Women’s identity and gender relations in Aceh

Aceh has a long history of war against colonial powers. It launched its war against the Dutch in 1873 (Reid 2005, 267; Ricklefs 1993, 145–146; Ricklefs 2001, 185–188). In the 1950s, Aceh embarked on a new military conflict against the newly-independent Republic of Indonesia (Sjamsuddin 1985).

Throughout the history of Aceh, Islam has played a major role in shaping the character of Aceh’s identity. The Acehnese identify themselves as Muslims and that it is ‘not possible’ for an Acehnese not to be a Muslim (Aspinall 2007, 247–248). The strong identification of Acehnese with Islam is due to several reasons, including the fact that Aceh was an important power in the Malacca Straits in the sixteenth century, and became a centre of Islamic learning and trade in the archipelago (Aspinall 2007, 247). Islam is also believed to be part of the spirit that united both the Acehnese and the rest of Indonesia in their fight against the Dutch (1873–1903).

Various accounts suggest that throughout the pre-colonial history of Aceh, women had high social status, in both public and private spaces. Aceh’s cultural tradition places women in respected positions in the family structure and in the public domain.

The first woman to lead Aceh was Sultana Taj al-’Alam al-Din Shah (1641–1675), the daughter of Sultan Iskandar Muda. After her, three female leaders ruled Aceh: Sri Sultan Nur al-’alam Nakiyat al-Din Shah, from 1675 to 1678; Sultana Inayat Shah Zakiyat al-Din Shah from 1678 to 1688; and Sultana Kamalat Shah from 1688 to 1699 (Riddell 2006, 41–42; Siapno 2002, 51; Ricklefs 2001, 40). Female leadership only became impossible in the kingdom after a fatwa¹ was issued by the ‘Sheriff of Mecca’ in Saudi Arabia, which stated that a woman could not become a sultan or a leader, as that would be un-Islamic (Riddell 2006, 42). This fatwa ended Sultana Kamalat Shah’s leadership in 1699. Later, when Aceh started its fight against the Dutch colonial government,² at least four Acehnese women took part in the war in leadership roles: Tjut Nyak Dhien, Cut Mutia, Teuku Fakinah and Pocut Bahren (Siapno 2002, 59). All these historical accounts have, according to Amir (2002, 46), created images that Acehnese women are ‘heroic’. The images of Acehnese women as heroic in fighting against colonial power are also depicted in the history books at Indonesian schools.

The high status of women in Southeast Asia has been well covered by scholars in the field (Andaya 1995; Reid 1988; Boserup 1970). Reid (1988, 146) for example, has suggested that ‘the comparatively high status of women in the social system is distinctively Southeast Asian’. The high status of women in the pre-modern history of Southeast Asia was also due to women’s control over economic resources, because society highly valued the work of women and the influence of indigenous religious beliefs, which emphasized women’s participation (Andaya 1995, 166–167). Although women in Southeast Asia have been historically recognized as having high status, in the case of Indonesia it is not easy for women to enter the public political arena and articulate their needs and concerns to the state (Blackburn 2004, 6).³ This is because gender relations between men and women in Indonesia are constructed by beliefs and practices based on the ‘appropriate’ behaviour and treatment of men and women (Blackburn 2004, 3).

As regards women’s status in Aceh, local Acehnese believe that throughout history Acehnese women enjoyed high status and respected positions in society. According to him, this was because Islamic teaching recognizes gender equality between men and women. A noted Acehnese historian, Hasbi Amiruddin, confirmed this depiction by saying that it is indeed Islam that lays the basic foundation for gender relations in Aceh, guaranteeing Acehnese women equal opportunities with men in exercising their public and private roles (Amiruddin 2004).

Exploring the complexity of gender representation in rural Aceh by looking at Aceh’s oral traditions, Siapno explained that gender roles are plural in the everyday lives of rural Acehnese society (Siapno 2002, 91). For example, she discussed an oral story, ‘Pak Pande’, which describes how Acehnese females perform all the men’s jobs, including being heads of households and guardians of Islamic identity, as men are incapable of doing these jobs.

In reporting anthropological work he conducted during the 1960s, Siegel (2000, 139–140) has described the position of women in the family structure in Aceh. He described how Acehnese women enjoyed certain privileges in their households. According to him, Acehnese women had authority to rule their household, and the right to make decisions in the family. Women’s positions in their households, according to Siegel, relate to traditional practices by which the houses where women and their husbands live were the gift of the women’s parents (Reid 1988; Siegel 2000; Siapno 2002; Jayawardena 1977). Thus, the house was considered to be the property of the woman. According to tradition, Acehnese parents gave their daughter a house at the time of their daughter’s marriage and the house later legally became the full property of the daughter. Other than ownership of the house, a married woman also has ownership over the rice field that she and her husband work. This is due to the spatial mobility of men who often travel outside their villages for trade.⁴ While their husbands are away, women are responsible for managing their fields. To help with the harvest, the wife usually hires labourers to work the rice fields. The wives also controlled the money earned from selling the harvest (Siegel 2000, 143–145). In short, Siegel (2000, 145) wrote that ‘regardless of ownership of land, control of it is given to women’.

