1 - Politics of a Piece of Cloth

1That the wonderful narratives of jilbab in this study should have been produced by many brilliant, elite and well-educated young Muslim women, quotidian though this piece of cloth might be, is cause for celebration for us all as Muslim women. It was our decision, our agency, following the Surah preaching during the 1980s, to wear the jilbab, a novel version of the kerudung. While the kerudung is a piece of cloth that covers the hair loosely, the jilbab covers the hair and neck tightly, leaving no skin unconcealed. It was something our mothers used to wear in the 1960s. This book will focus on the Indonesian jilbab, this extraordinary piece of cloth whose achievement and role in toppling the authoritarian dictator Soeharto in 1998 is less well known.

2I too am a great admirer of Islam as represented by this novel jilbab. I decided to wear the jilbab in 1993. Since my personal trajectory — birth in the late years of the Old Order, beginning of my schooling under the New Order, attending of Muhammadiyah University from 1993–1997, witnessing the effects of corruption in the Soeharto era and the birth of the Reformation Era in 1998, reassessing the Indonesian Islamic identity and nationalism, and attraction to the dynamic mix of change and reformism in Islam and Indonesia — coincided with that of the jilbab, I will try to recapture just how impressive its evolution has been.

3Let me first return to the portentous decision by this Muslim girl and cosmopolitan Muhammadiyah graduate to wear the jilbab and in 1998 to study Rohis (Rohani Islam or Islamic Spirituality) at my senior high school year and, in general, to study Islam — not at any faculty of Islamic Studies but through deep soul-searching. What motivated these decisions of mine was in part the failure of secularism under Soeharto and the alienation I felt. Though he was President of Indonesia, it was not difficult to imagine him as a Javanese king. He had his spectacles smacked off his face by a loutish group singing the Indonesia Raya, and so he led the nation with ever more Javanese political jargons. The move towards Islam and the jilbab felt like an exhilarating break from the authoritarian Soeharto years. Muslim women scholarship championing the nascent jilbab, flourishing in sociocultural, political and economic dimensions, and making inroads into the marvels of Middle-East culture, proved irresistible.

4The first time I was struck by the lucidity of the spirituality of the jilbab was in 1993, when I was in senior high school. I had been taught to wear the jilbab by an ITB (Institut Teknologi Bandung) student, who happened to be an alumnus of our state-owned senior high school. On returning from Rohis with a dazzling affirmation of the jilbab, I urged my mother to wear it as well — at that time she was still wearing short skirts, the formal uniform of school teachers during the Soeharto years. Then the jilbab provided for me a clear-eyed analysis of the ideological conflicts of being a Muslim woman. Its incisive revisionism of the meaning of womanhood during the 1980s marked almost all Muslim girls in debates on secularism and religion. Muslim girls wearing the head veil drew upon the aura of extraordinary spiritual power this piece of cloth commanded. In the public sphere, the jilbab was a lightning rod for controversy — from Soeharto’s ban in 1975 to the spectacular political melodrama that arose when his daughter Tutut wore the jilbab in 1998 after her pilgrimage to Mecca, in a show of ostentatious piety to gain sympathy.

5My formative three years in senior high school in Boyolali, Central Java began what I later labelled a sort of love affair with Islamic values and the Western model of education, marked by a stint in a pondok pesantren, along with a predilection for literature and friendships among Muslim students. Upon my return, I channelled my scholarship into students’ newspapers, in an attempt perhaps to speak out against Soeharto’s regime. I became the chief editor of Koran Pabelan in 1997 and advocated the jilbab as an almost universal religious clothing for Muslim women, one that commands deep emotional, intellectual and physical adherence. I put up all these performances until Soeharto’s stepping down and explained my ambivalence as a Javanese woman who felt almost totally uprooted from her culture. I argued that Javanese values were secular and simply incompatible with my belief in Islam — the wayang repertoire offered only Hindu values alienated from Islam and unbefitting of a Muslim women.

6My attitude to my own body seemed to be cruelly disproved by my ideology and values. It was a fratricidal conflict between secularism and Islamism, and the victim was my own body, demonized by my ideology. The final chapter of my formative years had showed me how, on the tree of my Islamic culture, the leaves were dropping one by one, notably through the suppression of my own body and the moral ambiguities of a good-versus-evil dichotomy.

7I wore the jilbab when I taught at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta as soon as it appeared on the scene. It was an informal golden rule that every woman followed. Everyone did the same. My friends and I, who were more or less of the same age, felt that society was in a shocking mess and that Islamism was probably the answer, so we flirted with the idea of interlacing Islam and educational ethos. My own reason for not doing so in the end was that I knew myself to be too frivolous for the necessary commitment; I also felt undecided about using ends to justify the means. My other major preoccupation, the situation of women, would have appealed to me much more had it not been for the elaborate structure in which I had chosen to express it, for my tendency to overstate, and my style in the earlier formative years of my girlhood. My earlier writing in the Jakarta Post and Kompas tended to be assertive, and I agree that my assertiveness provoked resistance. I have always admired the boldness and ambition of activists, and their passion moves me, for example, Jurnal Perempuan, whose Board of Editors I sit on. I can say that it was a landmark in history for me.

