Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia

10. Religion and the Politics of Morality: Muslim Women Activists and the Pornography Debate in Indonesia

10 RELIGION AND THE POLITICS OF MORALITY: MUSLIM WOMEN ACTIVISTS AND THE PORNOGRAPHY DEBATE IN INDONESIA1 Rachel Rinaldo In late 2008, Indonesia’s parliament passed a law against pornography. The debate was short, because the bill had already been thoroughly discussed and revised in committees and a majority of legislators had agreed to support it. Prior to the vote, however, nearly a hundred legislators opposed to the bill stormed out of parliament in protest. The ratification of the legislation Rancangan Undang-Undang Pornografi, or RUU Pornografi as it is commonly known, marks the end of one of the many bitter public controversies that have preoccupied Indonesians since the collapse of the authoritarian Soeharto regime in 1998. At a time when Indonesia is still in the process of political and social flux, the recent debates over issues such as pornography entail competing ideas about how Islam should be incorporated into the nation-state. 248 Rachel Rinaldo Arguments about the pornography bill, for example, revolved around whether the state should regulate the media to prevent it from disseminating images that offend Islamic norms of modesty. In this way, the debate over the role of the state in regulating images or behaviour was also a debate about the extent to which the state’s actions should be guided by religious, in this case Islamic, ideologies. These controversies are moral debates, in that they involve arguments about individual or collective rights vis-à-vis the state, as well as struggles over what constitutes an ideal society, which are often informed by religion. Gender ideologies are a profound, but often underappreciated aspect of moral debates. The Indonesian debates about pornography not only involve competing ideas about rights and freedoms, but also about how bodies, particularly those of women, should be seen in public. Feminist scholars have argued that moral debates such as the one over pornography reflect attempts to define collective identities and to shape the gender structure of society (Yuval-Davis 1997). And in the case of Indonesia, such debates are also part of a continuing process of struggle over the relationship between religion and public life (Brenner 2011; Rinaldo 2011). Gender, then, has clear significance for moral debates. But women do not figure only as symbols in these debates. Increasingly in Indonesia, women activists from all sides of the political spectrum raise their voices in these controversies. The rapidly growing social science literature on Islam and gender has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of Muslim women’s agency as culturally contingent and not necessarily oriented towards liberation (Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2005). Yet within this literature there is a tendency to treat Islam as monolithic. For example, Gole (2002) argues that pious Islam’s gender practices and conceptions of the self pose a stark challenge to secular public spheres. This argument seems to suggest that pious Islam is a unitary subjectivity. One might therefore expect pious Indonesian Muslim women activists to take similar positions on the pornography legislation, but this did not happen. In this article, I examine how women from two Muslim organizations, FatayatNahdlatulUlama(hereafterFatayat)andtheProsperousJusticeParty (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, PKS), took different sides in the pornography debate. These activists’ political positions drew on different approaches to understanding Islam, and expressed markedly different visions for Indonesia’s future. While Fatayat women opposed the bill as part of their struggle for a more egalitarian society, PKS women supported it as a first step towards what they hope will be a more pious Islamic society. Their Muslim Women Activists and Pornography 249 political stances reflect Indonesia’s varied heritage of Islamic thought, different conceptions of the relationship between the subject and the state, as well as the contemporary lack of consensus over the future of Indonesia. Investigating these women activists’ public interventions reveals the ways in which the pornography debate was gendered, and also illuminates the intermingling of religion and politics in contemporary Indonesia.2 While Indonesia is far from being an Islamic state, ideas about the nation’s future are increasingly articulated within Islamic frameworks. INDONESIAN CONTEXT AND RESEARCH METHODS The pornography debate must be understood against the background of Indonesia’s transition away from authoritarian rule and the emergence of a public sphere constituted by a free mass media, NGOs and civil society groups, students and academic intellectuals, and religious organizations. Indonesia was governed by a military regime, led by General Soeharto, from 1965 to 1998. The 1997 Asian economic crisis helped...