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211 RECAPITULATION The voices of women are one of the distinctive strains in the Islamic soundscape, and as they perform, teach, study together, and practice alone, women contribute to the creation of messages of great beauty, power, and potency. They not only have access to the divine, but they also help to create it both for themselves and for others. Their voices, loud, strident, and authoritative, are heard by all and often emulated, even by men. Of the many distinctive features of Indonesian Islam, the role of women was often identified to me as paramount. In this chapter I recall the power of women as performers in the broadest sense, from qur’anic recitation to political activism, and confirm their empowerment through performance. I hope to convey the ways in which women, as exemplars of a “womanist” Islam, are agents of both the continuous localization of Islam in Southeast Asia, as well as of the Islamization of the Indonesian Muslim ecumene. Chapter 1, which opens with the young Muslim women from the Institut Ilmu al-Qur’an (IIQ) in the process of analyzing the complexities of international foreign relations, addresses the particular history of Muslim Southeast Asia, where, we discover, complementarity and equality have characterized gender relations. A section describing the separate worlds of Indonesian and Arab art musics, each of which features different instruments, organizational techniques, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics, underscores my point that distinctions need to be made among Islamic cultures in the global ecumene and signals the need for particular , rather then generalized, histories. Through exploring the roots and routes of Indian Ocean Islam as it is being historicized by contemporary scholars, I suggest 6 Rethinking Women, Music, and Islam 212 Rethinking Women, Music, and Islam some of the reasons why Indonesian Islamic history and culture have been marginalized and previously ignored. The representation of women as the protagonists of this story requires an acknowledgment that “progress” can be a perplexing concept. As noted by Sugarman (1997) and Abu-Lughod (1998), progress as construed by Western feminism is not always consonant with or indicative of the lives of women elsewhere in the world. Part of my argument concerns the ways in which active women are traditional rather than modern and that, in fact, modern constructions of Islam, particularly those fueled by a reformist agenda, do much damage to traditional ways. Although the modern Indonesian state may be seen as a counterbalance to religious constructions of and for women, its institutions perhaps have also been seen as creating more limitations than opportunities for women (see Suryakusuma 1996; Ong and Peletz 1995; and Brenner 1995, 1996). As Doorn-Harder writes: The Suharto regime especially promoted a state policy that stressed unequal relations between men and women. Its systematic bureaucratic attempts to keep women outside the centers of power and to perpetuate gender distinctions have received ample attention in research about Indonesian women. (2006, 20) Doorn-Harder’s work on the women of the two large Muslim organizations of Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, reveals the ways in which access to qur’anic texts through both traditional education, usually in the context of the pesantren, and the modern methodology of ijtihad has enabled women to discourse substantively on the issues that affect the control of women’s intellects and physical bodies—from access to education and the workplace to polygamy and rape. In this final chapter these themes are taken up through the filter of my own ethnographic work with Jakarta feminists. I tried to evoke the Indonesian soundscape in chapter 2, paying particular attention to the pervasiveness of religion-generated sound and its power. The physical environment of Indonesia’s cities and towns as well as their “open-door” policy with respect to noise allows women to hear and to be heard. I felt this most viscerally when I practiced my own Qur’an recitation lessons, vocalizing at the top of my range and at the top of my lungs along with the cassettes I recorded in IIQ classes and faculty offices. The entire neighborhood could hear me. Takbiran, the call to prayer, the sounds of the religious kindergarten (I. taman agama anak-anak): all reinforce and re-create—without interpretation by religious authorities—the unbroken historical chain of sound as information and hearing as knowing that connects the contemporary umma to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. Letting Arabic “live on the lips” of Muslims (Graham 1987) allows Indonesians—whether they understand Arabic or not—to both feel...

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