Pious Girls Young Muslim Women in Indonesia

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Series Editor’s Foreword
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Glossary
Transcription Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Young Muslim Women Coming into the Light
1 Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman
2 Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality
3 The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation
4 Be Entrepreneurial! The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia
Coda: Being Young Muslim Women in the Midst of Change
Index

Citation preview

Pious Girls

This book, based on extensive original research, examines young Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia to show how a new type of young Muslim woman is emerging: pious and loyal to traditional Muslim ideas, whilst at the same time entrepreneurial, comfortable with the world of neoliberal capitalism, living modern, middle-class urban lives, and, above all, assertive and forward-looking. The book analyzes the different facets of this new approach to Islam, shows how the young Muslim women’s groups influence Indonesian society, politics and the economy overall, and highlights that it is young Muslim women’s ideas about improving themselves that is key in bringing about the new approach. Annisa R. Beta is a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

ASAA Women in Asia Series Editor: Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales)

Editorial Board: Hyaeweol Choi (University of Iowa) Melissa Crouch (University of New South Wales) Laura Dales (University of Western Australia) Michele Ford (The University of Sydney) Trude Jacobsen (Northern Illinois University) Tanya Jakimow (University of New South Wales) Lenore Lyons (Independent scholar) Vera Mackie (University of Wollongong) Anne McLaren (The University of Melbourne) Mina Roces (University of New South Wales) Dina Siddiqi (New York University) Andrea Whittaker (The University of Queensland) Founding Editors: Susan Blackburn and Lenore Manderson 54. Islam, Women’s Sexuality and Patriarchy in Indonesia Silent Desire Irma Riyani 55. Women, Media, and Power in Indonesia Jane Ahlstrand 56. Face-veiled Women in Contemporary Indonesia Eva F. Nisa 57. Women and Martial Art in Japan Kate Sylvester 58. Pious Girls Young Muslim Women in Indonesia Annisa R. Beta For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Series Editor’s Foreword

The contributions of women to the social, political, and economic transformations occurring in the Asian region are legion. Women have served as leaders of nations, communities, workplaces, activist groups, and families. Asian women have joined with others to participate in fomenting change at micro and macro levels. They have been both agents and targets of national and international interventions in social policy. In the performance of these myriad roles, women have forged new and modern gendered identities that are recognizably global and local. Their experiences are rich, diverse, and instructive. The books in this series testify to the central role women play in creating the new Asia and recreating Asian womanhood. Moreover, these books reveal the resilience and inventiveness of women around the Asian region in the face of entrenched and evolving patriarchal social norms. Scholars publishing in this series demonstrate a commitment to promoting the productive conversation between gender studies and Asian studies. The need to understand the diversity of experiences of femininity and womanhood around the world increases inexorably as globalization proceeds apace. Lessons from the experiences of Asian women present us with fresh opportunities for building new possibilities for women’s progress the world over. The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) sponsors this publication series as part of its ongoing commitment to promoting knowledge about women in Asia. In particular, the ASAA Women’s Forum provides the intellectual vigour and enthusiasm that maintains the Women in Asia Series (WIAS). The aim of the series, since its inception in 1990, is to promote knowledge about women in Asia to both academic and general audiences. To this end, WIAS books draw on a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, media studies, literature, and history. The series prides itself on being an outlet for cutting-edge research conducted by recent PhD graduates and postdoctoral fellows from throughout the region. The Series could not function without the generous professional advice provided by many anonymous readers. Moreover, the wise counsel provided by Peter Sowden at Routledge is invaluable. WIAS, its authors, and the ASAA are very grateful to these people for their expert work. Louise Edwards (UNSW Australia) Series Editor

Pious Girls

Young Muslim Women in Indonesia Annisa R. Beta

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Annisa R. Beta The right of Annisa R. Beta to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-44422-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-44424-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37212-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures x Glossaryxi Transcription Notes xiii Acknowledgementsxiv

Introduction: Young Muslim Women Coming into the Light

1

1 Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman

24

2 Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality

47

3 The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation

64

4 Be Entrepreneurial! The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia

86



Coda: Being Young Muslim Women in the Midst of Change

106

Index110

Figures

4.1 Conditions conducive to the emergence of the productive, pious feminine subject

90

Glossary

akal intellect. akhlak  virtuous disposition. amr ma’ruf nahy munkar  enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong. aurat  parts of body may evoke desire and thus need to be covered. berkarya  creating, working. celebgrams  influencers, celebrities on Instagram. cewek  girl, young woman. dakwah proselytization. dzikr/zikir  a repeated series of utterances in remembrance of God. emak-emak  colloquially used to refer to older and usually lower-class women. Gerwani  Indonesian women’s movement affiliated with Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI). hadith/hadis  sayings of Prophet Muhammad. hidayah  guidance from God. hijab  veil, to cover oneself. hijabers/hijabista/hijabi  young women donning fashionable veil or hijab. hijrah  colloquially in Indonesia: a Muslim’s commitment to improve the self to appear and act in accordance to Islamic religious injunctions. ibadah  acts of worship. ibu-ibu  mothers, also refers to older women. iman faith. insya Allah  God willing. istiqomah/istiqamah  steadfast in one’s belief. jilbab  veil, to cover oneself. jilbab/hijab syar’i  a practice of veiling considered to be in accordance to Islamic law. keluarga sakinah  pious family. khimar  longer veil considered to be in accordance to Islamic law. kodrat wanita  idealized naturalness of women’s domestication and depoliticization in Indonesia. konveksi  textile manufacturers, usually small or medium-sized. kuno  old-fashioned. lembaga swadaya masyarakat/LSM  literal translation: self-reliant social institutions, a kind of non-governmental organization (NGO).

xii  Glossary mahzab  school of thought or jurisprudence in Islam. Majelis Taklim  a site to discuss and learn; as an institution in Indonesia, it refers to a key activity organized by Badan Komunikasi Majelis Taklim (Majelis Taklim Communication Body or BKMT) founded by Tutty Alawiyah, a prominent national figure of Muslim women’s leadership in Indonesia. masya Allah  what God has willed has happened. memantaskan diri  to make oneself worthy. mubah  permitted or allowed. munafik deceitful. mushalla/musholla  prayers space, colloquially refers to a smaller mosque. muslimah  Muslim woman, female Muslim. New Order  the period marking 32 years of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime in Indonesia. ngaji  Qur’an recitation. niat intention. orang kreatif  creative individual. pacaran dating. pahala  God’s rewards. Pancasila  Indonesia’s official state ideology. pengajian  Qur’an recitation, usually followed by tausyiah or advice from a religious teacher. perempuan muda  young woman. pesantren  Islamic boarding school. Reformasi  the period after 1998 until present in Indonesia marking the end of President Suharto’s New Order authoritarian regime (1966–1998). ridha willing. ridho Allah  God’s approval. sakinah mawaddah warohmah  tranquil, affectionate, and merciful. santri  students at Islamic boarding school. shalat prayer. sheikh  religious leader, cleric, male. state ibuism  a term coined by Julia Suryakusuma to refer to the dual role imposed on Indonesian women to be good wives and mothers as well as good citizens. syar’i  in accordance to Islamic law. syariah/syariat  Islamic law. syiar  an Arabic word used colloquially in Indonesia to refer to the promotion of Islamic teachings. ta’aruf courtship. taat devout. tausyiah  advice, sermon. ulama  Islamic scholars. umat  Muslim community. ustadz  religious teacher, male. ustadzah  religious teacher, female.

Transcription Notes

Except for well-known figures, all the names of religious teachers, speakers at events, and young Muslim women interviewees have been changed to maintain confidentiality. The Indonesian spelling of Arabic words is used, and non-English words are italicized, unless they are proper names. I translated quotes from interviews, films, and books from Bahasa Indonesia to English, unless the text provides the English translations or uses English terms.

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my late Mama and Ayah, both of whom rediscovered Islam as they grew older and through whom I learned the depth and collective complexities in personal religious trajectories. I am thankful for my mentors and role models for their guidance. The strong women whose kindness and generosity are boundless: Professor Melani Budianta, Professor Tracey Skelton, and Professor Natalya Lusty. The book was written in three different locations throughout my still very early academic journey. I thank Professor Audrey Yue and my colleagues at the National University of Singapore and Associate Professor Sylvia Tiwon at the University of California Berkeley for the opportunities of learning and discovering my own path as a researcher. I am thankful that I get to work at the Screen and Cultural Studies Programme and the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne surrounded by colleagues who are committed to rigorous research and make me believe that what I write matters. My friends have cared for me for a very long time now, especially during the most precarious times, and I can never thank these generous people enough. Astriani Widiastuti and Meisari Widiyawati have risen the bar in long-distance bestfriendship. Nila Ayu Utami and Inditian Latifa have picked me up and comforted me countless times. I am grateful for Fang Tze Hsu, Audi Tangkudung, and Laura (Lette) Nevendorff who fully understood that my academic life requires the melding of the professional and the domestic and that their support have been the foundation of my every day. I am beyond grateful that I found friendship in Shaffira, Aris, Aya, Sarah, and Titis as soon as I set up my life in Melbourne. I thank my generous friends who are also brilliant scholars, collaborators, and the most generous experts. The witty conversations and giggly discussions I have with these people have made me more confident with my writing process: Ariane Utomo, Benjamin Hegarty, Harriette Richards, Tim Mann, Asri Saraswati, Ryan Febrianto, and Veronica Gregorio. I hope Anotasi’s passion for collective knowledge sharing oozes through this book, and I have Marissa Saraswati and Dian Soraya to thank for. My brother and his family have given me the encouragement I need in their own ways. They understand it takes so much space and time spent alone working on this project.

Acknowledgements  xv I am grateful for the young Muslim women who have talked and opened up to me about their lives and worlds. Finally, I thank Professor Louise Edwards and Peter Sowden for their meticulous work and patience with this book. Thank you for making my dream of publishing my own book come true. Annisa R. Beta Melbourne March 2023

Introduction Young Muslim Women Coming into the Light

Don’t stop working and creating (berkarya) after you’re married. Women usually have different goals before they’re married. After you get married, don’t say ‘I just want to sit around and ask for money’. Don’t do that. You should work harder. Take care of your children. Should you take care of your husband? Your husband should take care of himself because the Prophet after he got back home, he fixed his own buttons and fixed his own shoes, and even made his own drinks. So, I’m teaching you that in Islam there is no such thing about [women] serving the husbands. Rather, the husband and wife should serve each other. So, in the spirit of Islam, women are truly venerated.

Once every month, Hijabers Community Bandung would organize a pengajian, a gathering where they would meet their followers in person, recite the Qur’an, invite emerging and popular religious teachers (ustadz/ustadzah), and have a sharing session. Speaking in front of tens of hijab-clad young Muslim women in a marblefloored, beautifully decorated mosque in the city of Bandung, Ustadzah Sari gave her tausyiah (advice, sermon) about the importance of berkarya and becoming a ‘womenpreneur’, a popular neologism for women entrepreneur and the topic of the pengajian of Hijabers Community Bandung that day. Berkarya, an Indonesian word the ustadzah used, evokes productivity and creativity simultaneously, alluding to the significance of young Muslim women in the modest fashion industry and Islamic lifestyle businesses of Indonesia’s creative economy. In encouraging the young women in the audience to be entrepreneurs, Ustadzah Sari referenced the fact that she was the wife of Ustadz Amir, who was also a well-known religious teacher, as a way to emphasize that in her family it was never a problem that she was as equally busy and enterprising as her husband. She would spend a lot of time outside the home, and she convincingly described how her husband understood her passion. In her tausyiah that day, Ustadzah Sari underlined that trading and doing business are forms of worship in Islam, as exemplified by Prophet Muhammad himself. About two months before the pengajian in Bandung, and almost 500 kilometres away in the city of Yogyakarta, I listened to a tausyiah on the same topic. This time, it was during a trade fair organized by Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community. Syekh Ali, an Egyptian-Indonesian preacher and an Islamic scholar who was gaining popularity in Indonesia in early 2016, reminded the young Muslim women DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-1

2  Introduction attending the fair that no matter what, a good Muslim woman would always prioritize her husband. His reminder sounded to me almost like a ‘warning’ because the event had about 200 booths showcasing small businesses, mostly in modest fashion, owned by young Muslim women. Syekh Ali carefully retold a story of a husband who sought the Syekh’s advice because his wife lived far away from him and refused to return home. The wife was too busy taking care of her online business in Bandung, more than three hours away from Jakarta where the husband lived. In this anecdote, the wife said that she would only come back if the husband bought her gold. Syekh Ali asked a rhetorical question to the audience: “Where is the akhlak (virtuous disposition) of the wife?” He further queried, “How could you build a household that is sakinah mawaddah warohmah (tranquil, affectionate, and merciful) that way?” The brief overview of events, which I will revisit in Chapter 4, exemplifies the centrality of the figure of productive and pious young Muslim women in the minds of not only the religious teachers and preachers but especially the young women organizing and following the popular young Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia, such as Hijabers Community and Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community. The productive young Muslim woman is an idealized character who is compelled to imagine a future in which she should continue working while raising children and taking care of her husband and at the same time be committed to Islamic virtues. This ideal figure, however, is both appealing and risky—she manifests the popular contemporary interpretations of Islamic teachings in Indonesia, but, at the same time, she can be too close to the dangers of being too independent, straying away from one’s obligation to be a dutiful, good Muslim wife. Religious teachers and public figures often emphasize that it is ‘natural’ for women to be nurturing and taking the role of the main carer for children. This does not mean, however, that they are prohibited from doing paid work or business. Religious teachers highlight that Islam allows women to work, as long as they receive permission from their husbands. And, as we could understand from Ustadz Sari and Syeikh Ali, balancing entrepreneurial success and family life is at the heart of how the ideal young, entrepreneurial, productive, and pious Muslim women’s lives and futures are constructed. This book is about that idealized young Muslim womanhood. It focuses on this reconfigured feminine subject emerging in contemporary Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim society. While the preachers and the young women themselves often frame this feminine subjectivity as ahistorical and often apolitical, this book argues that productive and pious young Muslim women are key actors who have transformed many intimate elements of everyday life and fuelled Indonesia’s sociopolitical changes. They exemplify not only the economic and cultural shifts among Indonesian Muslims but also the contemporary formation of young feminine citizenship. This feminine subject started to come into the public view after the event of Reformasi in 1998, the dawn of the thirty-two years of the authoritarian New Order regime led by President Suharto (1966–1998). In post–New Order Indonesia, the newly democratic sociopolitical landscape has given birth to at least two kinds of youth figure: the activist (Lee, 2016) and the pious youth. Young men have

Introduction  3 often been the ones most visible and analyzed in street politics and political demonstrations. They are involved in progressive movements and conservative Islamist groups, influential in both formal and informal political stages in Indonesia. The role of their female counterparts, unfortunately, have often been overlooked and marginalized. Despite the disregard, young women’s politics of visibility in the ordinary and mundane sites are alive and thriving. This pious feminine subjectivity appears amid expanding female representations on the formal political stage and in creative industries. Reformasi brought hope for the resurfacing of women’s movement and feminist values in Indonesian women’s everyday life. Under the New Order, women empowerment efforts had been stalled as the regime promoted paternal and militaristic imaginary of its men and, to its women, female meekness and obedience in domestic lives and to state development projects (Suryakusuma, 2011). After the regime ended, Indonesia has seen increasing participation of women in political parties and even a female president. Concurrently, with the ‘Islamic Revival’ of Muslim societies around the world in the early 2000s, increasing access to the Internet and digital technologies, and Indonesian government’s emphasis on developing creative industries and entrepreneurialism, more and more young women adopt the hijab and participate in groups teaching about Islam both online and offline. At the turn of the first decade of the 2000s, fashion designers, female entrepreneurs, bloggers, and social media influencers with ‘Muslim’ branding started to become the epicentre of a booming Islamic creative economy. Unfortunately, even though some scholars have analyzed female politicians’ roles in the government and others examined how female Muslim entrepreneurs have reshaped women’s economic capacities and identity, the two enquiries seem to be separate from one another. The representations of women in formal governance positions and organizations is often regarded as the only marker of their proper political subjectivity. In effect, the social and political influence of young Muslim women, who are the key players of a flourishing creative industry and social collectives, remains underexamined. Their fashion and business acumen have been examined as part of their articulations of religious identity and youthfulness. But, do they play any role in social and political changes? Are they simply fashionable and creative individuals? In Pious Girls, I address these questions to explain the productive, pious feminine subjectivity through a study of popular young Muslim women’s groups, founded by urban, educated, entrepreneurial, (upper) middle-class young Muslim women. They have varying numbers of followers on social media, some a mere couple of thousands, and others hundreds of thousands or even millions. My intention is to capture the moments, acts, and practices involved in the formation of idealized young Muslim womanhood today—not to map the different young Muslim women collectives around Indonesia, an impossible task as social media platforms provide ease and almost infinite possibilities for groups to form and dissolve. My contention is that we need to understand how the young Muslim women’s groups are entangled in and make use of the productive tension between Islamic pedagogy, market logics, and the prevalence of social media to engender a new feminine

4  Introduction subjectivity. In other words, we need to understand how the veiled and fashionable young Muslim women exert their influence and shift Indonesia’s social, cultural, and political topography. This book explores how Indonesian young Muslim women’s groups have influenced and led young women in a transformation that has shifted how they perceive themselves, others, and their sociopolitical environment. This emergent form of subjectivity is fragmented, it is a product of a neoliberal ethical regime, and it has brought about an ideal(ized) feminine subject position that challenges the hopes of progressive women’s movement. In the following chapters, I trace their historical connections with young Muslim women’s movements in the past and the New Order’s dominant gender politics. I delve into how they made use of the omnipresence of social media platforms, well-curated visual representations, and the need for a sense of community in the everyday life of young and urban Indonesians. I investigate how these groups have made women’s ‘traditional’ roles in domestic life, obedience to masculine authority, and more conservative interpretations of Islamic teachings attractive to their followers. This is not to say that feminist politics and advocacy are incompatible with modesty or religious conviction. Rather, I suggest that we take a closer look into the increasingly strong presence of an emergent feminine subject position that does not provide a simple solution to progressive feminist demands. My aim is to point to the different forms female political participation may take and draw our attention to the entanglement between religious practice, market logics, and political life in which these young Muslim women are active participants. Instead of saying that they are victims of conservative doctrines or heroes of progressive dreams, I propose that we really investigate how they have reconfigured young womanhood, recoded the idea of being political, and reinterpreted young women’s citizenship. Although they are rarely included in the political discussions among elites, this new subjectivity represents young Indonesian women’s view of the self and the world around them: a view that can be mobilized during peak political events such as elections; a view that also becomes the foundations of their daily conduct. The pious feminine subjects, I argue, are important political actors who have shifted many of the intimate details of the everyday lives of young women with religious, economic, and sociocultural aspirations that feed the larger changes in Indonesia. This makes them worthy of examination. Politics of Visibility and Visuality In this book, ‘politics’ is invoked to refer to the idea of visibility that constitutes power relations. In some disciplines, the notion of politics is often reserved for studies on formal governmental affairs, particularly elections. However, the investigation on young Muslim women as political actors in this book will demonstrate how the embodied practices and the training of the ‘soul’ promoted by the young Muslim women’s groups have influenced not only on the ideals of selfhood of their followers but also on how they engage with Politics (with capitalized p) and the dominant and regulatory practices and institutions in their social environment.

Introduction  5 I use ‘visibility’ not only to refer to the visual and physical experience of seeing but more particularly to social acceptance and the notion of ideal Muslim womanhood. Before I discuss the politics of visibility further, let me address some basic questions that may arise in relation to the focus of this book. Why Indonesia? It is one of the largest Muslim societies in the world, with more than 220 million Muslims, comprising almost 90 per cent of its population. Indonesia itself is a ‘young’ nation. Indonesia is youthful by many accounts, and, like other postcolonial nations, it only existed as a state when it gained independence in the middle of the twentieth century. The median age of its population is 29 years old, which is relatively young in comparison to the United States, England, and Australia’s median age of approximately 38 years old (Plecher, 2019). Its Internet economy is one of the fastest growing in Southeast Asia, valued at 40 billion dollars, and its population spends four and a half hours per day on their phones—that is, at least one hour longer than global mobile use (Davis et al., 2019). In 2017, it was reported that its creative economy sector generated about 7 per cent of its GDP, with women comprising more than half of its ‘creative’ labour force (Berawi & Rusiawan, 2017). But it is not simply about the numbers. The intensity of the changes that are happening in Indonesia are not only interesting in their own right—they are also representative of concurrent shifts happening among young Muslim women globally whose lives are entangled with religious convictions and late modern economic and social logics. Why young Muslim women? My concern first lies in discourses about female piety and virtuous conduct that are often treated as ageless. Such thinking dismisses the different access to social, political, cultural, and economic tools and interests available to women of different ages. It also blurs the young women’s capacities to connect with one another to create change using less conventional instruments, like their smart phones or their quick adoption to new media innovations. In other words, a seemingly ‘ageless’ analysis of gender politics reflected in many important studies on Muslim women generalizes the specificities of sociocultural landscape that shapes the notion of ideal womanhood in the first place. Second, the concept of ideal womanhood that is entangled with the politics of visibility is clearest among young women in Indonesia. To be covered and to properly observe religious norms are now markers of adulthood and of emotional maturity. Aspirations and desires are to be educated and navigated towards the young women’s capacities to be good Muslims and at the same time to be good (future) wives and mothers within the framework of pious family (keluarga sakinah) (Wieringa, 2015). These markers, as I show later in the book, are not only linked to detailed instructions on how to be good young Muslim women but also on how to be good citizen-subjects. That said, the questions that follow may be: who are young women? Are they different from girls? As in many studies on girls and young women, defining the terms is an important move, yet it can be contentious (Harris, 2004). The line between girls and young women is often porous and usually determined by capitalist interests. Catherine Driscoll notes that our contemporary idea of girls is a product of late modernity and refers to “no specific age group but rather an idea of

6  Introduction mobility preceding the fixity of womanhood and implying an unfinished process of personal development” (Driscoll, 2002, p. 47). Literature on girlhood studies often combine girls and young women to demonstrate how the terms are social and cultural constructions. Conflating ‘girls’ with ‘young women’, nevertheless, can be problematic because it ignores the importance of many social and political categories (Taft, 2010), most importantly the voting age, which is vital for women’s capacity to create social and political change. In Indonesia, the formal category of youth or pemuda includes those who are 16 to 30 years old.1 The idea of the ‘girl’, however, is a consumer category emphasizing female youthfulness (Saraswati & Beta, 2021). The vernacular word in Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia) for girls is cewek, which can be used for a wide age range, from children up to women in their late thirties. Young women or perempuan muda, the term I choose to use in this book, addresses the imagined figure of the female youth as defined by the government. I choose to use the term ‘young women’ instead of ‘girls’ not to exclude younger women, rather to point to exactly how labels used for different female generations are artificial but at the same time highly effective in categorizing, imagining, and regulating females of a certain age. While the term girls or cewek is often used to emphasize youthfulness and, in worse moments, to infantilize women, there is a sense that young women or perempuan muda are located at an aspirational stage, informed by the public discourse and the current governmental projects of extracting and deploying the talents of its youth. This term entangles young women in their presumed capacity of making a ‘better’ future for different and often conflicting interests, as I will show throughout the book. The idea of a politics of visibility here addresses the importance of and the tension around being ‘seen’. For a long time now globally, young women are ‘seen’ as symbols of national and social progress and futures, and Indonesian young women are part of this trend. As feminists and, more specifically, girlhood studies scholars have argued, female youth has come to the fore of new media and consumer culture for more than three decades now; in other words, the spotlight is now shining on them (Banet-Weiser, 2018; McRobbie, 1991, 2009). They are promoted, problematized, and regulated. They are potential consumers for different trendy lifestyle items as well as leaders of cultural and social changes. The attention given to young women today, especially those residing in the countries labelled as a part of the Third World/Global South/developing countries like Indonesia, often rests on the fact that they are ‘potential’ ideal capitalist subjects ready to be liberated from oppressive and limiting social forces of their localities. The success of incorporating them into a larger global economy often symbolizes the progress of their society. International non- and intergovernmental as well as non-profit organizations and private foundations like the UN Women, Plan International, Ford Foundation, or Malala Fund and corporate programs sponsored by multinational companies like Nike’s Girl Effect frame girls and young women as symbols of development and the social group capable of lifting their society’s economic status. The stories of these girls often start with a framing of them being bogged down by conservative social norms and expectations, a plight they need to escape (MacDonald, 2016). It is imagined that if and when they ‘break away’ from the social pressures, they

Introduction  7 could join the other (Western) ‘can-do girls’ who are expected, with all the facilities and access that feminism has provided, to develop their ‘choice biography’: choosing and developing different skills useful for their future, pursuing their education, and planning their career (Harris, 2004). These breakaway stories, unfortunately, seem to only be told by very few Third World female youth, and other young women from the same region seem to just ‘follow’ the trope (Khoja-Moolji, 2018; Mohanty, 2003). Stories of their political and social influences that do not necessarily demonstrate the need to ‘run away’ from their own society and cultures are rarely examined (Taft, 2010). Young Muslim women are today seen as the key figure of change in Muslim societies. We have heard success stories of Malala Yousafzai or Sultana challenging the backward and oppressive patriarchal Muslim cultures in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Malala, as Ayesha Khurshid and Brittany Pitts point out, “has become a symbolic embodiment of not only the desired subjectivity of Muslim girls, but also the potential of Muslim societies to adopt modernity” (2019, p. 432). The trope of the ‘Muslim girl’, as Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2018) aptly argues, can only be a legible subject of (Western) modernity when her empowerment is engendered from her opposition to and ‘will to improve’ her own culture. There seems to be a difficulty in understanding how young women from these different Muslim countries are complex and highly diverse. There also seems to be a lack of critical understanding about class, racial, and ethnic difference that may make some young Muslim women more visible than others, and that there may be issues based on class, race, and ethnicity in these locations. This book will demonstrate that rather than affirming the ‘victim and heroine’ model (Cobbett, 2014) popular within the Western discourses around Muslim and/or Third World girls, we should understand how, for many young Muslim women, their subjectivity today is embedded in neoliberal and market-based rationalities of everyday life. We should realize that social inequalities may be perpetuated by the actors we consider innocent. We should also understand that young Muslim women cannot just ‘get away’ from the specificities of gender and sexual politics and histories that are entangled in the way they understand their womanhood. And just like youth in many parts of the world, we should recognize how social media has played a transformative role in the way young Muslim women define their political participation and citizenship. The perpetual need to see young Muslim women as either victims or heroines points to how the politics of visibility is entwined with visuality (Mirzoeff, 2011). The lives of young Muslim women are not only imagined but are ‘known’ to be oppressed, sad, and limited. The debate of ‘saving the Muslim women’, as Lila Abu-Lughod has shown (2002, 2013), comes from the notion of ‘unfreedom’ attached to female Muslims, including the garments they wear as part of their religiosity, the veil, which is seen as the material representation of their oppression. This is a form of visuality. Visuality does not involve only the physical experience of sight or perception but more importantly the “historical techniques . . . and its discursive determinations” (Foster, 1988, p. ix). It is more than the gaze. Visuality today comes from an imagined subject position validated by streams of information, data, and images. Visuality classifies, discriminates, and aestheticizes the

8  Introduction subject position it imagines. Authority emerges from and for the proponents of the dominating discourse around this imagined subject position. This authority, then, self-authorizes and polices the claims as to how the subject should be imagined (Mirzoeff, 2011, pp. 2–8). Visuality, in short, creates knowledge of and for both the subject being visualized and the authority who claims the right to visuality (Vivian, 2009, pp. 118–119). The tension within the politics of visibility has generated different responses to the (Western and imperial) visuality of young Muslim women. Playful, rulebending, stylish young Muslim women seemed to have emerged as a response to rampant Islamophobia after 9/11 and persistent discourses around Muslim societies’ ‘backwardness’. With the advent of blogs and social media platforms as well as the rise of modest fashion industry in the first decade of the twenty-first century, young Muslim women have since performed a ‘look back’ at the discriminative Western assumptions about Muslim women, challenging the imperial gaze of their partial legibility as modern subjects. Reina Lewis, examining the global rise of the modest fashion industry, argues that the significance of modest Muslim designs lies not only in sales but in their influence as image within discourses of female religious and religio-ethnic identity that achieve enhanced valence in the visually led digital and social media of which [the] youth population are notable early adopters. (2015, p. 5) One can argue that they are claiming the ‘right to look’ and enacting countervisuality (Mirzoeff, 2011). The images of fashionable and playful young Muslim women create a sense of community, a challenge to the visuality of poor and victimized young Muslim women. One can even say that they are disputing the Western imaginaries of its ‘Other’. However tempting it is to label the popularity of creative and stylish young Muslim women as a claim to countervisuality, this book urges an interrogation of the entanglement of market logics, piety, intimacy, gender and sexual politics, and visual social media cultures that informs, enables, and regulates how young Muslim women produce and distribute and challenge the dominant visual representations of them. Their challenge to neo-imperial visuality is not outside the contemporary platform society given their presence is facilitated by and relies heavily on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. At the same time, within such power relations, they have reconfigured the notion of female citizenship. Indonesian fashionable and entrepreneurial young Muslim women, as this book will show, have creatively (re)produced feminine subject positions. Pious Girls contributes to the ongoing conversations in girlhood studies, gender studies, and cultural studies about the visibility endowed to girls and young women in different parts of the world. By examining young Muslim women, I encourage an expansion of the important discussions of the politics of visibility of young womanhood to arenas that are often ‘exoticized’ or made to be proxies to conceptual

Introduction  9 frameworks grounded in (mostly) North American, European, and largely Western contexts. This suggestion is rooted in the concern that the historical connections and sociocultural specificities of postcolonial states like Indonesia are often treated as different from the ‘developed’ countries like the United States or Britain but at the same time similar to or always already comparable with other ‘developing’ nations. I do not deny the physical and figurative borders that separate the ‘first’ world from the ‘third’ world, nor the eerily analogous social trauma postcolonial societies have undergone. This expansion, rather, will reveal the deep connections global sociopolitical shifts and new media technologies have engendered in the young women’s lives and also the specificities of past gender and cultural politics. Young Muslim Female Citizenship in an Intimate Public Discussions of the contemporary representations of young Muslim womanhood, including my own work (Beta, 2014), seem to find an endless fascination with how they look. On the one hand, their appearance marks their consumption and creativity, although their innovations in fashion and business are never outside the discernment of fellow Muslims and Western observers. On the other hand, young women’s idea of a good life (within which appearance and a sense of creativity are important) are seen as outside the political. In addition, Indonesia’s turbulent democracy has been analyzed through facade of ‘genderless’ politics. Political analyses, in other words, seem to be for more ‘serious’ matters—issues that its citizens could only relate during times of crises or political regime change. In response, this book offers an analysis of the popularity and efficacy of young Muslim women’s groups that is informed by the relationship between citizenship, pious subject formation, and the intimate public. It determinedly looks at young Muslim women as political actors involved in practices that redefine and reconfigure the meaning of ‘political’ and the notion of female citizenship in Indonesia. It explores the process of production and reconfiguration of particular feminine subject positions in networks of power relations that generated the notion of ideal (future) womanhood. This ideal womanhood is entangled with specific ideas about citizenship and political participation and sewn into Indonesia’s gender politics and the current of neoliberal ethical regime. There are two ways we can think of the political here. ‘Political’ with capitalized p is usually reserved for the ‘formal’ matters related to the idea of government and governing the state and nation through legal structures, while ‘political’ refers to those ‘informal’ arenas seemingly outside the institutional structures. Although it is common to use the binary to categorize political analyses, young people’s political potential is not located simply in the intersection of the ‘Political’ and the ‘political’ but rather in their “capacity to blend and meld both types of politics simultaneously” (Skelton, 2010, pp.  147–148). With different forms of digital media and their access to digital tools, youth political engagement today traverses the division between the online and offline (Boulianne & Theocharis, 2020). Furthermore, the idea of ‘political Islam’ within which the young Muslim women discussed in this book are active participants of is inseparable from how Muslim women’s lives are

10  Introduction generally regulated with Islamic virtues. When we study Muslim women, her act, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, would always be examined within the framework of the comprehensive moral codes in Islam. The notion of ‘political’ for Muslim women zooms in from the crowd to the individual. Her womanhood, in other words, is always political (Blackburn, 2008). How, then, is this new feminine pious subject formed? This is the reason the book focuses on the informal collectives of entrepreneurial and pious young women who have shifted the political and social landscape. They highlight the importance of rethinking the modern ‘soul’, the disciplined body, and the micro-practices of power (Foucault, 1995) in relation to pious subject formation. The examination of young women’s citizenship contributes to a reconsideration of how to analyze the political significance of the piety movement led by young Muslim women. It also places the young Muslim women in continuous relation not just with religious traditions and pedagogical approaches but also specific historical and social conditioning and their adoption of different kinds of media technologies. A key work in Muslim women’s involvement in piety movements is Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005), which has opened the way for a serious discussion of how we should think about the pious subject’s agency without putting aside the significance of religious practices. Bodily practices, she urges, should not be seen merely as symbols or ‘vehicles’ used by social movements. A study of embodied practices and forms, therefore, would help us understand their political implications. In her conceptualization, pious subjects understand belief as “the product of outward practices, rituals, and acts of worship rather than simply an expression of them” (2012, p. xv). To become ideal ethical subjects, the Muslim women in Egyptian mosque groups she studied constantly trained and perfected their bodily practices. The ethical subject is indeed a product of “the political technology of the body” (Foucault, 1995, p. 26). As an extension of Mahmood’s contribution and to address how the young Muslim women in Indonesia today present themselves, I find it important that we also examine how the body is imprisoned by the “soul”, as Michel Foucault puts it (Foucault, 1995, p. 30). The soul is the site of articulation of power and knowledge. Thinking about the soul as it corresponds to technologies “produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power” (Foucault, 1995, p.  29) would allow a more fluid reading of self-cultivation surrounding the issue of subjectivity and political participation. This helps us extend the focus of the discussions on pious subjectivity that Mahmood has opened beyond differentiating the inner and outer aspects of the self and widens the horizon through which we understand subjection beyond self-cultivation and technologies of the self. I suggest two elements can be included in reconsidering the pious feminine subject formation. One is to examine the subject by accounting for both the technologies of the self and technologies of domination. Technologies of domination highlights how authority determines how the subject conducts the self and submits the subjects to objectives set by the authority (Foucault, 1993, p. 203). We should reject thinking about the feminine pious subject as either having to be constituted by power relations or capable of autonomy (Allen, 2011, p. 44), and recognize that this logic is the stereotypical predicament of marginalized subjects like young

Introduction  11 Muslim women. A new way of thinking requires us to see power through its microphysics as something that is exercised, relational, and always in tension. Inclusion of the technologies of domination makes more explicit how discipline creates the subject through hierarchy, surveillance, supervision, and different forms of assessment (Foucault, 1995, p. 177), but it does not necessarily foreclose the capacity for the subject to self-transform. The concept of ‘governmentality’ best describes this encounter between the technologies of domination and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1997, p. 225). Governmentality entangles the administrative state’s exercise of power through institutions, procedures, calculations, and tactics of power with governmental apparatuses and accumulated knowledges that target its population. It provides space for innovation and creativity as much as it invests in individual self-government as well as the state administrative capacities to manage the population. This brings me to my second point. An analysis of pious subject formation should include the roles of the state and other disciplinary apparatuses more explicitly. The ‘management of subjectivity’ (Rose, 1999) is central to the modern forms of social institution and organization. In this book, I call for a more explicit inclusion of the ‘citizen-subject’ and its relationship with the state political, economic, and cultural regimes as more young women participate in informal collectives. Governmentality as the contact point between technologies of domination and technologies of the self, in short, reveals the necessary inclusion of the idea of ‘citizen-subject’ when analyzing pious feminine subjects, which I will discuss later. Young Muslim Women as Citizen-Subjects

Citizenship locates individual’s membership of a nation/state which includes civil, political, and social rights as well as the individual’s ineluctable involvement in the ‘politics of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011). The concept of ‘citizen-subject’ highlights the process of the ‘creation’ of the citizen (Cruikshank, 1999; Eagan, 2006). The citizen is conditioned by multiple processes of regulation and normalization. However, this does not exclude the citizen-subject’s capacity to act and to self-­ transform; either to inhabit the norms that define ‘good citizenship’, to resist them, or to have complicated, tense, and obscured relationship with the state, its programs, and transnational forms of politics of belonging. Let me spell out my contention further. To look at young Muslim women as citizen-subjects allows us to see the specific political, historical, and cultural contexts that have normalized the idea of ‘good young womanhood’ and ideal (future) womanhood as an important element of ‘good citizenship’ for young women. In this book, I will make the case specifically for the continuation of the state-sponsored gender regime aiming to guarantee the existence of ‘good young women’ to advance the Indonesian state’s developmentalist project. This is not to say that there has been a straightforward ‘transfer’ of knowledge from one regime to the other. Rather, it is a contested process involving different actors, social technologies, and institutions, whose objectives seem to stray far away from what we perceive as political participation. This is precisely how the concept of ‘citizen-subject’ can help us reveal the strategies, procedures, and implication of the process of subjection.

