Ambivalent Subjectivities: Young Women in Leftist Muslim Activism in Java

Abstract

This article investigates the experiences of young women involved in progressive Muslim youth activism in Java, Indonesia. Hailing from the Indonesian periphery, many of them encounter leftist ideas for the first time as they enter university. As male intellectual leaders emphasize a shift from personal to social morality in their theological exegesis as a foundation for leftist Islam, young women feel encouraged to engage in this mixed-gender movement. However, this turn away from the personal also conceals discourses that challenge the young women’s full involvement in the movement, namely the masculine connotations of youth activism, and hegemonic strictly observant, and colonial notions of “female nature” as docile, caring, and domestic. As a result, female activists experience ambivalence between being Muslim and leftist, and concerns about their future involvement in activism as adult women.

Introduction

During a regional meeting of a leftist traditionalist Muslim activist group in a Javanese city, a case of sexual harassment of a female activist by a male comrade was brought up. Sixteen activists from different local groups, three of them women, were gathered in Ahmad’s ¹ —one of the regional activist leaders’—guest room discussing how to handle sexual harassment. Several activists asked for the perpetrator’s suspension, disagreeing with a male activist leader from a different region who had proposed the issue could be dealt with through a simple reprimand. They regarded this as undemocratic and more generally indicative of a masculine leadership culture around pesantren, traditionalist Islamic boarding schools. The largely unquestioned authority kyai, their charismatic leaders, hold in traditionalist circles and its potential for abuse is criticized publicly only by a few outspoken young progressive Muslim intellectuals. The common opinion during this meeting was that the activist group had to be held to the same standards it was promoting outwardly and therefore ought to introduce a complaint mechanism to establish a safe environment for all members, not brushing over transgressions.

As the discussion continued, I snuck away to the kitchen to get some water, where I encountered Nour, Ahmad’s wife, and Aliyah, her neighbor, married to Asep, another activist. Doing household chores together, the women were themselves engaged in a heated conversation about how they were expected to cater to the activists’ needs and serve them food and drinks without much acknowledgement. At the same time, they complained, they were not being supported by their husbands to join activist meetings themselves. Both perceived this as gatekeeping and felt excluded as they bemoaned objectifying male activist conversations about other women they had overheard. While ironing laundry, both expressed their frustration with the situation and complained that, due to household responsibilities, they often lacked the time or energy to educate themselves politically or even attend activist meetings. The discussion took on a more general turn with Nour and Aliyah wondering how far these domestic responsibilities were to be seen as natural (kodrati) for women. Joining them in their work and their discussion about their uneven share of responsibility for domestic chores, the irony of the situation was not lost on me: In one room, activists were discussing women’s equality, while in the kitchen two of their wives felt left behind and treated all but equally as women.

This example gets at the heart of the tension that many young women in Indonesia experience between being leftist activists and Muslim women and is just one among many similar ones in Muslim leftist activist groups. Female activists experience ambivalence regarding their activist and Muslim subjectivity and often experience their male peers as exclusionary. I draw on ethnographic material during 17 months of fieldwork with different progressive Muslim activist groups in Java between 2015 and 2018. These groups are theologically affiliated with the large traditionalist Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama or modernist Muhammadiyah and strive for (social) justice in a variety of causes from political imprisonment to agrarian conflicts. While the groups have slightly different religious and political orientations, they collaborate and ought to be seen as part of a leftist Muslim movement, a radical offshoot of the wider progressive Islamic movement since the 1980s and 1990s. Leftist Muslims challenge the government, at once ethically motivated by Islam and distancing themselves from Islamists because they do not believe formal politics should be influenced by religion.

In this article, I address the gendered ethical dilemmas young women face in simultaneously inhabiting a Muslim and leftist subjectivity. I will show that, if these women want to be good Muslims and practice political activism, they inevitably experience conflicts, while receiving little solidarity on this issue from their male comrades. To understand why this is the case specifically in leftist Muslim groups whose (mostly male) leaders deliberately turn away from an Islamic morality that emphasizes personal piety in favor of social morality, I briefly discuss the histories of Islam and leftism in Indonesia, which shape leftist Muslim activism’s relationship to the state. Similarly, I will address (conflicting) historical discourses around womanhood and female subjectivity and their political trajectories.

