Introduction

For nearly a century, Indonesian Muslim activists have fought for the protection of women's rights in Islam. The fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, however, unleashed Islamist forces that are challenging these activities. As a result, we can witness intense competition between Muslim activists who reject the national application of Islamic law and those who promote it. Particular to the Indonesian situation, which differs from that which we observe in other parts of the Muslim world, it is not the secular feminists who are confronting those who wish to apply the Shari’a but rather Muslim theologians and activists, many of whom belong to traditionalist Muslim circles.

The prominence of these Muslim feminists can be ascribed to the convergence of two developments. First, neo-Salafi movements have arisen, mostly at non-religious universities, and have started to lobby for the Islamisation of the national law. Second, for the past three decades, traditionalist Islam, as represented by the organisation of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), has produced activist groups that strongly promote women's religious rights. As a result, traditionalist Muslims have been pioneering the reinterpretation and re-reading of conservative religious texts, finding great support from Islamic state universities. Thus, these scholarly institutions, which, according to the American anthropologist Robert Hefner, are among the ‘most intellectually far-ranging in the world’, not only provide tertiary education to tens of thousands of Muslim women but also transmit Muslim feminist teachings.

The umbrella organisation for these activists, the NU, represents the traditionalist interpretation of Islam in Indonesia. The NU was launched by religious leaders in 1926 to counter the pervasive influence of the Egypt and Saudi-inspired puritanical reformist movement and today enjoys a majority following within the Indonesian Muslim community. Salafiyya reformists advocated a return to the pure Islam of the ancestors (al-salaf al-salih), rejecting the Shafi’ite legal codes used by traditionalist ulama in their daily practice and interpretation of fiqh. Reformists rejected local rituals that they considered to be pre-Islamic, including the veneration of saints (wali), similar to the practice of venerating sacred places, which flourished in Indonesia well before Islam entered the archipelago. Unlike traditionalist ulama in other parts of the Muslim world, as soon as it was launched, the NU participated in local and national politics (Feillard 1995, 1999).