8The way Indonesian feminists rejected Sharia Ordinances with blistering honesty shocked me. I first read about it five years ago in Germany, when I was about 33 years old, and it had an overwhelming impact on me. I remember vividly my awe and dismay at how politicians controlled women’s hair and bodies in the name of Islam, using the issue to hog the spotlight and have their ugly faces plastered everywhere. Unluckily for me, I had already voiced my protestations in the press, mainly in Jakarta Post and Kompas, yet I was holding a job in an Islamic university. I received letters in 2008 calling for my dismissal due to my stance. Alhamdulillah, thanks be to God that I wrote those articles, otherwise, I might never have found my own voice. I might have gone off the rails completely. Now that I am dealing with students in classes again, I voice my rebuffs through murmurs and metaphors.

9It is impossible to calculate all that Islamism has taught me, not least about discipline and spirituality, about the sense of responsibility that can keep a suicidal mother in the midst of a breakdown alive, about the efforts needed to conduct a career while rearing a child with difficulties. I have no time for pregnancies that will silence me or reduce my output.

10My traditional female behavior is all the more puzzling then. I found fascinating a lifetime of preparing meals for the man I love; just as much care was lavished on his laundry. Throughout my marriage, it was I, as wife and mother, who did all the cooking and made all the cups of teas and coffees, even for men to whom I owed less than nothing. It was almost like being a protagonist in an awkward Indonesian commercial ad. And yet it seemed liberating.

11Liberating indeed was all the discussion generated within Jejer Wadon. We just gathered out of the blue to talk intimately about sex, parenthood, creativity, work, beliefs and politics, domestic stuff, menstruation, grappling with identity and truth. Ours is not a branch of radical, misunderstood feminism; the radicalism lies in breaking away from oppression. Jejer Wadon does not seek to speak out through people with enormous power or importance but through a concept of intelligent private life acting as a prism for larger forces.

2 - Prophetic Jilbab

12How then to explain the catastrophic turn of events that shattered us, who had been entranced by a piece of cloth? Our love of Islam prevailed, channelled through the observance of the head veil as well as the intellectual task of making sense of this taboo surrounding women’s bodies. As I put it later: how to understand what a woman’s body means; how to throw off the sacredness that limited its liberty and freedom; and how, theoretically, to reconcile the jilbab with the brutal engines of global economic and political change?

13The immediate result was an outburst of feminist study on the origins of the ‘body coup d'état’ in 2005, during my early doctorate years in Germany. This inevitably spilled over to my dissertation and teaching, through which I introduced the marvels of Muslim feminist writers such as Fatema Mernissi and Leila Ahmed. This culminated in 2008 in a publication Mainstreaming Gender through Muslim Women Writers (Muenster: LitVerlag). It was less a mature analysis of the coup d'état than about my determination to draw attention to the tragic turn of events in Indonesia with the implementation of the Sharia Ordinances that banned girls from showing their hair in Islamic schools.

14The Indonesian women whom I had known were gone for good. They had lost in the patriarchal political battle where men were the victors. But women retained their optimism about wearing the jilbab. There was some hope of a revival of the politicization of the jilbab in late 2011 but the marginalized woman’s voice was deemed as non-political. Ruling out Indonesian women’s bodies remains the key feature of maledominated politics during SBY’s era.

15At the end of March 2012, brilliantly controversial Surya Dharma Ali (then Minister of Religious Affairs), who likened the mini-skirt to pornography and banned it in an infamous statement, outdid himself in postulating that masculine political culture has its own political theory premised on the systematic oppression of women’s bodies. He provided no logical explanation, relying instead on Islamic tradition, which he claimed to be a single monolithic truth, thus brushing aside all the traditions present in Indonesian culture. He even managed to ignore the Javanese origins of his own name — ‘Surya’ and ‘Dharma’ — which come from Sanskrit. His statement demonstrated that culture matters in politics and it ignited debates on the social theory of feminism. He undermined the fundamental assumptions of womanhood and the meaning of the female body. This episode captured all too well the political climate of patriarchal superiority that dominated the twenty-first-century history of Indonesian women. There is a multi-billion-rupiah vested interest in setting up a system to monitor, physically intimidate and prey upon Indonesian women. Now politics is in a position to demean women sexually — a potent tool in the hands of any bully.