On this basis, I turn to the emerging leftist Muslim movement in Java. I argue that even though its male intellectual leaders are committed to progressive social moral principles and deliberately turn away from personal notions of Islamic morality, young women often feel excluded from activist groups due to male gatekeeping and an implicit notion of masculinity tied to activist subjectivity. Furthermore, I show that young women experience ambivalence regarding their participation in leftist activism and the societal expectations directed at them, which are equally linked to dominant conservative discourses of strictly observant Islam and notions of womanhood inherited from the authoritarian Suharto regime. I contend that a focus on social morality sometimes leads male activists to disregard the personal as a site of political morality, the gendered implications of which challenge women’s full participation in the movement.

Focusing on leftist Islamic activism, the article makes an ethnographic and conceptual contribution to Islamic ethics and morality beyond piety. Such pious self-cultivation through religious practices like prayer has been the central analytical focus of scholars engaging with Islamic moral subjectivity (cf. Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2012 [2005]; Simon, 2014) and some authors (cf. Schielke, 2009a, 2009b) have argued that these authors tend to totalize this aspect of their interlocutors’ subjectivities. In this article, I tease out the gendered implications and specifically young women’s experiences in my interlocutors’ moral reasoning. In so doing, I build on Brenner’s (1996) argument that young women embracing Islamic piety give up autonomy in an act of ethical freedom (see also Laidlaw, 2014) and argue that this poses challenges for subsequent generations wanting to inhabit alternative subjectivities and leads to ethical ambivalences young leftist Muslim women cannot fully resolve. At the same time, I argue that their continuous struggle to embrace these frictional ethical registers can be seen to model a new progressive Muslim female subjectivity.

Strictly Observant Islam, Marxism, and Politics

What “strictly observant” Islam means in the Indonesian context cannot be answered straightforwardly. Puritan reformist influences first began to take hold in Sumatra in the late 18th century, culminating in the anti-colonial Padri movement (Dobbin, 2016). On Java, for centuries, the royal courts were oriented toward a mystical Islam, blended with elements of indigenous, Buddhist, and Hindu mysticism (Ricklefs, 2007). A schism began to develop in the 19th century, not least fueled by class conflict, whereupon strictly observant Muslims, commonly denoted as Santri, challenged the widespread “mystical synthesis” (Ricklefs, 2007). This dichotomy still plays a significant role today (Beatty, 2003).

Two large streams of strictly observant Islam emerged on Java: On the one hand, a mostly urban reformist movement, which embraced modern Western education alongside a pious understanding of Islam, rejected mystical practices without clear scriptural foundation and renounced the reliance on ulama (religious scholars) in favor of new interpretation (Noer, 1973). Its proponents founded the influential political and educational organization Muhammadiyah. On the other hand, traditionalists founded Nahdlatul Ulama (The Rise of Ulama, NU), to preserve their orthodox Sufism based on classical commentaries, mystical prayers, and the authority of ulama, rejecting modern education (Laffan, 2003). Despite their antagonism, during the independence struggle, Muhammadiyah and NU collaboratively pushed for an Islamic constitution. This endeavor was unsuccessful, but independence President Sukarno chose to diplomatically prescribe the “belief in the one and only God” as part of the constitution (Boland, 1971, pp. 17–39). In contrast to the Darul Islam movement (Temby, 2010), which unsuccessfully attempted to establish an Islamic state by force in the 1940s, both organizations eventually accepted the pluralist religious constitution. In line with Java’s wider cultural and political dominance, both mass organizations have held a central place in the Islamic landscape of independent Indonesia.

The authoritarian Suharto regime (1967–1998) severely limited the public role of Islamic organizations. In its final years, however, a more conservative brand of Islam, shaped by international movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, gained increasing influence across Indonesia. After democratization, it consolidated its sway with a growing emphasis on anti-liberal orthodoxy and personal piety and morality, influencing Islamic discourses within Muhammadiyah and NU (Brenner, 2011; van Bruinessen, 2013a; Hoesterey, 2015; Howell, 2001). At the same time, both organizations have come to be seen as the “moderate” bulwark against the threat of so-called “extremism” to religious pluralism (van Bruinessen, 2013b). Parts of NU have opened up increasingly toward critical hermeneutical exegesis and have produced “progressive” or “liberal” intellectuals and social movements (van Bruinessen, 2013b; Hefner, 2000; Kersten, 2016; Lukens-Bull, 2013). While leftist Muslims criticize these strands for their liberal political orientation, with their own emphasis on critical exegesis and incorporation of political theory they build on this development themselves.

