Islamic Perspectives on the New Millennium

11. Islam, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia

183 Islam, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia 11 ISLAM, GENDER, AND POLITICS IN INDONESIA Kathryn Robinson Megawati Sukarnoputri was installed as Indonesia’s fifth president on 23 July 2001 (see Mietzner 2000). Although her party, the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia–Perjuangan, or Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), won the largest number of seats in the 1999 general election (the first free election following the toppling of President Soeharto), her ascendancy to the presidency had been blocked by the political manipulations of Abdurrahman Wahid, who came to power as the fourth president on the strength of a coalition of Muslim-identified parties. There had been vigorous public debate in the period leading up to the general election in 1999 about whether a woman president was acceptable under Islamic doctrine and whether Indonesia, with a majority Muslim population, could accept a woman president. The negative arguments were based on textual interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith.1 An analysis of this debate demands a broader context: to what extent has public debate in Indonesia about women’s participation in public life rested on Islamic textual interpretation? To what extent has Islamic doctrine determined the limits and possibilities of women’s political participation, in the way that it has done in many other countries which have a majority Muslim population? 183 Kathryn Robinson 184 INDONESIAN ISLAM AND DEBATES ABOUT WOMEN’S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT To gain an impression about what has been written on this topic, I conducted a quick review of the Indonesian-published books dealing with “Indonesian women” which I had on my bookshelf — not a comprehensive or scientific survey, but a wide-ranging one, with a mixture of my own collection from the last twenty years — and those in the Australian National University Library, dating back to the 1950s. Many of them are government publications, others are commercially published. In these publications, where Islam is mentioned as a factor impacting on Indonesian women’s social participation, it is in respect of family law although adat (custom, tradition) is also seen as relevant in this context. With regard to women’s participation in public life, or political institutions, what is commonly invoked is historical precedent, in particular the historical cases of women who were rulers in pre-colonial polities such as Aceh (see, for example, Soewondo 1968; Department of Information 1987). But Islam is generally absent not only from these Indonesian accounts of “the position of women”. The standard English-language reviews of “the position of women” in Indonesia (written by scholars, mostly Westerners, from outside the country) rarely mention Islam as a factor influencing women’s social position (see Robinson 2001). In the collections of studies on modern Indonesian women which have had considerable influence on understanding the status of women in Indonesia (for example, Atkinson and Errington 1990; Loche-Scholten and Niehof 1992; Sears 1996; Ong and Peletz 1995), Islam is not a major focus of interest or analysis. A useful point of entry into the modern era is to examine the activities of women during the 1920s and 1930s when anti-colonial feeling was generating public political action. In women’s organizations involved in the nationalist struggle, which included Islamic organizations — many connected to the major movements (such as Aisyiyah, the women’s grouping within Muhammadiyah) — there was no difference of opinion about the importance of women being given equal citizenship with men. This was later reflected in the Indonesian Constitution which guarantees all citizens equal rights. Conflict among the organizations was related to the right of the state to impose uniform family law, in respect of issues like polygamy, age at marriage, and divorce. These issues split Islamic and non-Islamic (secular and Christian) women’s organizations. Whereas discussion of marriage law reform had been an important issue at the first Indonesian Women’s Congress in 1928, by the third congress, held in 1930, it had been dropped (Soewondo 1968). 185 Islam, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia By the 1950s, the major debates about women and Islam occurred in the Konstituante (Constituent Assembly, a committee to draft basic law) which deliberated between 1956 and 1959. Although its attempts to draft a truly representative constitution for the new republic ultimately failed, records of its deliberations give us some insights into the political thought of the time. Nasution reports that in its meetings, “Equality of rights between men and women was endorsed in...