Women vs. fundamentalism
Women’s movement vs. fundamentalist; lessons from Iran
Recently, the women’s movements in Indonesia have been facing a giant challenge from the fundamentalists. Campaigning for the anti porn bill framing women as the source of the problem, the fundamentalists have tactically pull the entire related discussion on women’s movements as anti morality and even religion because the fundamentalists emphasize their promotion based on morality and religious piety. Additionally, capturing women as an entity behind the rise of the porn phenomena suggests that the women’s movements in Indonesia call women to bravely show the immorally and religiously bad conducts; and this is an adequately strong reason for the fundamentalists to impede the women’s movements.
The noticeable angle is that the fundamentalists often use women’s issue as a turning point to design a theocratic state. Despite its simple for the fundamentalists to play with some religion-based rules to control women’s area –even few of the rules are written down– some fundamentalist ideas are easily pervasive among women’s lives. Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor; Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic Word (1995) clearly documented the influence of the fundamentalist ideas that have been contagious among the country which had began from women groups. In Iran, for instance, since the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini controlled the country under the conservative Islamic schemes, some Iranian women asserted to initiate expressing their sense of Islam with some new customs such as wearing burgah, going to, staying and gathering in mosques more intensively, etc.
How can the women’s movements survive in this game? Instead some women imitated the fundamentalist ideas, some of them, particularly from the feminist groups, provide a crucial lesson that may inspire the women’s movements in Indonesia how to persist evolution from the fittest against the fundamentalists.
Since Ayatollah Khomeini sponsored the 1979 Revolution and developed the Islamic Republic of Iran, a lot of feminists within the country decided to live in some western countries such as UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Canada, and USA. They tried to assert not only avoiding the hard circumstances under the fundamentalist but also designing some genuine agendas to protect the Iranian women from the fundamentalist influences. A serial sarcastically comical book from Mirjani Satrapi, Perseapolis, richly portrays the journey of the Iranian feminists to the western countries.
Living in the western countries unlocked their sensibility toward feminism particularly within their country; then they productively fashioned some internationally theoretical and practical actions. It is no wonder that there are hundred internationally-based Iranian feminist organizations in the western countries with numerous programs on women and fundamentalism. These organizations are politically and academically supported by the western scholars. This has been a vital way for the Iranian feminists to show their existence to face the fundamentalist power.
The Iranian feminists living abroad then pull out their programs through weaving networks with some Iranian feminists struggling from their intern-country. In addition to providing some scholarship and other supporting finance for nationally-based feminist activists to broaden their knowledge, they also escorted the development of the western-Iranian feminist cooperation. As a result, there are thousand analytical studies about Iranian women and feminist including its correlation with fundamentalism. Further, the cooperation is also significant to change Westerner’s assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes about Iran (Mahsa Shekarloo, 2006). In this regard, we can learn another lesson from the Iranian feminist to live survival vis-à-vis the fundamentalist regime.
These enormous Westerner’s studies on Iranian women encourage the Iranian feminists struggling in the country, whether from universities or non governmental organizations to not only actively study this subject but also keep their spirit of feminist movement up face-to-face to the fundamentalist influences. They dug some blessings in disguise of living under the fundamentalist rules to protect women from the subordinations, stereotypes and violence. Some of them develop community-based organizations to strengthen their position. A mutual coincidence when the feminist programs are internationally acknowledged, which was symbolically addressed by the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi, the intrepid Iranian human rights lawyer. Ziba Mir-Hosseini (2003) said that the Nobel will strengthen a particular set of forces in Iran’s long and arduous transition from theocracy to democracy.
These Iranian feminist’s efforts have two main strong orientations of both calling the international attention and alerting to the national fundamentalist regime. In this regard, finally, some elements of the women’s movements in Indonesia can creatively imitate these efforts. First of all, they must be aware of and critical to the ongoing situation regarding fundamentalism. This awareness then leads us to set up some powerful actions; and some lessons from the Iranian feminists should be very intriguing encouragement to present our existence against the fundamentalist waves then further contribute to democracy in Indonesia. (source: the jakarta post, july 25 2006)
c: farid muttaqin 2006 (fm181405@ohio.edu)
Vanquishing Women: Toward the Construction of a Conservative Religious State
Efforts to promote women’s rights in Indonesia are now in danger. After the reform movement, little fresh wind offered a promise of good opportunities for women’s rights. Nowadays, however, it has been gradually led to a worse situation. Now, we might forget the idea of affirmative action in politics to meet the 30% quota for women as legislation member candidates, despite our claim a couple of years ago that there was an awakening of Indonesian women in politics. Now, we might forget that we could formulate the Anti-Domestic Violence Act, representing a revolutionary picture of the Indonesian women’s movement. The Act has changed the domestic domain, which inspires domestic violence against women more politically and legally protective. The Act also has abrogated many misjudgments about women’s issues, including religious biases licensing husbands to perpetrate marital rape. Under the Act, marital rape becomes a type of violence against women; a husband perpetrating this violence acts against the law.
Nevertheless, despite our hard work, some conservative religious groups have been systematically attempting to foster conservative religious perspectives as a fundamental value of our state through the marginalization of women. In other words, women marginalization is a crucial way for the conservative groups to promote the idea of conservative religious state. If this process continues, it is possible that Indonesia could become a conservative religious state.
