Maria: Women's rights and Islam

Ati Nurbaiti, The Jakarta Post

The glittering lights of the road leading to Puncak Pass, that cool weekend escape for Jakartans, accompanies the well-known fact that there are women for hire here. It's easy money, it seems, compared to the other option of signing up with a nearby labor agency to work around the clock behind some walls in a Middle Eastern country. And working in the Middle East is already a more attractive choice compared to similar work as a maid in Jakarta or seeking a factory job elsewhere in the province.

That the sex industry provides the best paying work here does not sit well with those concerned with the area, which was formally under the administration of Cianjur, supposedly among the religious centers of West Java. But no fear, there is yet another option -- marriage, even if only for a few months, or a few days, to a man with money, often a foreigner.

The marriages are performed under Islamic rites and fulfill the basic requirements, including the presence of witnesses, usually the bride's father, to whom the bridegroom has been sent by a broker.

But Maria Ulfah Anshor, chairwoman of Fatayat, the young women's organization of Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Islamic organization, will have none of it. Although some of these so-called marriages are performed by local religious teachers, she says "real kyai wouldn't do that".

Those marriages, adds Maria, a lecturer at the Institute of Koran Studies in Jakarta, are nothing more than "a contract for a woman's vagina and should be banned", even if the mother of the young bride may have witnessed -- and therefore blessed -- the rite herself.

No one can gauge the parents' real feelings, especially if the bride turns out to be only 15 years old. "It seems there's no problem at all to change a woman's age from 15 to 22 on her ID, which is already breaking the law", let alone violating the sanctity of marriage, she says.

When the man has had enough of his "wife", the woman is then left with the stigma of being a widow without proper divorce papers, and sometimes with an unwanted pregnancy.

This "religiously sanctioned prostitution" is a subject Maria hopes to study and put an end to. She was recently honored with the Saparinah Sadli award for her research of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) as regards abortion.

When it comes to cracking open the walls of tradition, Maria may have the benefit of the fact that she is not the first woman in a religious community largely accustomed to following the kyai. There are quite a few women role models in NU; one is Shinta Nuriyah Wahid, the wife of former NU chairman Abdurrahman Wahid, who led a movement of women studying the traditional religious books used at NU schools. Armed with counter- interpretations of the Koran, the women started discussions and approached the highly authoritative kyai, pushed on by their conviction that teachings that justified the abuse of women contradicted the egalitarian values of Islam.

Maria, a former student at pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) in Indramayu and Surakarta, credits a nationwide surge in the number of younger members of Fatayat for a more lively environment where such sensitive issues can be discussed.

But what about abortion? Her study, part of her master's thesis at the women's studies postgraduate program at the University of Indonesia, could cause quite a stir if released outside the world of academia and the close community of women activists who packed the award ceremony on Aug. 24. Senior leaders of the NU are already a bit flustered by her articles on polygamy.

Maria, born in Indramayu in 1960 in an agricultural, religious community, said the number of women risking their health and even death for illegal abortions led her to study the four schools in Islam that had jurisprudence on the subject. Her research, supported by other studies she did, such as one on the multiple factors leading to abortion, and medical opinions on what constitutes a fetus, sought Islamic jurisprudence that could help prevent the risks of abortion.

Among her conclusions was that it is possible to form jurisprudence on safe abortions up to eight weeks into pregnancy, based on the earlier rulings of scholars.

Maria, who has a 13-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, says she hopes her study will help provide material to review the Health Law, which effectively bans abortion regardless of the safety of the woman. Meanwhile, illegal abortions continue to account for some 11 percent of the country's high annual maternal mortality rate, which stands at 373 out of 100,000 births.

She says the adoption of such Islamic jurisprudence would only be possible along with safe medical measures, including counseling before and after abortion.

But despite any possible effort to change the law books, she knows that is the women themselves who need to understand that abortion is not just going to a doctor or dukun and having the fetus removed.

"They take things like jamu (traditional medicine), saying it's to make their period come after several weeks of being late ... and they're shocked when I tell them that is abortion," she said of a common, and often risky practice among women here.

The foundation of Maria's activities -- either organizing, learning or teaching -- seems to be her conviction that "Islam deeply cares about women". And so she believes that a further understanding of the religion is crucial to bridge teachings that, she says, seem to be "removed" from the religion's spirit, and thus are irrelevant to many women.