The fact that women spent most of their time in the village, Jayawardena (1977, 159) argues, made women the ‘fixed point of reference’ in the social organization of village life in Aceh. According to Siapno (2000, 279), this relative power and the autonomy that women have in terms of ownership of land, control of the household, family and local village affairs have given women (be they mothers, grandmothers or older sisters) the privilege of dominant power in all important family decisions.

In terms of marriage, Acehnese women also had freedom to choose their spouses. Siegel says that although parents often arrange marriages in Aceh,⁵ an Acehnese woman had a veto if she did not like the man they chose, and could refuse to go through with the marriage (Siegel 2000, 165). In Acehnese tradition, both men and women have their own ideas about the kind of person they want to be their husband or wife. In married life, women were the ones with the authority and decision-making power for the whole family. The husband who often left the house to travel and trade did not have the right to participate in making decisions (Siegel 2000, 178). This is because, as Siegel (2000, 178) noted:

From the women’s point of view, the family consists of the people who occupy the house compound – themselves, their sisters, mothers and children – and their husbands have no place and hence no right to make decisions.

According to Siapno (2002), what Siegel described above is Aceh’s matrifocal adat, whereby women’s places are at the centre of the family, a culture that contradicts Islamic values that emphasize men’s position as head of the household, performing the role of a father and husband. This matrifocal adat, according to Siapno, has been increasingly challenged, in particular by attempts to revive Islam and strengthen adat based on Islamic teachings. Siapno (2002, 37) wrote:

Islam and Islamic culture achieved hegemonic status in Aceh, but within this hegemony there are opposing forms of Islam; on the one hand is the traditionalist Islam practiced syncretically with matrifocal (mother-centred and woman-centered) adat. On the other hand is modernist Islam with strong attempts at purification – the removal of practices such as matrifocal adat (e.g. women as head of the family) which supposedly conflict with ‘pure’ Islam.

The role and high status of Acehnese women can also be seen in the colonial period. During the fight against the colonial occupation, Tjut Nyak Dien became a symbol of women’s resistance (Reid 2006, 101). She heroically led the fighting after the death of her husband, Teuku Uma. Tjut Nyak Dien was not the only woman involved in the fight for Aceh’s liberation. Based on archival accounts from 1905 to 1930, she found that many Acehnese women were involved in the fighting against the Dutch and a significant number were killed (Siapno 2002, 25–27). Unfortunately, their names were not recorded in reports, as most of these women were not recognized as individuals but were listed under the name of their husband or fathers or brothers. This happened because women at that time wore the same clothing as men, a pair of black trousers and a traditional baju kurung, which made it difficult for the Dutch police to identify them (Siapno 2002, 26).

It can therefore be understood why many Acehnese that I talked with during my research (including Acehnese women) rejected the portrayal of Acehnese women as oppressed and discriminated against, both in public and family structures. Even Acehnese women activists were adamant that Aceh’s past was not one of oppression or discrimination against women. Many of them also referred to their experiences with their own families, which were not gender-biased, they said.

The International Development Law Organization (IDLO), one of the internationally based NGOs that came to Aceh after the tsunami, praised the role of women in Acehnese society in their regular posts on the local media (Serambi Indonesia, 19 April 2008). One IDLO article (2008) even argued explicitly that the portrayal of Acehnese women as subordinated and discriminated against is misleading. The article contends that in reality Acehnese women are not less powerful than men. The article went on to emphasize the fact that from both an Islamic and an Acehnese legal perspective, women are not typically subordinated and have usually shared equal rights and responsibilities with men. To support its argument the article quoted a statement made by the leader of the Consultative Council of Ulama (Majelis Permusyawaratan Ulama or MPU), Professor Tgk Muslim Ibrahim, who argued that ‘Islam perceives men and women equal’, quoting a Hadith which says that ‘heaven is under your mother’s feet’. For him, IDLO argues, this Hadith clearly demonstrates how Islam respects and reveres women, and that Islam does not allow women to be the subject of discrimination. Given what he said, in reality Ibrahim is not pro-woman, in particular when it comes to women’s clothing. He is of the view that women must ensure that their clothing does not show their body shape (Serambi Indonesia, 4 November 2009). The attitude of the MPU towards women in Aceh is described in more detail in Chapter 2.