12  Introduction Seeing the young women as citizen-subjects discloses the inequality of rights that women generally have as citizens and the lack of recognition for women’s political participation. Ruth Lister aptly argues that we need to see citizenship as both status and practice as women are more likely to engage in informal politics. She prescribes a feminist reconceptualization of citizenship that is alert to gendered power relations; in other words, one that is aware of the relevance of the category ‘women’ but at the same time questions versions of the category that may depress the diversity and complexity of women’s lives (Lister, 2003, p. 196). This is especially important when we think of citizenship as part and parcel of the ‘politics of belonging’, which indicates political projects that construct boundaries and struggles around inclusion and exclusion to maintain particular social groups (Yuval-Davis, 2011). A sense of religious belonging like the one demonstrated by the young Muslim women’s groups analyzed in this book will help us understand the intersecting political projects. Informal religious collectives involve not only religious authorities and traditions and the subject’s capacity to cultivate oneself as pious. They can also demonstrate the intersection of political projects of belonging endorsed by the state, globalizing economic, political, and social forces, as well as a ‘neoliberal ethical regime’ (Ong, 2006a, 2006b) requiring the citizen-subject to be responsible, efficient, and productive. Intimate Muslimah Public

One key argument that goes through the book is that young Muslim women enact and make claim to their citizenship through informal gatherings and in sites rarely seen as the premises of political participation. These sites include visual-based social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube in combination with gatherings in mosques and ballrooms as well as publications of how-to and confessional books. As youth participation in politics and technological advances are gendered (Harris, 2008), the young Muslim women’s groups address the needs among the increasing number of female urbanites in Indonesia who are keen to speak to and learn from one another about the importance of being good Muslims in many facets of their lives: their appearances, religious practices, friendships, romantic relationships, and entrepreneurial endeavours. On the one hand, in the eyes of political analysts more interested in calculating and predicting political dynamics, these components appear non-political and too intimate. On the other hand, the young Muslim women’s political participation should not be too quickly labelled as a form of ‘young women’s movement’. Instead, we should critically examine the way we can best define ‘movement’ in a time where political, social, cultural participation and authority have been democratized but, at the same time, have rendered surveillance and capitalist commodification as ineluctable elements of the visibility and popularity of such ‘movement’. In this sense, the word ‘movement’ can be understood at least in two ways. First, it categorizes diverse sets of organizations, both informal and formal, whether or not it is a product of online debates and forums. Revolutionary movements like Arab Spring and Me Too have emerged with the aid of social media

Introduction  13 platforms and reconfigured the idea of what comprises social movement. Second, movement can be understood as a metaphor useful for the analysis of the ‘force’ that encourages the young women not only to congregate and build collectives but also to move into the ‘spotlight’ as they gain visibility. We need to put into consideration what the word ‘move’ entails when it is embedded in the idea of young women-led collectives especially in a postcolonial context like in Indonesia, especially with the development of neoliberal and market-based rationality in everyday life. Takashi Shiraishi’s opening paragraph in his study on early youth movement in colonial Dutch East Indies is a significant starting point to rethink the idea of ‘movement’: The rise of a popular movement, expressed in such forms as newspapers and journals, rallies and meetings, trade unions and strikes, associations and parties, novels, songs, theaters, and revolts, is the phenomenon that most vividly struck the Dutch as the ‘native’ awakening in the Indies in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was and still is called the pergerakan (movement), in which ‘natives’ moved (bergerak) in their search for forms to express their new political consciousness, put in motion (menggerakkan) their thoughts and ideas, and confronted the realities of the Indies in the world and in an age they felt to be in motion. (Shiraishi, 1990, p. xi) Shiraisi’s analysis of ‘movement’ is insightful because it highlights mobilization not simply in relation to our calculative tendencies (for instance: how many went to the rally? How many tweets or Facebook posts?) but, more importantly, to the political consciousness heightened with the circulation and intervention of the ideas and thoughts emerging in a society in a specific time. It helps us understand the young Muslim women’s groups today not only in contrast to or in comparison with more formal organizations but also the sense of being in motion or moving toward something (that is usually assumed to be) better for the young women. In other words, understanding youth movements require us to understand the direction to which the young are moving to, not just the ‘change’ they have quickly instigated. To this point, I would like to evoke Maxine Molyneux’s warning (1998) about excluding women’s collectives with ostensibly ‘traditional’ values (promoting religious ‘fundamentalism’ or right-wing ideology) when defining women’s movements. Only a handful of studies have been done on the intersection between the Muslim women’s movement and subjectivity to capture the influence of the movement to the creation of the feminine, pious subject in contemporary Indonesia (van Wichelen, 2010). Rachel Rinaldo’s work (2008, 2010, 2013), for instance, is indispensable in understanding the importance of Islamic piety as a resource for Muslim women’s political mobilization and, thus, their political subjectivity. She argues that pious agency and feminist agency should not be seen as opposing one another, and, especially in Indonesia’s case, they are able to work hand in hand. While the scholarship is rich in details, I propose that we need to expand our understanding of women’s subjectivity, its relationship with organized movement, and

14  Introduction its political potential. Rinaldo’s categorization works well if the women’s organizations have clear and well-defined goals and address concerns about the nation state and the government. Her framework helps us to understand the potential of the women’s organizations to transform the social. My questions, however, remain. How we can understand groups of women who are increasingly influential and yet have no clear collective goals or engagement with the state and its governance? How should we discuss groups that cannot be categorized as political organizations? How should we think about their impacts on the idea of ‘Muslimness’ or, specifically, young Muslim womanhood? How do we discuss piety movement that produce tens of thousands of images on social media? How do we think of campaigns and public debates about proper Muslim womanhood that do not seem to come from political concerns? It is equally important to not assume youth movement’s revolutionary tendencies, if by revolutionary we refer only to the changes that celebrate social justice and democratic participations and aspirations. Angela McRobbie’s call for a ‘movement of women’ (2009) becomes an important addition because she proposes that we ask why young women today are gaining visibility; in other words, to seek the possible explanation as to why young women are now under a ‘spotlight’ that makes them visible in a specific way. With this, I  would like to re-emphasize the need to not only analyze how the young women transform themselves but also how technologies of domination have traversed the older techniques and tools of surveillance and supervisions and transformed themselves following the development of the Internet and new media. McRobbie proposes Gilles Deleuze’s rereading of Foucault (1988), particularly his term ‘forms of luminosity’ which can best explain how the ‘spotlight’ shines on and makes visible the activities and ‘potentials’ of the young women. McRobbie argues that the visibility of young women today requires the young women to deploy technologies of the self because the spectacularly feminine is now constitutive of young womanhood (2009, p. 59). A significant effect of this visibility is the ‘movement of women’ instead of women’s movement, which encourages and, in a lot of ways, enforces women to come out of the ‘shadow’ and into the ‘spotlight’. This movement of women is necessary not because of progressive feminist goals but rather for economic objectives that encourage women to participate in labour markets and consumer culture, to emphasize an aspiration for social mobility, and, consequently, preserve forms social and class inequality (McRobbie, 2009, pp. 124–125). In other words, the ideas put in motion by young Muslim women’s groups do not and cannot be framed necessarily in ways that the Western liberal feminist narratives prefer: that of the liberation of the victimized feminine bodies. They may, as I have said before, seem to tick all the boxes in developmentalist progression of (Third World) modernity: educated Muslim females creating change and leading businesses. But at the same time, their ‘movement’ into the spotlight perpetuate social and gender inequalities and make conservative politics and lifestyles appealing and attainable. What I propose, instead, is an examination of the young pious feminine citizensubjectivity entangled in the politics of an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant, 1997, 2008).

Introduction  15 The intimate public, as conceptualized by Lauren Berlant, comprises the sharing of intimate details of personal experience with strangers. Experience in the emotional world is important: this is about how one struggles and traverses difficulties and how one aspires for the good and ethical life. The citizens participating in an intimate public assume that their acts are non-political and that political battles are only performed by the elites or the state.2 In Indonesia, as I will show in the following chapters, its women and youth have generally been trained to imagine that a firm barrier exists between the state and their lives, despite historical evidence showing otherwise. The young Muslim women’s groups I studied ‘feel’ their way into different religious, social, and political concerns. They are key members of what I call ‘Muslimah intimate public’ (Beta, 2020). In this intimate public, the Muslimah (Arabic for ‘Muslim woman’) actively discuss, engage, and express how they feel about certain issues. In their gatherings and events, they hosted religious teachers and ‘inspiring’ individuals to help make sense of their lives. This could involve how one manages one ‘soul’ and also how one should ‘feel’ about social injustices. To engage more young Muslim women, the groups use social media platforms and digital technologies, and millions of young women follow them; an ‘affective allegiance’ is formed (Hoesterey, 2016, p. 17). This calls for an examination that understands the urgency of the effects of such hypermediated life on our understanding of young women’s subjectivity, visibility, and their ‘emergent modes of political participation’ (Harris, 2008; Harris et al., 2010) as they use multiple platforms, online and offline, as mediums for fellow young women to ‘feel their way’ into an issue (Papacharissi, 2015). Examining Ephemeral Archives: A Brief Note on Methods What does it mean to be examining, absorbing, feeling, reflecting on, and writing about the archive as it is being produced, rushing at us literally, to entertain an unfolding archive? This question may lend an immediacy to the work, or it may emit a hollow ringing of the past that no longer feels pertinent; even more bizarrely, it may mean that the present is still unrecognizable to us. (Puar, 2017, p. xxxvii) The very improvisatory ephemerality of the archive makes it worth reading. Its very popularity, its effects on the law and on everyday life, makes it important. Its very ordinariness requires an intensified critical engagement with what had been merely undramatically explicit. (Berlant, 1997, p. 12)

The previous section raised an important methodological concern: if the young Muslim women have relied on social media platforms, how did I, a cultural studies scholar, observe, study, and examine their activities? How did I make sense of their practices and experiences? While social media analyses based on ‘big data’ are valuable, the interest of this book lies in the experiences of the young women who have created, distributed, and consumed the social media posts. In that sense, the methods

16  Introduction in this book have had two lives. The first one started in 2015, when I  proceeded to conduct a one-year fieldwork in Indonesia. I followed the social media accounts closely, joined the events and gatherings, and immersed myself in a world created by six young Muslim women’s groups: Hijabers Community, Tasikmalaya Hijabers, Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community, Dunia Jilbab, Peduli Jilbab, and Ukhti Sally. I interviewed their chairpersons and members and talked to young women who casually followed the groups. I read through the books they published, and compared the images and imaginaries of young womanhood in older Indonesian magazines and newspapers. In a way, I started to feel intimate with the ‘world’ they were creating for their followers who regularly attended their events and paid close attention to what the groups had to say about becoming good young Muslim women in everyday life. The second life of this project has haunted me since the start of my fieldwork and fully formed itself as I left the physical ‘offline’ field. This was when I began to understand their drive and influence in shifting the contemporary sociopolitical landscape. The social media archive that these young women have generated since I started the project continued to be produced in high quantity; the archive is—following the words of Jasbir Puar and Lauren Berlant I quoted earlier—unfolding, popular, ephemeral. Right when I was persuaded by my field notes that these young women were not interested in formal politics, in 2017, they launched social media campaigns denigrating Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Jakarta gubernatorial candidate who is Christian and ethnically Chinese, a double minority in Indonesia. Almost two years later, in the 2019 presidential election, the groups mobilized their millions of followers to vote for Prabowo Subianto, the candidate supported by more conservative Muslim groups. Despite all these, their political influence was almost always under the radar of political analysts. The soft and girlish images fed on their social media accounts were their best disguises, so much so that the male-dominated political field could not make sense of them. As I moved on from my confusion and disbelief, I started to understand how and why these young women have been so captivating for their followers. The social and political landscape they have created for fellow young Muslim women is one that is filled with feelings, allegiance, and virtues. The pious feminine subject is a product of the tension between popularity, visibility, historical traces of past gender regime, and juxtapolitical virtues (always in proximity of the political but prefers not to act, think, or appear as one) (Berlant, 2008, p. 10). This was why I found it so necessary to think through intimacy, public life, political participation, and young womanhood using methods and techniques available to me as a feminist cultural studies scholar. My goal is to unravel the elements that compose the productive, pious feminine subject. As a feminist cultural studies scholar, I am never distant nor neutral about what and who I examine. I do not aim to explain the whole social processes in which this pious subject is formed, but rather to pursue its situatedness, meaning the concrete and specific political encounters and divergence which involve the articulation of historical struggles (Frow & Morris, 2000, p. 318) and understand what is at stake for the young Muslim women. I am interested in the production of discourses of the ideal young womanhood as part of the feminine citizen-subject formation (Foucault, 1971). This means that throughout the pages, I aim to identify gender power relations in

Introduction  17 everyday life politics (Brunskell, 1998; Shun-Hing, 2002). I am fully aware of the oppressive elements embedded in such power relations, and my goal is to reveal the ways young women continue to live their lives within such structural positions (Balsamo, 1991) without proposing that the young women that I studied were a “coherent group with identical interests and desires” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 21). At the same time, I am also aware that my interests are driven by my desire for social change inspired by a critical ‘feminist consciousness’ (Stanley & Wise, 2002) that cannot ignore the social inequality and sexist realities that the young Muslim women actively participate in. It will be obvious in the following chapters that I am critical of some of the young Muslim women’s groups and their key figures who promote the superiority of upper-class lifestyle, and I am also concerned about the lack of serious interest in discussing women’s labour issues. Productive, Pious Feminine Subjectivity Scholars have studied extensively women’s organizations that have been historically significant in Indonesia (Blackburn, 2004; Robinson, 2009; van DoornHarder, 2006; Wieringa, 1992). Those organizations continue to participate actively in electoral politics and are influential in law-making processes. As studies on the history of Indonesian women’s organizations have shown, the influence of the organizations has fundamentally shifted the position of women in society. If women’s movement can be defined as “collective articulation of the desires of Indonesian women” (Blackburn, 2004, p. 11), arguably, it should not be understood only through the lens of organizational articulations but also the different forms of movement within which specific version of a feminine subject emerges. Nevertheless, there seems to be persistent limitation as to how young Muslim women are seen as ‘political’ and, in effect, how the seemingly non-political groups led by young Muslim women influence Indonesia’s sociopolitical landscapes. The piety movement in Indonesia is not always driven by efforts to incorporate Islamic values on laws or regulations. Rather, the groups involved in such movements are driven by the notion of dakwah (proselytization), bringing about the idea of Islamic outreach activities that aim for creating better Muslims through a form of ethical self-cultivation (Brenner, 1996; Millie, 2008). The young Muslim women’s groups, I contend, are the dynamic sites where the young women learn, practice, and negotiate feminine, pious subjectivity. In other words, the seemingly nonpolitical movement can be the site that helps us understand how feminine and pious subjectivity is articulated and how power relations work to form the discourse on the subjectivity of young Muslim women in Indonesia. That is why throughout the chapters of the book, I outline how we can look at the past, the present, and the future of the pious feminine subject. In Indonesia, the productive, pious feminine subjectivity is formed through three elements. First, the ethical practices that are shaped by traces of the ‘state ibuism’ (Suryakusuma, 2011) of the authoritarian New Order. Second, the effects of depoliticization of Indonesian women and Islamic organizations during the same period. Third, the contemporary neoliberal ethical regime justified by the Islamic and state authorities

18  Introduction and mediated by the rise of social media. My aim is to show how young Muslim women creatively produce and reproduce feminine subject positions in complex networks of power relations, entangled within contemporary Indonesia’s gender and neoliberal ethical regime. This ethico-political feminine subjectivity is a product of a newly democratized, visibly pious, and highly mediated society. I will disentangle analyses done on ‘non-liberal’ feminine subjectivity to proffer a more critical re-reading of young Muslim women’s political, social, and economic influence under an increasingly neoliberal state like Indonesia. This proposition brings into view how everyday acts of ethical self-cultivation seemingly based on religious virtues are imbued by market logics promoted by the state under the condition of socially mediated public life (Baym & boyd, 2012). These acts cannot be separated from the effects of historical marginalization and control of women in Indonesia. They redefine female political potential. Chapter 1, ‘Renewing Ideals’, explores the genealogy the pious femininity and virtuous feminine citizens in Indonesia. This chapter traces back the New Order regime’s forceful gender ideology that has propagated the notion of ‘kodrat wanita’, the idealized ‘naturalness’ of women’s domestication and depoliticization, and its reconfigurations in post–New Order Indonesia. I am claiming that religious organizations and gatherings played an important role supporting the regime’s gender ideology, and today’s young Muslim women’s groups rework and share similar sentiments regarding women’s role in family and society, made obscure by the desire to create and participate in a transnational umat (Muslim community). The chapter pulls references from government reports and popular publications and events I attended during my fieldwork to demonstrate how young Muslim women’s citizenship today and its capacity to express dissent are entwined with the continuation of the heteronormative and patriarchal efforts to control the feminine bodies. Chapter 2, ‘Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality’, explores the contradictions of the young women’s acts as digital citizens in a platform society. With the ease provided by social media, the young Muslim women’s groups can make claims to what today is called ‘visual activism’. Informed by their social media posts, I deploy the concepts of visual activism and visuality to understand how the groups transform themselves into an aesthetic authority to visualize a pious feminine citizen-subject. I include the interviews I did with young Muslim women to map out emerging mundane practices of ‘countervisuality’. The groups can be seen as a form of collective action that addresses young women’s interest: challenging the dominating visual politics of Western observers and the male authority and renewing a sense of piety of young Muslim women. However, what could be seen initially as visual activism in response to the visuality of the oppressed veiled Muslim women became a form of visuality of its own with the young Muslim women’s groups making themselves authority dominating the visual discursive formation of ideal young womanhood. Chapter 3, ‘The “Muslimwoman” and Self-transformation’, examines the narratives in the books and short films produced by the groups. The chapter treats these texts as discursive sites where reconfigurations, repetitions, and contestations of Indonesian young Muslim womanhood are performed. This chapter is the first half of my analysis that investigates how the responsibility of self-transformation is

Introduction  19 now put on the young Muslim women whose lives are entwined with the neoliberal ethical regime. In this chapter, I perform a close reading of these texts to reveal the narratives that represents the subject positions and deviations and resolutions modelled for the ideal pious feminine subject. The presence of such narratives, I contend, intensifies the process of ethical subject formation for young Muslim women in Indonesia. The texts thread the path towards, and encourage the process of, self-cultivation that simultaneously positions the young women as individuals responsible for transforming themselves for religious ends and obscures their role as contributing members of the neoliberal economy. The second half of the analysis in Chapter 4, ‘Be Entrepreneurial! The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia’, examines how the groups encourage their followers to become entrepreneurs. They frame entrepreneurship, embodied by the founders and the female public figures in their network, as a moral quality. It proposes the concept of a ‘productive, pious feminine subject’ to demonstrate that the contemporary ideal young Muslim woman in Indonesia is imagined to be a woman/wife/mother who is also an entrepreneur capable of being productive, efficient, and, at the same time, pious. The concept also articulates the specific set of expectations and sources of tensions about Indonesian young Muslim women engendered by a global assemblage (Ong & Collier, 2005) that mediates the relationship between the Indonesian state policies and the flowing of various global changes into Indonesia, including the rise of the creative economy, Islamic revival, and the discourse of female empowerment. In these two chapters, I discuss the presence of the market-driven logics of neoliberal ethical regime. It works through the dissemination and capitalization of the narratives of self-transformation and the opportunities for entrepreneurship, which are made possible by the economic reforms and burgeoning e-commerce or online business in Indonesia. The formation of the contemporary young Muslim woman’s ‘self’ is a result of the curated markers of piety which, while seemingly arbitrary, reveal the historical, cultural, and political specificity of this reconfigured womanhood. ‘Being Young Muslim Women in the Midst of Change’ ends the book as a coda. It looks into how the young Muslim women’s groups mobilized the ideals during politically intense moments such as gubernatorial and presidential elections as well as protests in the past five years. The chapter reflects on the claims made by and about young people—and especially young Muslim women—about their roles and participation in public life. I suggest that youth’s luminosity has been increasingly appropriated for government’s goals. Their visibility, in other words, has turned them into captivating and useful data in support of the ambitions of the state. I am claiming that, moving forward, their visibility—facilitated by social media, digital technologies, and the intensification of neoliberal market logics—has been ‘captured’ (Chow, 2012) by government technologies. Notes 1 According to Indonesian Law No.40/2009 on youth. 2 I understand that the intimate public that Berlant analyses emerged out of the patriotic Reaganite America. One could argue that I am doing a hasty transfer of a public sphere analysis

20  Introduction in two very different parts of the world. We need to remember, however, the many political shifts that have happened in Indonesia. The authoritarian New Order regime came into power in 1966 because of the American Cold War anti-Communist campaigns. The second half of the 1960s was the age of political purging in Indonesia. For about more than 30 years, common Indonesians were trained to be (or to appear) non-political. The downfall of the New Order cleared the way for more democratic landscape, but perceptions of political participation—as I  have argued before in this chapter and will argue some more in the following chapters—is rarely reflective of the whole population. Politics and political concerns are relegated to formal stages, dominated by adults and masculine representations.

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1

 econfiguring the Ideal Young R Muslim Woman

Young Muslim womanhood is an important site of intervention. Historically, as this chapter will show, it is a site of contestation between the state and various secular and religious organizations. As Indonesia moved on from colonization and authoritarianism, more actors are involved: international NGOs, corporatesponsored foundations, civil society organizations, and the mushrooming collectives and communities online and offline. They make claims on how Indonesian womanhood should be, and they have actively approached those who will define womanhood in the future: the young women themselves. On the one hand, most feminist organizations and international NGOs imagine an empowered womanhood for a better Indonesia, which many propose could only start by increasing the number of entrepreneurial, educated, and forward-thinking young women to participate in the market-driven future of Indonesia. For them, the trope of the empowered Muslim girls and young women represents progress in a society supposedly dulled by patriarchy, tradition, and the often-caricatured oppressiveness of Islamic teachings (Khoja-Moolji, 2018). On the other hand, for many religious teachers and leaders, this trope is problematic because it may counter common understandings of the nature of womanhood according to their version of Islamic teachings and practices. Young Muslim women in the groups that I followed, nevertheless, managed to recreate the figure that can fulfil the demands of both parties: the ideal feminine subjectivity they endorse is both productive and pious. However, this conception of subjectivity is neither ahistorical nor simply a response to the dominating Western discourses on young Muslim womanhood. In this chapter, I trace the genealogy of the productive, pious feminine subject. I start from its historical beginnings in the early twentieth century to the present time. I am not concerned with tracking a precise chronology for this subjectivity. Rather, I am interested in the ‘situatedness’ of the subject formation, meaning a focus on specific ‘political conflict’ between social groups and the way ‘historical struggles’ of conflicting narratives and experiences may be articulated (Frow & Morris, 2000). This chapter traces the history that makes the present-day productive, pious feminine subject possible to argue that it is a product of the gender regime promoted by the developmentalist New Order state (1966–1998), which emphasized the naturalness of women’s destiny and duties known as kodrat wanita. However, today’s kodrat wanita has been recreated, remodelled, and reassembled DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-2

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  25 to create an ideal form of young Muslim womanhood that is virtuous, productive, and aware of women’s special roles in materializing the transnational Muslim community (umat). This process has fundamentally redefined, expanded, and made permeable young Muslim women’s citizenship and political participation. Forming the Pious Feminine Subject There are two popular approaches in thinking about the formation of the pious feminine subject. The first one examines how the subject is shaped by non-liberal traditions and movements. In this approach, pious self-cultivation is done through active pursuit of ethical self-formation within specific normative boundaries through repeated bodily practices (Mahmood, 2012). The second approach sees the subject as comprised of multiple positions intersecting different interests, a constitutive contradiction combining what is categorically secular and religious, creating its particular form of modernity (Jamal, 2013). In this chapter I propose that we need a somewhat different approach to expand our understanding of the formation of the pious feminine subject. There are two reasons for this new approach. First, the analyses that privilege religion often elide other important traditions that may be entwined with existing moral codes. Jacqueline Siapno (2002) suggests that often, studies on Muslim women as subjects are too focused on their relationship with the religion, leaving out other elements equally significant in the women’s lives. Studying the Muslim women of Aceh (the northern part of Sumatra), Siapno argues that patriarchal, militant Islamic identity arising from the region’s armed conflict with the Indonesian government strongly influences the construction and performances of gender roles and relations. Siapno shows that the Acehnese women took active part in the power struggle by strategically performing ‘traditional’ gender roles while also making sure they were not risking themselves too much in ‘pure opposition’. In understanding gendered power relations, she proposes a consideration of “multiple configurations of power which are intertwined with each other at different levels” (2002, p. 16). Siapno shows that the various elements of subject formation have a significant effect on political transformation and argues that a nuanced understanding of the formation of female political subjectivity should not depend on terms that might generalize the women. She urges that we see fractures within unifying concepts such as ‘Indonesian’, ‘Muslim’, or ‘women’. Feminine pious subject formation, in other words, may not only be related to religious virtues and pedagogies but may also connect to other elements in the social, cultural, political landscapes. Second, the presence of a specific model of ideal womanhood called kodrat wanita in Indonesia must be considered. The word kodrat is derived from Arabic word qudrah, often translated as ‘actions considered as appropriate’ (Dewi, 2012). Wanita is ‘woman’ in Indonesian. Kodrat wanita refers to the discursive formation of a ‘natural’ feminine self, which creates an expectation of and by women and ideas about the composition of ideal womanhood. Kodrat wanita became imperative in New Order Indonesia and was inscribed on the bodies of middle-class, urban women through women’s organizations. The regime used it to manage the

26  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman domestic sphere and treated the family as its centre of attention. Kodrat wanita was continuously articulated as the dominant and even the only way to be an Indonesian woman. Within New Order’s ideal family model, men played the role of the father whose imagery mirrored Suharto’s military and Javanese tropes: forceful yet disguised as benevolent. Women’s proper behaviours were centred around their roles as wives and mothers in a household. Despite abundant proof from ethnographic studies on the varieties of gender roles in Indonesia, the regime limited women’s status to her supposedly biological function (Robinson, 2009). The notion of kodrat wanita under the New Order mainly referenced the lifestyles of the priyayi (Javanese elites), in which the ideal woman is meek, obedient, and skilful in domestic duties (Wieringa, 2002). Indonesian women who challenged such models, then, are often considered to be deviant. Women’s organizations that promoted political participation were often seen as consisting of sexually promiscuous females. The concept of kodrat wanita, therefore, not only played an important role in the New Order’s efforts to control its population but also in its depoliticization of women. Those two reasons inform the need to reconsider the formation of the contemporary pious feminine subject. The practices of the self that cultivate the subject are not simply created by the individual but are based on the cultural models surrounding and being imposed on the subject (Foucault, 1997b). These ‘models’ are historically constituted, culturally specific, and are carried over by the practices and the institution that form the subject. This does not mean, however, that the subject is passive. In fact, the indication that there is ‘freedom’, specifically ‘freedom to choose’, is key to the power relations that shape the subject (Foucault, 1997a). In Indonesia, an instance of such freedom emerged after the downfall of the New Order regime in 1998, which presented a liberated sociopolitical landscape not only for Indonesians generally but also for its women. My argument is that, when articulated by the young Muslim women’s groups, the political ‘freedom’ of the young women to choose ‘how to be’ women reveals the sedimentation and the renewal of historically bounded models of womanhood under the discursive formation of kodrat wanita. I further contend that the re-occurrence of kodrat wanita should be seen together with the prevalence of the notion of the transnational umat, or Muslim community. I see the umat as a modern entity that is invoked in the present by constant reference to a collective sense of historical and religious belonging in addition to personal commitment and devotion to the entity. Rather than abstracted, this notion of umat is understood as material and an entity that good Indonesian Muslims should urgently actualize. All of those elements frame the formation of the pious feminine subject in Indonesia. To demonstrate my contention, I outline the political history of Muslim organizations and women’s movement in Indonesia to foreground the contrast between the New Order’s forceful installations of kodrat wanita with the contemporary construction of the ideal Muslim womanhood. I analyze the documents produced on and by Muslim women’s organizations during the New Order regime to illustrate the prevalence of kodrat wanita that emphasized women’s piety. This New Order model of ideal womanhood is constantly reworked and shared today through

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  27 images and narratives using affective language that depicts young women as part of a larger collective of Muslims or the umat. Muslim Organizations, Women, and State Control: A Brief Political History The relationship between Muslim organizations and the Indonesian state has always been dynamic and tense. The political history of Muslim organizations and the women’s movement in Indonesia I present in the following passages should be seen as the historical context through which today’s productive, pious feminine subjectivity, as endorsed by young Muslim women’s groups, emerges. This subjectivity, as I will show later in this chapter, can be seen as both corresponding to and distinctive from the larger political shifts that have shaped the notion of female citizenship and political participation. By showing how the New Order state’s campaign to depoliticize Muslim organizations and Indonesian women and tracking the transformation of the political landscape after the regime ended, I set the scene for us to understand the significance of the informal politics of the young Muslim women’s groups and their influence to young women’s citizen-subject formation. Islam and the State

In 1912, a mass political movement, the Sarekat Islam (SI, Islamic League) formed in the wake of the late nineteenth century Islamic reform in the ‘Middle East’ and the early twentieth century Dutch colonial Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek). It was the first mass political movement in Dutch East Indies. It grew into a large Muslim organization, and by 1914 it had about 360,000 members (Gross, 2007). In the 1920s, with a strong current of Islamic Communism in Java, some members of the organization later created Sarekat Rakyat (People’s League) and Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Indonesian Communist Party). Another organization, Muhammadiyah (followers of Muhammad), was formed in the same year as SI by Ahmad Dahlan, the preacher of the Great Mosque in Yogyakarta. He learned about reformist Islamic teachings during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1890 and was heavily influenced by the Egyptian Islamic reformist thinker Rashid Rida. The organization’s focus was on ‘purifying’ Islam from local and mystical beliefs, which he believed to be deviations from the ‘true’ Islam. Dahlan’s organization was different from SI, as it resolved to be strategically ‘non-political’ in the eyes of the Dutch colonial government and focused its energy on creating a modern Muslim education for the colonized population, as well as building medical facilities, orphanages, and various social welfare facilities based on Islamic philanthropic traditions. Nahdlatul Ulama (Revival of the Islamic Scholars) or NU was later established in 1926 in East Java. In contrast to Muhammadiyah, NU is often seen as spreading ‘traditionalist’ Islamic thought by combining Islamic teachings with local beliefs. The rise of NU was supported by its network of pesantren, a type of Islamic boarding school in rural areas in Indonesia that emphasize the relationship between the

