Maria: Women's rights and Islam

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.