Background

A photo that circulated in September 2005 in local and national media of an Acehnese woman giving her non-Acehnese military boyfriend a passionate open-mouthed kiss in front of a battalion of the Indonesian army getting ready to leave the war-torn province following the peace agreement with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) shocked Acehnese men and women (Tempo interaktif 2005).

This incident provided an opening for sharia activists to push the local government to implement sharia law more seriously. They also demanded that the government not discriminate between anyone who violates the law. They believe that total implementation of Islamic law would save Acehnese women from any further wrongdoing. This incident legitimizes the spirit of the sharia activists that women should be the central focus in their attempt to Islamize society.

This book is about the lived experiences of Acehnese women in the Indonesian province of Aceh who live under Islamic law. The enforcement of Islamic law has subjected women’s sexuality, bodies and religiosity. The Acehnese women respond to it by mobilizing for change, shaping local discourse on women’s equality and status, promoting equality, women’s civil and political rights and demanding law reform within an Islamic framework.

Acehnese women are not alone. Along with many other Indonesian women, their behaviour and sexuality have increasingly been targeted by those who want to revive Islamic values. Islamic political parties and other Muslim groups established after the 1998 Reformasi are at work with the agenda of returning the society back to Islam. In this project, Muslim politics put women’s bodies, status and roles subject to the contestation of what is right and wrong according to Islam. The decentralization policy introduced by the Indonesian government in 1999 provides regional authorities with the power to introduce regulation that is inspired by religion, in particular Islam. A number of provinces and districts around Indonesia have enacted religiously inspired regional regulations or PERDA (Peraturan Daerah) syari’at. Up to 2008, about 52 out of 470 districts and municipalities enacted 78 religious regulations or PERDA (Bush 2008, 176). The desire to promote adat (local customs) and the idea to return to Islam are the key source of values believed to be behind the formation of social norms implemented into PERDA. This religiously inspired PERDA regulate public morality to diminish social problems, from prostitution, gambling and alcohol consumption to the regulation of women’s behaviour and what women can and cannot wear. In some cases, they also regulate sexual mores.¹ Sadly, it is only when Indonesia democratizes that women are being criminalized for not following Islamic dress code.

Indonesian women use various means to challenge this. They use democratic openings to engage in political and social activism to express their political views.² Indonesia’s cultural and social structure still places constraints on women to participate in formal politics such as being elected to political office. In the last three democratic general elections, in 1999, 2004 and 2009, women’s representation in the parliament has remained at around 16–18 per cent, while the number of women voters is counted to be around 51 per cent of the total voters. Women then use various alternatives by organizing into social movements to express their socio-religious and political views. They get involved in various efforts from religious organizations to many other forms of voluntary organizations aimed at transforming society, from the grassroots to those at higher levels of society.

Politicians and male religious authority figures use Islam to justify the attempts to limit women’s freedom and status. This has prompted Muslim women take the initiative to promote the need to have more gender-sensitive reinterpretations of Islamic texts. Muslim women’s groups and other Muslim organizations at the national level developed connections with international feminist groups, as well as receiving support from Western sources and building alliances with modernist Muslim men scholars since the 1990s. They build alliances with male Muslim reformists to pioneer the discourse on the need to contextualize Islamic texts and emphasize their egalitarian messages (Bowen 1998, 2003; Feener 2007; Robinson 2007). These male and female Muslim reformists are educated in pesantren³ or traditional Islamic educational institutions and received higher education from the modernized State Institute of Islamic Studies or IAIN system, giving them religious credentials to reform Islamic teachings.⁴

It is thus tempting to see similar developments that have occurred at the local level, which is in Aceh, where Islamic law is formalized into the regional regulation.