28  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman ulama (Islamic scholars) and santri (students), still operating today. Like Muhammadiyah, it framed itself in the beginning as a non-political religious movement. Organized Islam took a political turn during the Japanese occupation of colonial Indonesia from 1942 to 1945, with the creation of Masyumi (Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia or Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims) in 1943. Masyumi later became a political party after Indonesia’s independence in 1945. Its members consisted of NU and Muhammadiyah. After independence, power struggles caused a split in Masyumi, and, in 1952, NU-affiliated members left the party (Hefner, 2000). In the years that follow, the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, increasingly leant towards the PKI. But friction between the PKI and the nationalist army and Muslim organizations intensified despite Sukarno’s support. Between 1956 and 1959, the divisions between Muslim organizations and communist or secular organizations widened during the debates on Indonesia’s constitution and the Konstituante (Constituent Assembly). NU and Masyumi wanted Islam and the Islamic Law (Syariah) to be the foundation of the constitution, although, between the Muslim groups themselves, there was no clear direction as to how Islamic Law should be applied (Nasution, 1992). In 1959, during President Sukarno’s Guided Democracy era (1959–1965), the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, and a year later, the President banned Masyumi (Hefner, 2000). The transition from President Sukarno’s Old Order to President Suharto’s New Order between 1965 and 1966 was marked by the ‘cleansing’ of communism from the state. The military blamed the PKI for the death of a number of army generals on September 30, 1965. Large Muslim organizations like NU and Muhammadiyah actively took part in the purge of communists in Central and East Java.⁠2 By participating in the killings in 1965–1966, the Muslim organizations hoped to return to the centre of state politics after their marginalization under President Sukarno (Hefner, 2000; Roosa, 2006; Wieringa, 2002). When General Suharto became Indonesia’s second president, he gave the military the dominant role in government, and social organizations came under strict governmental control. The regime forced all organizations to direct their efforts to the state’s development project, and, although the regime had ‘cleaned’ the state of communism, they remained cautious of different, potentially ‘dangerous’ ideologies.⁠ Suharto’s New Order depoliticized Indonesia’s people and treated them as a ‘floating mass’ (Li, 2007), uninvolved in politics and focused on developing the state. For Muslim organizations, this meant that they had to be ‘unified’ under one political party (the Party of Unity and Development or PPP) whose structure was strictly determined by the government. The kind of Islam that the government permitted, at least in the first half of the New Order regime, was ‘cultural’ and devoid of political objectives (Hadiz, 2000). Despite being under the control of the state, Muslim organizations gained sympathy among the grassroots precisely through the more ‘cultural’ approach. Muhammadiyah and NU expanded their own networks of Islamic educational institutions or smaller Muslim study groups and students’ associations. By the 1980s, new middle-class Muslim intellectuals emerged as an influential presence, and in the early 1990s, President Suharto had to acknowledge the growing ‘new’ Islamic power. He decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca and added the

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  29 title Hajj to his name. Although Suharto attempted to appease the growing Muslim middle class, his authoritarian regime could no longer hide its rampant corruption or address the anger brewing among multiple parties whose political aspirations had been oppressed for decades. The end of the New Order regime in 1998 saw the start of increasing involvement of Muslim groups in formal politics. Outside Muhammadiyah and NU, other groups and new political parties formed very quickly. An Islamic political party, Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS or the Prosperous Justice Party), established in 1998, gained momentum and won a significant number of votes from mostly urban, middle-class Muslims. A more liberal strain of Islam was led by Jaringan Islam Liberal (JIL or the Liberal Islam Network). Indonesian popular culture was quickly filled with representations of Islamic piety (Hasan, 2009; Subijanto, 2011). Various groups labelled as ‘radical’, such as Jamaah Islamiyah (JI or Islamic Community), Darul Islam/Negara Islam Indonesia (DI/NII or the Domain of Islam/Indonesian Islamic State), and Front Pembela Islam (FPI or the Islamic Defender Front), emerged. Religion was and is still today expanding its impact on both formal and everyday politics (Fealy & White, 2008). Indonesia’s Women’s Movements

The Indonesian women’s movement emerged from amidst the turbulent relationships between Muslim organizations and the rising tension between religious and secular organizations. The first women’s organization in the Dutch Indies, Poetri Mardika (Free Women), was founded in 1912 in association with the men of the nationalist group Boedi Oetomo (Noble Endeavor). Their focus was on education for women and to empower women’s status in marriage. Three years later, Jong Java Meisjeskring (Young Javanese Girls’ Circle) was founded in affiliation with the Jong Java nationalist movement. Subsequently, women affiliated with religious groups also started to form organizations. In 1917, Aisyiyah (the name of one of Prophet Muhammad’s wives), the first Muslim women’s organization, was founded as the women’s wing of Muhammadiyah. In 1924, Wanito Katholiek (Catholic Women) was formed. The 1928 Women’s Congress heralded a new stage in the women’s movement in colonial Indonesia. About 600 women from 20 women’s organizations came together forming a federation called Perserikatan Perkoempoelan Perempoen Indonesia (Association of Women’s Organizations). It later changed its name to Kongres Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Congress) or Kowani. The congress’ goals prior to Indonesia’s independence in 1945 were to promote education for women as well as to improve women’s status in marriage, especially regarding polygamy. This issue of polygamy later divided the member organizations, creating a division between the secular-nationalist and the Islamic-nationalist women’s organizations. The latter at that time supported polygamy as part of Islamic law (Blackburn, 2004, 2008; Suryochondro, 2000; van Doorn-Harder, 2006). After 1945, the dynamics of women’s movement changed dramatically. The communist Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Movement) or Gerwani was popular during the early post-Independence years. However, during the

30  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman 1965–1966 purge of communists, just preceding Suharto’s authoritarian New Order, Gerwani members were framed by the state as ‘morally depraved women’ (Wieringa, 1992, p. 99) due to their PKI affiliation. Despite having more than one million followers, Gerwani was dissolved by the New Order. Under Suharto’s regime, women’s organizations were put under strict state control. The Indonesian Women’s Congress, Kowani, was transformed into the state-sponsored ‘umbrella’ of women’s organizations, with members mostly coming from Dharma Wanita. Dharma Wanita, founded in 1974, was and still is a wives’ organization, which bases the women’s rank and position in the structure of their husband’s profession in the government. It comprises a vast network of women, from the wife of the president to the wives of the lowest village or neighbourhood officers (Martyn, 2004; Suryakusuma, 2011). Women who worked as civil servants were also required to be members. Dharma Wanita’s Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (PKK or Family Welfare Guidance) programs propagated a gender ideology that Julia Suryakusuma calls ‘state ibuism’. State ibuism made sure that Indonesian women took part in the state’s development projects and, at the same time, guaranteed that the women were properly domesticated and docile subjects. Indonesian women were actively depoliticized and had to be familiar with their ‘dual role’ ( peran ganda): first, their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and wives, and, second, their support for the New Order state’s development projects by organizing themselves in accordance with state programs. The state wanted the Dharma Wanita and PKK women to increase their knowledge as mothers and wives in order to assist the society and the state’s developmentalist objectives (Suryakusuma, 2011) while the men were positioned as the breadwinners. This hierarchy made sure that the women were in control of other women while also serving male-centred concerns, which was framed in the vocabulary of development. The women of Dharma Wanita were supposed to be performing and training for the mastering of domestic skills as good wives and mothers so they could maintain the well-being of the family while their husbands worked for the state as civil servants. In short, for more than 30 years under the Suharto’s New Order regime, the state campaigned for a specific model of hierarchy-based domestic femininity and a set of training methods to achieve their idealized womanhood. In the 1980s, as a response to the dominance of Dharma Wanita and PKK, a number of independent lembaga swadaya masyarakat (self-reliant social institutions), a kind of non-governmental organization (NGO), were founded independently to reach more women with more specific concerns such as labour and women’s legal rights. With the centralized construction of ‘hegemonic masculinity and femininity’ under the New Order regime, the new women’s organizations, such as Kalyanamitra (Women’s Communication and Information Center) and Solidaritas Perempuan (Women Solidarity), were often framed as ‘new Gerwani’ (Wieringa, 2002). Suharto’s New Order vilified women’s political participation: women who participated in public life, voiced political concerns, and stood outside the framework provided by the state were considered the equivalent of the derided Gerwani women, who, in the myth of the New Order, were sexual perverts or even evil mothers. In other words, “women’s political agency became suspect” (Wieringa, 2011, p. 560).

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  31 Muslim Women’s Organizing

The trajectory of Muslim women’s organizations that cater specifically to those who identify as Muslims differs slightly from women’s and feminist organizations like Kalyanamitra or Solidaritas Perempuan. Those that remain from the early 1900s until today were founded by Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). Muhammadiyah founded its women’s wing, Aisyiyah, in 1917 and, two years later, created Nasyiatul Aisyiyah for young women. NU established Muslimat NU in 1946, followed by Fatayat NU to cater for younger women in 1950. In contrast to progressive women’s organizations like Gerwani, larger Muslim women’s groups such as Aisyiyah and Muslimat NU and their younger women’s organizations have maintained their presence and influence in society by “eschewing overtly political stances” (Blackburn, 2004, p. 28) with their charity, social work, and education programs and institutions. This can be seen as a strategic stance so they could still work within the paternalistic gender ideology of the New Order, but it can also be considered as a form of organizationally imposed ‘depoliticization’ to maintain their presence when more secular or progressive women’s organizations were dissolved or controlled by the state. For many educated and urban young Muslim women, Suharto’s oppressive regime demanded different forms of negotiation. A series of protests against the New Order regime were driven by young Muslim women, and in the early 1980s they increasingly wore the jilbab (headscarf).⁠ After a series of incidences where students wearing jilbab had to deal with school authorities or even the police, a ministerial order, SK 052, was released in 1982 stipulating the national standards of school uniforms. This order was deployed to problematize female students wearing the jilbab to school or, in some cases, forbid them from taking their identification card photos wearing the jilbab. It was seen as an order that could counter a covert political movement that used the young female students as ‘tools’ to oppose the authority of the government. For almost a decade, between 1982 and 1991, young Muslim women participated in protests against SK 052. In February 1991, rising social pressure saw the government replace SK 052 with a new order (SK No. 100/C/Kep/D/1991) that allowed Muslim women to wear their veils with their school uniforms (Alatas & Desliyanti, 2001; Ramage, 1995; Robinson, 2009). The late 1980s and early 1990s, as Suzanne Brenner notes, was a time when the practice of veiling was adopted as a form of ‘alternative modernity’, especially among high school and university students, especially those affiliated with or sympathetic to the Salman Mosque Movement based in Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) (Hefner, 2000). Veiling was a symbol of ‘new historical consciousness’ that detached itself from local values, proposing a form of alternative modernity, neither Western nor traditional Javanese, and that did not aim for secularization, but rather more intensive religiosity (Brenner, 1996). As Suharto’s popularity and power started to decline in the 1990s, the two most popular Muslim organizations, Muhammadiyah and NU, started to allow women to participate in the process of forming fatwa (religious opinions), influenced by the stronger stream of Muslim feminism coming into Indonesia. This marked

32  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman the beginning of more serious Islamic female scholarship in Indonesia. By the mid-1990s, the women’s organizations along with other Muslim groups intensified their discussions on democratic reform in the country (Rinaldo, 2013; van Doorn-Harder, 2006). After the fall of Suharto, Muslim women’s organizations in Indonesia grew exponentially, and simultaneously there was a marked ‘turn’ to more conservative interpretations of Islam by the increasing popularity of syariah or the Islamic law (van Bruinessen, 2013). The women’s wing of the Islamic party PKS became an important player in the scene, especially among youth. New NGOs were formed, such as PUAN founded in 1999 and Rahima in 2001. In 2000, Aceh and several cities in West Java started to implement their versions of the syariah (Robinson, 2009). In contrast to the veiling ban in the 1980s, the veil represented an imagination of ‘Muslim modernity’. It allowed women to be mobile and active; it has become a tool for women to advance in spaces where male and patriarchal values dominate (Smith-Hefner, 2007). The rise of the involvement of Islam and Indonesian women in formal politics was also accompanied by a stronger emphasis on good Muslim womanhood. The presence of women on the formal political stage was followed by demands for them to remain committed to the domestic sphere and embrace more pious appearances and lifestyles (Rinaldo, 2010). The democratization of Indonesia that followed the collapse of New Order authoritarianism produced these complex outcomes for women and marks the distinctive political history of the Indonesian women’s movement. As more Muslim women entered the public space, “the boundaries and meanings of public and private, and the moral issues that entwine them is, more than ever, a high-stakes political game” (Brenner, 2011, p. 487). This book takes up the challenge to explore young Muslim women organizing in informal collectives to understand what such activities mean for their citizenship and political participation. Muslim Women’s Organizations and the State The political history of Muslim women’s organizations and women’s movements in the previous section foregrounds my analysis of informal women’s organizing. One of the most persistent features of President Suharto’s New Order gender regime was its ‘atomization’ of Indonesian women. In programs organized by Dharma Wanita, women were put in a hierarchy that defined their rank, status, and seniority, with a strong emphasis on idealizing the elite and upper-middle-class women. In contrast, women who congregated and organized themselves as collectives like Gerwani were seen as a threat to the regime. In other words, women who organized and were politically active outside the model imposed by the state were misrepresented as the ‘maniacs’, the ‘beasts’, or even hypersexual (Tiwon, 1996; Wieringa, 1992). Adding to the literature on the role of state-sponsored women’s organization, I propose that, in addition to Muslim women’s organizations, a specific type of Muslim women’s collective called Majelis Taklim was essential in promoting New Order’s gender ideology. Majelis Taklim and Muslim women’s organizations like ‘Aisyiyah helped extend Dharma Wanita’s and PKK’s reach and expanded a specific model of the ideal Indonesian woman with religious nuance. Indonesian

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  33 women, I argue, were not only bound up in domestication through state ibuism; their lives were also controlled by the idea of womanhood asserted by the state’s gender ideology that seemed to agree with Islamic teachings. In other words, under the New Order, the model and the practices of Majelis Taklim became a solution for many Muslim women who might not fully engage with either Dharma Wanita’s programs or progressive, feminist women’s groups. Majelis Taklim offered these women a solution for their desire for greater voice. Its legacy is evident today in the young Muslim women’s groups construction of themselves as productive, pious citizen-subjects. Majelis Taklim as a concept in Islamic pedagogical tradition can generally be understood as a site to discuss and to learn. Its main activity, pengajian, includes Qur’an recitation and a session in which a religious teacher (called ustadz or ustadzah) provides the participants with advice on how to live a virtuous life and how to be good Muslims. The concept of pengajian itself is older than Majelis Taklim, and today the practice of pengajian is so common that it does not necessarily connect with a Majelis Taklim. However, the institutionalization of pengajian by Majelis Taklim in Indonesia happened during the New Order period, specifically from the As-Syafi’iyah group. Abdullah Syafi’ie, the group’s founder, and his daughter, Tutty Alawiyah, a prominent national figure of Muslim women’s leadership during the New Order, established Badan Komunikasi Majelis Taklim (Majelis Taklim Communication Body or BKMT) in 1981 as a non-governmental organization (lembaga swadaya masyarakat) to help manage and educate religious teachers and the women participating in their pengajian (Alawiyah, 1997). The As-Syafi’iyah group has a strong influence in Hijabers Community and its popularization of pengajian for young Muslim women, as I explain in the next section. The goals of Majelis Taklim and its larger organization, BKMT, also seemed to work hand in hand with New Order’s gender regime. In 1997, Alawiyah explained the functions of Majelis Taklim: “First, [it is] a place to give and learn new knowledge and skills. Second, it is a place to have social contact and build networks. Third, it is a place to realize social interests. Fourth, it is a place that can encourage consciousness and practices that can help the welfare of households” (1997, p. 76). The state-sponsored Dharma Wanita and PKK, similarly, aimed for the development of the spiritual and material elements of Indonesian families (Suryakusuma, 2011, p. 27). Both focused on the role of women in the household and in the community to encourage women to participate in development and to ensure they understood what their main duties were as wives/mothers. Majelis Taklim, rather uniquely, saw their structure as a form of pluralization of religious authority. Majelis Taklim based its practices on two principles. First, dakwah (proselytization) according to the Islamic principle of amr ma’ruf nahy munkar (enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong) was elevated. Second, they broadened access to Islam by moving away from the monopoly of the ulama or the scholars of Islam (Alawiyah, 1997). Even though its format is not gender specific, in daily life, Majelis Taklim was and is often considered as a religious gathering for women ( pengajian ibu-ibu). It is also important to highlight that Majelis Taklim, in contrast to PKK and Dharma Wanita, was started, organized, and managed voluntarily

34  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman by women (Kustini, 2007). During the New Order era, Majelis Taklim’s pengajian was often more attractive for women rather than the state-imposed programs made by Dharma Wanita or PKK. Suryakusuma found, for instance, that when PKK was first introduced in Buniwangi, West Java, in 1979, most women in the village would prioritize pengajian above PKK activities (2011, pp. 64–65). The New Order state saw the political potential of pengajian. By 1989 the Department of Religious Affairs released a report on women’s pengajian and revealed that pengajian wanita or Majelis Taklim was in accordance with the state’s Five-Year Development Plan or Pelita IV. Islam, in general, the department reported, had “the potential to take part in national development generally and religious development specifically” and that “[i]n pengajian, Islamic teachings that are related with efforts to increase human welfare through planned development can be delivered. Pengajian can also deliver Islamic teachings that can control the negative impacts of development” (Pengajian Wanita di Jawa Tengah, 1989, p. 1). The exponential growth of Majelis Taklim and BKMT meant that, in 1991, the First Lady Tien Suharto attended the BKMT tenth anniversary event (Hasanuddin, 1991). In short, I contend that Majelis Taklim and pengajian, at least in the second half of New Order, should be seen as the social groups where the teachings of Islam and the state gender regime merged. Rather than seeing them as detached from state ibuism, we should see them as them as spaces where the ‘dual role’ of Indonesian women was further emphasized and expanded to include Islamic virtues. With BKMT and pengajian, a gathering of Indonesian women was not seen as threatening to the state’s authority (unlike Gerwani or Kalyanamitra and Solidaritas Perempuan I mentioned earlier); rather, they became socio-religious institutions that could contain Indonesian women in a space that could guarantee their conformity to the state developmental projects and gender ideology. During the New Order, the discursive formation of kodrat wanita became a site through which the ideal model of femininity was propagated to ensure women participated in the development project, but also to restrain their politicization and prevent them or challenging women’s ‘natural’ roles. My explanation of pengajian and Majelis Taklim aims to illustrate how Islam was also used to make sure that Muslim women understood their expected role as wife/mother, and that the religious collective they participated in did not threaten the regime’s gender ideology. I do not mean to say, however, that the New Order regime had successfully closed all possibility of resistance or excesses against the discourse of kodrat wanita. The successful protests against the veiling ban in the 1980s showed how young Muslim women were also involved in a movement against the government regulation. Rather, I argue that the forms of ideal womanhood adapted by Majelis Taklim and its pengajian practices have travelled, remained, and even been further justified in the democratized spaces of post-1998 Indonesia. Kodrat wanita has been reinvented and cannot be separated from virtuous behaviours. It is very much alive through the models of femininity taught in the meetings and events organized by the young Muslim women’s groups. The recreation of kodrat wanita does not only demonstrate the reinvention of female domesticity, but it also informs how young women’s citizenship and political participation are modelled.

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  35 Reinventing Young Muslim Womanhood The landscape of the contemporary young Muslim women’s movement as a discursive site—in which knowledge and truths about young Indonesian women are engendered and contested—is marked by the contrast between the ways they are seen by the public, the way they present themselves to the public through social media, and the topics discussed during their gatherings. The practice of pengajian in Majelis Taklim has become a model for present-day young Muslim women to gather and learn about Islamic teachings—especially for those who do not identify with either Islamic political parties or progressive feminist organizations. Many of the women in this category present a strong female Muslim voice. Pengajian has long been seen as a feminine space in Indonesia, and the young Muslim women’s groups take advantage of this feature. The founders of the groups I spoke to genuinely wanted to open a space for young women to learn about Islam. Because pengajian is often affiliated with ibu-ibu or older women, they understood that they had to make it attractive to younger women. The groups present pengajian as social events that their target audience, young urban women, could easily attend: the pengajian would be held in large mosques in central locations (usually in upper-middle-class areas), cafes, ballrooms, or even function rooms in shopping malls. Attendees would normally dress exquisitely. The religious teachers they invited to give tausiyah, or advice, were popular figures at any given time. Sometimes, celebrities who just had ‘religious awakenings’ (commonly called hijrah), or successful Muslim entrepreneurs, would speak and share their experiences. The groups themselves consist of loose networks of young Muslim women who join the pengajian once or twice as they please, unless they were members of the organizing committees. The young Muslim women’s groups whose events I attended did not find it necessary to meet regularly with the same young women—in contrast to the campusbased Muslim groups studied in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Suzanne Brenner (1996). Rather, because the groups would treat pengajian like an event, they were open and welcoming of young women who rarely had access to the more formal and tightly knit activist scenes in Islamic political parties or Muslim organizations. The groups would upload posters of the event on their social media feeds weeks before the pengajian to make sure their followers were notified. Their pengajian would also be sponsored, often by smaller businesses, but it was not uncommon to have large corporations interested in the growing Muslim lifestyle market support their events. All these factors—the young Muslim women urbanites attending the pengajian dressing up fashionably, the usually lavish spaces the groups would book to hold the events, the famous people, and the sponsorship—often make the young Muslim women’s groups appear fake or trivial to many observers, especially those in more formal organizations. Their social media accounts—perhaps because the founders and organizers were mostly fashion designers and influencers—were always well curated, and they maintained a soft and feminine look. Nevertheless, the pengajian’s activities are very different from what these casual observers assume. In this section, I discuss the three pengajian organized by Hijabers Community that I attended between 2015 and 2016 and reveal how young Muslim

36  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman women’s groups have successfully remixed the model of pengajian as a medium for Islamic teachings to be delivered and to promote a specific form of female domesticity. In addition, their reference to pengajian practices—having Qur’anic recitations and religious teachers offering tausiyah or advice—becomes a route for critical engagement with the state and notions of a transnational Muslim community (umat). This, I propose, has redefined young Muslim women’s citizenship. One Sunday morning in 2015, hundreds of young Muslim women, veiled and beautifully dressed, entered the ballroom of Menara 165, an iconic skyscraper in South Jakarta, joining an event organized by Hijabers Community to celebrate the group’s anniversary. The building, uniquely marked by the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic on its roof, seemed to be a good signifier for the event. Following the young women in attendance, I sat on the carpeted floor of the room, patiently waiting for the event to start. I shuffled the content of the green ‘goodie bag’ I received when I entered the room. The bag was marked with the logo of Sunsilk, the shampoo brand from multinational corporation Unilever that sponsored the event. At that time, Sunsilk was promoting its Sunsilk Hijab products. They had identified the perfect group for their products. Two beautifully dressed young women came to the stage after a brief Qur’an recitation. One of them donned a colourful veil with a long dark dress. The other wore a dark-blue dress with a small golden brooch pinned on the right side of her veil. They welcomed the audience to the celebration of Hijabers Community anniversary and gleefully welcome Ustadz (religious teacher) Faqih to the stage to deliver his tausiyah (advice). In 2015 when I attended this event, Ustadz Faqih was one of the emerging male Muslim preachers in Indonesia, and his popularity seemed to attract a lot of eager attendees. The large number of young women in the audience was also the result of Hijabers Community’s successful promotion of the event on their Instagram account. The post uploaded to announce the event was dominated by soft pink watercolour accents, characteristic of Hijabers Community’s social media feed. All the speakers at the event were pictured smiling. The women in the posts were covered in pastel-coloured veils; one of them even wore a flower crown. It is invitingly feminine, soft, and beautiful. However, the tone of the event slightly changed when Ustadz Faqih started speaking. He fired up a presentation slide titled ‘Islam Karunia Terindah bagi Wanita’ (Islam, the Most Beautiful Blessing for Women), and he began his tausiyah. Please pay attention to my discussion on Muslim women who have been blessed by Islam; it will be the most beautiful blessing in their life. Do you know what women were before Islam? Before Islam came, women had always been in despicable position. Families in Arab lands before Islam arrived (Jahiliyyah) were ashamed when they had daughters. It was a disgrace. However, if a son was born, they would celebrate for two months. Isn’t that racist [sic]? What were the effects? The effects were when they had daughters, they felt ashamed. Similarly, in Hinduism, Buddhism, the Romans, the Greeks, they did not think women had value before the arrival of Islam. When you have a chance to go to Europe when you have the fortune, you will

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  37 see. In Europe, what kind of statues do they have? Images of women. Images of women doing what? Always in sexy poses. Why? Women have always been sexual objects. These days women are used to sell cars. They would wear short skirts fifty centimetres above the knees. What is the focus [of the sales]: the car or the woman? It is the wrong focus. Mobile phone sales: the [sales] women would wear tube tops. What is the focus [of the sales]: the mobile phone or the woman? The woman. Women have always been treated so badly in the history before the arrival of Islam. How come? Women themselves know how. Women selling cigarettes would say, “cigarettes?” Have you seen them? I was approached by one of them once. I said, “No, sorry, miss, I don’t smoke.” She said, “Just try it, sir.” I said again, “Sorry, I don’t smoke.” “Just try this, sir, this is the latest edition, it’s light, the nicotine is really small.” “Sorry, miss, I don’t smoke.” You know what did she say next? “Well, okay, here’s my card and mobile phone number.” How does that even work? See, she was so forward, right? Why? Because the woman made herself a slave. The woman wanted to be an item for sale. Women are the ones who make themselves sexual objects. Therefore, feminist movement emerged. What is feminism? Feminism is a movement that aims to make men and women equal. No difference, we all have to be equal. If men can play football, women can also play football. If men can lift barbells, women can also lift barbells. If men can do bungee jumping, women can also do bungee jumping. If men can arm wrestle, women can also arm wrestle. If men can, women for sure can. They say the movement called feminism defend women’s rights. Do you actually know what is feminism? Feminism is a movement that attacks Islam. You have to be careful in Indonesia; do you want me to ­introduce you to the figures? One of the figures of feminism is often on television, and she sometimes goes mad (ngamuk) if women are—according to her—oppressed. Who is that? One person: Ratna Sarumpaet. She is one of the bosses of feminism in Indonesia. The point is feminism wants men and women to be the same, while men and women are different. A man can only focus on one thing; a woman can do multiple works at one time, right? My wife can iron the clothes, and after ironing she takes care of the laundry and then sign our child’s homework, and then cook, while being on the phone. Can she do it? She can. How about men? If I drive and my child bothers me, “Abi, Abi, what was the name of the person who is scary?” “Shush! Abi (father) is driving!” Why? Because a man, when he is dealing with one activity, he cannot be multitalented [sic]. Different from women. That is why it is fitting for women to take care [of things]. Men and women are different. So, men and women, do not adopt the idea of feminism. Be careful. Also, Hijabers Community, communities for hijabers and alike are sometimes obsessed with the idea of feminism. Be careful. She says, “my husband works, and you don’t work, you have to work, what happens if you don’t work? What if your husband doesn’t give you money?” What happens then? Women are racing to leave the house. When they leave the house, who will

38  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman take care of the children? The maid. If the children are taken care of by the maid, what about their way of thinking? They will think like the maid. Then, who will prepare breakfast for the husband? The maid. Then, who will iron husband’s shirts? The maid. Then, who will massage the husband? The maid. Who will sleep with the husband? Be careful, don’t be a parrot (latah). “Ustadz, what should I do now, I’m working.” You can work, who say you can’t? Islam allows women to work. Islam allows women to do business. Who owns a business here? Raise your hand. Amazing. What kind of business? . . . Wow, masya Allah (what God has willed has happened). If you have a business, grow it, it’s okay. My wife has a business, she grows it, and I support it. Why? Working for women is mubah. What is mubah? It means allowed. She is allowed to work if the husband allows it, and if she does not work, it is okay. Who is obliged to earn a living? The husband. The husband’s wealth is also the wife’s; the wife’s wealth is her own. It’s nice to be a wife. The scene of the Hijabers Community anniversary I illustrated earlier demonstrates the multiplicity of meanings that come into play just in one of their events. More importantly, the quote from Ustadz Faqih’s tausyiah reflects how productive, pious feminine subjectivity is imagined and contested in contemporary Indonesia. Hundreds of young women in the audience were exposed to the narratives of obedient and virtuous femininity and the tension between Muslim women’s collectives and feminism. Ustadz Faqih’s narration that Islam is a religion that saved and protected women was common among male religious teachers like him. ‘The arrival of Islam’ was seen as a specific moment that changed women’s position, a point in time imagined as a historical turnaround for women. Islam was also narrated as a coherent entity unchanged in time. This idea of Islam that arrived, fully coherent in its teachings about women’s position in the society, was deployed by Ustadz Faqih as the ‘truth’ when speaking of the difference between men and women. He was pleading for the ‘correct’ interpretation of emancipation for women based on sexual difference. His claims about feminists and gender equality movement made them appear questionable, illegitimate, and even ridiculous. Ratna Sarumpaet, an important figure in contemporary Indonesian feminist movement, was derided when he used the term ‘ngamuk,’ triggering an idea of an out-of-control femininity or a ‘maniac’ (Tiwon, 1996). By emphasizing his dislike for the ‘out-of-control’ feminist, Ustadz Faqih reminded the participants about the ‘better’ model of femininity, one that is marked by Islamic virtues. The naturalness of gender difference was further highlighted using examples of women’s ability to multitask, supposedly representative women’s superiority. Household work, thus, was framed as a proof of women’s ‘advantage’. Lastly, Ustadz Faqih suggested that career women put their families in danger not only by abandoning housework but also because of the presence of the ‘other’ women, specifically of lower-class women working as domestic helpers in the private sphere of family and home. Using a quick series of events based on false causality, he used the domestic helper as a symbol of a home deserted by its proper hostess (the wife or mother) and, at the same time, of an uncontrolled sexuality (having an affair with the husband). At the same time, the

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  39 Ustadz carried with him a message of entrepreneurship. For young Muslim women to own a business becomes a viable alternative to feminism, an invocation of productive yet pious subjectivity. This, I propose, demonstrates how the New Order’s kodrat wanita is invoked as ideally domesticated, but it also points to the need for young women to imagine a future in which business ownership, not career, could support the ideal home life. It is a life where a woman does not abandon her natural duties as a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. Business ownership is understood to give flexibility in earning money while also caring for the family. This is a remodelled version of female citizenship during the New Order: the female citizen should constantly be aware of her dual role or peran ganda (Suryakusuma, 2011). The maintenance of the home life is the most obvious similarity with the ideal New Order woman. But there is a difference in the relationship between the female citizen and the state. It is reflected in the two events I discuss later. In another event organized by Hijabers Community in 2015 also held in a glamorous ballroom of an upper-middle-class mall in South Jakarta, Ustadz Zidan opened the pengajian. He is young, good-looking, and articulate, and he quickly grabbed the attention of the mostly female audience. He advocated, during his tausyiah, that Muslims should learn more about the history of Islam, to be smarter about the religion (lebih cerdas beragama). He proposed that fellow Muslims stop looking for faults in different interpretations in Islam, but rather promote tolerance, or what he called inter-religious tolerance (toleransi seagama). Ustadz Zidan explained how a happy Muslim is a Muslim who knows Islam thoroughly (he used the word kaffah): Happiness in Arabic is called ‘hasanah’. You cannot measure it with the world nor your possessions. Its measurement is your heart. . . . One of the signs of a happy person is one who understands Islam thoroughly (kaffah), comprehensively, totally. Sometimes, understanding Islam cannot be one sided, Islam is how we perceive Islam. Once again, Islam is how we perceive Islam. Sometimes, our perception about Islam forms our life, so what we often forget is to understand Islam through history. There are four mahzab in Islam, Syafi’i, Maliki, Hambali, and Hanafi. Indonesians or generally, Southeast Asians, are followes of Syafi’i. Ustadz Zidan’s approach in delivering his tausyiah made him appear rational and educated, making his knowledge to the audience valid. He denounced one-sided knowledge about Islam and its interpretations. He put his audience in a bigger picture, as a part of a larger, transnational umat. To be able to be a part of the transnational umat is to understand different ways that Islam has been interpreted. His explanation of the four mahzab (school of thoughts) is reflective of the kind of audience he expected. Although it may be a common knowledge in other Muslim societies, an understanding that Islam itself has different schools of thought is unfamiliar for most Indonesian Muslims—or, at the very least, the urban, middleclass Muslims in Jakarta, as in the case of Hijabers Community’s followers. Syafi’i school of thought is the most popular in the country, and a cultural imaginary of

40  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman a homogenous Islam is indeed prevalent among Indonesian Muslims, especially those who never attended pesantren (Islamic boarding school) or madrasah (Islamic school). Ustadz Zidan continued: Religion in Indonesian is agama. Agama is derived from the Sanskrit language. ‘A’ means not, ‘gama’ means damaged. So, someone who is religious is someone who should not damage [anything]. Do not damage other people’s beliefs, do not damage harmony. We are lucky that we live in Indonesia. You can check, of all democratic countries, the one following the Pancasila (Indonesian state ideology) model is just us. This is a blessing for Indonesia because at the time of the Prophet, when he entered the city of Medina, he faced many differences. There were Jews, Christians, but all were taken care of by the Prophet under a rule called the Medina Charter. So, the Medina society became a civil society; one of the most advanced society at that time. For what reason? Because of religious tolerance. Invoking the Medina Charter, Ustadz Zidan called for an educated interpretation of Islamic history. The period of Prophet Muhammad’s rule in Medina has often been depicted as a time where his ruling was at its most stable. Here, Ustadz Zidan made it an ideal and compared the charter to Pancasila, Indonesia’s state ideology.1 The content of his tausyiah, I contend, signalled the prevalence of the reinvented idea of the umat (Muslim community) constructed as a transnational group of Muslims under the authority of God, and Islam a guide in creating a particular kind of Muslim subject (one that does not injure social harmony). At the same time, however, this umat is bound by nation state discourse. When the explanations about Islam coalesced with Pancasila, I saw a demonstration of “Islamic community as a political entity” (Moallem, 2005, p. 99) that glided from transnational, historical space of the imagined ideal Islamic society to one that was normatively defined by the state. Ustadz Zidan’s call for a reflection on the Islamic umat’s historical role in welcoming and governing ‘Others’, whether fellow Muslims adhering to different schools of thought or foreigners in general, demonstrated a key feature of the pengajian organized by the young Muslim women’s groups rarely seen in public. There was an allusion to different reference points that might seem inconsistent and problematic to some observers, but because of the always ‘informal’ shape and representation of the groups, they have never been expected to deliver a clear and coherent set of ideas about the teachings of Islam. In contrast, when the women’s wings of large Muslim organizations in Indonesia had public gatherings, coverage of their statements would be taken seriously by the media and the public at large. The pengajian that I attended, however, was covered as a Muslim women’s fashion and lifestyle event. Right after Ustadz Zidan concluded his tausyiah, the big screen in the middle of the stage played a video about the Rohingya in Myanmar. The video described the horrors inflicted by the Burmese government on the Rohingya people. After a dramatic narration and series of images of suffering, the video shifted to explain that Aksi Cepat Tanggap, or ACT, an Indonesian humanitarian organization which