Like Islam, Marxism has challenged and influenced Indonesian politics substantially since the independence struggle. After independence, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) played a major societal role and became the largest communist party worldwide after Russia and China. Even though Islam and Marxism are often depicted as antagonistic forces in Indonesian history, they had in fact considerable synergies. The PKI, effectively, emerged from the Islamic-political mass-organization Sarekat Islam, even though the two groups eventually parted ways (Noer, 1973). Anti-colonial Islamic and PKI leaders emphasized commonalities between Islam and communism and the driving force behind the 1926 revolt in Banten, West Java, has been characterized as an Islamic-communist movement (Crawford, 2019; Misbach, 2016; Williams, 2009). At the same time, there were considerable tensions between Muslim organizations and the PKI about the role of religion in society and the authority of religious leaders. Kyai were seen by the PKI as feudal landlords benefiting economically from renting out plots and politically from their charismatic authority. This led the PKI-associated peasant organization Barisan Tani to attempt to implement a large-scale land reform singlehandedly, which put the final nail in the coffin of the relationship between Santri and communists (Mortimer, 1972).

After an alleged communist coup attempt in 1965, the PKI and Marxism were banned. Whereas the exact circumstances of this event remain murky, what followed was effectively an anti-communist military coup, fueled not least by tacit US interference (Bevins, 2020; Cribb, 1991; Herlambang, 2011). As the military leadership under General Suharto fomented fear of communism, hundreds of thousands of alleged communists were killed by the military and civil society organizations, and many more were imprisoned unlawfully (Roosa, 2020, p. 64). Suharto ousted Sukarno’s authority and rose to power as the new president. Utilizing the specter of “communism” as an immoral, atheist force threatening social harmony served Suharto’s authoritarian regime to contain any opposition and solidified its connotation as the state’s enemy number one, which has largely survived democratization (Lane, 2008). Nonetheless, the 1990s saw a re-emergence of leftist thought in the militant student movement that, alongside mass protests in the face of the Asian financial crisis, brought about a regime change (cf. Aspinall, 2005; Lee, 2016). Leftist thought has consolidated its oppositional role since but remains banned officially as politicians reinforce the mainstream discourse, using it to delegitimize political opponents. ² Considering the threat of legal persecution and mob violence leftist movements face, Islamic leftism holds a particular position as being able to lend socialist ideas moral legitimacy.

Womanhood and Politics

Within the matrix of Islam, Marxism, and the Indonesian state, gender relations are a contested issue. Even though Islam was prevalent in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) by the 19th century, women’s social roles and rights varied considerably and were shaped to similar extents by religion, class, and customary law (Blackwood, 2000; Bowen, 2012; Brenner, 2005, p. 104; Utomo, 2005, p. 71). Even though political decentralization after the end of the Suharto regime brought Islamic bylaws in conservative Islamic regions, Islam does not have a dominant legal role due to Indonesia’s pluralist constitution (Feener, 2013; Kersten, 2016, pp. 200–217). Nonetheless, many laws concerning gender relations are shaped by conservative Islamic, but also colonial and Javanese, morality.

In the early 20th century, a moral debate around womanhood emerged between different classes and secular as well as orthodox Islamic forces in the NEI (Wieringa, 2002, pp. 33–35). The discussion centered on the notion of the kodrat wanita (woman’s nature), referred to in the introductory ethnographic vignette. Kodrat (from Arabic) denotes “God’s omnipotence” and is often used in the sense of “law of nature” beyond Islamic contexts. However, different groups assigned different characteristics to supposedly “natural” womanhood (Robinson, 2009, p. 10). The by-then largely Islamic Javanese nobility expected women to be meek, obedient wives and caring mothers, and largely confined them to the domestic sphere. To justify this, notions of self-cultivation were mobilized as women were regarded as naturally less capable of controlling their passions than men (Feillard & van Doorn-Harder, 2013, p. 142; Robinson, 2009, pp. 35–37; Smith-Hefner, 2007, pp. 393f.; Wieringa, 2002, p. 33). In part, Wieringa (2009) traces the strict policing of women back to Dutch bourgeois anxieties of losing control over native concubines (pp. 211–213). ³ Orthodox Muslim discourses similarly put a strong focus on female modesty and docility. However, an emerging orthodox women’s movement, manifesting in ‘Aisyiyah in Muhammadiyah as well as Muslimat and soon after Fatayat (for young women) in NU, advocated for education for women in fields in line with their kodrat, such as religion, nursing, midwifery, and pedagogy. Arguing that, according to Islam, men and women are equally responsible for their moral comportment, ‘Aisyiyah and Fatayat in particular became increasingly influential in conducting religious-political work (van Doorn-Harder, 2006, p. 42).

