shape the outlook and choices of individuals. Broad issues of nationality, ethnicity, class, and social status, of course, are at play. So, too, are a host of micro-level factors involving personal opportunities and circumstances. A strength of this collection is its demonstration of how women of various backgrounds and perspectives are engaging religion to transform their lives and communities. Five of the essays deal with gender issues in policy and politics. These include family values, law, and policy in Indonesia and Malaysia (Nelly van Doorn-Harder, Siti Musdah Mulia, Maila Stivens); and women’s leadership and political involvement in the southern Philippines (Birte Brecht-Drouart, Amina Rasul-Bernardo). Four essays examine women’s involvement in neo-orthodox movements: Tablighi Jama‘at in southern Thailand (Alexander Horstmann...
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Jan 1, 2019
Jaime Banks + 1
Open Access