The Deputy Governor of Aceh, Muhammad Nazar, has similarly argued that women have always been given respected positions in decision-making. In front of hundreds of women from different districts in the province who attended a conference organized by the Australian NGO, LOGICA-AIPRD, in collaboration with BRR and local women’s NGO Beungung Jeumpa on 8 March 2007, the Deputy Governor used Aceh’s history to show that Acehnese women enjoyed equal opportunities with men, as some women gloriously led the wars against the colonial powers. He argued that women’s high status in Acehnese society is due to Islam, which he said has become ‘the Acehnese way of life’. By saying this, he denied allegations that Islam causes women’s subordination. He contended that Acehnese women only encountered discrimination and subordination after Aceh joined the Indonesian Republic and that this only became worse when the New Order was in power and women became targets of exploitation and state violence.

Despite this historical background and the defensive narrative pertaining to the status of women and the gender relations in the society described above, the reality is that representation of women in the public domain remains minimal in contemporary Aceh. Safril (2008), for example, observes that in 2008 there were only two women serving as policy-makers in the government offices, out of a total of 74 high-ranking officials. Of about 6,000 villages across the province, only six were led by women. In legal matters, there were only four women judges in the provincial Syari’at court and none at the Mahkamah Syari’at or the sharia court. There were only 15 Islamic women judges in the Mahkamah Syari’at of a total of 138 Islamic judges. At the administrative level, there were only 145 women working at the BRR, the Bureau for Reconstruction and Rehabilitation, of 1,219 employees. Safril (2008) also noted that the commitment of the local government to make women’s issues a priority is questionable, as the allocated budget for women’s welfare and children was only about 0.82 per cent of the total reconstruction budget in the first year of the reconstruction period following the tsunami, and reduced to 0.045 per cent in the second year. Arabiyani Abubakar, the manager of the Women and Children unit at BRR, mentioned that her unit was allocated IDR 55 million in 2005, IDR 65 million in 2006, IDR 45 million in 2007 and IDR 6 million in 2007 (interview, Banda Aceh, 15 December 2007). In the area of education, no women have ever reached the highest position (that of Rector) at the two public higher educational institutions in Aceh, the Syiah Kuala University and IAIN Ar-Raniry (Inayatillah 2009).

In 2007, a local women’s NGO, RPUK (Relawan Perempuan Untuk Kemanusiaan or Women Volunteers for Humanity) conducted research aiming to look at gender equality in the agriculture, irrigation and fisheries sectors. The research found that women’s earning capacity is destroyed when machines take various agricultural jobs, because development projects force mass production. During conflict, women’s roles in the public economic sphere were also much diminished, due to the absence of a supportive security system to protect women, which prevented women from travelling from home to their fields and to sell their harvest in markets. Agriculture has historically been one of the main forms of women’s economic activities in Aceh.

In her research on gender representations of male and female lecturers at the State Institute for Islamic Studies, IAIN Ar-Raniry, Inayatillah (2009, 5) found a lower involvement of women. Inayatillah argues this happens because of the bias of institutional regulations, women’s ‘double burden’ (to contribute to the family income and to take care of the children), and the patriarchal culture of the society. To become a lecturer at IAIN, the regulation requires a postgraduate degree, but the opportunities for men and women to access higher education are not equal. In the 1950s and 1960s, she says, many Acehnese had to travel to other areas (in particular Java or West Sumatra) to access higher education due to the absence of good educational institutions in the province and the fear caused by frequent military conflict. In this situation, many parents did not allow their daughters to pursue higher education, because it was too far away, and because many believed that women did not need it. Many Acehnese at that time still believed that if a woman gets higher education, she might not get a husband. As a result of this, in 2006 IAIN Ar-Raniry had only 57 female lecturers, compared to about 208 male lecturers. Of the five faculties at IAIN – Adab (history), Dakwah (Islamic preaching), Syariah (Islamic law), Tarbiyah (Islamic education) and Ushuluddin (Islamic theology) – the Syariah and Ushuluddin faculties have the smallest number of female lecturers, with just six female lecturers.

From these two studies, it is clear that the gender problem in Aceh emerged not only because of tradition, but also as a result of economic development and state gender policies, as Nazar claimed. Gender roles in Aceh were indeed subjected to Indonesia’s New Order gender policy, with its expectations of how women and men should behave according to their ascribed sex (Blackburn 2008, 8). In addition, however, the Aceh religious community also continues to use Islam to justify the confinement of women’s roles to domestic affairs. Both of these issues are explained further in Chapter 4.