After independence, the PKI-affiliated Gerwani became the most radical and popular women’s organization, fighting for women’s labor rights, marital autonomy, and domestic rights (Feillard & van Doorn-Harder, 2013, p. 142; Wieringa, 2002). Whereas Gerwani did not contest the idea of women’s “natural” role as caring mothers it called for their militant involvement in politics. Its family model, in which a woman would educate her children politically, challenged the seemingly clear boundaries between public and private (Wieringa, 2002, p. 257). During the 1965/1966 violence, Gerwani became a primary target of anti-communist vilification, defaming its members’ alleged sexual looseness (Wieringa, 2002, 2011). This campaign facilitated a reactionary turn as, drawing on essentialized “Javanese” ideas, Suharto’s propaganda placed women’s roles as wives and mothers at the center of womanhood (Robinson, 1998, pp. 205f.). Its doctrine of ibuisme (“motherism”) went hand in hand with his ideal of an integralist state as a “family,” run by the president as its “father” and the nuclear family constituting a miniature version of the state (Shiraishi, 1997; Suryakusuma, 1996, pp. 97–102). During the Suharto regime’s final years and after, the secular feminist movement experienced a revival alongside the wider progressive movement. However, it remained in a precarious position due to the lack of a parliamentary political left and the increasing influence of reactionary Islam (Feillard & van Doorn-Harder, 2013).

With the growing influence of the international piety movement from the 1980s on, an increasing number of young Indonesians committed to pious Islam, embedding devotional practice in their lives and large numbers of young women donned the headscarf, often against their parents’ will. ⁴ Various authors have pointed to the freedom women can exert through this commitment to piety and its simultaneous impact on their subjectivities. The Islamic revival has by no means confined women to the domestic realm and can even be read as resistance to the New Order’s ideology of womanhood. What is more, many of these young women understood themselves as “activists” (Brenner, 1996, p. 678, Brenner, 2005, p. 93; Rinaldo, 2010, 2014; Smith-Hefner, 2007, p. 395; van Doorn-Harder, 2006). Like in the Egyptian mosque movement, this ethical work on the subject therefore has strong political implications pertaining to secular nationalism and the (gendered) role of the body vis-à-vis the state (Mahmood, 2012, pp. 34–36). While women’s groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement tend to take a rather conservative stance on Islamic womanhood, for progressive ‘Aisyiyah and Fatayat activists, piety and feminism are not contradictory (Rinaldo, 2014). These organizations collaborated against the controversial anti-pornography law and polygyny, causes notoriously difficult to challenge for secular feminists (Feillard & van Doorn-Harder, 2013, p. 141). NU-affiliated NGOs have also been pushing for a gender-sensitive interpretation of Islamic scripture, more equitable gender relations, women’s reproductive rights, and the acknowledgement of female Islamic authority (Arnez, 2010; Feillard & van Doorn-Harder, 2013; Künkler & Nisa, 2018; van Doorn-Harder, 2006).

Examining the political subjectivity of young Muslim women in leftist Muslim activist groups, I build on recent scholarly works that discuss Indonesian Muslim women’s social concerns and their role in the public sphere (Brenner, 2011; Rinaldo, 2010) and argue that these groups’ mixed-gender settings bring out particular challenges for female activists.

Contemporary Leftist Mobilizations of Islam and Young Women

The groups I focus on draw on reformist currents in Indonesian Islam. Muslim and leftist—a synthesis unprecedented since Suharto’s reign—they also understand their project as a radical departure from liberal Islamic movements and secular leftist movements alike. Despite theological differences, modernist and traditionalist leftists largely refer to the same intellectuals who, while rooted in each Islamic tradition respectively, are eager to create a unified discourse of progressive leftist Islam.

These intellectual leaders critique mainstream contemporary Islam for its strong emphasis on piety or personal morality (Hornbacher-Schönleber, 2021). Questions of social morality and especially the struggle for social justice, they argue, ought to be at the center of a truly radical Islam. They argue that such a leftist-engaged Islam stands in the tradition of the Prophets, who were themselves “activists” fighting the unjust establishment of their times. One of their key criticisms of liberal Islamic tendencies is, consequently, the accommodation of capitalism, which they regard as opposed to this aim (cf. Al-Fayyadl, 2015, 2019; Murtadho, 2015; Prasetyo, 2002, 2016). While the activist movement is open to all who identify with its political and religious ideas, regardless of gender, the latter is not a central theme of their thought. Women’s rights mainly play a role with regard to their economic and workplace precarity. Women’s legal equality concerning “personal” matters, for instance, their right to guardianship over their children, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and the equal distribution of reproductive labor—central topics in feminist movements—are much less prominent.