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  41 worked closely with Hijabers Community, had been helping Rohingya Muslims since 2012. The video ended with a comparison of what Muslim Indonesians could do to help the Rohingyas just like when the Anshor helped Meccan Muhajirin: Just like 1,400 years ago, when the Meccan Muhajirin fought for their lives crossing the desert and rocky hills to Medina. They were welcomed with smiles and the helping hands of the Anshor people who were willing to protect and honour their lives. Will our nation inherit the sincerity (ikhlas) of the Anshor? After the video, Abu, a representative of ACT, appeared on the stage. He claimed that the horrors in the video illustrated very little of what was actually happening. He then made a proposition to the audience: What I can say today is that it is not too late, even though our government is now the world’s laughing stock, our government has tried to accept the Rohingyas. Although, it is unfortunate that the government said that we will only accept our Rohingya brothers and sisters for one year. That is very temporary. And the government has not spent even one rupiah from the APBN (state budget) until today. Because they say that those responsible are countries who signed the refugee convention, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs is now going around the world pleading for funds. . . . Just like what has been presented before [in the video], 1,400 years ago, Allah made Rasulullah and his companions hijrah from Mecca to Medina. While travelling, wives died, husbands died, just like today. One thousand eight hundred Rohingyas came to Aceh without family members. We told the Governor [of Aceh], insya Allah (if God wills), we the Islamic umat do not need the state budget to accommodate the Rohingyas. We no longer need the government. What is important is we do not expel the refugees. Then, who will give them food, housing, education, their needs? In the name of Allah, Indonesian umat will build houses for them. We will make sure they have food, they have housing, they have a mosque to pray, clothes to wear, and the food they need. No matter the number, the umat will be able to handle it. Insya Allah.” Abu’s way of telling the story is important for several reasons. First, his talk worked to include both rational, ethical, and affective reasonings. His call for help for the Rohingyas followed the argument that Ustadz Zidan had just made during his tausyiah. To help the Rohingyas was to understand how, historically, good Muslims have been those who helped fellow Muslims. To help the Rohingyas is both rational and ethical, because the story of the Anshor helping the Meccan is considered as a historical fact, and because the story is written in the Qur’an, this call also worked well in imagining an ethical Muslim woman. Good Muslim women would welcome and help fellow Muslims despite nationality, despite state borders. The use of the video and images, as well as Abu’s trembling voice as he retold the story of his journey to send aid to the Rohingyas in Aceh, encompassed a call that touched the

42  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman hearts of the audience. Second, the proposal is also important because Abu criticized the Indonesian government’s decision not to help the Rohingya people with a substantial allocation of funding. The imagination of a larger umat and a call to be good Muslims based on the Qur’anic stories and Islamic virtues became more important than the borders of the modern state or the role of the government. By saying “we the Islamic umat do not need the state budget to accommodate the Rohingyas. We no longer need the government. What is important is we do not expel the refugees,” Abu invited the audience to imagine that the umat is at least as equally powerful as the government, or perhaps even more powerful. In other words, by creating the ‘we’, he asserted a dominant narrative about the umat and imposed a particular way of thinking that was deeply political but delivered as altruism. The ethico-moral context staged by Hijabers Community and ACT was temporarily intensified, and such escalation, I argue, marks the specific way groups like Hijabers Community become political actors. The next instance should help me further my argument. About eight months later, I attended a pengajian organized by Hijabers Community in an old mosque in Menteng, an upper-class residential area at the centre of Jakarta. An ACT banner was displayed in the front part of the mosque. It had a close-up picture of an old lady in a veil who looked like she was in pain. The accompanying bold text said #IndonesiaDaruratBencana (Indonesia in Disaster Emergency), encouraging attendees to participate online using the hashtag. Devi, a spokesperson from ACT, told the audience a story of a disaster that had just happened in Bandung city and how ACT was quick to rescue the victims. Like Abu, she made a swift attack on the government: On March 12, Citarum river overflowed and inundated 35,000 houses in 15 regions. Isn’t that sad? What’s sadder is the lack of help from the government. If it all depends on my hands, [I would not be able to do anything because] I am very limited. But, insya Allah, if you help, with your hands, insya Allah, the help will reach more areas and it will be bigger. Other than the inundated 35,000 houses, there are also 24,000 people who are affected and 3,000 people who have evacuated. Yes, we never know if our family members, our friends, or maybe our distant family members are the victims. We never know. Don’t we want to be helped? Imagine what the 3,000 evacuees have experienced. Yesterday, two people died, and three are still missing, because the flood came during dawn time. Suddenly the water came in so fast. And only we at ACT could rescue or be on alert to save them. But how about those we did not have a chance to help? We cannot do anything. We could only pray for them. And here I am representing ACT. We would like to thank Hijabers Community, first of all, who gave us the opportunity to be here and to allow us to let you know about something that is outside our habit, outside our daily activities, that is, we would like to let you know that there is someone who is waiting for our help. Is there anyone here that would like to help? Alhamdulillah, masya Allah, thank you very much for those who have nodded. Hopefully Allah will jabah (answer) your prayer and that the angels will take note. Thank you. So, friends, other than 35,000 houses and the 24,000 [evacuees], until today,

Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman  43 ACT has managed to take a number of actions. First is providing health services, because during emergency, rescue, or saving people, the hardest part is to return their spirit, to return them to their usual state, that is the hardest. Because it takes a lot of time, a lot more cash. All of those need your help. Maybe you have seen on TV. You must have seen help from this, help from that, but why you have never heard about ACT. It is usually like this: help from the government is usually given only to those on the side of the road, so that it is visible. But, ACT goes deep to the remote spots that the public doesn’t know. Alhamdulillah, with the help of disaster agencies, until now there are 3,000 people that we have provided with health services, with food. Both Devi and Abu made the state and its government ‘the other’ of the Islamic umat and, in this way, shaped a specific imaginary of what the umat should be for the followers of Hijabers Community. Abu’s description of the Indonesian government as ‘a laughing stock’ undermined the position of the state as an authority over Indonesian Muslim community. Devi illustrated a government that was unable to assist its own citizens and also a government that was munafik (deceitful) towards their own people when she said, ‘Help from the government is usually given only to those on the side of the road, so that it is visible.’ The umat is also imagined as one with financial capital, as Abu and Devi highlighted how the collective effort of fellow Muslims mediated by ACT had managed to build shelters and provided decent lives for the victims. In other words, the Islamic umat was made into a medium of engagement with the state and expression of dissent. These examples from the Hijabers Community gatherings revealed a number of instances in which young Muslim women, in their roles as citizens of Indonesia and members of the transnational Islamic umat, have been defined, extended, and made porous. Under Suharto’s regime, women’s citizenship through state ibuism as gender ideology marked women’s bodies always as a potential ibu or mother. Today, despite the use of social media and digital platforms, contemporary Muslim women’s groups rely on similar kinds of ideas on ideal womanhood which, throughout two periods in Indonesia, have put at the centre women’s natural roles or kodrat wanita and imagined these roles to be threatened by modernity, secular life, gender emancipation, and corrupt government. The spaces created to socialize and gather with like-minded Muslim women created by the contemporary groups have contributed to the continuous reconfiguration of ideal Muslim womanhood under masculine authority. This novel configuration of kodrat wanita establishes a middle-class, urban lifestyle that is simultaneously situated as looking outward into a larger, transcendent, global Muslim umat of altruistic relations of humanitarian relief for fellow Muslims in distress. This ideal vision also marginalizes lowerclass women and people of other beliefs in Indonesia. Young Muslim Womanhood Reconfigured In her seminal volume on Indonesian womanhood published about 25 years ago, Laurie J. Sears remarks: “To speak of ‘Indonesian women’ is an impossibility.”

44  Reconfiguring the Ideal Young Muslim Woman She and her contributors proposed that any essentialist notion of Indonesian womanhood is artificial and that it was more urgent to examine representations of the feminine as sites of struggle (Sears, 1996). Their observation remains true, and, as this chapter has shown, the essentialist ideals of womanhood have been deployed by those contesting power and authority. Despite the political and social changes brought by the democratization that followed the end of the New Order in 1998, there is a continuation of the heteronormative and patriarchal forces dictating the nature of ideal womanhood. The rules and boundaries from the past statesponsored gender ideology have carried over into the contemporary religious, transnational, and masculine discourse of the Muslim community or the umat. These intermingling discourses become part of the current efforts to control young Muslim womanhood. This does not mean that the young Muslim women are passive recipients of the essentialist notions of how young women should behave or how their future should be shaped. In this chapter, I have demonstrated that they take an active part in organizing the events ( pengajian) to make them attractive to their followers. This capacity to organize and hold events following their version of Islamic teachings and notions of young womanhood is a product of ‘freedom’ that emerged at the end of the New Order. Nevertheless, we also see how those in authority (religious teachers) uphold a remodelled narrative of ideal womanhood. In addition, they also facilitate engagement with humanitarian interests to redefine the meanings ascribed female citizenship in the context of Indonesia’s relation with the transnational Muslim community. The young Muslim women’s groups are obviously aware of the importance of taking an active role in redefining what they can or cannot do as good Muslims. By translating their aspirations into the form of a productive, pious feminine subjectivity, they fulfil demands made by religious figures and the larger Muslim community. By invoking gender politics of earlier times, young Muslim women in present-day Indonesia demonstrate that they are fully capable of negotiating their own authority in the public sphere. The ways they create media visualizations of their ideas of womanhood is examined in the next chapter. Note 1 The principles of Pancasila were formulated around the time of Indonesia’s independence in 1945 by Sukarno, emphasizing belief in one God, nationalism, humanism, democracy, and social prosperity. Today, its principles have often been invoked to recognize the plurality and equal rights of Indonesian citizens.

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2 Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality

“If you see my Instagram, it is just filled with the pictures of hijab bloggers”,⁠ said Davita when I asked her whether she knew about the famous ‘hijabers’, a popular term for trendy and fashionable hijab-wearing Muslim women (Beta, 2014).⁠ Davita was a university student, and when I met her, she was not affiliated with any of the young Muslim women’s groups I had been following. She, however, was an eager online follower of the founders of Hijabers Community. She took her smartphone that had been lying on the table while we were talking and quickly opened Instagram, showing me the photos of the fashionable young Muslim women that she followed on her Instagram feed: Dian Pelangi, Zaskia Sungkar, and Zaskia Adya Mecca. Dian Pelangi is one of the founders of Hijabers Community and now one of the main players in the modest fashion industry in Indonesia. Zaskia Sungkar and Zaskia Adya Mecca started their careers as actresses and models and, later, when they decided to don the hijab, created modest clothing lines. Both were regular guests in the events organized by Hijabers Community, often featured to share their experiences of transforming themselves. As I conversed more with Davita, she told me about her self-transformation or hijrah, an Arabic word used colloquially in Indonesia to express one’s commitment to change the self to appear and act according to Islamic religious injunctions. Although Davita did not join any of the groups, she shared the same interpretations of the doctrine of veiling for young women and, more importantly, a similar view regarding ‘ways to be’ good young Muslim women. Davita decided to don the veil two years before I talked to her in 2016. The way she narrated her decision to don the veil to me sounded similar to the way celebrities like Sungkar and Mecca would narrate their self-transformation stories in media interviews. She said it felt like it was the right time, and her friends were supportive of her because they also wore the hijab. Moreover, she did not want to wait until she felt that she was pious enough; rather, she wanted to learn to be pious because she covered herself. The hijab, she believed, can be a reminder for her to do good: Some people say that before donning the jilbab, you should jilbab (cover) your heart first.⁠ I don’t think so. Just wear it, and then it will be an alarm. If you walk pass a nightclub, the jilbab is an alarm. It will be weird to enter one if you wear the jilbab. DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-3

48  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality Davita is making a reference here to a popular reason among young Muslim women who delay or do not want to don the veil or ‘jilbabin hatinya dulu’ (cover the heart first and the body later). Donning the veil is voluntary for Muslims in most places in Indonesia,1 so it was understandable that Davita felt like she needed support from her friends and the hijabers she followed to remain committed to her choice. This is the kind of support that the groups I followed provided for young women. Ukhti Sally, for instance, routinely uploaded social media posts about how the veil could help guard a young women’s honour. In one post, the group writes: “What is covered is more protected. Let’s cover our aurat to be honourable” (Ukhti Sally, 2016i). Nalia Rifika, one of the founders of Hijabers Community firmly claims that there is no such thing as ‘jilbabin hatinya dulu’: My advice, for those who are not veiled: Don’t just make excuses that you want to cover the heart first. Try to cover your body first. Donning the veil does not mean our hearts have to be clean and make us angels without sin. Insya Allah (God willing), by donning the veil, we will be encouraged to become better people, because I experienced it myself. (Rifika, 2015) The words used young Muslim women’s groups to express the importance of donning the veil have rarely been forceful. Donning the veil, as Ukhti Sally and Rifika claimed, is about honour and becoming better Muslims. What they are pointing to is a shared emotional world within which young women shared internal struggles to stay committed to practising Islam and advice one another. The young Muslim women’s groups, I propose, created a sense of authentic connection that is based on the relationship between “strangers who would be emotionally literate of each other’s experience of power, intimacy, desire, and discontent” (Berlant, 2008, p. 5). When I met her, Davita modelled the way she wore her hijab after the hijaber style, a stylish twist of her pastel-coloured hijab worn with jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. She told me she was a bit uncomfortable wearing the longer veil (khimar), although she knew that would make her veiling practice more syar’i (in accordance with Islamic law), just like the jilbab syar’i style promoted by some of the more ‘conservative’ young Muslim women’s groups like Ukhti Sally, Peduli Jilbab, or Dunia Jilbab. “I really don’t follow any rule. I just follow the style. If I wear the khimar, it’s like so long, right? I don’t want to be called ‘ibu-ibu’ (older woman).” When Davita said that the longer veil would make her look older, she reminded me of the way the Hijabers Community’s founders would describe the groups and the hijaber style: playful, youthful, and stylish. However, Davita continued by telling me that she also volunteered for a Qur’an school for children, for which she had to change her look to dress ‘properly’: I also teach ngaji (Qur’an recitation). I volunteer near my house. If I wear what I’m wearing now, I’d be ashamed. An ustadzah (female religious teacher) should wear things that are long, like emak-emak (colloquial term in

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  49 Greater Jakarta area for ibu-ibu or older women). But I’m not going to look like that every day. When she used the word ‘emak-emak’, a term often used to categorize older lowerclass women coming from the Betawi ethnic group in Greater Jakarta area, she referred again to her concern of looking older than she was. What Davita described was, I suggest, a strong ‘inherited’ visuality of the veiled Muslim women from the New Order regime in Indonesia. As I described in the previous chapter, in the 1980s to the 1990s, young Muslim women were involved in an extended series of political protests to lift the ban on veiling in schools. Many of them wore long veils. The long veils signified not only political belligerence against the authoritarian state. In fact, the meaning of the long veil was twisted by the authoritarian state as a sign of backwardness, in opposition to the state’s image of itself as modern and progressive. This was also repeated by the founders of Hijabers Community, emphasizing that they used the word ‘hijaber’ to represent a version of veiling practice that is “modern, Islamic, and acceptable.” Davita acknowledged this by saying that she found the hijaber style more consistent to her ‘I don’t follow any rule’ conviction about how she donned the veil. Nevertheless, she also understood that she had to look a certain way to be accepted as a good ustadzah, at least for the children she was teaching. Her commitment of teaching the Qur’an and her story of self-transformation represented her dedication to Islam, and this required a certain look. This illustrates her awareness of how an ideal young Muslim woman should look and the need to negotiate with the circulated imagination of how a good young Muslim woman should behave. This is what is significant about the visual discursive formation of the good Muslim women that the groups produced. From Davita we can see how the idea of the good young Muslim women did not necessarily come as a forceful imaginary developed by young Muslim women groups. Rather, by following social media accounts of the groups and their key figures, Davita could feel as though she was given a choice to stay committed to Islam. I open this chapter with the story of Davita to highlight the flexibility and the ease provided by the discourses circulating about ideal young Muslim womanhood mediated by social media. Davita and the other young women I talked to understood intimately the ethical and aesthetic details of good young Muslim womanhood as defined by the young Muslim women’s groups on their social media feed. From the feed, they learned how to be and how to act like good young Muslim women (ethics), and they understood the aesthetic markers that suggest if one’s style is stylish and/or appropriate according to the circumstances and the people they were with. Informed by young Muslim women’s groups’ social media posts and the interviews I conducted with young Muslim women, in this chapter, I explore the concepts of visual activism and visuality within an intimate public to understand how the groups’ visualization of productive, pious feminine citizen-subjectivity transforms them into the aesthetic authority of young Muslim womanhood. The groups’ posts and their impact on young women could be understood as emerging, mundane, but influential practices of ‘countervisuality’, an alternative imaginary to the dominant visuality (Mirzoeff, 2011) of oppressed veiled Muslim women. The groups can

50  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality be seen as representing a form of collective action that addresses young women’s interest in challenging the dominating visual politics of Western observers and the male authority and renewing a sense of piety of young Muslim women. In this chapter, I acknowledge the groups’ emergent form of visual activism but, at the same time, critically evaluates how the groups have turned themselves into the authority, prescribing a specific set of appearances, behaviours, and aesthetics of young Muslim womanhood. The chapter’s analysis establishes a critical reading that allows us to see that the groups significantly contribute to the renunciation of alternative religious interpretations for young Muslim women in Indonesia who choose not to veil or not to follow the groups’ convictions on virtuous behaviours. Thus, the young Muslim women’s visual activism cannot be interpreted solely through the lens of ‘subversion versus submission’. Rather, it provides a new perspective on the effects and agentic capacities at work in the popular representations of young Muslim womanhood. Visuality and Young Muslim Womanhood From messaging applications that allow group chats such as WhatsApp or BlackBerry Messenger, text-based Twitter, Facebook, to the visual-based Instagram, young Muslim women’s groups I followed have managed to grow significant followings online and reconfigured the definition of Muslim women’s movement in Indonesia. Some of them stay online and rarely have physical meetings, while some others integrate online and offline activities seamlessly. The numbers of their followers are in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions, like Dunia Jilbab (@duniajilbab on Instagram). They are clearly influential. Following the discussion in Chapter 1 on their meetings and citations to past gender politics in Indonesia to reshape young women’s pious feminine subjectivity, we need to reconsider the idea of young Muslim women’s movement, especially within the context of digital media. What kind of activism emerges on digital platforms? What kind of public condition causes such activism? How do we understand and appreciate the political potential of groups that gain grounding in the realm of the virtual? What roles do visual online representations play for young Muslim women? We can see the young Muslim women’s groups as social movement communities that are based on social networks and informal resources. Social movement communities consist of an “informal network of politicized individuals with fluid boundaries, flexible leadership structures, and malleable divisions of labor” (Buechler, 1990, p. 42), and they mobilize based on personal networks of friends (Wiktorowicz, 2004, p. 13). However, the social movement communities that the young Muslim women are part of are not only informal but they also challenge the idea of a movement’s ‘groundedness’ as most were ‘born’ in the virtual space, which is true for many of online movements today. Communication scholar Merlyna Lim reminds us: Social movement effectively consolidates by its invisibility (to authority); the vast and convivial digital media provides the space for this mechanism.

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  51 In contrast, it must claim its power with visibility, which can only be done by either ‘occupying’ public space and/or ‘opening’ public space. (Lim, 2012) In other words, digital media can be the novel space to spread and promote ideas that may transform people’s relationship with authority; however, there will always be specific history and context as to how the social movement makes itself visible to the public. Today, the definition of public space is changing as publicness has become increasingly mediated. It could be argued, of course, that the idea of collectiveness, the feeling of being a part of a public, is always mediated. The public space facilitated by digital media, especially with the rise of social media, nonetheless, is produced through what Nancy K. Baym and danah boyd call ‘socially mediated publicness’ (Baym & boyd, 2012; boyd, 2010). Social media extends the quality of publicness, as anyone, even young people, can now produce and reproduce the information they see as important, interesting, or urgent. Whether or not there is an audience at the receiving end becomes a potential instead of an impossibility. In social media platforms, Baym and boyd propose there are “multiple and diverse kinds of publics, counterpublics, and other emergent social arrangements” (Baym & boyd, 2012, p. 322). One can quickly and conveniently label the young Muslim women’s groups as a ‘cyber-collective social movement.’ As we see the rise of political movements that started online, like the Arab Spring in Egypt or Tunisia, such movements have become “the new paradigm in the contemporary political arena” (Agarwal et al., 2012, p. 113). Nevertheless, it is important to note that the young Muslim women’s groups rarely immediately position themselves within the political arena, although they may do so when they consider such positioning necessary. As the following chapters of this book will show, political interests are built up over time, expressed in particular forms and only when they are deemed necessary. Sometimes, their contribution to political arena is not obvious at all. Instead, they are part of what I have called ‘Muslimah intimate public’ (Beta, 2020), an extension of Lauren Berlant’s intimate public (1997, 2008). The intimate public is unlike the rational Habermasian public sphere nor the strictly domesticated or alienated intimate sphere (Habermas, 1989). Personal experiences are at the centre of an intimate public, which acts as if it is non-political because it is more interested in the ethics and aesthetics of life in the emotional world. A Muslimah (female Muslims) intimate public, as I have alluded to in the Introduction, is a public in which young women “discuss, engage with, and—ultimately—express how they ‘feel’ about issues that interest them” (Beta, 2020, p. 28). Their relationship with formal political concerns, most of the time, are unclear or indirect. Instead, they are more interested in issues that directly affect their everyday life and concerns that facilitate a sense of camaraderie and togetherness (Berlant, 2008). In a Muslimah intimate public, new creative and intimate forms of dakwah (proselytization) activism emerge. They encourage and celebrate religious self-improvement and engender a sense of

52  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality togetherness that is affective and opinionated but rarely appearing political in conventional terms. How should we understand and appreciate the political potential of the young Muslim women’s groups, then, if their relationship with the political is almost always indirect or unclear? To answer that question, it is important to understand the roles that ‘networked affect’ (Tzankova, 2015) and ‘fields of visibility’ (Moallem, 2005) play within visual social media cultures. Digital media, specifically social media, does not only transfer, produce, or distribute information. Affective encounters and attachments are also facilitated by social media (Hillis et al., 2015). Affect could be defined here as “a stream of intensities operating at individual and group levels, which enable the collective experiencing of one thing in terms of another” (Tzankova, 2015, p. 61), and it is “a means through which people conduct themselves or conduct others by making certain avenues of action possible and foreclosing other potential courses” (Rudnyckyj, 2010, p. 162). Social media, thus, can be seen as ‘a platform of affective mediation’ between the immediate, non-rational physio-psychological intensities and the collective experiences of the subjects (Tzankova, 2015, p. 61). Individuals are not always rational users of social media, as the social media platforms, in their variety of forms, allow the individuals “to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment” (Hillis et al., 2015, p. 3). Affect’s political quality lies precisely in its potential in creating counterpublics to existing forms of authority, from personal, to group, and to civic level (Protevi, 2009). This is the reason online representations are important for young Muslim women’s groups in visualizing and curating the markers of the productive and pious feminine subjects. An examination of visual imageries of bodies through discursive formation and systems of representation is necessary to understand how the production of meanings and knowledge determines the subject formation and how the individuals identify with one another. Minoo Moallem’s concept of ‘fields of visibility’ is imperative in analyzing social media posts as texts. Fields of visibility are “the dynamic, historically specific processes through which visual imageries of bodies are framed and coded” and allow an investigation of subject positions that are both “assumed by and inscribed on bodies” (Moallem, 2005, p. 25). This concept incorporates “both the coercive and seductive forces engaged in the struggle over representation, ideas, cultural leadership, and authority” (Moallem, 2005, p. 32). Fields of visibility, thus, can be used to understand how social media visual representations frame and assert specific subject positions. It also helps articulate why gendered, religious identity becomes an important signifier for the modern, neoliberal governance in Indonesia. With that in mind, this new form of social movement that the young Muslim women’s groups demonstrate is effective precisely because it works through and with the growth of digital media, especially social media. The movement builds a sense of collective identity shared through the networked affect with the potential to be political. I contend that their collective identity on social media is produced through fields of visibility. The fields of visibility consist of the visible that is both symbolic and material irreducible to words or statements. The concept of fields of visibility helps us to understand how

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  53 a subject is not only either confirming or resisting the dominating discourse that frames and codes its subjectivity but also becoming the nexus through which the dominating discourse ‘illuminates’ itself in multiple ways (Vivian, 2009). In other words, fields of visibility will help us understand how subject positions are created and how a subject is ‘known’ through knowledges and meanings surrounding it. Productive and pious feminine subjects created in an online environment, especially on social media, bear different modes of representing religious norms, moral codes, and virtues. It is important to remember that the visibility of the young Muslim women’s groups is not a product of claims that are startling, controversial, or obviously political, as I will show in my analysis in the next section. Rather, their visibility is created by the constant production of images and stories on social media that are creative and expressively feminine, focusing on how young Muslim women should behave in everyday life, in private, and in their relationships with others. With digital tools and platforms, these young women produce affective forces. They share references to Qur’anic verses and hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) that can be useful to understand how good young Muslim women should dress, wear make-up, and have a relationship with the opposite sex. They also share why getting married young is important, and why building businesses and becoming entrepreneurs are characteristic of good young Muslim women. All these topics are presented with feminine markers and framed as harmless. The groups gain popularity and can create a sense of collectiveness through the shared feelings and emotions of being young, middle-class Muslim women in what they see as the increasingly urban, liberal, secular Indonesia. These feelings and emotions are actively engendered as the groups carefully and actively produce images and texts that are well curated, creating a sense of closeness with their followers. This collectiveness can be political as they create a body of knowledge on ways to be ideal young Muslim women and when they recognize their potential to be a counterpublic. But, most importantly, they have challenged the stereotypical visuality of young Muslim womanhood. And they do so without obvious and direct confrontations to the conventional authorities on young Muslim women’s visuality, such as the Western discourse of suffering Muslim women and girls. The most common trope of Muslim women and girls engendered after 9/11 and its subsequent global Islamophobia convinces many living in the West that the lives of Muslim women are not only imagined but are ‘known’ to be oppressed, sad, and limited. This ‘knowledge’ was engendered by the intense circulation of photographs, videos, and stories of ill-treated Muslim women and, at the same time, of liberated Muslim women narrating the terrible lives they lead under the Islamic patriarchal system.⁠ The debate of ‘saving the Muslim women’, as Lila Abu-Lughod shows, comes from the notion of ‘unfreedom’ attached to the Muslim women, the garments they wear as part of their religiosity, and the imaginary embedded around the lives of the Muslims in Muslim societies (Abu-Lughod, 2002, 2013). This is a form of visuality which involves not only the physical experience of sight or perception but also discursive and historical determinations (Foster, 1988, p. ix). Visuality comes from the imaginary validated by the circulation of images and ideas, and it classifies, separates, and naturalizes or even aestheticizes the subject position

54  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality that it imagines. Those who dominate become the authority who self-authorizes, claims, and polices the right to how the subject should be imagined and act (Mirzoeff, 2011, pp. 2–3). Visuality is more than gaze. It is, rather, a politics of the visual that creates the knowledge of both the subject being visualized and the authority claiming the right to visuality (Hochberg, 2015; Vivian, 2009). The visuality of Muslim women is not only assembled and managed by the Western observers. The authority often given to and/or assumed by the men in Muslim societies also visualizes the women as their subordinate and the men as their ‘protectors’. In postcolonial Muslim societies, Aihwa Ong observes that male reason is associated with both citizenship and religious judgement and virtue regulating “the ethical norms of gendered self-conduct and public behavior” (2006, p. 34). As I have shown in the previous chapter and as many scholars have demonstrated, there are different ways that Indonesian Muslim women have challenged these unequal power relations (Alatas & Desliyanti, 2001; Brenner, 1996; Budianta, 2006; Dwyer, 2001; Jones, 2007; Nurmila, 2009; Siapno, 2002). This chapter will show how young Muslim women take part in the production of images and imaginaries of young Muslim women in Indonesia. I aim to demonstrate how the groups can be considered as participating in an emerging form of visual activism. When I  use the term ‘visual activism,’ I  refer to the effort of transforming visual engagement by bringing the issue of visibility to articulate specific political goals (Garland-Thomson, 2009; Pham, 2015). This activism highlights the ‘right to look’ of the subjects being stared at, who are often female and/or minority groups. This right to look is a claim to autonomy, to challenge to the visuality imposed by the authority or those in power (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. 4). Visual activism is a form of political struggle: with the increasing production and circulation of images, the struggle over presence has become political. Mobilizing through images, as Manuel Castells (2015) observes, is characteristic of today’s networked social movement. Visual activism in its creative forms especially thrives with the advent of social media. Using social media, the young Muslim women’s groups challenge the authorities controlling the visuality of the veiled Muslim women’s bodies, making the changes that are taking place more recognizable. The tens of thousands of images they uploaded on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have sparked and added on to the ongoing debates on the appropriateness of the appearance and behaviours of young Muslim women. More specifically, there are two nodes of analysis that I would like to link. First is how visual activism should be seen as a legitimate form of women’s political participation. Second, to highlight the need to start reconsidering the mechanism of such activism, including its elements and effects, especially when it is motored by young Muslim women’s groups. Considering the two elements, I propose, will bring out a clearer view of the specificities of the political participation of young Muslim women in an intimate public. The following discussion acknowledges this form of visual activism but, at the same time, critically evaluates the impact of this visual activism on the condition of authority of the groups and the visualized ideal Muslim womanhood. Although the founders of the groups often imagine themselves as creating social change through dakwah (proselytization), I suggest that, at the same time, this

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  55 social change is limited to a set of rules around their interpretations of Islamic teachings. The notion of self-transformation they campaign for is structured by a set of expectations found in the orthodoxy of Islamic teachings. Although this might sound much like what Saba Mahmood (2005) found in Egypt about 20 years ago, I argue for the importance in acknowledging that the visual activism of the Indonesian young Muslim women’s groups resides on social media whose platform is hypervisible but, at the same time, ephemeral. I insist on a reading that allows us to see how the groups have managed to gradually limit the possibility of ‘standing’ in the porous borders for Indonesian young Muslim women who choose not to veil or to follow their convictions on appearance or virtuous behaviours. Here, I am invoking Martin van Bruinessen’s (2013) apt observation on the visible shift to a more ‘conservative’ Islam in Indonesia. Although I do not mean that these women are ‘fundamentalists’ (as a derogatory term often used to mark the nonWest or ‘non-modern’), I want to emphasize, in the case of young Muslim women, that the quality of ‘in-betweenness’ often celebrated in Indonesia’s more moderate and liberal Islam is now starting to dissipate. In other words, in their effort to regain the right to look, the groups have turned themselves into the authority, prescribing a specific set of appearances, behaviours, and aesthetics of Muslim women to their followers. What they are making visible is a call to a new way of looking at Muslim women, in response to how the Western observers, Muslim men, or the state have seen and represented them. They also simultaneously produce a new form of visuality. Looking Pious on Instagram In a series of posts tagged #RoadToHijabDay2016, #7daysHijabDayChallenge, and #HijabDay2016, Hijabers Community hyped up their followers in preparation for the group’s annual event, Hijab Day. The caption of a post profiling three of the group’s committee members wearing uniform hijab says, “Hanging out with friends is not only about worldly matters. Together with the Hijabers Community, God willing, we can also have fun while deepening our knowledge of Islam.” Just like girlfriends would, the committee members in the photo are doing silly poses in front of a pink banner of the group’s fifth anniversary. They are surrounded by pink, green, and blue balloons. Hanging out with them, as the captions says, would be fun and religious at the same time, a combination rarely ascribed to Muslim societies and cultures. But Hijabers Community is not just fun, they are also acutely aware of the stereotypes often applied to those donning the veil: “We are the living proof of ‘Hijab never limits you.’ So, be proud of your hijab and boost positive vibes!” the group writes on a post (Hijabers Community, 2016). The image of this post is of the committee members posing in fashionable dresses designed by Ria Miranda, one of the group’s cofounders and a renowned, modest fashion designer. The members look glamorous, wearing pastel-coloured hijabs with their faces well made-up. They look happy and, indeed, proud of their hijab. “The young subverted the production of ‘Muslim youth’,” claims sociologist Asef Bayat (2010, p. 36). The Hijabers Community challenges the moral and political

