Sexuality in Muslim Contexts

Restrictions and Resistance

Anissa Helie, Homa Hoodfar, Anissa Helie, Homa Hoodfar

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780322889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

This groundbreaking book explores resistance against the harsh policing of sexuality in some Muslim societies. Many Muslim majority countries still use religious discourse to enforce stigmatization and repression of those, especially women, who do not conform to sexual norms promoted either by the state or by non-state actors. In this context, Islam is often stigmatized in Western discourse for being intrinsically restrictive with respect to women's rights and sexuality. The authors show that conservative Muslim discourse does not necessarily match practices of believers or of citizens and that women's empowerment is facilitated where indigenous and culturally appropriate strategies are developed. Using case studies from Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Israel and India, they argue persuasively that Muslim religious traditions do not necessarily lead to conservative agendas but can promote emancipatory standpoints. An intervention to the construction of 'Muslim women' as uniformly subordinate, this collection spearheads an unprecedented wake of organizing around sexualities in Muslim communities.

PART I

Tools of policing: the politics of history, community, law

1

The politicization of women’s bodies in Indonesia: sexual scripts as charters for action

Vivienne Wee

Sexual scripts, indigenous contexts and Islamism

How have women’s bodies in Indonesia been politicized by disputed sexual scripts over time? The term ‘sexual scripts’ refers to two political dimensions: an external interpersonal dimension that generates a discourse shared by two or more persons, and an internal intrapersonal dimension whereby participants internalize such discourse as motivations for action (Gagnon and Simon 2005: 14).¹ I examine sexual scripts as charters for action in Indonesia, including indigenous contexts, external sources of inspiration, and competing normative proposals for the shaping of Islam and Indonesia.²

In indigenous contexts prior to conversions to Islam (since the twelfth century) and European colonization (since the sixteenth century), men and women in tropical Southeast Asia enjoyed relative freedom from constraining clothes and gender segregation. With both sexes accorded near-equal importance in the prevalent bilateral kinship system, there was/is relatively little concern with a woman’s virginity, the number of her sexual partners, the biological paternity of her child or the production of male heirs (Winzeler et al. 1976: 628). In my research in Indonesia and among Indonesian migrant workers, I encountered many instances of families tolerating premarital sex, women becoming pregnant before marriage, and women migrants bearing children out of wedlock and having their children at home brought up by relatives (see Sim 2006). This indicates relative social acceptance of women’s sexual autonomy, in keeping with the relative gender equality of a bilateral kinship system.³

Women in the Indonesian archipelago had relative bodily freedom without fear of harassment or rape. Even in the twentieth century, among non-Muslim and non-Christian indigenous populations, women could bare their breasts in the same way as men could bare their chests, without insinuating sexual impropriety. This corroborates the correlation of relative gender equality with rape-free societies, as argued by Sanday (1997).⁴ In Riau villages in the 1970s and 1980s, I saw Muslim women wearing sarongs that covered their breasts, leaving shoulders and arms bare, for bathing at public wells, some draping a towel on their backs to cover their shoulders, with no harassment for their state of dress/undress. However, constraints are increasingly imposed by a sexual script that obscenifies customary dress codes and bodily routines as immoral.

Although conversion to Islam began in the Indonesian archipelago in the twelfth century, it did not reach all areas uniformly. Despite the country having the world’s largest population of Muslims (about 177.53 million in 2000), the Muslim majority represents only 88 per cent of the population, alongside Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, animists and others (Suryadinata et al. 2003: 104). There is diversity even among Muslims, with Islamic traditions derived from ‘the Arab world, Persia, India and … the Muslim trading communities of southern China’, as well as from varied teachings brought back by Indonesian Muslims studying abroad (Fox 2004: 2–3; see also Riddell 2001, and Azra 2004).

This religious diversity relates to the political diversity that preceded Dutch colonization. Apart from the empires of Srivijaya (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) and Majapahit (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) that unified sizeable parts of the archipelago, there were diverse tribal societies, Muslim sultanates and Hindu kingdoms (Munoz 2006). No higher level of political unity unified the Muslim sultanates. Religious interpretations varied between sultanates and between the reigns of different rulers, often influenced by foreign Muslims (Federspiel 2007).