16My life has been shaped foremost by Islamic tradition, hand in hand with dying Javanese rituals. Why did all this speak to me, a young woman born under the Soeharto regime and raised in comfortable conservatism in rural Central Java? My political upbringing was shaped by Islamism, then feminism and opposition to the absurd ghost of neoliberalism and everyday consumerism, followed by post-feminism and environmentalism. My intense engagement in global politics offered a sharp relief from the bland cynicism of my generation: even while some young people and I were marching on the streets to protest against the rise of fuel prices (to little avail), many other women were busy shopping in malls. Social media debates conceive of gender as a relational issue — it is not just about women, and a particular type of woman at that (Javanese, middle-class and so on), nor is it about women versus men, but all the ways in which people struggle together through complex intersections of sex, class, race and location. In this sense, it is a mistake to claim that this study is only about feminism, for it takes the stance that “the personal is political”, to borrow Betty Friedan’s phrase. To be more precise, it shifts the locus of women’s authority to a more inclusive space than a binary Manichean conceptualization. I probe the diversity of women’s lived experiences rather than explore dull dichotomies.

17After the exclusion from politics, the female body has been informed by a voracious engagement with fascism-masculinity and patriarchy. We are given to superficial generalizations about morality when it comes to the concealment of women’s bodies. The Internet and social media have become the sole respite when the home becomes a prison, when the state turns to inspection. Morality is becoming the imperative language of political culture. Why is this happening? I used to think the push was led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance on women’s bodies under the cloak of so-called Eastern values (nilai ketimuran). But now I see the struggle as a larger one. It is a race against time. Politicians realize that the Internet is a tool of empowerment that works against their interests and that they need to get ahead to turn it into a tool of control. Yet women have not lacked in creativity in their response.

18What marks everything I’ve ever written is a spark of anger, forcing women to rethink cherished assumptions by uncovering a neglected angst or a suppressed voice. I have never been content to tell an audience what they want to hear. The intellectual scrutiny that I task myself with is to find the uncomfortable, suppressed perspectives. In spite of the discomfort, I open this book to criticisms.

3 - Chapter Outline

19I anticipate readers new to this field as well as experts, and have structured the narrative accordingly. I begin by introducing key representational paradigms, building from the single narrative of a girl from the 1980s to comparative national frameworks. Chapter 1 examines aspects of the historical production of the Indonesian Muslim woman and her perception of the jilbab, specifically the contribution of women in defining the veil through their own Weltanschauung. I revisit the intergenerational freedom and angst of the repressive Soeharto regime, and the pseudo-liberty of the Reformation Era influenced by Sharia Ordinances, all of which prompted an ongoing battle on female corporeality between nationalist neo-patriarchal ideologies and feminist discourse in the Indonesian political landscape. I then focus on the Sharia Ordinances and the narrative of censorship. My analysis centers on the interlacing themes of the visibility of repression, patriarchy, and the voice of opposition. The gravity of the political situation after the New Order is one reason why women are more repressed now than before. The implications of this simultaneous affiliation with and distance from politics is of great concern to NGOs, as I illustrate throughout the book.

20In Chapter 2, I emphasize the relevance of what Rémy Madinier has called “politics and religion”. Taking into account the encroachment of religion into politics, or the links between politics and identity, is necessary because women’s bodies should always be understood within a political context, a spatial and temporal context, insofar as corporeality provides a basis for representation. Recognizing that subjectivity is anchored in a located body enables me to interpret the political voice, vision, and visibility of oppression during my interviews with female politicians wearing the jilbab. I hope to have shown, though, that their voices also demonstrate awareness of the politics of representation. I highlight the importance of transmission of women’s stories, as exemplified by Ibu Rina Iriana, now Regent of Karanganyar Central Java.

21Chapter 3 discusses the body in the global economy whereby memory, melancholia and mourning work as modes to convey the history of the exclusion of the female body. It has been defined, reproduced and used as a cash cow, yet displaced and excluded from morality. A palpable generational tension underpins the post-colonial Muslim market, prompting me to engage with both the enduring allegories of the jilbab and the representation of often radically disempowered sexual minorities: waria (transgenders), gays, lesbians, bisexuals and queers.

22Chapter 4 consolidates the foregoing themes of social media and the consequences of tabooed sexuality among the youth in Indonesia, highlighting the creative transformation of sexuality from the sterile zone of Indonesian homes to Internet encounters. I emphasize the affective aspect, intimacy, adulation of self and the meaning of sensuality embedded in the jilbab. Again, I stress ways in which women reframe corporeal apprehension to conceive of personal, inter-subjective, performative and collective identities in the present. Reference to a group of youth that reflects a range of national settings allows me to demonstrate both that women’s projects of individual emancipation tend to have a wider, decolonizing significance, and that a movement from the private to the public sphere, while obviously desirable in some ways, is not the only possible feminist trajectory. I end by contemplating what readers and viewers may take from this book to counter lust and angst.