56  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality authority that the West often presumes over young Muslim women. None of the posts tagged to celebrate Hijab Day reflect tropes of the suffering Muslim girls. While many Muslim youth in the Middle East defy or feel indifferent to religion, as Bayat observes, Indonesian young Muslim women’s groups assert excitement and interest in learning about Islam, and they detail how ideal young Muslim womanhood could be achieved. In this section, I will present examples from the patterns formed in the young Muslim women’s groups’ Instagram posts, like Hijabers Community and Ukhti Sally. My goal is to demonstrate the different ways the young Muslim women’s groups perform creative visual activism to promote their interpretations of Islamic teachings—a version of dakwah (proselytization). They highlight and make sure that their followers pay attention to the ethics and aesthetics of good young Muslim womanhood. They post images and captions that emphasize the intimate relationship between them and their followers. The goal is to encourage self-improvement. They post motivational quotes, explainers, event announcement, quotations from the holy texts, advice to the followers. They often focus on how to dress appropriately, and their relationship advice can be very detailed. Advertorials and encouragement to be entrepreneurs are also common, which justify the market logics that envelop the subject position they encourage—which I will discuss in the next two chapters. Let us focus now on the posts that Ukhti Sally uploaded to represent and encourage ideal young Muslim womanhood to their followers. Like Hijabers Community, Ukhti Sally is also aware of the limitations often assumed about young women donning the veil. Ukhti Sally promotes veiling practices that are syar’i (in accordance with Shari’a Law), more popularly known in Indonesia as jilbab or hijab syar’i. Like what Davita explains in the beginning of this chapter, those practising jilbab syar’i often attract attention because the practice requires longer hijab called khimar and long and floor-sweeping dresses. “It is okay if because of hijab syar’i you look different,” Ukhti Sally writes. The caption continues, “ ‘I don’t want to don a long hijab because it can make me look fat.’ It’s better to look fat in the eyes of humans than not looking devout (taat) in His eyes” (Ukhti Sally, 2016b). This kind of commitment to Islam is repeatedly promoted in Ukhti Sally’s account. They reminded their followers to be istiqomah or steadfast in the midst of ‘worldly interests’ in order to gain God’s favour and love (Ukhti Sally, 2016c, 2016g). This does not mean that the group is not aware of the importance of romantic relationships among their young followers. Ukhti Sally frames romantic relationship as a way to practise Islam, and to assure appropriate practices, the group details ways and criteria of ideal romance. For example, Ukhti Sally suggests that an ideal future husband should be bearded (Ukhti Sally, 2016d). Growing a beard is a common marker of piety among Muslim men as they follow Prophet Muhammad’s practice in daily life. But the group also emphasizes avoiding overreliance on romantic relationships. “If God says that he doesn’t belong to you ( jodohmu), he won’t belong to you” (Ukhti Sally, 2016h). A heart that is way too invested in romance, the group suggests, would be crushed. The solution? Practising dzikr or zikir, a repeated series of utterances in remembrance of God’s glory (Ukhti Sally, 2016e). Ukhti Sally’s detailed guides outlining how young

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  57 Muslim women should cover themselves or position romance in their lives reveal the group’s commitment to training young Muslim women in specific behaviours and emotions. “If your heart is calm, your speech is too. If you are humble, your speech is soft. Only those who always remember Allah will exude serenity” (Ukhti Sally, 2016f). How young women act in front of others is also a concern. “Don’t let your knowledge, wealth, and power make your words hurtful, suka menyindir (sarcastic), and make you think you’re always right” (Ukhti Sally, 2016a). The values Ukhti Sally and Hijabers Community promote, while expressed using current popular forms (fun group selfies, cute illustrations, trendy words), remain within the fields of visibility of femininity influenced by past gender politics, especially the reconfigured kodrat wanita, discussed in the previous chapter. They are not copies but reconfigured versions. The ideal feminine pious subject as represented on social media is a product of ‘dynamic, historically specific processes’ that frame and code the visual imageries of young Muslim women (Moallem, 2005). Hijabers Community responded to the historical stereotype imposed not only by the West but also New Order’s gender politics that suggest hijab as limiting. Ukhti Sally confronted the suspicion of conservative modesty. But more than that, they also actively promote a certain kind of femininity that is focused on finding love and getting married while also appearing soft and, in many ways, subdued. Ukhti Sally’s encouragement for young women to be soft-spoken and restrained is similar to that encouraged by the earlier New Order authorities: a version of Javanese elite femininity that is meek, obedient, and family-focused. Furthermore, the groups are also interested in shaping young women’s ideas of romantic interests and behaviours to ensure their followers remain virtuous—all expressed via visual representations that are soft, sweet, and feminine. The detailed instructions young Muslim women’s groups shared on their social media accounts were taken seriously by the followers. This does not mean that the young Muslim women who follow and are inspired by their accounts are brainwashed or passively receiving instructions, as my conversation with Indita and Nilayu demonstrates. Negotiating the Ideal Muslim Womanhood Unlike Davita who was not affiliated with any of the groups, both Indita and Nilayu became followers of Dunia Jilbab because when they had just started wearing the veil, they wanted to find a community, “people with the same story (orang yang secerita)”. Both were still finishing their undergraduate degrees while I was talking to them. They got to know the people behind Dunia Jilbab through WhatsApp and decided to join after being invited to be part of the team. However, after only a couple of meetings, they decided to leave because they did not feel that the young women behind Dunia Jilbab really followed what they preached on their Instagram. They felt like there was a strong division between the women who wore khimar and those who still wore the hijab in the hijabers style, a style often judged to be less proper. Nilayu also disagreed with the insistence of some of the women behind Dunia Jilbab to blur out the face of the women on their Instagram account

58  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality because they thought the face was a part of the aurat (body parts that may cause desire). She said: I don’t think the face is part of the aurat. Allah says in the Quran that the aurat does not include your face and your palms. For me, your face is part of your identity. So what, really? Why don’t we blame the guys for thinking that the face is desirable? Why aren’t they holding themselves back? The reason I share my photos on Instagram is to inspire others, just like I was inspired by people who do that, like Dian Pelangi and other celebgrams (influencers). The reason I decided to veil was because of them. Previously, wearing the veil seemed old-fashioned (kuno). But because of the celebgrams, I became interested in wearing the veil. Nilayu did look like her inspirations. She wore a pastel-coloured veil and a big necklace with a long, loose top with a pair of skinny jeans and flat shoes. She had put on her make-up, wearing a lot of mascara which highlighted the greenish contact lenses on her eyes. Meanwhile, Indita looked simpler. She wore a pair of jeans, a shirt, and a pair of sneakers. Her veil went just below her neck and did not really cover her chest. She was more relaxed about her appearance. I could see that neither agreed with Dunia Jilbab’s prescribed version of young Muslim women’s attire. These young women, like Davita, preferred the hijabers style that allowed them to feel like they had more choices to look stylish. Despite being critical about Dunia Jilbab, Nilayu and Indita agreed with some of the doctrines that the group shared with their followers. There are two examples that I will use here. First, when we were talking about their choice of the hijaber style, Indita suddenly pulled out her phone and showed a picture of an old friend on Instagram who once donned the veil in the jilbab syar’i style that Dunia Jilbab promoted. This friend suddenly decided to stop donning the veil and uploaded a picture showing herself wearing a bikini. She then said that this friend had transformed herself too many times. Indita implied that she would rather do it step by step as she told me that she was not ready to don the veil with syar’i style, although she acknowledged that “in the Qur’an the proper veil should cover your chest and your buttocks. But I think as long as it’s not tight and not shaping my body, it’s okay.” Nilayu chimed in, I want to be syar’i, but I’m not ready. My mother said that I’m still young, so I should style myself the way I want. I shouldn’t force myself because my mother doesn’t do that either. Although that (syar’i style) is how it should be. Maybe I’ll do that when I’m married, when I have children. Although both Indita and Nilayu seemed comfortable with the style they chose, they knew that there was the ‘correct’ way, and they ‘deviated’ from those rules. They carried that knowledge, and as they explained their reasoning, the goal of becoming better by wearing the longer veil was laid out. Despite already wearing

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  59 the veil, they acknowledged that a woman could always learn to be better, and wearing a longer, more proper veil would mark that process. When Nilayu touched on the issue of marriage, I asked them about dating and romance. Dunia Jilbab had taken a stand against dating ( pacaran) because, according to the group, it could lead to evil deeds, such as premarital sex or other salacious acts between a man and woman. Instead, they teach that a good Muslim woman would appreciate a marriage proposal rather than going out or hanging around with men. Another option is to do ta’aruf, in which the man courts the woman through the mediation of a religious teacher or her parents. Indita and Nilayu explained to me the reason they were not dating anyone. Both had dated men before, but when they decided to don the veil, they also decided to stop dating altogether. According to them, their decision not to date helped them feel calmer and less tired from the ensuing heartbreaks. Although they framed their decisions as if they were of their own choice (rather than informed by Dunia Jilbab), Indita used the word ‘dilarang’ (prohibited) when she explained that it was still okay to have a crush on someone: “I think it is right that we should not date ( pacaran). But I can have sort of a crush (suka-sukaan). Having a crush is not prohibited, as long as we know how to convey the feeling.” When I asked if that means that they would rather have someone propose to them through their parents, Nilayu agreed and said that a proposal shows that the man is serious: I think so because it’s more convenient this way. If we date someone, we always think whether this person will marry me or not. If he comes to my parents that means that he’s serious about us. I think it is munafik (hypocritical) to say that you do nothing while dating. At least you would hold hands. And then when you break up, you would have to think about it. If we don’t date, we don’t have that burden. We don’t think about anyone, and he and you won’t do anything anyway. Indita and Nilayu saw themselves as young Muslim women who were critical and ready to negotiate, rather than simply complying with the values and teachings of Islam as promoted by the group. The way they thought about dating, however, has similarities with the ideas shared by young Muslim women’s groups like Dunia Jilbab or Ukhti Sally. The choice of the word ‘dilarang’ (prohibited) reveals that they understood there was a set of rules or guidelines to follow, although Indita did not seem to think she was referring to any rules. Nilayu’s observation that it is impossible to not do anything salacious when dating or that only a man serious about the relationship would discuss marriage with her parents were the same doctrine that Dunia Jilabab promoted. Numerous posts uploaded by the group on their different social media accounts, for instance, implied that dating ( pacaran) opened the way to sin and hell. The coinciding ideals about relationships with the opposite sex reveal how influential the groups could be. Although both Indita and Nilayu tried to show me that they were self-determined and able to argue and interpret the different doctrines that Dunia Jilbab campaigned for, the way they conduct themselves followed many of the rules promoted by the group.

60  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality Visuality of the Ideal Young Muslim Woman The ubiquity of the young Muslim women’s groups and the network of influential hijabers in the minds of the Muslim women I interviewed showed how social media became the main medium through which the experience and narrative of self-transformation were shared, sourced, and learned. Comparable to the role of the Internet for the initial growth of the modest fashion industry globally, social media mediated “new forms of religious interpretation and knowledge transmission” (Lewis, 2015, p. 238) for young urban Indonesian Muslim women. Unlike the fashion industry, however, the presence of the groups and the number of followers they attracted added a new dimension to the Islamic teachings circulating on social media. They were not seen as businesses or as publishing companies; rather, they appeared as the guides to living the life of ideal young Muslim womanhood. They appeared more genuine in offering religious commentary, and in response, the young Muslim women contemplated their choices in representing their piety. The young women were in conversation with and actively negotiating the doctrines the groups promoted in the process of making sense of their faith. They followed or joined young Muslim women’s groups because they wanted to have a community in which to meet like-minded Muslim women. Using the banal practice of uploading images on social media, they claimed their ‘right to look’ back at the authority with their online visibility. The groups were able to represent sweet and modest femininity, but at the same time there were reminders that the women had the right to choose and interpret Islamic teachings. The social media accounts of the groups allowed fellow young Muslim women to teach one another, a form of authority rarely given to lay Muslim women. The groups were able to visualize, through repetition and the reproduction of images made possible through social media platforms, a different kind of Muslim womanhood from the one often depicted by Western observers and patriarchal society. Although their activities started as a form of visual activism to challenge the prevailing imaginaries about Muslim women, they slowly grew to claim the authority of young Muslim womanhood. Despite the different ways of visualizing the pious feminine subject, there was a convergence in the ideal form of a young Muslim woman across different accounts. I am not suggesting that the groups have created a unified, hegemonic visual regime. I  would argue, rather, that the visibility of the groups has created a visual discursive formation: knowledge about the ideal young Muslim womanhood built cumulatively through a new form of visuality. This chapter explores this new and emerging form of women’s movement in Indonesia represented by the young Muslim women’s groups. I argue we need to acknowledge that these groups are a form of collective action addressing young women’s interests in challenging the dominating visual politics of Western observers and male authority and in renewing a sense of piety among young Muslim women. However, as I have emphasized, while at first glance this could be seen as a visual activist response to the dominant vision of oppressed, domesticated, or ‘old’ veiled Muslim women, it has become a form of visuality in its own right. And the young Muslim women’s groups have emerged as the authority dominating the visual discursive formation of ideal womanhood. The next chapter traces narratives

Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality  61 of the ideal (Muslim) womanhood in Indonesia and reveals how young Muslim women’s groups reconfigured these ideals for current times. Note 1 Except in Aceh, a special province at the northwest side of Indonesia, which practices Syariah/Sharia law officially.

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62  Gaining Visibility, Occupying Visuality Garland-Thomson, R. (2009). Staring: How we look. Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press. Hijabers Community. (2016, April 1). We are the living proof of “Hijab never limits you.” www.instagram.com/p/BDnn27cRDW0/ Hillis, K., Paasonen, S., & Petit, M. (2015). Networked affect. The MIT Press. Hochberg, G. Z. (2015). Visual occupations: Violence and visibility in a conflict zone. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375517 Jones, C. (2007). Fashion and faith in urban Indonesia. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, 11(2–3), 211–231. Lewis, R. (2015). Muslim fashion: Contemporary style cultures. Duke University Press. Lim, M. (2012, April 24). Reality bytes: The digitally-mediated urban revolutions. The Architectural Review. www.architectural-review.com/view/broader-view/reality-bytesthe-digitally-mediated-urban-revolutions/8629140.article?blocktitle=Broader-View& contentID=5095 Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press. Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counter history of visuality. Duke University Press. Moallem, M. (2005). Between warrior brother and veiled sister: Islamic fundamentalism and the politics of patriarchy in Iran. University of California Press. Nurmila, N. (2009). Women, Islam and everyday life. Routledge. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Duke University Press. Pham, M.-H. T. (2015). “I click and post and breathe, waiting for others to see what I see”: on# feminist selfies, outfit photos, and networked vanity. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, 19(2), 221–241. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic (Vol. 7). University of Minnesota Press. Rifika, N. (2015, September 4). Semua lebih indah dengan berhijab. Rappler. www.rappler. com/world/alasan-harus-berjilbab-syari Rudnyckyj, D. (2010). Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development. Cornell University Press. Siapno, J. A. (2002). Gender, Islam, nationalism and the state in Aceh: The paradox of power, cooptation and resistance. RoutledgeCurzon. Tzankova, V. (2015). Affective politics or political affection: Online sexuality in Turkey. In Networked Affect (pp. 59–74). The MIT Press. Ukhti Sally. (2016a, January 5). Hapus kesombonganmu. www.instagram.com/p/ BAJxxqCtsWY/ Ukhti Sally. (2016b, January 21). Aku nggak mau berhijab panjang-panjang. www.insta gram.com/p/BAyqV1xNsYz/ Ukhti Sally. (2016c, January 22). Jangan lupa istiqomah! www.instagram.com/p/ BA0747vNscD/ Ukhti Sally. (2016d, January 22). Leh uga. www.instagram.com/p/BA1H8YeNsdK/ Ukhti Sally. (2016e, January 26). Setrika dulu yuk hatinya pakai zikir. www.instagram. com/p/BBEyRSSNscB/ Ukhti Sally. (2016f, February 20). Kalau hatimu tenang, bicaramu pasti tenang. www. instagram.com/p/BB_RpkVtsa2/ Ukhti Sally. (2016g, February 23). Cintai Allah, cintai perintahNYA. www.instagram.com/p/ BCG_Ntmtsa0/

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3 The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation

What is the criteria to be a good Muslim woman? A Muslim woman who is jorok (not clean, nasty)? A Muslim woman who is judes (rude, snarky)? A Muslim woman who is nyebelin (annoying, offensive)? . . . To be a true Muslim woman (muslimah sejati) is not just about the hijab. Muslim women have to have akal (intellect) and akhlak (virtuous disposition). I summarize it with the tagline brain, beauty, and belief. (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p. 12)

Dian Pelangi, one of the founders of Hijabers Community, opens her 476-page 2014 book, Brain Beauty Belief: Panduan Menjadi Muslimah yang Cerdik, Cantik, dan Baik (A Guide to Be a Smart, Beautiful, and Good Muslim Woman), with this statement. A true Muslim woman, Pelangi proposes, is beyond the hijab. She is smart and virtuous, two criteria celebrated in her book title. What does Pelangi mean by intellect and virtue? How does an influential young Muslim woman like her invite her readers to understand what it takes to be the ideal subject? The present chapter looks at the narratives in the books published and the short films uploaded online by the young Muslim women’s groups I  followed. I  see these texts as discursive sites where reconfigurations, repetitions, and contestations of Indonesian young Muslim womanhood are performed and mediated. This chapter is the first half of my analysis that explores how responsibility for selftransformation is now placed firmly on the shoulders of young Muslim women. In the next chapter, I will extend this analysis to show how the groups encourage their followers to become entrepreneurs. They frame entrepreneurship, embodied by the founders and the female public figures in their networks, as a moral quality. In these two chapters, I discuss the presence of the market-driven logics in the process of subject formation. The logics work through the dissemination and commodification of the narratives of self-transformation made possible by Indonesia’s economic reforms and burgeoning e-commerce, online business sector. To highlight the process of subject formation, this chapter reconsiders the neologism ‘Muslimwoman’ coined by miriam cooke (2007), and I will ruminate on Saba Mahmood’s argument on the importance of embodied practices for the formation of the pious self in a ‘non-liberal’ Islamic context (2012). As a theoretical engagement, I will work with and against the category ‘Muslimwoman’ and propose the DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-4

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  65 significance of looking inward in addition to Mahmood’s analysis of embodied practices in the formation of the pious self. The ethical work the young women must do to fit in, negotiate, or resist the label of ‘Muslimwoman’, I contend, involves the training of the body as well as the ‘soul’. By rethinking Mahmood’s argument, I aim to contribute to the growing body of literature on the formation of a pious self that focuses on the embodied practices and outward markers. I do this by showing that moral subjectivation (Foucault, 1990) works beyond “the empirical character of bodily practices as the terrain upon which the topography of a subject comes to be mapped” (Mahmood, 2012, p. 121). Revisiting the Muslimwoman Chandra T. Mohanty argues that Western feminist works “discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Third World” by “producing/representing a composite, singular ‘Third World woman’—an image that appears arbitrarily constructed but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 19). The composite of the Third World woman signifies those who are “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 22), never to reach the level of the always-already-superior Western counterpart. In post 9/11 world, the composite of the backward and inferior Third World women is further sedimented with stereotypes about Muslims. In the South Asia context, Shenila Khoja-Moolji argues that the figure of the victimized Muslim girl ready to be educated and empowered has become ‘commonsensical’ in developmental projects (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 17). For urban young Muslim women in Indonesia, I  propose that the idea of ‘Muslimwoman’ informs the specific arrangements of representations of the ideal pious feminine subject. ‘Muslimwoman’ is a neologism introduced by miriam cooke more than a decade ago (cooke, 2007). It is a critical concept that draws attention to the reduction of Muslim women’s diversity into a primary identity. She uses it to illustrate how nowadays Muslim women are often seen and let themselves be seen as a ‘collective’, illuminating gender and religious identification over the diversity of cultural, historical, national, political identities. She maintains that it can empower the ‘cosmopolitan consciousness’ of Muslim women’s transnational networks as it affirms the relations between gender and religion for Muslim women around the world. However, the category can also be disabling. On the one hand, Muslim women are always potential outsiders in a patriarchal moral economy since they represent the symbol of Muslim purity. On the other hand, for the neo-Orientalists, they are potential ‘victims’ that need saving. The symbol of the neologism, or the ‘cage’, in cooke’s term (2007, p. 141), is the veil. The veil and the politics of modesty within the framework of Muslimwoman, cooke contends, can be a platform for action because veiled Muslim women are able to project a transnational imaginary that represents Muslims as a religious, political community. Cooke’s Muslimwoman emphasizes the problematic reduction of Muslim women in different societies into a singular image, and it is especially useful when it is deployed to understand how

66  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation Muslim women refuse or embrace such labelling. But how does this label of ‘Muslimwoman’ work with pious self-cultivation among Muslim women themselves? In her seminal work on the politics of piety among Muslim women in Cairo, Egypt, Saba Mahmood argues that pious self-cultivation is done through bodily practices that are repeated so that religious virtues, norms, and acts could become second nature. She urges an investigation of those practices and their forms. In her conceptualization, pious subjects understand belief as “the product of outward practices, rituals, and acts of worship rather than simply an expression of them” (2012, p. xv). The subjects she analyzes also show the importance of understanding embodied practices as they are taught, shared, discussed, and deemed a form of self-cultivation. However, Joan Copjec notes that the mosque movement and the participating Muslim women Mahmood analyzes seem to be detached from the “ubiquitous presence of capitalism” which consequently disavow “the piety movement’s imbrications with capitalism” (2016, p. 154). Mahmood highlights the contrast between the ‘secular-liberal’ morality of the self and agency, and the non-liberal sensibilities, in her focus on the Muslim women’s embodied practices that denounce the parochial objectives of liberal Western feminism. I argue that to understand the novel ways young Muslim women cultivate their piety, we need to include the intimate ways the young Muslim women’s groups insert the ineluctable market-driven logics of neoliberalism, which involve not only the reworking of the body but also the ‘soul.’ In other words, cooke’s Muslimwoman helps me experiment with Mahmood’s emphasis on the body and outward markers of religiosity in two ways. The first is by rethinking the possibility of refusing and, at the same time, embracing Muslimwoman by investigating how religiosity is marked. The second is by considering how ‘radical connectivity’ (cooke, 2007, p. 141) and the reduction of the diversity of Muslimwoman could help us rethink about the cultivation of the pious subjects among young Muslim women in Indonesia. The compressing of ‘Third World’ women’s lives into one category is potentially made more problematic by the term ‘Muslimwoman’ because it adds religious experience as another element to describe the lives of women in non-Western settings. The compression of the women’s experiences, I contend, not only reveals the disjuncture and inequality between Western women and non-Western women. It also allows us to see how the ‘marginalized’ women themselves might have been deluded, encouraged, and tempted to embrace the homogeneity implied in their new identities. In other words, the term ‘Muslimwoman’ engenders an emerging politics of belonging that forms a specific imaginary of collectiveness which both includes and excludes particular women. The neologism ‘Muslimwoman’ is useful for my analysis of young Muslim womanhood because we need to understand the processes that are reducing young Muslim women’s diversity. The chapter aims to examine the role of the young Muslim women’s groups and their key figures in the formation of young Indonesian Muslim women’s subjectivity more broadly. It studies how, in the process of ‘teaching’ specific forms of subjectivity, the groups use market-driven logics of neoliberalism to justify how young women’s subject positions are determined and possible deviations and resolutions are modelled. The presence of such narratives intensifies the process of

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  67 ethical subject formation for young Muslim women in Indonesia. The texts tread the path towards and encourage the process of self-cultivation that simultaneously positions the young women as individuals responsible for transforming themselves for religious ends and obscures their role as contributing members of Indonesia’s neoliberal economy. The Muslimwoman: Neoliberalism and the Ethical Subject The sociopolitical landscape of contemporary Indonesia, as I described in Chapter 1, is more open and democratic. The state is no longer the only force moulding the models of femininity. There are more actors involved in redefining what citizenship means in Indonesia. Religious groups flourish. Young Muslim women groups, especially, have been able to reinterpret what it means to be young Indonesian Muslim women. It is therefore urgent to examine the intimate relationship between the growth of informal religious groups with the neoliberal market-driven logic proliferating in post-authoritarian Indonesia. By neoliberal, I refer to the reconfiguration of the “relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge . . . between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions” (Ong, 2006, p. 3). Government refers not only to bureaucratic mechanisms of the state but especially to the specific ways sociopolitical objectives are achieved through calculation, force, and management of individuals, which depends on a set of knowledges to be able to produce, circulate, organize, and authorize truths about the subjects (Rose, 1999). It includes all social institutions, including schools, families, communities, and work environments. Governing, in this sense, is more focused on self-management to create an ethical subject (Ong, 2006). The idea of the ethical subject refers to the technologies of the self that permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (1997, p. 225) In Indonesia, neoliberalism is equally present as an economic doctrine and an ethical regime determining the practices of the self. A neoliberal ethical regime compels citizens to transform themselves to be responsible and enterprising to keep up with market competition (Ong, 2006). The core principle of governmentality in Indonesia is the ‘will to improve’ (Li, 2007), and femininity is one of its key sites. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the will to improve was mediated by the World Bank’s financial support that promoted competition and accountability from the village and rural areas to ‘restore’ the state. In the early 2000s, in Indonesian cities, Carla Jones shows, the will to improve was reflected by the mushrooming of self-improvement courses for

68  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation the middle-class women, which became attractive precisely because of the centrality of the ‘culture of expertise’ in the post-authoritarian environment (Jones, 2010). The feminine self, both the body and the personality, became the object of analysis. Following an expert’s guidance on self-cultivation provided aspirational Indonesians with the confidence of knowing themselves in rapidly changing times. Jones sees how “the self becomes the self’s profession” as there seems to be no end in the project of reworking it. And the ideal femininity was engendered by admiration and application of expertise, diluting the expectation of the ‘natural’ feminine self with the rigorous training of her becoming (2010, pp. 271–274). In the second decade after the dawn of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, self-cultivation as a form of the ‘will to improve’ has started to align with the increased visibility of Islam in Indonesia. One reason was the global circulation of discourses of the ‘Islamic world’ and the increasing call for the unity of the global Muslim community (umat) (Ong, 2006, p. 236). This aspiration is articulated through localized and historically specific interpretations of self-cultivation, which do not seek the kind of ‘liberation’ or ‘reform’ that circulated after the end of the New Order regime. Rather, they seek to attain God’s love. Post–New Order Indonesia is marked by the growth of ‘pious neoliberalism’ (Atia, 2012) and a ‘spiritual economy’ (Rudnyckyj, 2010). Pious neoliberalism and spiritual economy denote the convergence between Islam and neoliberal values. ‘Pious neoliberalism’ is a discursive mix of religion and economics, in which individuals are encouraged to be active and entrepreneurial in order to improve their relationships with God (Atia, 2012, p. 808). I see that neoliberal principles fit with Islamic virtues that uphold “self-discipline, accountability, and transparency . . . hard work, honesty” (Rudnyckyj, 2010, p. 21). This spiritual economy is a product of the active participation of the spiritual reformers and lay Muslims in combining different principles from different traditions to enhance self-management and productivity as expressions of piety. It emphasizes work as a religious duty, piety and faith as analytical and manageable objects, and habituation of “norms of transparency, productivity, and rationalization” within the self to form an ethical subject (Rudnyckyj, 2010, pp. 131–132). Pious neoliberalism and a spiritual economy, as a set of specific government practices, create the conditions to manifest the ‘Muslimwoman’ in Indonesia. Working with the concept of Muslimwoman illuminates how the young Muslim women’s groups make use of such “foundational singularity” (cooke, 2007, p. 142) to engender and curate the ethical feminine subjectivity. Working against it allows me to see that the borders are set not by “non-Muslims or Islamist men” but by the Muslim women themselves. When she coined the term, cooke was more interested in seeing the growing Muslim women’s activism around the world to resist the label ‘Muslimwoman’ by going against the patriarchal or Western-oriented perspective. In Indonesia, I contend, the idea of such resistance is too limiting. We need to think about the complex build-up of power relations and the country’s specific historical and political trajectory as well as technological affordances that have made womanhood in Indonesia an object of control by those in power. I suggest we relinquish the idea of women resisting the label, and rather rethink the Muslimwoman by using the operations of Indonesian young Muslim women’s

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  69 groups to gain an understanding of the landscape of power relations. It is therefore necessary to consider the politics of representations involved in the Muslimwoman’s own writings as a site of truth telling (cooke et al., 2008, p. 109). We should examine how feminine tropes are produced and deployed in such labelling by the women themselves, and how it requires the subjects to assume the images and imaginaries embedded in the identity (Moallem, 2005, p. 107). My goal here is to extend our understanding of the ‘Muslimwoman’ by recognizing that it is a dynamic discursive site whose borders and limitations reveal the operations of religious and neoliberal ethical regimes on the feminine subject. I have chosen to analyze the books and shorts films produced by the young Muslim women’s groups to examine them as the media and the tools for moral subjectivation working within the setting of a neoliberal ethical regime. They are the texts used by the women’s groups “for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformation that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object” (Foucault, 1990, p. 29). The Muslimwoman, in this sense, becomes the discursive site through which the production and circulation of the ethical feminine subjects’ moral conduct is marked, formed, and contested. I examine closely the different ways the ethical subject is represented and modelled in the texts. There are four key steps to my process. The first step is to evaluate how ‘ethical substance’ is represented as the key material of moral conduct in the books and films (Foucault, 1990, p. 26). Second, I study the ‘modes of subjection’—that is, the way the ideal individual determines her relationship with a set of moral codes. This helps to understand how the young women see the obligation to put the moral codes into practice. Third, I consider the ‘forms of elaboration of the ethical work’ that an individual performs to transform herself into the ethical subject (Foucault, 1990, p. 27). Lastly, I study the ‘telos of the ethical subject’—that is, the larger constellation of values and rules within which the moral action an individual performs is located (Foucault, 1990, p. 28). Guiding the Subject In contrast to the instant, brief ‘words of wisdom’ appearing on the social media accounts I analyzed in the previous chapter, the books published by the young Muslim women’s groups offer a set of comprehensive guidelines on becoming the ideal ‘Muslimwoman’. The publications are not only illustrative of how the groups creatively reinterpret Islamic pedagogy. They also show the embeddedness of the groups’ interpretations of womanhood to the neoliberal ethical regime: selftransformation is seen as a form of religious ‘investment’. The readers are encouraged to be responsible for their self-transformation, and they are expected to be selfenterprising as part of their submission to God. As a ‘reward’, they will profit from God’s love through different forms of spiritual and worldly achievements. In what follows, I examine a book published by Dian Pelangi (quoted on the first page of this chapter), and a book published by Ukhti Sally, to reconsider the label ‘Muslimwoman’ and the concept of the ‘soul’. I then introduce the term memantaskan diri

70  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation (to make oneself worthy) to explore the problem of the homogenization of Muslim women’s diversity as well as the important role that the idea of the ‘government of the soul’(Rose, 1990) plays in the process of pious subject formation. The ethical feminine subjects in these texts are formed through detailed tutorials provided by the influential figures from the groups that encourage self-transformation to attain God’s love. They teach young women to not only focus on the physical or embodied markers of piety (Mahmood, 2005, p. 31) but also to understand the importance of the training of the ‘soul.’ Like Mahmood, I see that Islamic traditions emphasize corporeal training in the creation of the pious feminine subject, especially through discussions of proper practices of veiling and behaviour. However, in the subsequent discussion, I reveal that the division between the interior and the exterior is not clear-cut. I  found that the ‘inside/outside configuration’ (Copjec, 2016, p. 158) is more fluid, and neither the body nor the ‘soul’ takes a dominating role in the formation of the pious subject. It is possible, I believe, to understand the formation of an ethical subject from a more holistic perspective, by analyzing the operations performed by the subjects on their own ‘bodies and souls’ to manage their ‘thoughts, conduct and a way of being’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 225). Let us then consider Dian Pelangi’s opening to her book, quoted in the beginning of this chapter. The quote reveals two important aspects of her communication style. First, Dian is aware of the expectations her audience has for her and themselves. As the cofounder of Hijabers Community, her name is one of a few closely linked to the hijaber style, the fashionable veiling practice adored by millions of Muslim women in Indonesia and abroad. Here, she claims her position as an ‘expert’ (Jones, 2010) able to guide readers to understand the ethical substance of a true Muslim woman. The true Muslim woman is contrasted with those who are not physically appealing and not able to communicate well with people (by being snarky and offensive). Second, she fixes akal (intellect) and akhlak (virtuous disposition) in her guide to self-cultivation as elements that add to the hijab, the main marker of Muslim woman’s piety. This demands an analysis that explores how the ‘soul’ is educated. I show that there are two implications for Dian’s framing of her ideas on Muslim womanhood. First, the hijab becomes ‘naturalized’ as a prerequisite for a young Muslim woman’s journey of self-transformation. This follows cooke’s point that the hijab is a ‘cage’ for the Muslimwoman (cooke, 2007, p. 141), reducing the diversity and hybridity of Muslim women more broadly. Significantly, this flattening of the multiplicity of possible identities is not undertaken by Islamist men or neo-orientalist observers—rather, the young Muslim women themselves perform this homogenizing role. The cover of Dian’s book signifies and celebrates this ‘cage’. Dian’s face is adorned with beautiful eye make-up (her lashes are long and lids coloured with silver and purple eyeshadow that make her eyes ‘pop’). She looks directly at the reader with a persuasive gaze that is also attractive—her right hand touches her face with her fingers positioned playfully. Her face is made up to look naturally rosy. Her smile, with her lips adorned with blush-pink lipstick, is as inviting as the colourful, rainbow-like hijab she wears, tastefully twisted on her head. The colour of the background and her veil signify her ‘brand’: the rainbow