To illustrate, in Sulawesi (in the east of the archipelago), ‘in the nineteenth century there were still several queens ruling in Bugis states, long after they had disappeared from other parts of the Muslim world’ (Andaya 2003: 79). These queens appeared in public ‘like the men’, rode, ruled and met foreigners ‘without the knowledge or consent of their husbands’ (Brooke and Munday 1848: 75, cited in Andaya 2003: 79).

In contrast, in Riau (in the west of the archipelago), during the reign of Raja Ali as underking (1845–57), women were ordered to cover their heads (Andaya 2003: 85).

Raja Ali abhorred those who indulged in pleasures which led to loose behaviour between men and women and those who sang and crooned pantun (rhyming verses) with veiled invitations to adultery. Sometimes he ordered the instruments of those who serenaded near the houses of decent people to be confiscated, so that their young girls would not be corrupted and so that there was nothing unseemly in the state (Matheson 1972: 137).

Raja Ali’s brother, Raja Abdullah, the next underking, was even stricter.

According to a Dutch report of January 1858, a woman whose husband was absent had taken a young man into her house and was discovered. Without further ado, she was declared guilty of adultery and strangled. … In response to Dutch objections, … Abdullah argued that religious law lay outside colonial jurisdiction. (Andaya 2003: 90)

The Riau examples indicate the growing influence of the movement initiated by Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab (1703–1787) in Arabia. Wahhab’s followers condemned ‘unlawful commerce with women’ and ‘infamous lust’ (Burckhardt 1831: 111, cited in Andaya 2003: 84). The Wahhabi capture of Mecca and Medina in 1803 was a landmark event widely publicized in the Indonesian archipelago (Andaya 2003: 84; Hadler 2008: 979). Before this event, by the end of the eighteenth century, an islah (reformist) movement had already begun in parts of the Indonesian archipelago, especially West Sumatra. This movement differentiated between elements identified as ‘Islamic’ and those identified as ‘un-Islamic’, urging Muslims to purge the latter from their religious practices (Zakariya 2011: 197–9). The movement was radicalized in 1803 when three pilgrims returning from Wahhabi-ruled Mecca advocated the use of force to bring about ‘an Islamic community’ (Zakariya 2011: 199). Such a community was characterized by ‘the abandonment of cock fighting, gambling and the use of tobacco, opium, sirih and strong drink; white clothes symbolizing purity were to be worn, with women covering their faces and men allowing their beards to grow’ (Dobbin 1987: 132). An English visitor to the West Sumatran highlands in 1818 noted that the men were clad ‘in white or blue, with turbans, and allowing their beards to grow, in conformity with the ordinances of Tuanku Pasaman, the religious reformer. … The women, who are also clad in white or blue cloth, … conceal their heads under a kind of hood, through which an opening is made sufficient to expose their eyes and nose alone’ (Raffles 1830: 349–50).

The Wahhabi nation-making vision creates a constituency based on sexual morality by regulating gender relations and controlling women’s bodies (El-Fadl 2001). This political use of sexuality is not unique; the control of sexuality as a site of power shaped European civilization (Foucault 1976). By imposing sexual morality, a power structure can be developed through the regulation of persons and activities, resulting in a chain of regulatory relations that permeates society.⁵ As noted in Hoodfar and Ghoreishian (Chapter 9 in this volume), ‘the mechanisms and institutions charged with “forbidding the wrong”, whether upheld by states or private citizens, have emerged as serious impediments to gender equality. They are used to regulate and control “morality” and operate as the bedrock for many policies and practices that seek to create a gender apartheid system, rendering women subjects of their male kin and limiting their public roles.’ The religious vigilantism that currently exists in Indonesia derives from two centuries of Wahhabi-influenced violence that included ‘physical attacks, abduction and even assassination’, all legitimized in the name of religious purification (Abd A‘la 2008: 283).