Based on a textually-interpreted religious doctrine, the trial to vanquish women as a prerequisite step to establish a conservative religious state began around 1998 when the Indonesian Islamic Community Congress III declared a restriction on women as presidents. Although the declaration has encouraged the latent debate on this topic, it could not strongly enforce the idea of religious conservatives in our political public discourse. However, I argue that it was a good way to make Indonesians aware of the political existence of conservative groups. Making such a declaration was a deliberate and tactical way to measure the political power of both the conservative groups and the liberal groups.
Some conservative groups spread their conservative ideas through vanquishing women around districts in Indonesia. They approached local grass root groups. Through collusion with local governments, they capitalized people’s despair toward the central government that has failed to provide a better situation after the reform. Taking advantage of regional autonomy, the local government had the independence to create public policies; they promoted a certain rule that accommodated local people’s needs for an Islamic Syariah movement. In this regard, they often utilize women’s issues to decorate their Syariah actions. Local governments of Padang, Tasikmalaya, Jember, Cianjur, and other districts have tried to construct the Syariah law. Now it has brought about the paramount debate, particularly after the city government of Tangerang developed a local anti-prostitution law that blames women as the origin of the prostitution problem.
At the national level, conservative groups use national institutions, including governmental institution like Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) as a vehicle to influence the decision making process on Islamic issues. In early 2005, MUI published a controversial fatwa on anti-liberalism, pluralism and secularism to restrict the rise of liberal movements. Although indirectly there is no correlation between the fatwa and women’s movement, but promoting women’s rights is seen as a liberal action; the main strategy of this action is to campaign for a religious doctrinal reinterpretation or cultural change. In addition, it is somewhat impossible to represent gender equality in Indonesian society without doing critical religious reinterpretation, especially since some gender-biased religious interpretations have inspired violence against women. Hence, taking advantage of women’s right promotion to critically reinterpret a lot of religious teachings can further reconstruct a liberal tradition of thought in several fields. In this case, the fatwa influenced the women’s right efforts.
The promotion of conservative religious ideas by vanquishing women seems clearer after the conservative groups strongly campaigned for the anti porn bill. They even blasphemed the group of women activist who try to refuse the bill as immoral and debauched women. They distinctly separated the opponents of the bill from the proponents by playing with moral issues so people will worry to follow the opponents. Again, if they can play this politic of morality, it is easier to conduct the next steps toward a conservative religious state in Indonesia.
We can discuss the driving forces behind the idea of using marginalization of women as a strategic turning point in the design of the Indonesian conservative religious state. First, conservative religious groups are typically gender-biased and dominant. The stereotype comes from the group’s literal approach on religious doctrines interpretation. Conservative religious groups commonly segregate women, especially in the public sphere. For instance, we can find the phenomena of polygamy in several conservative religious families. Additionally, blaming women as the culprit of some social problems, such as pornography and prostitution, has at least two relating targets. Emphasizing morality protection through the promotion of anti-pornography and prostitution, conservative groups are easy to label women “immoral” because that is a common view in our conservative religious community. Hence, the conservative groups only cultivate the public opinion that women are the evil behind these social problems.
A more important agenda than religious reasons is the “moral discourse” of pornography that blames women which is also related to the correlation between women and politics in the minds of conservative religious groups. The issue of morality in politics, especially regarding sexuality, is still taboo for Indonesians. People who do not agree with this promoted morality are blamed as immoral groups; in political race, morality determines people’s support.
This situation is similar with the fundamentalist movement in America, which promoted anti-feminism and anti-abortion ideals via the political race to design America as a theocratic Christian state (see William Saletan’s analysis about this subject in “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War). Karen Armstrong in The Battle of God (2001: 312) described an intriguing theory on this subject; in particular, feminism and other women’s rights movements have “feminized” men and reduced men’s masculinity. In general, feminism has made people more feminine; in the mind of fundamentalists, it has changed their original political attitude from being aggressive to more accommodative. Maybe the political action of the religious conservatives in Indonesia is not really same as that of fundamentalists in America. However, we can underline the similar political spirit of both religious conservative groups in Indonesia and America to create a conservative religious state by vanquishing women and restricting the women’s movement.
In order to prevent the problem, women activists have to push their political orientation. They have to be aware that the ongoing discourse on anti-pornography and anti-prostitution is a political race. They shouldn’t be tempted by this political game. They should try to provide some evidence of the conservative group’s violence to re-attack their politic of morality. Further, women activists must focus to design new political strategies to face the problems including raising women’s awareness toward the political interest of conservative groups and unifying women from any social segments to express their political agendas.
Finally, I want to end this article with a question. Do we, people of Indonesia, want to have a conservative religious state? Before answering this question, we have to ponder and reflect on the possible condition that might occur under this type of state. Then, we need to decide carefully whether to follow or oppose the idea of using women as “martyrs” of religious conservative groups in their efforts to establish a conservative religious state in Indonesia. (source: the jakarta post, June 5 2006)
c: farid muttaqin 2006 (fm181405@ohio.edu)
