ABSTRACT
This chapter examines emergent positions in Islamic feminism in Indonesia, which draw inspiration from a global Islamic movement for gender equity associated with the names of scholars such as Fatima Mernissi, Riffat Hassan, Asghar Ali Engineer and Amina Wadud. Under the authoritarian regime of Suharto, Islam was eclipsed as a political force. Indonesia was characterised by a growing secular women’s movement throughout the Suharto period, a movement of middle-class women who found ‘democratic space’ in the apparently paradoxical engagement of the Suharto regime with the global movement for women’s rights through the UN-sponsored agenda. Anti-violence developed as a strong theme of the Indonesian women’s movement through the 1980s; for example, the Islamic group Rifka Anissa established a women’s refuge in Yogyakarta to support victims of violence, and women’s groups became increasingly vocal critics of military and paramilitary violence against women in areas of conflict like West Papua and East Timor.
