Indonesia\u2019s 18,000 islands cover a vast oceanic footprint north of Australia. On a map, they look like gathering thunderclouds.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fitting picture. The predominately Islamic republic is a cultural weather system of sorts, one that anthropologist Nancy J. Smith-Hefner<\/a> said may show how ancient Islam negotiates its place in the modern world.<\/p>\n Smith-Hefner, a Radcliffe<\/a> Fellow who is on sabbatical from Boston University<\/a>, studies social change among Muslim youth on Java, Indonesia\u2019s most densely populated island. Her focus since 1999 has been Yogyakarta, a Javanese provincial capital. It\u2019s a place she made come alive in a Feb. 24 lecture at the Radcliffe Gymnasium.<\/p>\n Indonesians began to convert to Islam as early as the 14th century. Before long, the religion had displaced Buddhism and Hinduism, and today Indonesia is the world\u2019s largest Islamic nation. But until the 1970s, said Smith-Hefner, Muslims there followed a modified style of Islam, blending the teachings of Mohammed with Sufi and folk traditions.<\/p>\n Then came that change in the cultural weather. In the past few decades, a growing fraction of Muslims on Java \u2014 most of them young \u2014 are embracing what she called more \u201cnormative\u201d forms of Islam.<\/p>\n That means more mosques in Yogyakarta and elsewhere, along with more Friday prayer meetings for men, more explicitly Muslim publications on newsstands, and, most visibly, more interest in traditional Muslim styles of dress, particularly for women.<\/p>\n Smith-Hefner said \u201cIslamic restraint\u201d is penetrating a traditional culture that, for instance, is still famous for its shapely, bare-shouldered dancers in form-fitting dresses. \u201cIf she doesn\u2019t waddle,\u201d she said of a woman in a traditional dress, stepping from the lectern to mime a shimmy, \u201cit\u2019s not tight enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Coming into style instead are tight, concealing scarves and loose togas, she said, \u201cmeant to fully obscure the contours of a woman\u2019s body so the shape of the waist and hips is not apparent.\u201d<\/p>\n The change in cultural weather also means something else, said Smith-Hefner, getting to the heart of her research: a \u201cpatriarchal bargain.\u201d In exchange for modern freedoms such as access to work and school, women tacitly agree to avoid any \u201cpublic show of authority over men.\u201d<\/p>\n Under cover of modesty and restraint, women in this corner of Islam are allowed to value education, exercise personal authority, and live in what is in effect a society of gender equality. This form of Islam is pious and even strict, said Smith-Hefner, but it should not be construed as in defiant contrast to the West.<\/p>\n Men are expected to keep their end of the bargain too, in what the anthropologist calls a \u201cgender paradox\u201d within Islam. (It\u2019s a term coined by religion sociologist Bernice Martin, who noted the same gender bargaining among Pentecostal Christians.)<\/p>\n Men are expected to conform to high standards of personal comportment: that is, to pay more attention to their families; avoid smoking, drinking, and gambling; and refrain from extramarital sex. \u201cIt\u2019s not easy\u201d on them, said Smith-Hefner, and the numbers prove it. Among converts to this more normative brand of Islam, women outnumber men two to one.<\/p>\n To explain this gender paradox, Smith-Hefner focused her study on KAMMI, an acronym for the Indonesian Muslim Students\u2019 Action Union. This artifact of Muslim religious activism started in the 1980s \u201cwith small communities of observant believers,\u201d she said, and was intended to be \u201ca movement for student morality.\u201d<\/p>\n KAMMI activists \u2014 some of them influenced by travel to other Islamic countries \u2014 took control of student university groups and state-sponsored religious courses. They were also part of the demonstrations against the dictator Suharto before he stepped down in 1998. The KAMMI demonstrations had one striking feature, said Smith-Hefner: the unusual predominance of women.<\/p>\n Followers of KAMMI do not lobby for an Islamic state or insist on strict sharia religious law, she said. But they do see sharia law as an inevitable part of \u201cgradual moral and societal reform.\u201d<\/p>\n This hope of gradual reform is based on the Islamic notion of kodrat, \u201cone\u2019s divinely determined nature or role,\u201d said Smith-Hefner. For men, that includes leading, protecting, and providing for the household. For women, she said, that includes caring for the household, raising children, and providing \u201csexual service\u201d to men.<\/p>\n At the heart of this agreement, for both sexes, is modesty and structure, ideas that may create tension with gender roles as they evolve in modernity.<\/p>\n KAMMI practices include an exacting and detailed dress code for women that is meant to temper male desires. There are also strict norms for gender interaction that proscribe limits on greetings, gazes, and dating. \u201cThere is no dating in Islam,\u201d said Smith-Hefner. \u201cThere is only a pattern of familiarization.\u201d<\/p>\n There are KAMMI marriage bureaus of a sort, which combine the idea of a Western dating service with \u201cold pieties,\u201d she said. Students exchange \u201cbio-data,\u201d a committee suggests a match, and that leads to \u201cseveral formal meetings,\u201d said Smith-Hefner, at which prospective partners talk about \u201ctheir visions and principles.\u201d<\/p>\n After this, \u201cmost marital decisions occur with surprising rapidity\u201d for couples, she added, \u201cand they never even touch one another.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a \u201cradical departure\u201d from traditional Javanese marriage practices, in which the families play a role in matchmaking, said Smith-Hefner, and is certainly at odds with the Indonesian marriage law of 1974, which gives people the right to choose their own partners.<\/p>\n But marriage bureaus and similar structures offer advantages, she said, especially to women attending universities. The pool of eligible partners with similar attainments is small. So KAMMI helps women to identify matching partners, who often are younger men, said Smith-Hefner.<\/p>\n These strategies also protect educated women, not just from the pressures of male sexuality, but also from men who might not let their partners work. (In strict Islam, whether a woman works is a man\u2019s decision.) That\u2019s always part of the premarital discourse, said Smith-Hefner: \u201cWill the man allow the woman to work?\u201d<\/p>\n Outwardly, KAMMI and its practices might seem to destabilize the concept of a woman\u2019s individual choice. But in fact, she said, they provide \u201caccess to other valued ends,\u201d including sexual modesty, education, employment, and incentives for a man to be a better provider.<\/p>\n This emerging style of Islam \u201cis not in opposition to secular modernity,\u201d said Smith-Hefner, \u201cbut (it\u2019s) a way of striking a different balance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Indonesia\u2019s 18,000 islands cover a vast oceanic footprint north of Australia. On a map, they look like gathering thunderclouds. It\u2019s a fitting picture. The predominately Islamic republic is a cultural weather system of sorts, one that anthropologist Nancy J. Smith-Hefner said may show how ancient Islam negotiates its place in the modern world. Smith-Hefner, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}