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  71 or pelangi in Indonesian, the second word of her pseudonym, and her fashion label ‘Dian Pelangi’. In viewing this book cover, I ask: should we stand with cooke’s analysis that the hijab is a ‘cage’? If the hijab is indeed a marker of piety that flattens out the diversity of Muslim women’s expressions, making them ‘Muslimwoman’, how do we understand the cover’s colourfulness and the celebration of such a ‘cage’? Second, Dian does not guide the readers through a process of self-transformation that only relies on the body. The hijab is indeed one form of representation of one’s faith in Islam. Bodily practices do occupy a substantial part of her book, with a 272-page chapter on beauty that covers topics from personal style, the history of fashion trends, Dian’s fashion style and makeup, hijab styles, to body and healthcare. I agree with Mahmood that “the body is not a medium of signification but the substance and the necessary tool through which the embodied subject is formed” (my emphasis) (Mahmood, 2005, p. 29). Dian dedicates a considerable amount of space to focus on embodied practices. She starts the ‘Beauty’ chapter with this statement: “Clothing style and choice of accessories play an important role in building your overall self-worth” (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p. 110). And she closes it by saying “[a]lthough inner beauty is the most important, do not forget about your outer beauty. Align your niat (intention), which is to inspire others to be faithful (beriman) to Allah and to embellish oneself (berhias) for the enjoyment of those who are halal for us” (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p. 380). However, Dian deploys those outward markers of religiosity not as the only substance of and tools for pious subject formation. A chapter titled ‘Brain’ compels the readers to first find their passion and then pursue success in that area. The closing chapter on ‘Belief’ discusses not only the bodily behaviours helpful in the process of pious selfcultivation, but it also spends a lot of time discussing the work that needs to be done for the ‘heart’ and ‘soul’. Consequently, I ask: as we reconsider Mahmood’s argument, how should we examine the ethical work stationed within the internal regimen of piety? Significantly, Dian’s discussion of proper bodily practices includes lengthy details on brands and type of bags appropriate for the style of the Muslimwoman imagined in her book. Where should we position those elements of consumer practices and consumer identity within the process of pious self-cultivation? There is some truth to cooke’s view that the veil is a ‘cage’. It has become the marker of the visibility of Muslim women in different media, as the previous chapters of this book have shown. Dian’s face and her style on the book cover mark the presence of the ‘Muslimwoman’ as the new cosmopolitan (cooke, 2007, p. 152). She embodies the connection between Muslim fashion bloggers around the world, in the UK, US, Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia. However, the word ‘cage’ is unfitting. It carries with it a sense of forcefulness and limitation. I would also want us to reassess cooke’s suggestion that the actors behind the insistence on focusing on the veil are Islamist men and the Western actors who want to suppress the diversity of Muslim women’s expressions (cooke, 2007, pp. 141–142). The ‘cage’ metaphor does not work for all Muslim societies, although it may work in those under the Islamic law (for instance, Iran or Saudi Arabia) or those regions under direct contact with neo-orientalist ‘aid’ projects of ‘liberation’, like Syria

72  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation or Afghanistan. In contrast, the case of Indonesia, as Dian illustrates in her guidebook, should be understood through its intimacy with excessive consumer culture, the diversity and mixing of identities, and varied expressions of social differences, among others religiosity, class, and race. It would be more proper, I suggest, if we follow Reina Lewis’ conceptualization of the ‘discourse of choice’ within Muslim fashion (Lewis, 2015). The discourse of choice carries with it the imaginary of the autonomous, modern individual who chooses to transform and cultivate the self through religious dispositions. Here I follow Nikolas Rose’s (2004) formulation of ‘choice’ and the ‘freedom to choose’ as necessary in the process of subject formation of modern individuals. The discourse of choice regulates the subject through the management of desire and consumption, and through it the “independent experts” like Dian emerge. The key task of these experts is to disseminate the norms of conduct. Today, experts like her can be more persuasive than any bureaucratic instruction for self-regulation (Rose, 2004, p. 87). The proliferation of Muslim fashion and modest dressing as well as the rise of Muslim fashion icons are engendered by specific structural influences (age, gender, class, ethnicity) and socio-historical contexts that allow them to participate in the consumer culture with a sense of freedom as they reject the ‘either/or’ position asserted by Islamist men or Western observers. Rather, they can see their religiosity in terms of ‘both/and’, allowing them to mix seemingly dissimilar references for their own convenience (Lewis, 2015, pp. 165–169). It is important to recognize that cooke saw the veil as the ‘cage’ devoid of choice because she wrote almost a decade before the global rise of Muslim fashion. Cooke’s 2007 analysis of the network society of e-conversations among anonymous Muslim women did not include the current saturation of online businesses and commentaries surrounding Muslim fashion and the popularity of modest fashion practices. And these did not emerge from ‘resistance’ to the control imposed by the Islamist men or the racist regulations in secular countries (cooke, 2007, p. 143). Rather, these phenomena are a promotion of female agency which produces emergent Muslim habitus (Lewis, 2015, p. 18). In Dian’s book, this agency is present in her emphasis on the importance of learning Arabic, travelling extensively, continuing education, and placing these alongside tips on the pronunciation of luxury designer brands, most of which are French or Italian, and lists of ‘legendary’ bags priced between 3,000–10,000 USD. The veil does not limit women. In contrast, Dian’s book shows that being veiled allows access to multiple choices. Veiling, in other words, is framed as both an obligation and a choice (Lewis, 2015, p. 164). Therefore, I propose that the ‘Muslimwoman’ and its identity marker should be released from the cage of a singular causal relationship with the external, masculine, imperialist actors. The ‘Muslimwoman’ today is reconfigured by the women themselves, treated as an open and ornamented label. The ‘Muslimwoman’ and modest clothing practices should be understood as part of a discursive formation of womanhood in which ‘choice’ is a necessary tool for identification in the context of the neoliberal ethical regime. The discourse of choice and Muslim women’s agency brings me to my second set of questions related to Saba Mahmood’s insistence on the body as the main

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  73 substance through which the pious subject is formed. I seek to understand the form of pious self-cultivation whose reference is not always embodied practices but is framed to be available and can be worked from within. I found the concept of the ‘soul’, its government, and its engineering by experts (Rose, 1990) useful to answer my question on the inculcation of the ‘soul’ in the topography of the pious self. The knowledge of the ‘soul’ (feelings, emotions, desires, and aspirations) is fundamental for the modern governing of the living. In many ways, it is not a bureaucratic imposition on the citizen; rather, the individual actively seeks knowledge about herself, seeks an education of her own subjectivity (Rose, 2004, pp. 10–11). I problematize this aspect because of Dian’s careful explanation about ‘passion’ in the first section of the chapter ‘Brain’, titled ‘First Thing First: Find Your Passion’. This section comes after a 60-page long autobiography about Dian’s life achievements. She writes: Do you want to be successful in career or business? The key is to find your passion. What is passion? You can say that passion is something that you love so much that you would desperately fight for it (mati-matian memperjuangkannya). You are willing to bleed (berdarah-darah) to make it come true successfully. (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p. 82, translated) The search for passion, Dian indicates, is long, complex, yet worthwhile. It is worthwhile because once found, a passionate individual could have “a more sincere heart” (hati akan lebih tulus) and would do their best in front of others. The arduous (berdarah-darah) process will no longer be a problem, but rather it will be a trigger to continue creating. Passion is better, Dian continues, if it is accompanied by niat (intention). Intention and passion, when combined, bring about the value of ibadah (acts of worship) (2014, p. 83). Her successful career and fashion business, Dian illustrates, emerged from her passion and niat for her job so that her actions became meaningful, especially since her goal is to earn “ridho Allah” (God’s approval) (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p. 64). I argue Dian represents the presence of the ‘expertise of productive subjectivity’ (Rose, 1990, p. 115) in pious neoliberal terms. The productive subject is shaped by the individual’s quest for a sense of personal achievement and quality of life tied with the self-actualization that work can provide. In the managerial doctrines of work environments, productive subjects are shaped and aligned with corporate aspirations (Rose, 1990, 2004). In the neoliberal context, productive subjects are manicured as such to be aligned with an assemblage of government technologies, which include, but are not limited to, the neoliberal state’s aspirations as well as globalized capitalism. Specifically for Muslims, it also involves the aspirations of the transnational Islamic revival to rebuild the umat whose search for approval is between the self, the community, and God. Dian’s performance of her expertise is indicated by the repeated illustrations of herself as a high achiever and successful entrepreneur. At the same time, there

74  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation is a heightened intimacy of this new pious feminine subject formation with the neoliberal ethical regime and consumer culture. Within the context of pious neoliberalism, a market logic is implanted and reasoned as a form of worship. The transformation of the self, by learning and practising religious doctrines and finding one’s passion, is treated as an ‘investment’ for success in the future and in relation with God. The impetus for veiled Muslim women to have purchasing power like Dian’s and then style themselves accordingly to look pleasing is also framed as the expression of piety and the means to understand religious, virtuous comportment. Beauty and the knowledge of fashion are seen as a form of religious duty to inspire others to have iman (faith) in God. One could say that Dian Pelangi’s book is too specific to those hijabi/hijaber/ hijabista practices currently popular in the global fashion industry. That is partly true. Dian’s book dedicates many pages to fashion and luxury brands, while also mixing references to mainstream high fashion with more ethnic, ‘folk fashion’ to enable Muslim women to wear global brands while staying modest and meeting their consumerist desires. A similar promotion of self-transformation is also found in Diary Cinta Sally (Momalula, 2016), a book published in 2016 by Ukhti Sally, a young Muslim women’s group whose interpretations of Islam are comparatively strict compared to Hijabers Community—including their views on hijab/jilbab syar’i (veiling practices according to Islamic law) and modest dressing. If Dian emphasizes achievement, hard work, and a beautiful appearance as a form of worship, Ukhti Sally’s book provides a guide for the readers to achieve those goals and even more. Transformation of the self is underscored by the importance of understanding love and marriage. The book is a mix of fiction and a self-help manual. It tells the story of Sally, a pious young Muslim woman, who owns a modest fashion business, and her journey to find her soulmate ( jodoh). In each chapter, after Sally learns about her feelings and experiences heartbreaks and emotional turmoil, the book provides the readers with messages and a summary of learning points. For instance, Sally wears the proper hijab syar’i, thinking that it is a sufficient marker of her piety, which— following the market logic of investment and rewards—will bring her a good man to marry. However, as the book illustrates, her search for a soulmate is stalled due to her inability to see that marriage is a form of worship, and, through her quest for love, Sally can learn about and transform herself. The reader must go through Sally’s failures to understand the definition of marriage that the book provides: Marriage is God’s provision, within it are virtue and God’s rewards ( pahala). In marriage, we can keep on trying, creating, and seizing His rewards with the person we love. Marriage is when we are ready to enter someone else’s life, by being ourselves who always want to develop, learn, and be the best for our partner. (Momalula, 2016, p. 13) A good young Muslim woman, in this sense, would be able to see that marriage is not intended to fulfil one’s desire for love or lust with a man. Rather, it is an

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  75 important part of the process of self-transformation in relation to God. Efforts to perfect oneself should be directed not to another human being but to the divine. The term ‘memantaskan diri’ or making oneself worthy of God’s love, is used repeatedly in Ukhti Sally’ book. I find this term useful to understand the process of self-transformation beyond the body and in relation to the notion of ‘Muslimwoman’ promoted by young Muslim women’s groups. Memantaskan diri can be understood as an act of worship undertaken by transforming the self through introspection of the ‘soul’ which, as promised by the groups, results in good fate (marrying a good man and having achievements that do not only look great but also serve as a form of worship). If Dian Pelangi teaches self-transformation by finding one’s passion and working hard to gain worldly and religious success, Ukhti Sally’ book emphasizes that self-transformation is required to be worthy of a virtuous marriage. The Muslimwoman of Dian Pelangi’s Hijabers Community learns religious doctrines and excavates ‘passion’ from inside herself, both of which are seen as ‘investment’ for a successful career and in relation with God. Ukhti Sally’ Muslimwoman is depicted quite similarly (Sally is an owner of a fashion business, just like Dian). But, in addition, Ukhti Sally emphasizes that a woman is a part of a ‘marriage market’. In this market, marriage is a form of worship. The woman is (and should be) willing to do well-intentioned self-transformation as an investment, and, as a result, she will earn not only a good Muslim man but also God’s approval. Diary Cinta Sally provides pointers to the readers to be worthy of a marriage with a good Muslim man and, more importantly, God’s love. The narrative encourages menikah muda or early marriage instead of dating based on a hadis (recorded words and actions of Muhammad according to his companions) which states that those who are married have fulfilled half of their religion’s duties. Next, it explains that to find true love, a Muslim woman should be knowledgeable of her duties as a woman and as a Muslim. For instance, she needs to wear the jilbab syar’i and be able to cook. However, the book reminds the reader that any act of selftransformation should be done in the name of God. Furthermore, a pious man, the book guarantees, will only be matched with a Muslim woman whose goal in life is to love God. Because marriage is a form of worship, the woman should also be accepting. The men are the ones expected to be active. A good Muslim man visits the woman’s house and talks to her parents, discussing the possibility of marriage. Throughout the book, it is made clear that this process is the cause of Sally’s heartbreaks: because dating is prohibited, she cannot really establish a romantic relationship, and Sally can only adore men she has feelings for through prayers, in silence. Each time a man visits her house (and there are a number of them in the story), he decides to marry someone else or end the ta’aruf (courtship), and Sally must endure sadness and strive to continue transforming herself. Closing the book, Sally instructs the readers: “If God is your heart’s primary goal, He will provide you with anything. Aim for His love, a love above all love, the perfect love” (Momalula, 2016, p. 164). There are two ways of understanding this narrative. First, self-transformation is framed as a woman’s choice, and it is her will to improve herself that drives a spiritual journey. Sally’s story persuades the readers to choose to continuously better

76  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation themselves despite the problems and pain. To desire a man in silence is not seen as a form of passivity, nor is it imposed by external, masculine authority. Rather, desire is reconfigured as a form of manageable feeling that is mediated and can be trained through prayers and the Muslim woman’s relationship with God. Second, we can see the narrative as a renewed form of women’s domestication rationalized through the neoliberal ethical regime. Following Julia Suryakusuma’s analysis on womanhood in Indonesia, I understand domestication not only as a term of the homebound life of women but also the “taming, segregation and depoliticization of women” (Suryakusuma, 2011, p. 8). In post-Suharto Indonesia, domestication does not require a woman be devoid of financial value, paid work, or career. Rather, a good woman is depicted as a choosing agent who has the option to make herself compliant and accommodating despite her potential. This is not because they are like the mosque women who Saba Mahmood argues are part of a non-liberal movement. Rather, because they are under a neoliberal ethical regime, domestication of women becomes voluntary, virtuous, and teachable. Using the term memantaskan diri (making oneself worthy of God’s love), as exemplified by Dian Pelangi and Ukhti Sally, we can revisit miriam cooke’s Muslimwoman in relation to a model of self-transformation circulating within the context of pious neoliberalism. The young Muslim women’s groups deploy the Muslimwoman to unify different kinds of experiences. However, they are not directly resisting masculine or Western authority, as cooke insists. Rather, the selftransformation references a conflation of Islamic, capitalist, and Western sources to create a modern subject whose life is dedicated to her religion. She is not limited in the binary opposition of ‘either/or’, in which one has to choose a specific lifestyle within a particular category, but rather ‘both/and’, mixing and working with different elements (Lewis, 2015, p. 13)—that is, as long as she can earn God’s approval. Furthermore, the books’ reconfiguration of the religious concept of ibadah (acts of worship) not only complicates the concept of the Muslimwoman but also adds to Saba Mahmood’s rather restricted conception of piety as marked by bodily acts. It reveals some similarities and differences between the mosque women that Mahmood studied, whose lives seem to be limited to their activities at the mosque and their homes, with the young Muslim women’s groups analyzed here. Like the Egyptian mosque women, the pious comportment of the young Muslim women here necessitates the knowledge of one’s faith and the inclusion of worship in different aspects of life. Nevertheless, the young Muslim women are imagined as ambitious, passionate about their careers, fashionable (either by styling themselves or owning a fashion label), willing to learn and change, accepting their domestication, and being faithful to God (beriman). Looking inward to the ‘soul’ through knowledge of oneself, the will to improve, and understanding that the importance of religious embodied practices are the substance of and means to achieve pious subjecthood. As ‘experts of the soul,’ the self-help manuals written by Dian Pelangi and Ukhti Sally become the tools and mediums for moral improvement. One of the important features of neoliberal governance is that the individuals choose to transform themselves. It is in the best interest of the young Muslim women’s groups, therefore,

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  77 to demonstrate that their followers, as self-responsible subjects, are striving for a version of the pious feminine self with their own means and with the help of the groups. To further illustrate this, the next section discusses ‘based on a true story’ books and a new genre of Internet film or web series the young Muslim women’s groups published and uploaded to highlight the journeys of self-transformation experienced by the groups’ followers. Memantaskan Diri: Narrating Self-Transformation In the previous section, my reconsideration of the ‘Muslimwoman’ draws from my agreement with miriam cooke’s view that Muslim women have had their diversity reduced to a single, undifferentiated image. I reconsidered who insists on the labelling and how they deploy the Muslimwoman to show that it is the Muslim women themselves who deploy the label, and that in no way do they express that they are ‘caged’. Instead, they demonstrate that it is the women’s ‘choice’ to understand the importance of transforming, cultivating, and managing the self. Self-transformation techniques are framed as an attempt to make oneself worthy (memantaskan diri) and become the means to and the markers of the women’s commitment to performing acts of worship to serve God in every aspect of their life—within their ‘souls’ or as performed through bodily practices. In this section, I extend my analysis of how the process of self-transformation to become the ‘Muslimwoman’ is imagined and visualized by the young Muslim women’s groups. I use two research materials, a book published by Peduli Jilbab, and short Youtube films uploaded by Ukhti Sally. My aim is to illustrate how the texts further highlight the neoliberal ethical regime that emphasizes authenticity in the process of self-transformation. There are increasing demands for books, TV series, and movies ‘based on a true story’, which demonstrate the urgency to think about the demands for the ‘real’ as represented in popular culture (Park, 2016). In Indonesia, specifically, a hybrid of Islamic and self-improvement books that retell the tales of spiritual journeys have gained strong footing (Alfi, 2016). In 2015, ‘Kisah Nyata’ or ‘True Stories’ are the keywords of the books published by Ukhti Sally, Dunia Jilbab, and Peduli Jilbab. Ukhti Sally published #DiarySally, Dunia Jilbab released two books, Kutinggalkan Dia karena DIA (I Left Him for Him) and Gue Jomblo, Masbuloh? (I’m Single, Is It a Problem for You?), and Peduli Jilbab produced From Jilbab to Akhirat (From the Veil to the Afterlife). The groups collect stories submitted by the readers under a topic they are most concerned about, and the stories are edited lightly to create a more ‘authentic’ feeling. The tales of personal spiritual journeys of self-transformation gathered by the groups should be seen in relation with the inculcation of the different ideals expected of the ‘Muslimwoman’. The books are a medium in which the ‘Muslimwoman’ is contested, negotiated, and redefined, but—at the same time—they direct and persuade the readers to see the fundamental role of authentic self-transformation in becoming pious feminine subjects. Using the ‘true stories’, the books are better able to provide narratives that are seemingly closer to the ‘real’, making their claims of truth about the lives of Muslim women more appealing. They highlight

78  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation the commitment to the (neoliberal) ethics of authenticity visible in the stories. Here, I refer to Christine M. Jacobsen’s argument (2011) about young Muslim women making the ‘choice’ to live a pious life. Jacobsen argues that making the choice is a way to “secure the legitimacy of religious practice as a true sign of obedience to Allah, to be distinguished from obedience that emerged rather from social conformity or pressure” (2011, p. 76). The sense of authenticity emerges because the individual can stay ‘truthful’ and express who they really are and who they choose to be. The following paragraphs elucidate how Peduli Jilbab’s representation of the Muslimwoman enfolds the narratives of authentic self-transformation but at the same time ‘frees’ the readers from feeling dictated. Rather, it compels the readers to ‘choose’ to be like the followers whose stories are featured in the book. Like Dian Pelangi’s colourful, inviting book cover, the Peduli Jilbab’s From Jilbab to Akhirat (Peduli Jilbab, 2015) is covered in purple and pink with a dominating image of a smiling woman—a fitting and appealing picture for their target audience. However, in contrast to Dian Pelangi’s consistently light-hearted explanations about why a Muslim woman should be modest while simultaneously striving for achievement and a pleasing appearance, in this book, the injunction to follow Peduli Jilbab’s specific interpretation of Islamic teaching is laid out more firmly. Peduli Jilbab’s ‘Muslimwoman’ stands in opposition to the other groups’ ‘Muslimwoman’. Peduli Jilbab starts the book as follows: It is common to see in our daily life Muslim women with lack of knowledge about adab (Islamic etiquette) and ways to glorify herself (memuliakan dirinya sendiri) by donning the jilbab. Some of them even refuse to wear the jilbab. This is what we call as the end-of-time phenomena, when the syariat (Islamic law) is considered foreign. . . . Yes, lucky are those who are seen as foreign because they implement syariat. This phenomenon is common in our daily life. [It is common to witness] The scorns and the way people look at those who want to do their obligation and to live the sunnah (recorded words and acts of Prophet Muhammad), treating them as aliens (seseorang yang asing). (Peduli Jilbab, 2015, pp. 8–9) In the quotation earlier, we see how the readers are assumed to have similar experiences of being ‘othered’. Peduli Jilbab emphasizes that the everyday ‘reality’ for those whose life is governed by the syariat is under the scrutiny of those who are more interested in things that are ‘modern’ and fashionable (2015, p. 9). The painful experience of being alienated and the knowledge of virtuous behaviours are then interpreted and deployed as a marker of social distinction for Peduli Jilbab’s Muslimwoman. This version is a more complicated image of the Muslimwoman. Neither Peduli Jilbab nor Dian Pelangi regard the veil as a ‘cage’—rather, it is a marker and a fundamental means to create the pious self. However, Peduli Jilbab strongly opposes stylish veiling, modelled by people like Dian Pelangi. In the introduction to From

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  79 Jilbab to Akhirat, Peduli Jilbab writes that the trend of fashionable veiling is a part of the agenda of Islam’s enemy (agenda para musuh Islam) as they are trying to make the Muslim women think that jilbab is a part of fashion and art (membuat pola pikir Muslimah beranggapan, jilbab sejalan dengan mode dan seni). One could say that this is at odds with Peduli Jilbab’s own approach to creativity in dakwah (proselytization) as seen on their social media account and through the book. But this, I argue, is consistent with the discourse of choice within the neoliberal ethical regime: a young Muslim woman has the option of learning how to make herself worthy of God’s love. However, after she has settled on a method to nurture her pious subjectivity, she is obligated to faithfully follow the religious injunctions and fulfilling the objectives established by the young Muslim women’s groups (Beta, 2019). Groups like Peduli Jilbab are those whose inclination towards delineating ‘the disappearing lines between insider and outsider’ (cooke, 2007, p. 151) is more obvious. Peduli Jilbab’s interpretation of the Islamic teachings, as we can see, is one that inserts the Other (fellow Muslims who are infatuated with the modern and fashion or the enemy of Islam) as a part of the motivation for readers/followers to become the particular type of ‘Muslimwoman’ the group imagines. The 28 stories in From Jilbab to Akhirat underline that responsibility for change is located within the ‘soul’ of the narrator. Here, I use three stories as examples of how the authors recount their experience in choosing the path of pious life. The story of Novi in ‘Vokalis Band yang Berkerudung’ (The Veiled Vocalist), for instance, illustrates her journey in “learning to be a true Muslim woman” (belajar menjadi Muslimah yang sebenarnya) and her struggle to escape the mental breakdown she was experiencing after her decision to don the veil and to leave her metal band. She confessed that she lacked any actual knowledge of veiling and used to think that Muslim women who wore the khimar (long veil) were terrorists. After a turbulent episode with her mother, Novi became steadfastly committed to self-transformation (berhijrah). Similarly, Dhita’s story in ‘Aku Mantap Berjilbab’ (I Am Committed to Veiling) illustrates that the will to be pious comes from the ‘soul’. Dhita remarks that, as a teenager, unlike her friends who were into fashion, she had wanted to cover herself for some time because she felt something else deep inside her: “I missed donning the hijab. Even the big veil [khimar]. I truly missed it” (Aku rindu berhijab. Bahkan jilbab lebar. Sungguh aku rindu) (Peduli Jilbab, 2015, p. 95). When her parents allowed her to wear more modest clothing, Dhita had to listen to her friends’ awful jokes that she looked like an old woman (emak-emak). And when she decided to commit herself to donning the veil, she heard people calling her ‘terrorist.’ However, none of those difficulties changed Dhita’s decision. Another story, written by an anonymous follower of Peduli Jilbab, recounts the author’s experience of attending a hijabers gathering and was disappointed to learn that they were using Islamic veiling as a branding technique (kedok yang mau menjual trend dan branding yang dibungkus secara keislaman) (Peduli Jilbab, 2015, p. 156). At that time, the author had adopted a fashionable veiling style, but she started to feel that she was lying to herself. On learning more about hadis, sinful deeds, and heaven and hell, she decided to get closer to God by being more observant of her prayers, the books she read, her habits in reading the

80  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation Quran, and her behaviours. She also decided to wear jilbab syar’i and participate in more serious Islamic groups. As she transformed, she received reminders that she needed to be careful of the fanatics or becoming one herself. The most agonizing experience was when she was requested by her employer to wear trousers instead of long skirts (which is part of the jilbab syar’i outfit). The author recounts that she felt pain inside of her because of that order (“Sakit rasanya ketika disuruh memakai celana”) (Peduli Jilbab, 2015, p. 160). She concludes, however, that she remains strong to continue her spiritual journey. Like the self-improvement manuals, the stories in Peduli Jilbab’s anthology reveal the importance of the ‘inner strength’ of the ‘soul’ in the formation of the pious subject. The authenticity of the ‘true stories’ minimizes the distance between the writers and the readers. If the narrators can undergo the spiritual journey, so can the readers. The stories are persuasive in highlighting the ‘freedom’ the readers have to choose a virtuous life. The book frames the process of finding one’s inner desire to be a better Muslim woman, resisting pressure from others in order to reach these religious goals, and forging a closer relationship with God, as individual choices and markers of a pious self. The popularity of short YouTube films and the young Muslim women’s groups use of them contributes to the persuasiveness of the narrating of ‘true stories’. The films are valuable not for their cinematic qualities, but rather for their representation of the injunction for self-transformation using familiar tropes of melodramatic representation of womanhood and a newer emphasis on personal authenticity. In what follows I will describe the increasing importance of YouTube in re-spatializing cinematic experience, through an analysis of the inspirational films uploaded by Ukhti Sally. Film and cinematic space have mediated the relationship between Indonesians, nationalism, and sexual politics, especially after 1998 with the revival of Indonesian movies (Paramaditha, 2012; Sen, 1995). The rise of YouTube has complicated the rebirth of Indonesia’s movie market. It is important to understand the significance of YouTube as a creative online space and a social media platform on the role of film for the public. It changes the spatial experience involved in watching movies, both for cinemagoers and for those watching pirated copies of movies. It confronts a more conventional notion of distribution, access, and monetary value. Movie production and reproduction on YouTube opens the access to professionals, amateurs, or hobbyists to assert the value of their films. Production value becomes looser but also dynamic, as filmmakers have more direct connections and relationships with audiences, enabling them to assemble different features of cinematic genres to meet diverse interests. New genres like vlogs (video blogs) are well received on the platform. At the same time, capitalist interests move and transform from a more obvious presence (production houses, movie distributors, cinema tickets, sellers of pirated DVDs) to be more obscured and ‘friendly’. ‘Product placement’ plays a bigger role with quick advertising or small banners before or under the video playing on YouTube. There is also a sense that filmmakers can be more independent from the more conventional classification of movies. The short films I am addressing in this section are known as film inspirasi (inspirational films). This novel genre takes its cues from sinetron (sinema eletronik or

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  81 Indonesian soap operas), a genre known for its melodramatic narratives (Aripurnami, 1996), and the new sinetron Islami (Islamic soap opera) subgenre and the film Islami (Islamic films) recently growing in popularity in Indonesia. Using the same tropes from the now-familiar Islamic melodrama, inspirational films focus on love, interpersonal relationship, and the ‘journey’ towards self-transformation to be a better Muslim. They are popular on YouTube, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and sometimes even more than a million, for example, DAQU Movie’s Istri Paruh Waktu (Part-Time Wife), Hijab Alila’s Andai Dia Tahu (If Only He Knows), and Hijab Alsa’s Pacaran Islami (Islamic Dating). Ukhti Sally ventured into the new genre with Assalamualaikum Sally-Ketika Hati Harus Memilih (When the Heart Chooses, Ummami, 2015) and #Diary Cinta Muslimah-Bukan Cinta Biasa (Not Ordinary Love, Apriyanto, 2016). These short films were well accepted and together, by mid-2017, had attracted almost one million views. They have a basic plot structure, with a conflict in the middle and a resolution at the end. In Ketika Hati Harus Memilih, the main character, Sally, has trouble choosing her future husband because, although she has multiple options through the practice of ta’aruf (Islamic courting), including the one her father prefers, she is secretly in love with a man named Salman, whose appearance in the movie is visualized through his Twitter posts. In Bukan Cinta Biasa, Putri has to learn to cope with heartbreak after she ends her relationship with Galih. She is rather obsessed with her boyfriend’s whereabouts, a problem that the film suggests is a fundamental problem with dating ( pacaran). Like sinetrons, which are known for their idealization of characters and gender roles, all characters in the films are visibly pious. Parents assume traditional gender roles and are framed as ideals. In many scenes, the female characters perform traditional feminine duties in the kitchen, and they appear as good Muslim women. They maintain their prayers and are shown to be reading the Qur’an and religious books. Traces of the ‘state ibuism’ are visible, as women are depicted enjoying a traditional domesticated lifestyle in a patriarchal context. However, it is also important to note that in Bukan Cinta Biasa, the character of ‘the boss’ is a veiled Muslim woman, and in Ketika Hati Harus Memilih, Sally is shown to be an owner of a clothing business. If the New Order’s ‘state ibuism’ imposed dual role on women to be good wife/ mother and a good citizen in service for Indonesia, then the Muslim women in these films are good (future) wives/mothers and good managers/entrepreneurs. This aspect is further emphasized in the way the films resolve conflicts. The resolutions represent the main characters’ journey of self-transformation through the challenges of love and relationships and the development of identities as good young Muslim women. It is important to note that the women come to terms with their pain through personally choosing to memantaskan diri (making oneself worthy of God’s love). They seek self-transformation through refining their skills and in the service of others. In Bukan Cinta Biasa, when Putri is crying because of her heartbreak, her friend advises the following: Having a relationship before marriage is only wasting your energy, you spend too much time thinking of him. Yet you have skills, enrich them. You

82  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation have a family, give some attention to them. You have me and your friends, who misses [sic] you because you rarely hang out with us. Someone you fight for, might not be the right person to fight for. Fight for the future spouse by upgrading your self [sic] and with prays [sic]. Fight for His love before a human’s love. Similarly, Sally in Ketika Hati Harus Memilih feels calmer when she realizes that she needs to aim for God’s love and be in service of her parents and other Muslim women. She tells herself the following: Oh Allah the heart is Yours. All of me is Yours. I willingly accept my destiny to be single at this moment. To be Your best servant that I can be. There are still so many responsibility [sic] that I should do. To worship You, to serve my parents, to share to many moslem women [sic]. Maybe our soulmate don’t come on time. But he will come at the right time. He . . . eventough [sic] you really-really wanted him to be yours. If Allah says differently, then he will go the other way. He . . . eventough [sic] you’ve never seen him in person. If Allah says he’s yours, then he will go your way. The transformation of the self is framed as a choice the women take in the face of moral problems. The characters are portrayed as self-sufficient and responsible for their path of submission and closer relationship with God. To know and change herself through religious norms is an act of ‘upgrading’—a consistent feature of the insertion of market logic in the neoliberal subject formation. The obsession to get a husband—a trace of the New Order’s state ibuism—is masked as part of moral injunction to be a better and, perhaps, perfect Muslimwoman. By focusing on God and religion, the young women in the films are depicted, simultaneously, as an understanding of their domestication and subordination and taking an active role to have more time for honing their skills and be in service of other young Muslim women and her religion. Making the Self Worthy Through the discourse of choice and the narratives of freedom under the neoliberal ethical regime, the young Muslim women’s groups take an active role in shaping the subjectivity of young Indonesian women under pious neoliberal governance in Indonesia. With creative mediums and new genres of publications and films, the groups make a compelling case for young Muslim women in Indonesia to follow a certain model of womanhood as prescribed by them. Moral subjectivation, as represented by the texts, is not forceful. Rather, the good young Muslimwoman learns that transformation of the self by looking inward is necessary to be happy, perfect, and, most importantly, pious. The narratives in the books and short films produced by the young Muslim women’s groups are sites where young Indonesian Muslim womanhood is performed and mediated, intensifying the process of ethical subject formation. In this

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  83 chapter, my reconsideration of the neologism ‘Muslimwoman’ coined by miriam cooke and Saba Mahmood’s ideas about piety advocates for recognizing the significance of introspection of the soul of the pious self and the prescription to reshape the self. Beyond the veil as a limiting object that cages Muslimwoman, in this chapter I  show how influential young Muslim women encourage their followers to embrace homogeneous interpretations of the good young Muslim women. By analyzing the intimate methods young Muslim women’s groups use to converse with their followers, I demonstrate that the market logics, informing their view that the body and the soul require reworking to adhere appropriately to their particular interpretations of Islamic teachings, is obscured. The politics of belonging promoted in the texts offer a specific imaginary of collectiveness which champions a certain type of young Muslim women and excludes others. A binary is promoted in the conception of how one makes oneself worthy of God’s love (memantaskan diri) through the implied approval of influential Muslim women like Dian Pelangi and the groups she and others like her represent. The landscape of power relations analyzed in this chapter revealed the bracketing of differences between young Muslim women in Indonesia created by social, cultural, and economic inequalities as the books and short films offer resolutions to doubts or problems the readers might experience. The interpretation embeds ideal young womanhood into a neoliberal ethical regime that suggests self-transformation is a form of religious investment. The young women reading the books and watching the short films are encouraged to be responsible for their self-transformation, and they are expected to be self-enterprising as part of their submission to God. The reader’s sense of having a ‘choice’ is important to highlight how different acts of worship focused on transforming the self, which include reworking the soul, as promised by the groups, result in good fate. It is the young women’s ‘choice’ to understand the importance of transforming, cultivating, and managing the self. By focusing on God and religion, young women are expected to agree to their domestication and subordination and at the same time take an active role to have more time for honing their skills and be in service of other young Muslim women and Islam. As a ‘reward’, they will profit from God’s love through different forms of spiritual and worldly achievements. Just like Dian Pelangi and the characters in the books and films, the followers can be successful in fulfilling their career ambitions and in finding a love that allows them to be both in service of their families and husbands and simultaneously successful in business. All these are framed as acts of service to God. The relationship between the enterprising self and their contribution to the neoliberal governance, I suggest, is obscured. This chapter has illustrated the initial and foundational steps taken to normalize the presence of a self-enterprising Muslimwoman. But what of their relationship with state interests and global economic changes? The productive subject in the neoliberal context is formed through an alignment with an assemblage of neoliberal government technologies. The next chapter extends this discussion on the ‘soul’ of the self-enterprising subject by examining the entrepreneurial productive Muslimwoman.

