A Congress of Women Clerics
In his visit to Indonesia in early April, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani praised the one thing that he said Indonesia had that no other Islamic community in the world had: the accomplishments of its women clerics. In other countries, even if women clerics exist, their role in Islamic discourses gets little or no recognition.
Today (25/4/2017), more than a thousand women clerics, whose exact roles are loosely defined, gathered in Cirebon, West Java. They are holding the Indonesian Congress for Women Clerics (KUPI), which is decidedly not a usual event.
The congress is not held to vote for a chairwoman, a board of management or to set an annual agenda. Neither is this a politically charged congress to push for a certain political agenda or to promote certain women figures on the national political scene. Neither is this a gathering of mothers on a spiritual tour or those affiliated with the utopian agenda of universal sharia-ization. This is a gathering of religious ideas based on scientific concerns and their experience as Indonesian women concerned with the stagnation of religious ideas on women’s issues. It is truly a fundamental, significant and substantive political agenda.
There are three special themes that will bring forth an edict formulated through a methodology built on women’s experiences and mindset: violence against women, child marriages under the pretext of religious legitimacy and the effects of environmental destruction on women and marginalized communities. Outside of these three, there are eleven actual themes that will be discussed in parallel discussions, including on women and radical groups, migrant workers, and the accomplishments of and challenges for women clerics.
From the perspective of existentialism, KUPI is none other than an affirmation of a main feature of Indonesian Islam. This is the Indonesian Islam that is respected by Muslims in other countries and is envied upon by the world’s Muslim women’s rights activists as an oasis of ideas and post-colonial movement sourced from religious teachings.
Indonesian Islam is a form of Islam that, in its sociocultural life, opens itself to the role of women to work in the public space, therefore enabling the emergence of women clerics, religious leaders and even religious judges. The strong presence of women – and women clerics – with important roles in two of Indonesia’s largest mainstream Islam socio-religious organizations, namely Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, as well as in majelis taklim (Islamic study groups) across the nation signifies that Indonesian Islam is a moderate one.
Initiated and managed by volunteers comprising leaders of Islamic boarding schools and young clerics, especially from the NahdlatulUlama community, the congress seeks to respond to widespread concerns on women’s rights issues and to find concrete solutions amid stagnated discourse of religious texts’ interpretations.
A clear example will be the Constitutional Court’s rejection of the Marriage Law’s judicial review regarding the low age limit for marriage. Instead of using generally accepted state constitutional arguments that legally bind all Indonesians, some of the justices used primordial and highly debatable religious argumentations instead.
KUPI edicts
KUPI is run by a network of youth and college activists as well as grassroots social workers. The dialectics among them enrich the formulation of edicts that they are proposing, thereby highlighting the strong dynamics of their debates before they arrive at their conclusions as included in the KUPI edicts.
The formulation process went on for months through continuous dialogues between three poles: research-based field facts, religious ideas based on the methodology of ushul fiqh (the roots of Islamic law) and the practicality of the works involved in managing real-world social movements. From these three poles, an edict-formulation methodology was concocted that would best avoid any prejudice based on gender, social class and regimes of singular minds.
This is all possible only because KUPI is run by women leaders, including heads of Islamic boarding schools, officials from the women wing of mainstream socio-religious organizations, researchers with wide networks and paradigms that transcend the boundaries of religious thinking, women’s rights activists from Muslim families and community workers who persevere in empowering the women in poor and marginalized communities.
They avoid any unilateral domination and reliance on a singular leadership figure. Nevertheless, everyone believes in the idea that Indonesian Islam should be able to answer contemporary issues faced by Indonesian women and to contribute to the global Islamic discourse to end all oppression against women.
Such answers are deemed necessary as the structure of social and gender power relations are not the same today as they were when the religion was first revealed to mankind. Personal protection on women, which was originally clan-based in patriarchal traditions and guided by religious teachings, is no longer enough to respond to contemporary problems of oppression against women.
This is because there have been shifts in gender relations in post-industrialization and post-modern societies. There is a belief that religion should serve as ethical and ethos guides in reading the situations regarding contemporary women’s issues. Therefore, an updated method of reading religious texts are necessary to maintain religion’s relevance as a guide for societal changes.
The congress is highly important to be noted down in the history of Islam in Indonesia and the world. The congress has legitimized and affirmed the works of women clerics, especially those aware of the need for partisanship in the fight for justice among genders. It is, then, the duty of clerics, especially male ones, as President Ashraf Gani did, to recognize these achievements and not see them as threats even if their edicts may disrupt the comfort of religion-exploiting patriarchs.
LIES MARCOES
Director of Rumah Kitab; KUPI participant