New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ix, 254 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-994812-3.
In a moment of both increased global anxiety about Islam and arguably decreased awareness of misogyny and violence against women generally, scholarship on the intersection of feminist activism and Islamic piety is welcome. Rachel Rinaldo’s book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia analyzes this intersection through sociological fieldwork with four feminist organizations in Jakarta, Indonesia, each of which position themselves vis-à-vis Islam in arguing for women’s rights in the public and private spheres. While these activists do not argue for the same rights that Western feminist activists might, and even reject activism that “smells of America” (77), Rinaldo shows they maintain their own visions of feminism and the future. In the process, Rinaldo depicts activists who are creative, courageous, and determined. Rinaldo suggests that feminist activists around the world could do worse than take inspiration from Muslim Indonesian feminists. Rinaldo’s book will be of highest value for scholars and teachers of women’s studies and feminist sociology.
As is often stated yet nearly as often forgotten, Indonesia is the world’s largest majority Muslim country. Because of its geographic and ethnic position outside of the Arab world, non-Indonesian Muslims and non-Muslims alike often perceive Indonesian Muslims as inauthentic examples of piety. Yet since the 1980s, Islamic practices and identity have become important sites of Indonesian political and public culture. Rinaldo builds on this history to suggest that the turn to Islamic piety has had an unlikely outcome: it inspired and mediated gendered activism in the face of the Suharto New Order regime’s authoritarian celebration of housewifery for female citizens (1965–1998).
Rinaldo’s research is based on fieldwork in Jakarta in 2005 and 2008 with four women’s organizations, and is in closest theoretical conversation with the sociological literature on agency and Islamic gender politics. She proposes three types of agentive action that the four organizations articulate: pious critical agency, pious activating agency, and feminist agency.
Rinaldo’s concepts most closely engage intellectual debates of the past decade about pious agency, particularly in the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood (Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, 2004). Mahmood argues that liberal feminist conceptions of agency foreclose alternative visions of agency that may look docile or repressive, yet are nonetheless choices for pious Muslim women in the mosque movement in Cairo. Rinaldo argues that this is a useful insight, but worries that defining pious agency as docility and submission (to Allah and/or to men), may reflect a narrowly Cairene context, and may over-represent other modes of pious agency that are less docile and more collective. For example, she describes how Indonesian Islamic activists used Islamic law and theology to lobby with the Indonesian Ministry of Religion and Ministry of Manpower over issues they framed as moral justice, not just secular human rights, such as managing polygamy, outlawing pornography, or identifying the extraction of usurious fees for transnational female migrants. This strategy involves selective, but not necessarily strategic, embodiment of pious comportment, appearance, and language, even as it has concrete policy goals for groups of citizens in the public sphere. As a result, religious morals are not simply a matter of individual self-fashioning but are linked to national progress or regress.
Rinaldo identifies three types of agency with the four organizations she studied. First, she describes two organizations that practice what she calls pious critical agency, Fatayat NU and Rahima. Pious critical agency focuses on religious textual interpretation (itjihad) and women’s religious authority. Fatayat is the women’s branch of the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia, Nahdalatul Ulama, while Rahima describes itself as a Muslim women’s rights NGO. Starting from textually religious foundations, activists in both organizations then borrow from global gender rights language to articulate an explicitly pious language of gender equality, including, perhaps surprisingly, sexual education and the right for wives to expect sexual satisfaction in a marriage.
A second type of agency is what Rinaldo calls pious activating agency, which she describes as dominant in the offices of the women’s branch of the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) or Prosperous Justice Party. PKS is a relatively new but influential political party born of the post-Suharto era. As a political party competing for elected office, its official aims are to bring Islamic theology into the political sphere as the ideal solution for corruption and social decay. Its members consider the disconnection in secular societies between public politics and private faith destructive. Women activists within PKS have become publicly active in lobbying for national policies that protect women, but which focus on domesticity and morality campaigns (such as protecting women within polygamous marriages, rather than outlawing polygamy, and outlawing pornography). Rinaldo shows that, ironically, the women who worked to achieve these goals themselves enjoy active, public, professional careers with PKS even as they wish to introduce Islamic ideas of domesticity into national law.
Finally, Rinaldo studied an NGO that might feel most familiar to Western feminists, Solidaritas Perempuan. SP makes no formal religious claims, instead focusing on women’s rights as human rights. The activists focus on protecting transnational migrants who are often vulnerable to agency fees, corrupt Indonesian officials as well as harsh working conditions abroad. These activists directly engage feminist terms, and consider themselves critics of neoliberal political and economic conditions in ways very different from the activists of the other three organizations. In this sense, they may seem secular, in that they appear to treat religion as a matter of personal choice. Yet in practice, Rinaldo offers detailed descriptions of how SP activists carefully and intentionally use Islamic history, Islamic terminology and especially Islamic comportment in their official meetings with government officials and in their training sessions with regional activists. Their blended use of Islamic style and content relays to potentially skeptical Indonesians that feminism and Islam are compatible.
Carla Jones
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
pp. 744-746