84  The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation Bibliography Alfi, A. N. (2016, March 5). Buku Anak dan Islam Jadi Tren 5 Tahun Terakhir. Bisnis.Com. http://lifestyle.bisnis.com/read/20160305/220/525470/buku-anak-dan-islam-jadi-tren5-tahun-terakhir Apriyanto, R. (2016, March 4). #DiaryCintaMuslimah full movie—Bukan Cinta Biasa. www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hZ61c0ncQ Aripurnami, S. (1996). A feminist comment on the sinetron presentation of Indonesian women. In L. J. Sears (Ed.), Fantasizing the feminine in Indonesia (pp. 249–258). Duke University Press. Atia, M. (2012). “A way to paradise”: Pious neoliberalism, Islam, and faith-based development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(4), 808–827. Beta, A. R. (2019). Commerce, piety and politics: Indonesian young Muslim women’s groups as religious influencers. New Media & Society, 21(10), 2140–2159. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444819838774 cooke, m. (2007). The Muslim woman. Contemporary Islam, 1(2), 139–154. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11562-007-0013-z cooke, m., Ahmad, F., Badran, M., Moallem, M., & Zine, J. (2008). Roundtable discussion: Religion, gender, and the Muslim woman. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24(1), 91–119. Copjec, J. (2016). Cinema as thought experiment: On movement and movements. Differences, 27(1), 143–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3522781 Foucault, M. (1990). The use of pleasure: Volume 2 of the history of sexuality (Vol. 2). Vintage. www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-sexuality/oclc/858025305 Foucault, M. (1997). Technologies of the self. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 223–251). The New Press. Jacobsen, C. M. (2011). Troublesome threesome: Feminism, anthropology and Muslim women’s piety. Feminist Review, 98, 65–82. Jones, C. (2010). Better women: The cultural politics of gendered expertise in Indonesia. American Anthropologist, 112(2), 270–282. Khoja-Moolji, S. (2018). Forging the ideal educated girl: The production of desirable subjects in Muslim South Asia. University of California Press. Lewis, R. (2015). Muslim fashion: Contemporary style cultures. Duke University Press. Li, T. M. (2007). The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Duke University Press. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press. Mahmood, S. (2012). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Moallem, M. (2005). Between warrior brother and veiled sister: Islamic fundamentalism and the politics of patriarchy in Iran. University of California Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press. Momalula, A. (2016). Diary Cinta Sally. Elex Media Komputindo. Ong, A. (2006). Experiments with freedom: Milieus of the human. American Literary History, 18(2), 229–244. Paramaditha, I. (2012). Cinema, sexuality and censorship in post-Soeharto Indonesia. In Southeast Asian independent cinema (pp. 69–88). Hong Kong University Press. https:// doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888083602.003.0007

The ‘Muslimwoman’ and Self-Transformation  85 Park, S. S. (2016). Based on a true story. Neohelicon, 43(2), 473–483. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11059-016-0357-6 Peduli Jilbab. (2015). From Jilbab to Akhirat. Pro-U Media. https://doi.org/10.2307/41288861 Pelangi, D., & Aprilia, A. (2014). Brain, beauty, belief: Panduan Menjadi Muslimah yang Cerdik, Cantik, dan Baik. Gramedia Pustaka Utama. Rose, N. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Routledge. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Free Associations Books. Rose, N. (2004). Powers of freedom. Cambridge University Press. Rudnyckyj, D. (2010). Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development. Cornell University Press. Sen, K. (1995). Indonesian cinema: Framing the new order. Zed Books. Suryakusuma, J. (2011). State Ibuism: Appropriating and distorting womanhood in new order Indonesia. Komunitas Bambu. Ummami, M. A. (2015, August 27). Assalamualaikum Sally—Ketika Hati Harus Memilih Full Movie. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dJCSDXYMls

4 Be Entrepreneurial! The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia1

“Hijabers Community’s vision is for us together to be quality Muslim women. Being a Muslim woman is not just about the veil (  jilbab). She needs to be knowledgeable and productive. She also needs to have a capacity inside herself to make things that are beneficial for the society.” Syifa, the chairperson of Hijabers Community, explained this to me when asked about the group’s values. We were sitting on the floor of Baitul Ihsan Mosque, a grand mosque located in the compound of Bank Indonesia, the country’s central bank, at the heart of Jakarta. We spoke just right after a pengajian organized by Hijabers Community. Syifa later assured me that although it has been a challenge for her as a chairperson to get away from the fashion-centric image of Hijabers Community, she did not mind it very much. It’s fine because we were founded by fashion designers. They initiated it. But now we have so many other activities, not just on fashion. We now treat fashion as an entertainment. As long as it becomes a syiar to promote proper modest dressing that covers the aurat, not tight, and not transparent, I’m fine with that. As long as it is not too much, not like people’s perception that hijabers’ veils are all over the place (kerudungnya kesana kemari). In Tasikmalaya, a small city about a six-hour drive from Jakarta, Rere, the founder and chairperson of Tasikmalaya Hijabers, told me that the reason she created the group was to create a movement: “This year, we want to do syiar about donning the veil. We actually just held an activity where we shared veils ( jilbab) to people around here.” For Rere, the group’s focus on the veil is important, because “the veil is not just a piece of clothing, but an identity for Muslims. I’m not saying that those who do not don the veil does not have faith (beriman), but once you don the veil, it will bring in other forms of faith (mendatangkan keimanan-keimanan lain).” She continues explaining that this is important because we are “in the middle of the onslaught (gempuran) of fashion, people’s perspective of women and perspectives about Islam in which some thought that donning the veil makes you not free or confined.” The focus, according to Rere, has allowed her to think ahead about the group’s goal. She tells me that in her vision “we can move towards our goal. We have a lot of entrepreneurs here. We want to develop their individual creativity from the entrepreneurial or educational side.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-5

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  87 Both chairwomen were acutely aware of the public’s perception of their groups: they were often assumed to be frivolous and fashion-centric, which supposedly diminish the groups’ sincere and authentic interests in learning about Islam. That was probably why Syifa and Rere emphasized to me that what they did was a form of syiar, an Arabic word used colloquially to succinctly represent their attempt to promote Islamic teachings. I was intrigued. With the increasing popularity of public Islamic practices, Arabic terms like dakwah (proselytization) and syiar have entered everyday conversations about Islam. Syiar, as Islamic Studies scholar and historian R. Michael Feener writes, “is a central term in the rhetoric of state Shari’a” (2013, p. 143). He notes that popularity of the word syiar is relatively recent, and among Indonesian Muslims, it refers to a broad rubric that includes “all activities that carry with them values of religious worship to adorn and elevate the observance of Islam” as well as “moods and motivations” (2013, pp. 208– 209). While the word syiar has its roots from Arabic language, which makes it sound authentically Islamic when uttered in daily conversations, the word has become a colloquialism only in Indonesia. Its Arabic use in the Qur’an mainly refers to ‘religious symbols’ (Feener, 2013, p. 209)—a narrower definition than its usage among Indonesian Muslims. Its appearance in state legal documents and its broader popularity result from twentieth-century activists in schools and university campuses, like the Salman Mosque Movement based in Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and its networked university-based groups (discussed in Chapter 1). Tracing the usage of the term syiar reveals the circulation of Islamic public discourse among Islamist activists, the state, and young people in Indonesia. Just like other markers of piety that young Muslim women’s groups consider essential, its relationship with state interests is obscured. Significantly, the use of the word syiar and other Islamic terms in state documents, activist discourse, among young Muslim women, and even in industry vernacular sets the stage for, to borrow Raymond Williams’ term, the ‘structure of feeling’ of being good Muslims surrounded by values that encourage Islamic worship and observance. A ‘structure of feeling’ makes visible the operation and the “pattern of impulses, restraints, tones” (Williams, 1979, p. 159). In this case, the set of meanings embedded in the use of the Arabic-sounding terms among young Muslim women “operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts” (Williams, 1961, p. 64), sustaining their visions in enacting and promoting modesty and the desire to meld fashion, piety, and entrepreneurial success. The conversations I had with Syifa and Rere were both held in 2015. Since then, the two chairwomen’s concerns about the relationship between the veil, fashion, and creativity risked becoming irrelevant as the modest fashion industry made its major debut in global fashion stages. Writing about Vogue Arabia and Indonesian modest fashion designer Anniesa Hasibuan’s first-ever show during the New York Fashion Week in 2016, Elizabeth Paton of The New York Times writes, “If fashion helps define a social and cultural narrative, then this movement is focused on reshaping the perception of 21st-century Muslim female identity in ways that go far beyond the veil.” Paton continues by quoting Hasibuan’s vision; the designer says,

88  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia I believe fashion is one of the outlets in which we can start that cultural shift in today’s society to normalize the hijab in America and other parts of the West, so as to break down stereotypes and demystify misconceptions. (2016) Hasibuan’s participation in the exclusive New York Fashion Week was also quickly celebrated by young Muslim women. Opening an interview article with Hasibuan, Muslim Girl, a popular young Muslim women’s lifestyle blog, writes that she ‘made history’ and that her show “spoke volumes for celebrating diversity in the fashion industry and inspired people all across the globe” (Syeda, 2016). The ‘discovery’ of Islamic fashion industry by Western mainstream media intervenes in the commonplace narrative of Muslims as backwards or barbaric. It is a strategic marker of the success of a global Islamic revival since 9/11 that is palatable to the West: a celebration of diversity and a tool to challenge stereotypes. Beyond that, the entry of modest fashion designers to the fashion capital also evoked a different sensibility entangled with, but not limited to, their Muslimness. For Hasibuan, her Muslim identity is inseparable from her nationalist pride. Quoted by The Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia, Hasibuan shares, “I want to bring the Indonesian name to the fashion world and use my clothes to introduce people to the different and diverse parts of Indonesia” (Nugent, 2016). Dian Pelangi, whose design collections have been showcased in other fashion capitals, says, “I want to promote and to do syiar of Muslim fashion to friends overseas, so that they are not discriminated against by appearance,” and “I want to make it easier for Muslim women, especially those who are abroad, so that Indonesia is known as the centre of world Muslim fashion” (Nurcahyani, 2013). Indeed, Islamic fashion for Muslim majority Indonesia, Malaysia, and countries in the Middle East has been touted not only as a profit-making machine but also a tool to shift the image of Muslims in the West and a site to mobilize nationalism. The global fashion stage’s acceptance of the Islamic fashion industry is just a small part of interactions that shape how young Muslim women represent their commitment to the values, worship, and observance of Islamic teachings and negotiate their relationship with state political and economic interests as citizens. Writing about her long-term observations of Muslim women’s fashion, Elizabeth Bucar writes that “there is an unintended consequence of making Muslim women and their clothing important symbols of the nation: Women and their dress are given prominent roles in c­ onstructing what modern citizenship means” (2018). Reina Lewis also commented that Islamic fashion is “part of national branding and development” (Friedman, 2014). The connection I am making here references and extends Bucar’s and Lewis’ observations on the construction of modern citizenship and national brand from the perspectives of young Muslim women. In order to understand the subject position afforded to Indonesian young Muslim women, I cited Syifa and Rere’s anxieties about the public perception of them, their interest in Islamic fashion and business, and their commitment to spreading Islamic teaching. Their focus on adhering to and performing Islamic ethics (the way of life and activities done in accordance

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  89 with Islamic teachings) (Mahmood, 2005, pp. 27–28) defines how they act and represent themselves in public. This is when the productive, pious feminine subject, who has been taught and trained in models and ideal figures of young womanhood, emerges as the figure that embodies the expectations set by a structure of feeling defined by a global assemblage (Ong & Collier, 2005) of Islamic teachings, the discourse of female empowerment, state policies, the rise of creative economies, and the subsequent trend of ethical entrepreneurship. I propose that the productive, pious feminine figure should be taken seriously when we think of how Indonesian young women ‘do’ citizenship. The citizen-subject in this form contributes to the society and the state programs, but not by being at the centre of the formal political stage through involvement in political parties or historical mass organizations (organisasi masa) that either work with or pressure the government to engender change. Rather, the transformative effects of the productive, pious feminine subject on the socio-economic landscape are incited by specific discursive conditions that rarely make direct reference to the state or its economic regime. Instead, they are focused on redefining the ways the young women are expected to contribute to the society. In the previous three chapters, I discussed how the young Muslim women’s groups emerged within the historical and political traces of authoritarian gender and sexual politics in Indonesia, and I examined the persuasive accounts the young Muslim women’s groups deployed to promote self-transformation envisioning the ideal subject. Based on my interviews with young Muslim women and the events I attended in which fashion designers and religious teachers encourage young Muslim women to be entrepreneurial, in this chapter I discuss the space that this new pious feminine subject occupies within the global assemblage via a discussion of modest fashion industry and ethical entrepreneurship. The productive, pious feminine subjectivity I have traced in the previous chapters is most visible in this assemblage, and it helps articulate the specific set of expectations and sources of tensions about young Indonesian Muslim women. This subject position demands that young Muslim women’s success in a modest fashion industry can only be legible when they commit to be ethical entrepreneurs and maintain their performances of good young Muslim womanhood. Global Assemblage and Young Indonesian Muslim Women The structure of feeling that informs the considerations, compulsions, and anxieties of the young Muslim women’s groups as well as the ways they manage their public image is determined by an assemblage. When defined as a domain, an assemblage can be understood as a site of different subject positions (Hoesterey, 2016, p. 103) resulting from the circumstantial articulations of various global and local forms. It is a territory where the existence of individuals and collectives becomes “subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention” (Ong & Collier, 2005, p. 4). As an analytical tool, it identifies the interactions of global technologies and knowledges and localized political and ethical concerns (Ong, 2016, p. 7). The concept of assemblage, I suggest, frames the productive, pious feminine subject as a particular outcome of the mediations between

90  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia

Figure 4.1  Conditions conducive to the emergence of the productive, pious feminine subject

the forces of global technologies, which include creative economy policies, the global Islamic revival, the discourses of female empowerment, the influence of social media, and the situated context of politics and ethical regimes in contemporary Indonesia. It goes beyond explaining a causal relationship between globalization and young Indonesian women, and beyond neoliberalism as a universal economic doctrine that has infiltrated Global South countries like Indonesia and created masses of aspiring entrepreneurs. Figure 4.1 locates and maps the concepts, actors, institutions, practices, ethical regimes, and social technologies connected to one another to create the conditions conducive to the emergence of the productive, pious feminine subject. The links between the different elements should be understood as connections that are elusive, and even when they can be captured, the relationships between the components are

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  91 subtle. While elusive, the connections of the elements condition the visibility of the new feminine subject. The young women I talked to during my fieldwork and those who shared their success stories in the events I attended did not see themselves as part of this assemblage, and they believed wholeheartedly that their decisions and consequent actions of self-transformation and success derived from their own commitments to be better in adhering to Islamic teachings. The connections and conditions make visible the aspirations of young Muslim women and, at the same time, obscure others. Thus, I propose that it is important to examine the elusive connections between the components of the assemblage, because it is precisely the elusiveness that makes it so effective in generating and mobilizing a specific kind of reconfigured young Muslim womanhood in Indonesia. My proposal is that the productive, pious feminine subject is formed at the point of contact between the rise of the creative economy in the Asia-Pacific region and the involvement of Indonesians in the global Islamic revival in the past few decades. In addition, the remnants of the country’s more-than-thirty-years fixation with development, modernization, and regulation of gender identities, especially under the New Order regime between 1966–1998, are now contiguous with the neoliberal economic and political governance, the increasing influence of the discourses of gender equality and female empowerment, and the rise of the Internet and social media. In what follows, I will explain the elements identified in Figure 4.1 to set the scene for my analysis of young Muslim women’s involvement in the modest fashion industry and ethical entrepreneurship. I see the inclusion of the idea of a creative economy in state policies as key to the evolving combination of the knowledge economy and cultural policies not only in Indonesia but also in Southeast Asia. Singapore’s 2002 creative economy strategies, for instance, proposed the amalgamation of ‘arts, technology, and business’ added to the state’s deployment of ‘Asian values’ as a technique of state branding confirmed Singapore’s superiority in the global economy (Yue, 2006, p. 18). About seven years later, Indonesia, under the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, followed Singapore with the release of Presidential Instruction No.6/2009 regarding the development of creative economy (ekonomi kreatif). The creative economy relies upon economic activities that are based on its citizens’ individual creativity, skills, and talents. In a 2014 report prepared by the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, the person central to this economy is orang kreatif (creative individual)—someone able to productively “make use of different forms of science, including cultural heritage and technology” (Kementerian Pariwisata dan Ekonomi Kreatif RI, 2014, p. 22). The report claims that Indonesia has the potential to grow its creative economy exponentially. In the next two decades, the report predicts that about 60 per cent of the population will be in their productive years (15–64 years old), and by 2025, Indonesia’s creative economy will be globally competitive. Neoliberalism was seen as a ‘Western’ economic doctrine and faced explicit public scrutiny in Indonesia, but its counterpart—the creative economy—was taken as an ‘exception’ (Ong, 2006). The Indonesian government’s creative economy programs champions fashion, particularly the Muslim fashion industry.

92  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia The fashion industry contributed 18 per cent of GDP produced by Indonesia’s creative industry sector (Bekraf & BPS, 2018). In 2010, the government alongside the state-sponsored Indonesian Islamic Fashion Consortium and Indonesian Fashion Designers & Entrepreneurs Association proclaimed its ambition to make Indonesia the global Islamic fashion capital. Since then, they have organized the annual Indonesia Islamic Fashion Fair, a trade exhibition of the products made by a new kind of creative individual (orang kreatif): the ‘Muslim fashion designer’. Each year, the number of labels participating in the exhibition increases. In 2014–2015, Indonesia’s Muslim fashion industry grew 72 per cent (Midiani et al., 2015). The concept of the ‘Muslim fashion designer’ itself is not a novel idea for Indonesians. The categorization of designers focusing only on Muslim modest clothing appeared as early as the 1980s. Today, however, the presence of Hijabers Community and its founders, such as Dian Pelangi, Jenahara Nasution, Ghaida Tsuraya, among the earliest active members of Indonesian Islamic Fashion Consortium, is acknowledged by the government as one of the forces behind the speedy growth of the Muslim fashion industry (Midiani et al., 2015). The young women behind the establishment of Hijabers Community are the “locomotive of the new era of Muslim women’s clothing” (lokomotif era baru busana Muslimah) (Tempo, 2012). This description marks the visibility of young women and recognition of their economic capacity. This, as I will explain later, further justifies the encouragement for young women to be productive and to aspire to be successful entrepreneurs. At the same time, it obscures the state’s exploitative demands of young Muslim women. While it has been reported that about 20 per cent of creative business owners are women, and almost half of them were in the fashion business, more than half of the creative economy workforce are blue collar, mainly working in manufacturing (Berawi & Rusiawan, 2017; Katadata.co.id, 2018). It is important to note that young women textile workers who produce clothes and fashion items for aspiring Muslim women fashion entrepreneurs earn very little (barely 60 USD per month) and work with little or no legal protection as many of them work in home-based garment workshops or konveksi (ABC Australia & Detik News, 2019; Novianto, 2019). The creative economy and the presence of the Muslim fashion designers is integrated into the global Islamic revival and are simultaneously the products of, and the tools for, the increasing popularity of phenomena like Muslim televangelists (religious teachers or ustadz/ustadzah) and Islamic psychology and self-help books in Indonesia. James B. Hoesterey observes that the emphasis on religious experience for personal wellness has provided the path for what he calls renewed Islamic ‘ethical entrepreneurs’ (Hoesterey, 2016). Entrepreneurship was one of the fundamental elements of Islamic organizations in Indonesia since the early twentieth century, as I have discussed in Chapter 1. Ethics here refer to the subject formation, value creation, category division, and performance of practices (Colebrook, 1998, p.  50)—how one acts in life and deploys certain discourses, practices, and techniques to achieve a certain state of the ideal self. In Islamic pietist practices, ethics determine a certain way of life and include specific activities

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  93 that help subjects achieve a state of being that is consistent with the teachings of Islam (Mahmood, 2005, pp. 27–28), usually in reference to the Qur’an and the sunnah or hadis (record of Muhammad’s speech and actions). The Islamic ethical subject is shaped by performative acts, for example, shalat (prayer), almsgiving, veiling, and doing ethical business, that are understood to create corresponding inward dispositions and moral character. In addition, Islamic ethics for contemporary Muslims in Indonesia are also practised at work to ensure competitiveness in the global economy. Workplace training that focuses on Islamic ethics (like the popular ESQ trainings) are promoted to enhance corporate employees’ productivity and also to fight corruption. The training reinforces “an ethics of accountability, personal responsibility, and self-discipline” (Rudnyckyj, 2010, pp. 16–19) to achieve corporate success and inculcate the understanding that all actions, not only those labelled as religious like praying, but also working, should be conducted in the name of God (Rudnyckyj, 2010, p. 59). Today, the religious teachers make use of their popularity to offer programs that encourage entrepreneurial endeavours using vocabularies learned from Western self-help gurus but, in addition, base the participants’ desire for success and wealth on cultivating a closer relationship with God. The ethical entrepreneurs, in this sense, see that “the goal of business . . . is not unbridled capital accumulation for its own sake. Instead, capital is perceived as a prerequisite to fulfil one’s religious obligations of almsgiving” (Hoesterey, 2016, p. 119). Although it can seem to be an outcome of the Weberian Protestant ethic, the ethical entrepreneurs do not find the relationship between Islamic ethics and capital accumulation as accidental; rather, it is always already calculated (Rudnyckyj, 2010, p. 145). Let’s return to the graph (Figure 4.1). The resonance, the adjacency, and the nexus between the different components form the new feminine subject. The elusive relationship of the concepts, social technologies, and actors in this assemblage is the necessary condition for the young Muslim women to embark on the journey of self-transformation to become entrepreneurial and pious. It is infused with the reminders, through repetitions in different mediums, that becoming entrepreneurial is part of the process of becoming a good and ethical Muslim woman. Furthermore, despite their hesitancy, a lot of the young women I talked to justified their endeavours in the creative industries and the business world through the discourses of gender equality and women empowerment. This tendency is familiar to the phenomenon described in Angela McRobbie’s ‘masquerade’: a new form of gender power which re-orchestrates the heterosexual matrix in order to secure, once again, the existence of patriarchal law and masculine hegemony, but this time by means of a kind of ironic, quasi-feminist staking out of a distance in the act of taking on the garb of femininity. (McRobbie, 2009, p. 66) Young women, in this masquerade, are thought to be self-reliant and skilful and knowledgeable about self-presentation. This brings in two significant effects for young women in contemporary Indonesia.

94  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia First, the development of the narratives of the ability of women to ‘do it all’ as long as they stay within appropriate boundaries. Muslim women in Indonesia have been leaders of religious groups and schools, and they have significant positions in the circle of Indonesian Islamic scholars. Although there is a strong feminist movement, Muslim women’s entrepreneurial endeavours, especially among the leading Muslim designers and the women of the fashion industry, are not framed in the language of gender equality. Rather, they are regulated by the idea of ‘gender harmony’ (Wieringa, 2015) which helps continue the heteronormative gender relations based on women’s subordination akin to that asserted during the New Order. The difference is that today the Islamic and pious family or ‘keluarga sakinah’ takes centre stage (Wieringa, 2015, p. 38). In a pious family, a good wife expresses her piety by always being ready to serve and follow the husband, just as expressed in Ustadz Faqih’s sermon discussed in Chapter 1. This type of family supposedly plays the role of a fortress for Indonesians against the terrible effects of Western lifestyles. This means that, despite owning successful businesses, Muslim women must always remember and be reminded about the primary importance of sustaining the ‘traditional’ roles as wives and mothers. Second, the growing but dismissed importance of the lower-class Indonesian women. Young Muslim women who see themselves as ethical entrepreneurs view their successes as either coming from inside themselves (usually through passion, talent, hard work, and skills) or from God and their commitment to religious practices. The young women often discuss their fashion business in terms of personal endeavours, and the fashion items they sell seem to be produced out of thin air. During my fieldwork, I  observed that discussion about the labour involved in the working process of fashion designers and clothing business owners to produce their products was largely non-existent or dismissed. The flock of women working in small, sweatshop-like textile factories called konveksi, manufacturing the new styles of hijab, veil, and modest dresses, appears unconnected to the success of the young female business owners. The visibility of (upper) middle-class young women as aspiring entrepreneurs to a large extent conceals the exploitation of lower-class women working and manufacturing the products. The productive, pious feminine subject, therefore, does not include all classes of young Muslim women. Just like the gender ideology propagated by the New Order, the new feminine subjects in Indonesia are imagined to be and to become middle class, as I will explain in my analysis later. Chief Executive Officers and Entrepreneurial Aspirations In her 2013 book Hijupreneur: Berhijab dan Berkarya Tanpa Batas (Hijupreneur: Donning the Hijab and Creating without Limit), Diajeng wrote: Each Muslim is an agent of change for the positive image of Islam. When Islam is being cornered with terrorism issues, when Islam is thought to be discriminative to women, Muslims must be able to show their achievements and assiduousness through hijab. (Lestari, 2013, p. 40)

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  95 Diajeng, founding CEO of hijup.com, emphasizes that she started the company because she wanted to be an agent of dakwah (proselytization). Her book combines quotes on work ethics from pioneers of IT corporations like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs with others from the Qur’an about womanhood and principles about veiling, honesty, innovation, blessings, commitment, and the importance of prayers. The inside front cover includes a quote from a hadis about the importance of being creative and skilful, and, on the back cover, there is a quote by Steve Forbes about imagination and hard work. Founded in 2011, hijup.com grew exponentially in Indonesia and Southeast Asia and quickly caught the attention of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms. In 2015, it received millions of dollars from two American firms, Fenox Venture Capital and 500 Startups, as well as from two Indonesian firms, Skystar Capital and Emtek Group. There are several points worth considering in Diajeng’s success story. The rise of Indonesia’s creative economy after 2009 coincides with the booming of highly successful global Internet and social media companies. Hijup.com was part of the rising ‘dot-com’ corporations’ business model. Using the concept of assemblage, this Silicon Valley ‘work ethic’ does not necessarily become a universal, cross-cultural value simply mimicked once ‘exported’ from California to Jakarta. Diajeng’s articulation of the work-life balance that a Muslim woman could attain by becoming entrepreneurial and making use of contemporary technologies is a specific and situated outcome of the mediations between the growing global creative economy and the politics and ethics in Indonesia. Let us use Diajeng’s emphasis on work-life balance here as an example. This emphasis on the ability to ‘have it all’ is typical of other start-ups or bigger dotcom companies like Google or Facebook. The popularity of the idea of being able to work from everywhere and enjoy life at the same time is slowly gaining traction in Indonesia. Nevertheless, in contrast to her Silicon Valley counterpart, Diajeng’s reasoning for seeking work-life balance is based on Islamic virtues. First, it is related to the business’ goal to dakwah (proselytization). Second, her framing of the capacity to work from anywhere is framed within the language of service to her husband. As I have discussed elsewhere (Beta, 2019), Diajeng firmly believes that she will not be able to attain her goals or work in an area she is passionate about without her husband’s support. She also sees the importance of extending this flexibility to her employees so that they can raise their children while working from home—in other words, her employees can continue being good wives while working for her company. This kind of mixture is typical of the concept of ‘ethical entrepreneurs’ offered by Hoesterey, which he contends is the result of the assemblage of neoliberalism and Islam (2016, pp. 102–103). The ethical entrepreneur, like Diajeng, “acknowledges the importance of capital accumulation and ‘techniques of the enterprising self’ . . . while also allowing for Islamic practices of ethical cultivation that transcend secular models of entrepreneurship” (Hoesterey, 2016, p. 103) The feminine ethical entrepreneur, in other words, understands the importance of hard work and dedication as well as finding one’s passion, but, at the same time, she remains committed to maintaining traditional gender roles in the family according to Islamic ethics and practices to cultivate their faith and their relationship with

96  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia God. Furthermore, the Muslim women’s business endeavours today include the logic of the ‘prosumer’, a term formed from the combination of the words producer and consumer, referring to consumers’ ability to not only consume but also produce their own products. Diajeng emphasizes that it is specifically Indonesian veiled Muslim women that can gain success in the current competition with other modest clothing brands from other countries or global brands like Uniqlo or Zara. Diajeng asserts, “Indonesian Muslim designers have Islamic fashion DNA, because they are users. They feel what they wear, and they understand the context and the rules of Islamic fashion” (Lestari, 2013, p. 55). The personalized knowledge Muslim women have about their own clothing needs gained momentum following the rise of the creative economy—this makes them the ideal model of Indonesian government’s orang kreatif (creative individual). The combination of creative economy, encouragement for self-transformation following Islamic ethics, and access to the Internet and social media also underpins the success of other female Muslim entrepreneurs in Indonesia such as Rani (pseudonym), the owner of Queen Hijab. Her hijab-focused, modest fashion, Instagram-based online business started in 2012 and grew rapidly so that within four years it also had two physical shops in Bandung. In a sharing session with Bandung’s Hijabers Community in 2016, she described having a ‘natural’ disposition towards entrepreneurship since childhood. Rani started her business not because she was ambitious about building a company based on an idealized ethical model like Diajeng’s. Rather, she started because she was not particularly satisfied with the choices of veils available to her. Rani recalled that when she was still an undergraduate student in Bandung, she was unable to follow the stylish veils made popular by Hijabers Community because she lacked financial resources. So she decided to buy fabric and sew them herself to save some money. Her friends saw pictures of her do-it-yourself veils on her BlackBerry Messenger profile and liked the style. A substantial part of Rani’s success was happenstance or, in her own words, “by accident”. It seemed to be ‘luck’ that her uploading pictures of products on social media worked to her advantage. “I just sold what was left over from the fabric I bought, and they sold out.” Stories of success based on ‘luck’, in this sense, have encouraged more Muslim women to open their own business. I suggest that this cannot be seen as separate from the Indonesian government’s efforts to accelerate the development of the creative economy. In the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy’s report (Kementerian Pariwisata dan Ekonomi Kreatif RI, 2014), the formation of the creative individual is framed by use of digital media. Internet access provides the medium and the tools for the productivity of creative individuals. It is also essential to highlight that the formation of creative individuals in Indonesia goes hand in hand with the concept of ethical entrepreneurs. Despite different starting points, both Diajeng and Rani’s cases help articulate the importance of their perceived ‘higher calling’. Diajeng regards the businesspeople behind successful IT corporations as her inspiration and dakwah as her driving force, while Rani was inspired by Abdurrahman bin Auf, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, and Siti Khadijah, the prophet’s wife, to learn about the purpose of doing

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  97 business. The lives of Auf and Khadijah, Rani described, showed that wealth could be the tools to help the spread of Islam. Islam, she further contended, does not prohibit Muslims from trade or to accumulate wealth, because the financial capital can be used to help others through almsgiving and charity. Siti Khadijah is known for her wealth and skills in trading, and this eminent historical figure inspired Rani to understand patience and how to be a good, supportive wife. When requested by one of the young women attending the event to share her advice about overcoming the challenges she faces and tricks in managing her business, Rani answered that the key was to never stop praying to God and to let God manage the business for the benefit of the Muslim community or the umat: I never stopped praying after each shalat (prayer). This is what I would say: “Dear Allah, I leave Queen Hijab to you only, wherever you want to take it, whatever you want to make of it, I am willing (ridha), oh Allah” . . . Owning and starting Queen Hijab is a guidance (hidayah) from Allah. I would pray, “Dear Allah, please direct Queen Hijab to the direction of Islam that you approve”. [What is important is] how we can contribute to the Islamic umat. Because my inspirations are people who through their business contribute to the umat. Rani explained that, after a couple of years of running Queen Hijab, she had learned how to delegate: I’m a perfectionist, but I eventually learned that I have to delegate my work. I now have different managers looking after the business, boutiques, operations, human resources, and marketing. So, I learned to delegate, to educate, and also to allow my employees to make mistakes once or twice. But not more than two times. If my employee makes mistakes more than two times, that means that they are not compatible, and I would let them go. Let us draw our attention here to the ways in which Rani narrates her business success. There are two key elements in Rani’s explanation of her accomplishments: first, that her success was based on happenstance or ‘by accident’, and, second, her business was always in accordance with a ‘higher calling’, shown through the spiritual connection she has with God and her contribution to the umat. There was a shift, however, when Rani answered the management question: letting go of an employee was seen as understandable if they made a couple of mistakes. The event moderator even responded to Rani by saying: “Yes, we need to be patient with our employees just like when we teach children, they always start from zero.” Rani shows us that class and status differences between herself as an entrepreneur and her employees were reasserted in the process of running her business. A young Muslim woman like Rani, who is urban, educated, and middle-class, with access to digital devices and platforms, could ‘stumble’ upon the opportunity to try out modest fashion business and could later reflect the entrepreneurial struggle in relation to larger religious and virtuous objectives (in Rani’s case, contributing to the

