Abstract
This chapter examines the intersection of gender, sociality, and Muslim–Christian difference in community life. I provide five ethnographic stories to show that recent Islamic revivals have produced uneven effects on Muslim and Christian women: Muslim women reciting the Qur’an for a mixed audience to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday at the neighborhood mosque; women taking collective action to punish unsociable neighbors regardless of religious affiliation; the prominence of women’s Islamic sermon groups in life-cycle ceremonies; a pair of Muslim and Christian women who are best friends reflecting on the network of neighborhood women who cook for circumcision ceremonies and other rituals; and the different roles Christian women and men take in Muslim life-cycle celebrations.
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Notes
- 1.
Rasmussen, 2010. Women, the recited Qur’an, and Islamic music in Indonesia, p 212.
- 2.
Peacock, on the other hand, noted that maulud was more frequently practiced by “traditionalist” orthodox Muslims and never by the “reformist” Muslims (1978, 44) based on his 1969–1970 fieldwork in Indonesia and Singapore. But, in Salatiga today, maulud was jointly celebrated by both neo-traditionalist and reformist Muslims. I have argued elsewhere that this has to do with a greater solidary between the NU and Muhammadiyah due to the rise of extremism (Chao 2014).
- 3.
There was also RK, or “harmonious village,” that supervised RWs. In 1988–1989, the RK unit was abolished in favor of the smaller RW.
- 4.
Clifford Geertz and James Peacock, in the 1960s, both suggested that urban neighborhoods no longer represented corporate communities but, rather, administrative units (Guinness 2009, 169), and that ritual meals would soon lose their appeal.
- 5.
In Bourdieu’s words, these moral judgments are the result when habitus “implement distinctions between what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so on” (1996, 17). In our case, it is inclinations of customary sociality that constitute the lines of distinction.
- 6.
To keep my respondents anonymous and to protect their privacy, I have to conceal the actual name of this Islamic charity.
- 7.
Field notes, February 6, 2010.
- 8.
This number is based on various statistics of BPS Central Java 2005, expenditure per capita multiplied by the household size.
- 9.
Field notes, February 5, 2010. This excerpt from my field notes has appeared in an article of mine (2014) that has a different focus.
- 10.
Field notes, January 31, 2010.
- 11.
Depending on the definition one uses, the origin of pengajian can be traced back to what Dhofier identified as a practice in the pesantren (Islamic boarding school) (1999, 27–29), or what Geertz observed as weekly prayer meetings (1960, 168–170) named pengaosan (“pengajian,” in Javanese) in Eastern Central Java in the 1950s.
- 12.
This phrase, meaning “friend in the back,” designates Javanese women to be “in the back” in the kitchen area (to cook) and in the well area (to wash clothes).
- 13.
Field notes, February 5, 2010.
- 14.
See endnote 12.
- 15.
See endnote 12. This part of the interview has appeared in an article of mine (2014).
- 16.
Field notes, June 16, 2013.
- 17.
See endnote 15.
- 18.
Although it is commonly believed that Islam mandates men and women to cover their aurat, the part of the human body that should be concealed in front of men who are not muhrim or close kin, the covering is often conceived as a means to guard their honor (Abu-Lughod 1999, 137; Göle 1996, 93), rather than a burden reflecting women’s shame. Historically and cross-culturally, the practices of veiling differ widely, from the Arab elite emulating Persian headscarves in the past to the Indonesian middle-class university students aspiring to be modern in the Islamic way in the present.
In Turkey during the 1980s, for example, veiling represented a moral critique of Western hegemony and secularist political repression among the newly educated youth (Göle 1996, 83). To quote from a famous fictional but aptly realistic scene of that time period, “To play the rebel heroine in Turkey you don’t pull off your scarf, you put it on” (Pamuk 2005, 337). More recently, prominent feminist scholar Leila Ahmed also points out that, in post-9/11 America, many audacious Muslims women started veiling—not despite, but precisely because of the stigma that they now endeavored to rectify through being good and Islamic Americans in public (Ahmed 2011).
A brief comparison of the headscarf as the chronotopic motif in different time and space is useful here. Contrary to the unveiling movements in the broad Muslim-majority world before the 1960s, since the late 1970s Islamic thoughts and practices, veiling included, were revived globally as ways of achieving alternative modernity to compete with secular ideologies. Partially inspired by the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and different from the Saudi percept that imposed Muslim dress codes mostly strictly on women, revivals of Islamic costumes sometimes served as signs of rebellion in the wide disillusion with nationalist promises of prosperity and of the disapproval of continued Western domination in the Middle East and continued corruption in Indonesia up to the 1990s.
- 19.
Based on their reading of the canonical texts and against the conventional wisdom about the Islamic headscarf, religious and feminist scholars have argued that, strictly speaking, nothing in the Qur’an offers a concrete prescription that directly requires hair-covering (Barlas 2002; Mernissi 1987, 127–129). Indeed, as far as the two most related verses are concerned, it is only said that women should cover their bosom and be modest, or cast an outer garment over their body. While there are four sources of Islamic law, four traditional schools in Sunni Islam, and hence inherently plural opinions in legal affairs throughout history and in different regions, most of the misogynistic mandates were historically derived from the Hadith, not the Qur’an (Mernissi 1991). Scholars hence contend that, assuming head-covering is misogynistic, the custom of hair-covering and related dress codes must be a patriarchal interpretation, rather than a religious mandate. Historically speaking, head-covering was a cultural adoption from the elite culture of Persian or Byzantine courts, not an Islamic injunction inscribed in the Qur’an (Keddie 1991, 2). For ordinary Muslims, these historical contextualizations obviously do not resonate widely.
- 20.
In 1998, for a rather short period of time during the pro-democracy movement leading to President Suharto’s resignation, the veiling movement even partially grew into an anti-government symbol among activists against the corrupt New Order regime (Smith-Hefner 2007).
- 21.
This conversation took place via facebook messenger on May 9, 2014.
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Chao, EC. (2017). Regendering Community. In: Entangled Pieties. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48420-4_4
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