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137 8 Islam and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia: Public Discourses on Duties, Rights and Morality Sally White and Maria Ulfah Anshor Since the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998, the political and ideological landscape has changed dramatically for Indonesian women. During the New Order, public discourse on gender focused on a woman’s role as wife and mother, and on the contribution women were expected to make to the development of the nation. The principle of equality between men and women was enshrined in the 1945 Constitution. Nevertheless, there was relatively little discussion of women’s rights; the focus was on a woman’s obligations to her husband, her family and the state (Blackburn 1999). The New Order government downplayed gender issues, despite ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1984 and signing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action in 1995. The rise of cultural Islam in the 1980s, with its emphasis on Qur’aninspired ideals such as equality and social justice, and of several NGOs dedicated to advocacy on Muslim gender issues in the 1990s, began to influence Muslim thinking on women’s rights issues. But it was not until the reformasi period, when the state’s tight watch on all matters to do with religion, ethnicity and public discourse in general was relaxed, that gender issues come to the fore. Major factors influencing the increased  The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action resulting from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women affirmed the importance of gender equality and women’s social, economic and political rights. On Indonesia ’s response to this, see Davies (2005). 138   Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia attention given to gender issues included the growth of Muslim radicalism , the rise of activism based on women’s rights, the spread of democratic principles, and the implementation of regional autonomy with its decentralisation of political power. The first indication of the extent to which gender would be a significant site of contestation in the reformasi period came in 1999, when Megawati Sukarnoputri was the front-running presidential candidate in the first post-Soeharto election campaign (Platzdasch 2000; van Doorn Harder 2002). The questioning of her suitability to rule this Muslimmajority nation, not because of her ability but because of her gender, and the strength of the passion on both sides of the debate, took observers by surprise. It also demonstrated the way in which gender could become a factor in a larger political game. It was clear in 1999, and it is even clearer now, that not all those who opposed Megawati’s presidency did so on ideological or religious grounds. For many, her gender was a weapon they could use in their attempts to win at the ballot box, by appealing to conservative religious values that accorded largely with traditional ideas, if not practice, on gender in various parts of the archipelago. The last few years of the twentieth century and the first few years of this century have seen a proliferation of radical Islamic groups espousing literal interpretations of the Qur’an. The goal of many such groups is to achieve an Islamic state and implement sharia law, where sharia is understood in terms of strict positive legal injunctions and sanctions. They have been accused by those who oppose their views of seeking to Arabise Indonesian politics and culture. Radical Islamic groups tend to seek to restrict the active participation of women in public life and limit the types of occupations they may engage in to those where they do not interact with men, and which are considered suitable to their kodrat or ‘essence’ as females. They regard men as the natural heads of the household whom wives must obey unquestioningly. They seek to oblige women to adopt so-called Islamic dress which shrouds more or less the entire body. They do not talk so much about the rights of women, but instead emphasise women’s obligations and the need for them to be ‘protected’—from other men, and from the evils of globalisation and Western cultural decadence. At the same time, there has been a steady growth in the number of NGOs and institutions devoted to advocacy and research on gender  Such groups include Laskar Jihad, the Indonesian Mujahidin Council (MMI), the Indonesian Liberation Party (HTI), the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyah. For a short description of the similarities and differences between the various...

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