98  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia umat). The employees, however, could be treated as children (as the moderator elaborated) and permitted only a few mistakes before they were fired. Dewi, who had established her business earlier than Rani, sought a different approach when explaining how she conducted her business following Islamic ethics for her employees’ welfare. I visited Dewi at the Batik Merdu design studio and office located at the outskirts of Yogyakarta city. The large space, built following Javanese traditional architecture, had tens of employees working on the orders they received from customers, including batik craftspeople working on the patterns and colouring, and those who cut and sewed the fabric. As Dewi was giving me a tour of the studio, she showed me that there was a musholla (praying space) in the middle of the studio. She and her employees, most of whom lived in a dorm near the studio, would have morning prayers and Quran recitation together daily. It was an opportunity, she explained, to get everyone together and brief them about the day’s work. Dewi’s business had been online since 2009, and she marketed her products to consumers directly through a variety of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Since then, orders have flooded in, and Dewi had to hire more employees and learn about different computer programs that could help her better manage the orders and the company’s finances. When I asked her about how she managed Batik Merdu’s growing human resources, she conveyed to me her dreams: I have a dream. I would always strive for the welfare of my employees. That is why my lifestyle needs to be balanced. I am trying to live a simple life. It is not possible for me to live luxuriously while abandoning my employees’ welfare. In this narrative of ethical entrepreneurship, Dewi painted me a lovely picture of equal wealth accumulation among her and her employees. I queried her further about the studio’s production capacity while telling her that I had heard about clothes made in home-based, usually smaller garment workshops or konveksi, whose owners would pay their workers, mostly women, very low wages and sell the products for at least ten times their production value. Responding to my query, Dewi admitted that, because of the high demand, she sometimes had to resort to outsourcing her production to konveksi. However, she defended her choice by saying that she paid the konveksi workers well: Other companies would pay the workers under 10,000 rupiahs (about USD 70 cents). I pay the workers 15–20,000 rupiahs (1–1.5 dollars) per item, and I only sell the product for 100,000 (8 dollars). That makes sense, and it is clear how much I get, how much is the profit, how much is the risk value. She continued by saying that she has actively been teaching this reasoning to other young Muslim women entrepreneurs in Yogyakarta. Dewi believed that ‘business ethics’ were fundamental to becoming a good entrepreneur; that is,

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  99 thinking about the workers first reflects their consciousness about the presence of God. Dewi explained to me: We are Allah’s asset. These things are not ours. If we agree that we are Allah’s asset, then that means that the shareholder, the investor of our company is Allah. That is what I am trying to teach other young Muslim women entrepreneurs. We are just the managers of Allah’s company. My objective here is not to evaluate Dewi’s words for their moral claims; rather, I want to interrogate what they reveal about how the concept of ‘ethical entrepreneurship’ is put into practice by Indonesian Muslim women. Given that it is accepted that garment workers are paid very low wages, when a business owner like Dewi decides to pay a little bit more, she can justify her actions by claiming that her decision simply ‘makes sense’. This discrepancy between serious discussion and meaningful improvements of the labour rights of garment workers and the celebration of the entrepreneurialism of middle-class Muslim women was also apparent in my conversations with female university students. They are the ones most exposed to the narratives of success of young Muslim fashion designers and veiled female celebrities who decided to jump on the bandwagon to sell ‘Islamic’ products, mostly in the modest clothing industry. My exchange with Astri reveals this narrative. When I met her in 2016, Astri had been in the business of modest clothing for about one and a half years. She grew up in a family that adhered strongly to Islamic doctrines. When she began to feel that she did not ‘belong’ in the university course she had majored in, Astri decided to establish her own fashion business. Undertaking study and living in the Greater Jakarta area gave her access to catalogues of modest clothing from distributors that mediated products made in konveksi and the sellers. Astri told me that her goal was to own a bricks-and-mortar fashion store after she graduated from university and had married her boyfriend. She described her business to me as simply going to the distributor’s office, choosing the items in the catalogues that looked stylish, and transporting them from Jakarta to Jambi, her hometown in Sumatra. Jambi, a province with about three million people, is abundant in natural gas and gold and today has one of the largest palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Astri described how her customers were mostly those whose income came from the gold and palm oil industries. Located about 600 km from Jakarta, it was difficult for her customers to access new fashion items from the state’s capital despite the money they had, hence her business established a profitable conduit for the movement of these desired goods. Once Astri transported the items, her family members would help her with sales. When I asked her about how the clothes were made, she answered frankly that she did not know. Her distributor, she said, got the items from another distributor who sourced the products from a konveksi. She admitted that she had found out about the distributor through Google and quickly learned that the business model worked well for her. Astri’s profit margin at that time was at least 35%, and she could double the price of goods easily when her customers were getting ready for Idul Fitri, a day celebrating the end of the Islamic

100  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia holy month of Ramadhan. Furthermore, as soon as she told her buyers in Jambi that “they are from Jakarta” (bilang aja di Jakarta), the dresses would sell out very fast. Although she did not know who manufactured her clothes, Astri did not regard her business as unethical or exploitative. Astri was more interested in how her business model could help her shape the future she wanted (become successful and get married). Her reasoning came from the stories she heard about successful young Muslim entrepreneurs like Rani, the owner of Queen Hijab. Astri even admitted that she knew where Rani manufactured her products, and she was aware that a lot of these modest fashion entrepreneurs relied on konveksi for production. Young Muslim women like Astri, who had just started their modest fashion businesses, did not feel significant moral conflict about the low wages they paid garment workers and the high profits they gained by reselling the products. Perhaps because her business operation was still small, Astri did not take the time to justify her processes as had Dewi. Astri’s priority was personal entrepreneurial achievement. While many non-Muslim entrepreneurs may share similar attitudes toward garment workers and entrepreneurial success, in the Indonesian context, religious ideals amplify personal entrepreneurial objectives in ways which obscure concern for garment workers. Being ethical and entrepreneurial could vary in definition. For the young Muslim women in Indonesia discussed here, doing business ethically mostly meant adhering to religious orthodoxy and aligning with their future ideal self as a pious Muslim woman. Although religious virtues and principles are articulated, they conceal class differences and defer serious discussions about improving the welfare of garment labourers. It is also important to understand how the new young Muslim women’s subjectivity is encouraged by people beyond businesswomen like Diajeng, Rani, or Dewi. The following section will explain how the religious teachers support young Muslim women to start their own businesses. Religious Teachers and Online Business The ustadz and ustadzah (male and female religious teachers) invited by Hijabers Community Jakarta, Hijabers Community Bandung, and Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community in Yogyakarta encouraged entrepreneurship in a variety of ways but always in reference to an ethical approach and the Islamic doctrines regulating women’s lives. There was a delicate balancing act that the religious teachers had to perform to encourage Muslim women to start their own business as ethical entrepreneurs while simultaneously ensuring they remembered their primary roles as a good wives and mothers. The religious teachers’ understanding of Islamic doctrines became the mainstay of Islamic ethics for hundreds of young Muslim women listening to their tausyiah (advice) including discussions of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) on trading, owning a business, business ethics, and maintaining traditional gender roles. The figure of the productive Muslim woman was often imagined by the religious teachers to be risking ‘independence’, but, at the same time, because having a business was treated as a form of religious ritual and observance (ibadah), there was scope to ensure the women became ethical entrepreneurs. In the Islamic jurisprudence subscribed to by religious teachers preaching for Hijabers Community and Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community, women

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  101 working as business owners or getting paid for employment is classified as permitted or mubah. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Ustadz Faqih persuaded the audience in a Hijabers Community Jakarta event that it is ‘natural’ for women to be able to take care of children and be nurturing—and accordingly, good Muslim women should focus on becoming wives and mothers. This does not mean, however, that he prohibited women from doing paid work or business. He made it clear that Islam allows women to work, as long as the women receive permission from their husbands. The issue of nurturing the family and securing a husband’s permission is a significant point of contention for young Muslim women’s entrepreneurial endeavours. In the discussion to follow, I compare two pieces of advice (tausyiah): one from a female religious teacher, Ustadzah Sari, in a gathering organized by Hijabers Community Bandung, and the other from a male religious teacher, Syekh Ali, during a trade exhibition organized by Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community in Yogyakarta. As also quoted in the Introduction chapter of the book, the two religious teachers revealed different ways of seeing the importance of young Muslim women being productive and entrepreneurial and their roles in the domestic life, particularly in their relationships with the husbands. It was the second time that I had seen Ustadzah Sari give a tausyiah for Hijabers Community in Bandung. In her sermons, she would often reference the fact that she was the wife of Ustadz Aam, a well-known religious teacher in Bandung, to emphasize that there was no problem for her to frequently leave the house because she was busy promoting religion and her husband understood her passion. In her tausyiah that day, she discussed the topic for that gathering ( pengajian), the ‘womenpreneur’—a neologism for women entrepreneur. Ustadzah Sari underlined that trading and doing business are forms of worship that have been exemplified by Prophet Muhammad. She also convinced everyone in the audience that they could be future entrepreneurs. She stated that women should not stop being productive (berkarya) even after marriage. To emphasize this point, she declared that husbands should take care of themselves rather than wait to be served by their wives all the time: Don’t stop working and creating (berkarya) after you’re married. Women usually have different goals before they’re married. After you get married, don’t say “I just want to sit around and ask for money”. Don’t do that. You should work harder. Take care of your children. Should you take care of your husband? Your husband should take care of himself because the Prophet after he got back home, he fixed his own buttons and fixed his own shoes, and even made his own drinks. So, I’m teaching you that in Islam there is no such thing about [women] serving the husbands. Rather, the husband and wife should serve each other. So, in the spirit of Islam, women are truly venerated. Despite the demand for equality, her rejection of the idea that women serve their husbands was followed by an emphasis on productivity. She asserted that Muslim women now should be entrepreneurial because they had the support of the Internet as the medium to start their own brands. Her criticism of gender inequality, in this sense,

102  The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia was a tool to continue to emphasize women’s tasks to craft themselves in a way that adheres to current norms on becoming the ideal (neoliberal) young Muslim women. While most religious teachers encourage entrepreneurialism, the details in their message often differ when it comes to gender roles. Syekh Ali, an EgyptianIndonesian preacher and scholar who was gaining popularity in Indonesia in early 2016, reminded the female audience attending the exhibition that, ultimately, a good Muslim woman would always prioritize her husband. His reminder sounded like a ‘warning’ because the exhibition, organized by Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community, had about 200 booths of mostly small businesses owned by young Muslim women. Syekh Ali gave an example of a husband who sought the preacher’s advice because his wife lived far away from him and refused to return home. The wife was busy taking care of her online business in Bandung, while the husband lived in Jakarta. In this anecdote, the wife said that she would only come back if the husband bought her gold. Syekh Ali asked the audience: “Where is the akhlak (virtuous disposition) of the wife?” He further challenged the audience, “How could you build a household that is sakinah mawaddah warohmah (tranquil, affectionate, and merciful) that way?” Young Muslim women’s empowerment, supposedly enabled by online business opportunities, clearly posed a challenge to the idealized family known in Islam and in Indonesia, the keluarga Sakinah or pious family. Male religious teachers tended to highlight the importance of serving one’s husband, while female religious teachers like Ustadzah Sari considered that women could prioritize themselves above their husbands without necessarily abandoning their families. Entrepreneurial opportunities, aided by Internet access, have decidedly created a new space for women to advance their productivity. Young Muslim women are now encouraged to participate in the economic system, but they are constantly reminded of the dangers of leaving behind their feminine duties as (future) wives and mothers. Young Muslim Women ‘Doing It All’ These productive, pious young women emerge and represent the changing Indonesian socio-economic landscape engendered by the flow of diverse global and national changes and social technologies. They learn and are taught hard work and dedication to their passion in the fashion business as part of their self-cultivation in connection to God. The attention given to the young women by the government, religious authorities, and by fellow Muslim women reveals their visibility in the reconfigured market logic infused with Islamic values and virtues. Young female entrepreneurs, despite their ambivalent and problematic relationship with the labour of poorer women, are important actors within the development of the creative economy in Indonesia. This movement of young women into the limelight of economic advancement (McRobbie, 2009) reveals not only the compatibility between Islamic doctrines and entrepreneurialism, as exemplified by the concept of ethical entrepreneurs, but also the fragile yet dominating and lasting patriarchal gender ideology in Indonesia. I show how a husband’s authority remains important and how some (male) religious teachers take it upon themselves to safeguard

The Productive, Pious Feminine Subject in Neoliberal Indonesia  103 the young Muslim women from the ‘dangers’ of their increasing successes in the business world so that women do not forget about their ‘natural’ roles. Other religious teachers and successful female entrepreneurs illustrate the possibility of a more equal heterosexual relationship between (middle-class) husbands and wives, imagining a prospect where the young women could be good mothers and wives in supportive relationships and, at the same time, skilful business owners. The case of successful young Muslim women entrepreneurs in this chapter reveals how, rather than undermining male authority, the young women’s economic capacity, instead, has “[recomposed] new forms of gender subordination” (Elson & Pearson, 1981, p. 99). In other words, the visibility of young Muslim women as entrepreneurs enabled by online businesses has revealed not only the dynamic economic landscape of neoliberal Indonesia but also the tension created by the changing modes of subjectivation to engender the ideal Muslim womanhood. The concept of global assemblage used in this chapter provides insights into the complex workings of its different components that define a structure of feeling which demands a certain model of good young Muslim womanhood, articulated by young Muslim women and preachers. It is also essential, I suggest, to address how the technologies of the self in the assemblage often position young women in contested and conflicting terrains. For the young women to be intelligible as good Muslim citizen-subjects, they must displace and substitute parts of themselves in order to be presentable and palatable for the public. The emphasis on productivity can be seen as a possibility for change and a renewed sense of freedom. However, this also limits the features of female citizenship: the young Muslim women are now mostly seen as productive labour, active consumers, and the new vanguard of pious reproductive politics effective in securing economic advancement. This need not be specifically gendered. In general, young people in Indonesia and many Global South societies are expected to survive in conditions where their citizenship relies on their productivity and consumption (Beta, 2020; Herrera & Bayat, 2010). Young Muslim women’s participation in the rising creative economy via modest fashion industry in Indonesia, both as producers and consumers, relies mainly on their constant awareness of their piety and modesty, and these define how they act, perform, and represent themselves. Note 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Continuum, 35(6), 824–837, in 2021.

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Coda Being Young Muslim Women in the Midst of Change

Even though we are wearing a niqab like this, it doesn’t mean that we become weak Muslim women. . . . We can become strong Muslim women by participating in archery and horseback riding. (Paddock, 2020) The Indonesian government’s compulsion or acquiescence to pressure women and girls to wear a jilbab is an assault on their basic rights to freedom of religion, expression, and privacy. And for many, it is part of a broader attack on gender equality and the ability of women and girls to exercise a range of rights, such as to obtain an education, a livelihood, and social benefits. The threat of being denied an education or job is a highly effective way of persuading a woman or girl to wear a jilbab, at considerable psychological cost. (Human Rights Watch, 2021, p. 2)

In March 2020, Richard C. Paddock reported for the New York Times that a group of Muslim women in Indonesia were practising horseback riding and archery. This was supposedly fascinating, since the women were donning a niqab, a longer and far more conservative version of the hijab. Idhanur, cited in the first epigraph, shared that the sports helped her and her friends in Niqab Squad feel strong. Niqab Squad, like the groups I studied here, was also founded by a fashion designer who wanted to advocate the importance of donning the veil to Muslim women. The women in the group found no contradiction in wearing the veil and doing activities they found empowering. And as I have recounted in this book, my interlocutors rarely had any trepidation about activities assumed to be feminist or gender equal. In contrast, in early 2021, the global organization Human Rights Watch released a report retelling the stories of suffering women and girls in Indonesia forced to don the hijab after pressure from their peers and superiors. The report traces painful stories of bullying as well as family and institutional pressures that girls and young women had to endure to perform as ‘good Muslim girls.’ One interviewee reported, “My mother does not understand that wearing or not wearing a jilbab should be an individual choice” (Human Rights Watch, 2021, p. 38). A mother shares that her daughter’s school gave “unsolicited comments or make fun of her choice not to wear the jilbab” (Human Rights Watch, 2021, p. 39). Pressuring Muslim girls and DOI: 10.4324/9781003372127-6

Coda  107 women to don the veil is obviously an assault to their freedom. Nevertheless, as the second epigraph shows, Human Rights Watch quickly extends this troubling observation as part of a larger ‘attack on gender equality’ and problematizes its impact to the women’s and girls’ rights. This is a typical move in reports and stories about the lives of feminine Muslims subjects. Like many other scholars before me, I found that the narratives around Muslim women and girls are still confined to discourses of victims versus heroes based on the loose and vague judgements and interpretations of usually Western observers about the experiences of people living in a purportedly strange and foreign ‘Muslim world’ (Chan-Malik, 2018). The New York Times has published multiple articles revealing fascination with Muslim women’s agency and bodies (Cochrane, 2017; Goldman, 2016). Human Rights Watch, while claiming that to be concerned about the banning of veils and headscarves all over the world (2021, p. 103), also publishes extensively criticism of social pressures to veil. The 2021 report emphasizes individual choice, yet women or girls who choose to cover themselves are minimally represented. Both the Times and Human Rights Watch reduce Muslim women and girls’ experiences to those that are dependent on their capacity to rebel against the stereotypical image of Muslim women as powerless or as ‘implicit victims’—the stereotypical model that Chandra T. Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod argued against decades ago (Abu-­Lughod, 2013; Mohanty, 2003). Throughout this book, I have argued that the productive, pious feminine subjectivity has performed and taken active parts in public life beyond the roles assumed by the Western observers. I have offered ways to understand young Muslim womanhood beyond the veil as a ‘cage’ or the only container within which their changing subject positions can be discussed. I hope that I have made it clear that the neo-orientalist ‘victim versus heroes’ model is not only insufficient but also unable to explain the reconfiguration of young womanhood and its future that my interlocutors imagine. The productive, pious feminine subject is historical. Young Muslim women do not exist in vacuums or lead ahistorical lives where their entire experience is of suffering from patriarchal or religious demands. In fact, I have attended to the history of Muslim women’s movement in Indonesia that clearly demonstrate their active role in reimagining and making claims to how the Indonesian society and state should be organized. The young Muslim women I have discussed are political and actively involved in redefining the variety of ways political subjectivity has been imagined and governed. Nevertheless, they act as if they are not interested in formal politics, and many who follow popular young Muslim women’s groups assume this also to be the case. Perhaps this is the reason Western observers continue to assume that their activities are signals of their victim status. Many decision-makers in Indonesia also believe that they are not important players in its sociopolitical landscape. Hence, in this book I have explored how young Muslim women and their groups have resourcefully reproduced feminine subject positions and generated ideals of young womanhood that have shifted the model of citizenship in the minds of young women. The formation of the productive and pious feminine subject cannot be disentangled from their roles as citizens, their interpretation of Islamic teachings, and the

108  Coda intimacy of public life afforded to young women whose lives are interlocked with state and social governance based on market logics. The chapters in the book are not interested in examining the young Muslim women as the dominated subject. Instead, I  have articulated how social and class differences among young Muslim women matter and demarcate the influence the young women have in characterizing the ideal young Muslim womanhood. It is also imperative to attend to how they negotiate their relationship with religious and patriarchal authorities using digital tools and their business acumen. Most importantly, they do all these via informal gatherings, books, short online films, and popular social media accounts that instruct how young Muslim women should feel, dress, date, do business, criticize the government, and imagine their futures without appearing authoritative. They are rarely interested in developmentalist feminist goals to empower oneself by being educated or delaying marriage or pregnancy. Instead, they encourage marrying young, becoming good and pious wives who serve their husbands and families well. The young Muslim women’s groups have mapped out meticulously how ideal young womanhood can be achieved. They do not conform to the model imposed by neo-orientalist or developmentalist model, and, as I have shown, this does not mean they are in any way progressive. They are still, in many ways, conservative. But just not in the ways we—by we, I mean Western observers and scholars located in the Global North—expect them to be. While they have appeared non-political and more interested in the intimate details of their fellow young Muslim women, this does not mean that they can get away from state political contests and economic interests. As I have alluded in the Introduction, the young women whose groups I studied in this book have been involved in multiple events that are obviously political. In 2016 and 2017, young Muslim women’s groups like Ukhti Sally and Peduli Jilbab took a stand against the re-election of Basuki Purnama, who at the time was Jakarta’s governor and his double minority status (a Christian and a Chinese-Indonesian) clearly did not boost his chance of winning. The groups called on their followers to join the protests in the streets to join the ‘defending the Qur’an’ action (aksi bela Qur’an) and campaign against voting for Purnama with a social media hashtag called #MuslimVoteMuslim (Beta, 2019a). In 2019, Ghaida Tsurayya and Dian Pelangi, founders of Hijabers Community, openly supported Prabowo Subianto, a presidential candidate who was running against the incumbent President Joko Widodo. They uploaded their photos strategically nearing and on the voting day, and many followers in the comments section seemed to celebrate their choice to vote for Subianto (Beta, 2019b). And, as I have demonstrated in Chapter 4, young Muslim women have been the central actors of the Indonesian government’s obsession to be the world’s capital of Muslim fashion for almost a decade now. All those instances show that the mechanism of governmentality is fully adaptive and able to coopt the energy and profile of young Muslim women. Again, this is not an indication that they are passive subjects. Rather, it demonstrates the comingling of young Muslim women’s reconfiguration of the self and the state’s technologies of domination. These recent developments show that the young Muslim women are citizen-subjects worthy of examination, and that the productive, pious feminine subjectivity is an important emerging figure of contemporary Indonesia.

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I hope this book has achieved its objectives. First, to highlight the emergence of the productive, pious feminine subjectivity and track her long trajectory in the social, cultural, and political history of Indonesia. Second, to point to the ways and resources young Muslim women have creatively and commandingly deployed to create the ideal Muslim young woman figure. Her commitment in learning about Islamic teachings, improving the self, and her productivity in business are all elements of a subject that is increasingly influential. I would like to end this book with questions that require curiosity and openness: what happens when we disentangle young Muslim women’s lives from their presumed victimization or strangeness? Can we begin to take them as political actors seriously? I certainly hope that this book will open new avenues of enquiry and research into contemporary Muslim subjects, affording them complexity and nuance modern Western subjectivities have long had. Bibliography Abu-Lughod, L. (2013). Do Muslim women need saving? Harvard University Press. Beta, A. R. (2019a). Commerce, piety and politics: Indonesian young Muslim women’s groups as religious influencers. New Media & Society, 21(10), 2140–2159. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444819838774 Beta, A. R. (2019b). Young Muslim women as digital citizens in Indonesia—advocating conservative religious outlook. ISEAS Perspective, 2019/39. Chan-Malik, S. (2018). Being Muslim: A cultural history of women of color in American Islam. NYU Press. Cochrane, J. (2017, September 2). In Indonesia, 3 Muslim girls fight for their right to play heavy metal. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/indonesiavoice-of-baceprot-girls-heavy-metal.html Goldman, R. (2016, May 3). What’s that you’re wearing? A guide to Muslim veils. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/world/what-in-the-world/burqa-hijab-abayachador.html Human Rights Watch. (2021). “I wanted to run away” abusive dress codes for women and girls in Indonesia. Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2021/03/ indonesia0321_web_0.pdf Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press. Paddock, R. C. (2020, March 23). The ‘Niqab Squad’ wants women to be seen differently. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/world/asia/indonesia-niqab-veil-islamwomen.html

Index

activism 50 – 51, 68; see also visual activism affect 15, 27, 41, 52 – 53 agency 10, 13, 30, 66, 72, 107 akhlak xi, 2, 64, 70, 102 assemblage: actors 93; concept of 95; global 19, 89 – 91, 103; of government technologies 73, 83 belonging 11 – 12, 23, 68, 83 berkarya xi, 1, 94, 101 Berlant, Lauren 15 – 16, 48, 51; see also intimate public celebgrams xi, 3, 35, 58 citizenship 7, 11 – 12, 32, 54, 67, 89; female 4, 8 – 9, 27, 39, 43 – 44, 103; good 11; modern 88; young Muslim women’s 10, 18, 25, 34, 36 citizen-subject 5, 11, 16, 89, 103; formation 16, 27; pious citizen-subjects 18, 33, 49; young women as 12, 18, 27, 108; see also feminine subjectivity countervisuality 8, 18, 49 creative economy: booming 3; Indonesia’s 1, 5, 91 – 92, 95 – 96; policies 90; the rise of 19, 95 – 96, 102 – 103 cultural studies 8, 15 – 16 dakwah xi, 33, 56, 87, 95 – 96; creativity through 79; forms of 51; notion of 17; social change through 54 depoliticization 17 – 18, 26, 31, 76 Dunia Jilbab 16, 48, 50, 57 – 59, 77 emak-emak xi, 48 – 49, 79 ethical entrepreneurship 89, 91, 93 – 96, 98, 102 ethical subject 10, 19, 68 – 70

Facebook 8, 12 – 13, 50, 54, 95, 98 fashion designers 3, 35, 55, 86 – 89, 92, 106; Muslim 92, 96, 99; working process of 94; see also Muslim fashion fashion industry: global 74; Islamic 88, 92; modest 1, 8, 47, 60, 87, 89, 91, 103; women of the 94; see also Muslim fashion female empowerment 3, 7, 24, 102; discourses of 19, 89 – 91, 93 female Muslim see muslimah feminine subjectivity: creation of 13; ethical 68 – 70; ideal 24, 57, 65; neoliberal 18, 69; new 4, 17, 74, 91, 93 – 94, 100; pious 2 – 5, 10 – 11, 13 – 14, 16 – 19, 24 – 27, 38, 44, 50, 52 – 53, 60, 65, 70, 74, 77, 89, 94, 100, 107 – 109; productive 89 – 91, 94, 107 – 109; see also subject formation; subject position feminism 7, 31, 37 – 39, 66; see also women’s movement Foucault, Michel 10 – 11, 14, 16, 26, 65, 69 – 70 gender politics 4, 5, 9, 44, 50, 57 gender regime 11, 16, 24, 32 – 34 girlhood studies 6, 8 governmentality 11, 67, 108 hijabers 37, 47 – 48, 57 – 58, 60, 79 Hijabers Community 1 – 2, 16, 35 – 39, 41 – 43, 55 – 57, 74 – 75, 96, 100 – 101; celebration of 36; chairperson 86; establishment of 92; followers of 43; founders of 47 – 49, 64, 70, 108; As-Syafi’iyah 33 hijrah xi, 35, 41, 47

Index 111 ibu-ibu xi, 33, 35, 48 – 49 influencers see celebgrams informal: collectives 10 – 11, 32; gatherings 12, 108; politics 3, 9, 12, 27, 50; religious groups 12, 67 Instagram 8, 12, 36, 47, 50, 54, 98; Instagram-based business 96; looking pious on 55 – 58 Internet 14, 60, 91, 95 – 96, 101 – 102; economy 5; film 77; see also new media intimacy 8, 16, 48, 72, 74, 108 intimate public 9, 12 – 15, 49, 51, 54; see also Berlant, Lauren Islamic revival 3, 19, 73, 88, 90 – 92 jilbab xi, 56, 74, 86; jibab syar’I 80; wearing 31, 47 – 48, 58, 75, 78 – 79, 106 Jogjakarta Muslimahpreneur Community 1 – 2, 16, 100 – 102 kodrat wanita xi, 24 – 26, 34, 39, 43, 57 konveksi xi, 92, 94, 98 – 100 labour: creative labour force 5; markets 14; rights 99; women’s 17, 30, 102 Mahmood, Saba 10, 55, 64 – 66, 70 – 72, 76, 83 Majelis Taklim xii, 32 – 35 Malala, Yousafzai 7; Malala fund 6 market logics 3, 8, 18 – 19, 56, 83, 108; market-driven logics 19, 64, 66 memantaskan diri xii, 69, 75 – 77, 81, 83 movement: idea of 12 – 13, 50; Jong Java nationalist 29; non-liberal 25; nonpolitical 28; online 50; piety 10, 14, 17, 66; political 17, 27, 31, 51; progressive 3 – 4, 12 – 14; Salman Mosque Movement 87; social 10, 50 – 52, 54; youth 13 – 14; see also women’s movement muslimah 15, 18, 24 – 25, 51, 64 – 72, 75 – 79, 80 – 83, 86, 95, 100; concept of 76; ethical 41, 93; good 2, 32, 59, 74, 93, 102; ideal 2, 19, 26, 43, 49, 60, 70, 79; Muslimah intimate public 15, 51; Muslim womanhood 35 – 45, 60, 70; representation of 78; young 2, 19, 35 – 45, 49, 60, 64, 75, 97; see also feminine subjectivity; Muslimahpreneur

Muslimahpreneur 1 – 2, 16, 100 – 102 Muslim fashion 71 – 72, 88, 108; see also fashion designers; fashion industry Muslim Girl 88 Muslim woman see muslimah neoliberal ethical regime 4, 12, 17 – 19, 67 – 69, 76 – 77, 79; current of 9; freedom under 82; womanhood in 69, 72, 74, 83; see also market logics neoliberalism 66 – 68, 90 – 91; Indonesian 67; pious 68, 76, 95 networked affect see affect new media 5 – 6, 9, 14; see also Internet; social media New Order, xii, 17, 24 – 34; downfall of 20, 26, 29, 32, 44, 49, 68, 91; gender ideology of 4, 18, 26, 30 – 32, 57, 94; post-New Order Indonesia 2, 18, 68; see also kodrat wanita; President Suhrato; state ibuism participation: cultural 12; democratic 14; female 3 – 4, 7, 12, 19, 25 – 27, 30, 32, 34, 54, 103; political 9 – 12, 15 – 16, 25 – 27, 30, 32, 34, 54; social 12; youth 12, 19 Peduli Jilbab 16, 48, 77 – 80, 108 Pelangi, Dian 47, 58, 75 – 76, 78, 83, 92, 108; Brain Beauty Belief 64, 69 – 71, 73 – 74; fashion label 71 pengajian xii, 1, 33 – 36, 39 – 40, 42, 44, 86, 101 perempuan muda xii, 6 piety 8, 13, 66, 71, 103; expression of 68, 74, 94; marker of 19, 56, 70 – 71, 87; politics of 10, 66; renewal of 18, 50, 60; representations of 29, 60; Saba Mahmood’s conception of 76, 83; see also feminine subjectivity; movement platforms see social media political actors 4, 9, 42, 109 political participation see participation politics of belonging see belonging power 11, 51, 57, 67: experiences of 48; gendered power relations 16, 25; Islamic 28; micro-practices of 10; relations 4, 8 – 10, 12, 16 – 18, 25 – 26, 54, 68 – 69, 83; struggle 25, 28; see also female empowerment

112  Index President Suharto xii, 2, 26, 28 – 32, 43; see also New Order Qur’an 41, 49, 58, 79 – 81, 87, 93, 95, 108; recitation 1, 33, 36, 98; school 48 Reformasi xii, 2 – 3 self: cultivation of 10, 17 – 19, 25, 66 – 68, 70 – 73, 77, 83, 102; management of 77, 84; morality of 66; practices of 26, 67; self-actualization 73; selfexamination 69; self-government 11, 54; self-help 76, 80, 92 – 93; self-improvement 51, 77, 109; self-transformation 11, 18 – 19, 47, 49, 55, 60, 64, 68 – 83, 89, 91, 93, 96, 108; view of 4; see also technologies of the self social media 3 – 4, 7 – 8, 14 – 16, 18 – 19, 52 – 55, 60 – 61, 95 – 96; accounts 16, 35, 49, 59, 79, 108; feed 35 – 36, 49; influence of 90; platforms 12, 60, 80, 98; posts 48 – 49; prevalence of 3 – 4; rise of 8, 51, 54, 91; shared on 57, 69; use of 43; visual social media cultures 8, 12; see also Internet soul 10, 69 – 71, 73, 76 – 77, 79 – 80; education of 70; experts of 76; government of 15, 70, 73; introspection of 75, 83; reworking 10, 66; training of 4, 65, 70 state ibuism 17, 30, 33 – 34, 43, 81 – 82; see also New Order subject formation 24 – 25, 27, 52, 64 – 65, 72, 92; citizen-subject formation 16, 27; ethical 19, 67, 82, 92; neoliberal 82; pious 9 – 11, 25, 70 – 71, 74, 80; see also feminine subjectivity subject position 19, 52 – 53, 56, 88 – 89; feminine 4, 8 – 9, 18, 107; imagined 7; see also feminine subjectivity syariah xii, 28, 32, 61 Tasikmalaya Hijabers 16, 86 technologies of the self 10 – 11, 14, 67, 103; see also self; Foucault, Michel

technology: contemporary 95; digital 3, 15, 19; forces of 90; government 73, 83, 108; social 93, 102 Third World 6 – 7, 9, 14, 65 – 66 Ukhti Sally 16, 48, 56 – 57, 59, 74 – 77, 80 – 81, 108; Diary Cinta Sally 69, 75 – 5, films by 77, 80; self-help manuals written by 76; values of 57 umat xii, 26, 40 – 44, 68, 97, 98; discourse of 44; notion of 26, 40; transnational 18, 25 – 27, 36, 39, 43, 68, 73 unfreedom 7, 53 virtue: Islamic 2, 10, 34, 36, 42, 68, 95, 102; juxtapolitical 16; meaning 64; religious 18, 25, 53 – 54, 66, 100 visibility 12 – 16, 18 – 19, 51, 54, 60; fields of 52 – 53, 57; gaining 13 – 14, 18; of Islam 68; marker of 71; politics of 3 – 8; of young women 14, 91 – 92, 103 visual activism 18, 49 – 50, 54 – 56, 60 visuality 7 – 8, 18, 49, 53 – 55, 60 womenpreneur see Muslimahpreneur women’s citizenship see citizenship women’s movement 3 – 4, 14 – 15, 26 – 27, 60; defining 13; dynamics of 29; feminist 37 – 38, 94; history of 107; influence of 17; progressive 4; resurfacing of 3; young Muslim women’s 4, 12, 35, 50; see also feminism; movement women’s subjectivity see feminine subjectivity young Muslim women see muslimah young Muslim women’s groups 2 – 4, 12 – 19, 24, 33 – 36, 44, 47 – 57, 59 – 61, 64, 66, 68 – 70, 75 – 80, 82 – 83, 87, 89, 106 – 108; conservative 48; as digital citizens 18; efficacy of 9; informality of 27, 40; and neoliberalism 66, 82; as political actors 42; political influence of 19, 26 – 27, 29, 50, 52, 54, 82; popular 2 – 3; and social media 15, 49, 52, 55 – 57, 60; as social movement 51; ubiquity of 60 Youtube 12, 77, 80 – 81