ABSTRACT
Introduction Politicized Islam has emerged as an important force in the democratic atmosphere of the Reform period. Islamic voices that had been subdued under the New Order have found a public stage. Old political arguments that appeared to have been resolved, such as the form of the state (Islamic or secular) and the right of secular authority to regulate marriage, have re-emerged. Gender politics has become an element in competition between elites for the capture of the state, and an Islamist-influenced discourse of ‘traditional’ gender relations is the front line in an assertion of power by Islamist groups struggling to assert hegemony.