Dutch colonization destroyed the religiously diverse sultanates in the Indonesian archipelago, thereby opening a space for anti-colonialism to develop around a more uniform, Wahhabi-influenced, interpretation of Islam. Pilgrims to Mecca ‘would have been brought into contact with other Muslims who were virulently anti-European’ (Andaya 2003: 84–5). Anti-colonial resistance elsewhere also provided inspiration, including the Wahhabi call to jihad (holy war) when the French invaded Egypt in 1798 and the efforts by Indian Muslims to halt the advance of the kafir (non-Muslims) in India (Burckhardt 1968: 207–9, cited in Andaya 2003: 85). Wahhabism led to a significant shift in Muslim discourses worldwide, ushering in a new politics of everyday control:

An attentiveness to private life and daily behavior was a common and novel discourse in the Islamic world in the late eighteenth century. … Through the early 1700s, Islam and the ulama had been primarily concerned with states and with kingship. These new reformist Islamic movements were more involved with the everyday lives of ordinary people; fatwa addressed issues of family life, sex, and appropriate conduct. (Hadler 2008: 978)

Sexual dimensions of Dutch colonialism

In 1602 the Dutch East India Company was established with a monopoly from the Netherlands government to colonize Asia (Ames 2008: 102–3). Dutch men were considered as noblesse de la peau (‘nobility of the skin’), privileged to form sexual liaisons with and even marry brown-skinned native women (Gouda 2008: 164–5).⁶ In contrast, any white-skinned woman who had a sexual encounter with a brown-skinned man was legally stripped of her European status.⁷ Dutch women’s sexual agency was thus penalized, even though its potential was implicitly acknowledged by such laws.

Dutch colonial policies regulated indigenous women’s bodies according to different agendas. In various parts of Bali from the late nineteenth century to 1927, the Dutch government required Balinese women to cover their breasts ‘to protect the morals of Dutch soldiers (and adolescent sons)’ (Wiener 2005: 74). But as the Dutch began to promote tourism to Bali (and elsewhere), ‘women’s bare breasts became a selling point, encouraging [male] tourists to visit Bali and indulge their fantasies about paradise and easy sex’ (Wiener 2005: 68). Either way, the Balinese women were treated as the desired objects of white men, whether soldiers or tourists. Ironically, the Balinese women were compelled by the Dutch to wear the kebaya, a blouse made of a translucent material and ‘designed to signify, if not enhance the torso of the woman’ (Cattoni 2004: 4). Dutch policies thus obscenified Balinese women’s breasts. The means used to hide the breasts banned from public view instead calls attention to that part. Obscenification thereby imbues a bodily part with the power to arouse desire through its very existence, whether hidden or revealed.

Politicizing polygyny as anti-colonialism

Localized resistance to colonization took the form of royalist revivalism without pan-archipelagic aspirations (Wee 2002). But Islamist nationalism and pluralist nationalism were the pan-archipelagic forms of resistance that shaped Indonesia, with different political visions of the post-colonial state. By ‘Islamism’, I refer to ‘a political discourse … that attempts to centre Islam within the political order’ (Sayyid 2003: 17).

The first Islamist federation, the Great Islamic Council of Indonesia, was formed in 1938 specifically to promote polygamy (Cribb 2004: 814). The colonial government’s proposed law of 1937 on ‘voluntary monogamous marriage’ had to be rescinded due to the united opposition of such organizations as Muhammadiyah and Sarekat Islam, both founded in 1912, and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), founded in 1926 (Locher-Scholten 2000: 188). Prior to this, views were already polarized at the first Indonesian Women’s Congress (1928):

The Christian organizations and the non-religious organizations on the one hand, and the Islamic women’s groups on the other hand, however, were deeply and decisively divided on the central issue: polygamy. The Christian and non-religious women’s organizations saw polygamy as an unpardonable humiliation for women, against which they actively fought; the Islamic organizations only wanted to improve the conditions under which polygamy was allowed to occur, not to abolish the institution itself. (Wieringa 1985: 8–9)

Although some members of Islamically identified women’s wings voiced private misgivings, they never did so publicly:

Personally, I have never agreed with polygamy. I would never have allowed it. But, it is a religious rule, so what can we say against it?

Polygamy is a religious rule, we couldn’t change that. But we did feel that it didn’t give men license to take one woman after another. It should not be abused! Men have to adhere strictly to the conditions under which it is allowed. Now if a woman does not get any children, yes, then it was necessary. But if not … then he is just fooling around. Religion doesn’t allow that. (Two dissenting women, cited in Robinson 2009: 44).

Rasoena Said, a school principal and ‘female nationalist’, also said that while she recognized the ev...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• About The Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• INTRODUCTION Policing gender, sexuality and ‘Muslimness’
• PART I Tools of policing: the politics of history, community, law
• PART II Sites of contestation: reclaiming public spaces
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX