Gender and Power in Indonesian Islam: Leaders, feminists, Sufis and pesantren selves(ASAA Women in Asia Series)

The traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren are crucial centres of Muslim learning and culture within Indonesia, but their cultural significance has been underexplored. This book is the first to explore understandings of gender and Islam in pesantren and Sufi orders in Indonesia. By considering these distinct but related Muslim gender cultures in Java, Lombok and Aceh, the book examines the broader function of pesantren as a force for both redefining existing modes of Muslim subjectivity and cultivating new ones. It demonstrates how, as Muslim women rise to positions of power and authority in this patriarchal domain, they challenge and negotiate "normative" Muslim patriarchy while establishing their own Muslim "authenticity." The book goes on to question the comparison of Indonesian Islam with the Arab Middle East, challenging the adoption of expatriate and diasporic Middle Eastern Muslim feminist discourses and secular western feminist analyses in Indonesian contexts. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book explores configurations of female leadership, power, feminisms and sexuality to reveal multiple Muslim selves in pesantren and Sufi orders, not only as centres of learning, but also as social spaces in which the interplay of gender, politics, status, power and piety shape the course of life.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: De-colonizing Islam and Muslim feminism Part 1:Female Leadership and Muslim Agency 1. Between Sufi and Salafi Subjects: Contested female leadership, spiritual power and gender matters in Lombok 2. Leadership and Authority: Women leading dayah in Aceh 3. Gender in Contemporary Acehnese Dayah: Moving beyond docile agency? Part 2: Female Spiritual Authority in Sufi Orders and Mystical Groups 4. When Wahyu Comes through Women: Female spiritual authority and divine revelation in mystical groups and pesantren-Sufi orders 5. Reframing the Gendered Dimension of Islamic Spirituality: Silsilah and the ‘problem’ of female leadership in tarekat Part 3: Muslim Feminisms: Islamic and Islamist orientations 6. Interpreting and Enacting Islamic Feminism in Pesantren Al-Muayyad Windan7. Women’s Negotiation of Status and Space in a Muslim Fundamentalist Movement Part 4: Sexuality, Shari’ah and Power 8. The Tawdry Tale of ‘Syech’ Puji and Lutfiana: Child marriage and polygamy on the boundary of the pesantren world9. Constructing Sexuality in a Panopticon Pesantren

About the Author :
Bianca J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei and an Honorary Fellow at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. Mark Woodward is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, USA.

Review :
"This edited book is a very welcome addition to the growing corpus of work on gender in Islamic contemporary Indonesia. It is one of the first books on gender relations in pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) and many of the papers focus on the much neglected topic of women in pesantren." Lyn Parker, The University of Western Australia Asian Journal of Social Science 43 (2015) 655–657