, The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Mon, 06/05/2006 2:04 PM | Opinion
Farid Muttaqin, Athens, Ohio
Efforts to promote women's rights in Indonesia are now in danger. After the reform movement, a fresh wind offered a promise of good opportunities for women's rights. However, the situation has now gradually worsened.
Now, we may have forgotten the affirmative action taken to meet the 30 percent quota for women as legislative candidates, despite our claim a couple of years ago that there was an awakening of Indonesian women in politics. Now, we might have forgotten that we formulated a law on domestic violence, a revolutionary step for the local women's movement.
The law has changed the domestic domain, giving legal protection to women in the face of domestic violence. The law also has abrogated many misjudgments about women's issues, including religious biases licensing husbands to perpetrate marital rape.
Nevertheless, despite our hard work, some conservative religious groups have been systematically attempting to foster conservative religious perspectives as one of the fundamental values of our state through the marginalization of women. In other words, marginalization of women is a crucial way for the conservative groups to promote the idea of a conservative religious state. If this continues, there is a possibility of Indonesia becoming a conservative religious state.
The attempt to vanquish women as a prerequisite to establish a conservative religious state began in 1998 when the Indonesian Islamic Community Congress III banned women presidential candidates. Although the declaration encouraged debate on this topic, it could not strongly enforce the idea of religious conservatism 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-roots groups. Through collusion with local governments, they capitalized on people's despair toward the central government, which has failed to improve the quality of life after reform measures. Taking advantage of regional autonomy, they promoted certain regulations that accommodated local people's need for an Islamic sharia movement. In this regard, they often utilize women's issues to decorate their actions. Local governments of Padang, Tasikmalaya, Jember, Cianjur, and other regencies have tried to implement sharia. Now it has sparked a heated debate, particularly after Tangerang mayoralty issued a prostitution bylaw that brands women as the source of the problem.
At the national level, conservative groups use national institutions, including the Indonesian Ulema 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 the women's movement, promoting women's rights is seen as a liberal action. It is somewhat impossible to promote gender equality in Indonesia without doing critical religious reinterpretation, especially since some gender-biased religious interpretations have inspired violence against women.
The promotion of conservative religious ideas by vanquishing women seems clearer after the conservative groups strongly campaigned for the pornography bill. They even condemned the group of women activists who opposed the bill as being immoral. They play with moral issues so people will think twice about following their opponents.
We can discuss the driving forces behind the idea of using the marginalization of women as a strategic turning tool 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 to the interpretation of religious doctrine. 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.
A more important agenda than religious reasons is the ""moral discourse"" on pornography that places the blame on 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 most Indonesians.
This situation is not unlike the fundamentalist movement in America, which promoted antifeminist and antiabortion ideals via the political race to turn America into a theocratic Christian state (see William Saletan's analysis on 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.
We can underline the political spirit of both the 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 this, women activists have to push their political orientation. They have to be aware that the ongoing discourse on pornography and prostitution is a political race. They shouldn't be drawn into this political game. They should try to provide some evidence of the conservative group's violence to attack their moral politic. Further, women activists must focus on designing new political strategies to face the problems including raising women's awareness of the political interests of conservative groups and unifying women from various social segments to express their political agenda.
Finally, I want to end this article with a question. Do we, the people of Indonesia, want to have a conservative religious state? Before answering this question, we have to ponder and reflect on the possible conditions 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.
The writer, a graduate of Islamic philosophy at the State Islamic University Jakarta, is a student of the Southeast Asian Studies, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. He can be reached at faridmoe@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment