Intersections of Gender/Sex, Multiculturalism and Religion: Young Muslim Minority Women in Contemporary Bali

Abstract

This article examines the experience of Muslim female students in high schools in Bali. Since the religion of the majority of the population of Bali is Balinese Hinduism, these young women are part of a Muslim minority – unusual in Indonesia. Data were obtained through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010. Interviewees were mainly Muslim students, but teachers and Muslim parents were also consulted. Some of the students are a minority within a state senior high school, and some attend a private Islamic school in Denpasar. Interviewees identified choice of school and the wearing of the jilbab (Islamic head-scarf) as issues for them in their everyday lives. The Islamic school is (mis-)perceived as a morally safe environment by parents. The state school does not allow the wearing of the jilbab, showing the limits of multiculturalism in Bali. While the jilbab should express piety and morality, there is some hypocrisy among some young jilbab-wearing women. Some young women have internalised the Balinese objection to poor Muslim immigrants, and feel inferior when they wear the jilbab. The data suggest that their female sex/gender flags their unequal Muslim-minority status in ways that Muslim-minority men do not experience.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Bali
• Islam
• gender
• minority
• schools
• Muslim minority

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Victoria Randa Ayu for fieldwork assistance and the schools that allowed access and helped in data collection.

Notes

1. In 2005, MUI decreed that praying together with non-Muslims was prohibited for Muslims; in 2005 it issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from marrying non-Muslims; in 2006, MUI outlawed the Islamic minority sect, Ahmadiyah, and pluralism, secularism and liberalism in general.

2. The Indonesian government adopted gender mainstreaming as a national strategy with Presidential Decree No. 9 on gender mainstreaming in 2000.

3. See Parker (2011) for Indonesia; also Dzuhayatin (2001) for a New Order plea for greater diversity of gender models.

4. However, there are many other non-Islamic societies in Indonesia, each with a distinctive history and culture. Bali’s ability to stand firm as a Hindu society since Indonesia’s Independence was achieved in 1945 has been as much due to its ability to earn tourist dollars and represent Indonesia in a positive way internationally as to the nature of its distinctive culture.

5. This study was part of a larger project, which entailed a survey of more than 3,000 students in senior high schools in five provinces of Indonesia: Jakarta, Yogyakarta, West Sumatra, Central Kalimantan and Bali (see Parker, Hoon, & Raihani [2014] for more on the survey). In Bali, I first contacted Education Offices and obtained national examination scores, as well as data on the composition of the different schools, and geographic location. The seven schools surveyed in Bali were chosen to represent both rural and urban, and poor and high academic performance. The two schools represented in this paper are two of the seven; the SMA was chosen for more intensive study because of the diversity of its population, central city location and fairly high (but not top) academic performance.

6. The national statistics on educational attainment by different age-groups show that somewhat more than half the young people aged 16–18 attend school. These are the more socioeconomically secure, but it is too broad a generalisation to say that they are, by definition, middle class, as some have intimated. What we can say is that these young people come from families on at least adequate monthly incomes.

7. In this paper I use the terms jilbab, hijab and kerudung interchangeably when speaking about the Islamic head-scarf, and reproduce whichever term research participants used in quotes. Choice of term by participants can depend upon region of origin or residence (e.g. in West Sumatra, most young women use the term jilbab), the identity of the person to whom the participant is speaking, the relationship between them, and perceptions of foreignness and familiarity with terms.

8. Indonesian has gender-neutral third person pronouns that do not distinguish singular and plural, so it is not clear here whether he is speaking about his child, who is female, or children in general. Further on, he specifies particular worry about daughters.

9. While there is some work on young women and sexuality in Bali (e.g. Jennaway, 2002; Wikan, 1990) and in neighbouring Lombok (Bennett, 2005), the women in these ethnographies are significantly older than the schoolgirls reported on here.

10. See Hauser-Schäublin (2013) for discussion of Balinese as “natives”.

11. The teacher stressed that he had cited this national-level decree in his discussions with the principal, but acknowledged that he had not been able to access the Decree and did not really know its contents. In fact, the Decree had nothing to do with this issue. It was an important decree, in that it brought Islamic schools into the national education system; it led to the 1976 Ministerial Decision from the Ministry of Religion (which controls the Islamic education system) to adopt a new curriculum for madrasah under which they had to teach 70 per cent “secular” subjects and only 30 per cent religious subjects (Zuhdi, 2005).

12. She is a guru honor – i.e. an honorary teacher and not a permanent member of staff – and she only receives an honorarium.

13. A similar reticence was noted by Najib Kailani, in his research at a Muslim-majority state vocational school in Java. This school had made the jilbab compulsory school uniform for Muslim female students. The few non-Muslim girl students felt very vulnerable because their obvious naked heads marked them as “nonis” – i.e. non-Islam (Kailani, 2010).