Young women described the process of becoming involved in leftist Islamic activism as an important transformation in their ethical subjectivities during their university years. Often being the first in their family to receive tertiary education and mostly hailing from rural areas on Java or small towns on the “outer islands,” many of them had never heard about leftism other than the hegemonic narrative about the PKI. Afina, a 26-year-old activist from an island near Sumatra, recalled her entry into leftism during her graduate Sociology studies in Yogyakarta as follows:

To be honest, initially I joined because I didn’t have activities here, being new here. . . . Then, at [group name], I gained many new insights. I got to know many people who, I think, I couldn’t have met before. . . . I found their ideas really good and in line with my own ideas. ⁵

As for Afina, these young women’s experiences of adopting leftism are typically divided into two parts: on the one hand, they understand it as a big transformation of the self that necessitated the coming about of new awareness—note the parallels with Brenner’s (1996) account of women transitioning to pious Islam, who also refer to awareness—as well as learning and practicing (p. 683). In this context, activists named, for instance, the realization that the official version of the Indonesian history of leftism is not historically accurate and that the taboos surrounding it leave behind victims without rehabilitation or compensation (Kammen & McGregor, 2012; Zurbuchen, 2005). They learn about workers’ and peasants’ socioeconomic struggles and about legislations that create inequalities. Based on that, they get engaged in solidarity activism and protests. Yet, on the other hand, activists describe the related principles, such as social equality and justice as pre-existing concerns they can finally act upon together with like-minded comrades.

In the youth movement against Suharto in the 1980s and 90s many urban middle-class activists turned away from their religious family backgrounds and used their basecamps to create mixed-gender activist sociality (Lee, 2016, pp. 8f., 151f.). In contrast, my interlocutors explicitly commit to Islam and even regard their being leftist as morally implied in Islam. While mixed-gender activism is widespread in leftist student circles, it is not uncontested for my Muslim interlocutors because many strictly observant Muslims condemn it. The young women do not regard it as inappropriate to participate in mixed-gender activism, however, they experience challenges related to the masculine implications of youth activism and their male peers’ gatekeeping as well as a conservative (Muslim) understanding of womanhood.

Female Activists and the Masculinity of Youth Activism

Despite their enthusiasm about and commitment to leftism, female activists frequently felt marginalized in activist circles. A pronounced gender division became particularly obvious in the uneven participation in leadership roles, responsibilities, and during discussions. Many (sub)groups were headed by men and women rarely played an active role as presenters or panelists apart from discussions around women’s rights when they were—occasionally—on the agenda. In one group even the least experienced young men were given more responsibility than women who had almost completed their postgraduate studies in social sciences and could thus be regarded as highly qualified to play a leading part. As in the introductory vignette, female activists shared frustration over the men’s lack of awareness of gendered discrimination and exclusion among each other but were often reluctant to raise such issues in the group.

Afina and her friends Novi and Sarah, all graduate students in their mid-twenties, expressed their discontent with the fact that they were often side-lined when responsibilities were assigned in their Yogyakarta-based activist group. Only in a few cases, Novi claimed, were they asked to chair events and, despite being eager to do so, they were never given the chance to give a lecture or write a piece for the group’s magazine. Sarah speculated whether the male activists’ “sexist” behavior was simply because the group “is already used to being a guy’s group and thus they are not used to talk about women’s issues.” Instead, female activists were encouraged by the middle-aged male group leader Marwan to volunteer for a kindergarten led by his wife. Male members also expected women to take on care work such as cleaning up and washing the dishes after events. The wives of senior activists did not attend meetings or come with their children and were busy taking care of them. Thereby, dominant discourses of caring and motherly womanhood discussed above were reinforced within the group.

Additionally, the situation among youth activists is linked to the masculinity of militant activism in Indonesia. In her monograph on the Generation ‘98 movement that led to Suharto’s downfall, Lee (2016) discusses the figure of the pemuda (youth) activist and its connotation of masculinity. She points out that its historical reference to previous generations of pemuda, especially the independence movement, was necessary for youths to validate the struggle against the New Order regime, which had utterly delegitimized leftism. The identification of Generation ‘98 with the Suharto regime’s depiction of the independence movement and its iconography came with deeply gendered connotations (Lee, 2016, p. 9). Their militancy was modeled on a “propaganda image of pemuda that youth were most familiar with; a barefoot bare-chested man, with a bandanna tied around his forehead, armed with a primitive weapon the bambu runcing (sharpened bamboo stake)” (Lee, 2016, p. 96; Gouda, 1999). Today, too, young men find resonance in this militant masculine subjectivity, wearing black and red activist T-shirts, growing their hair long, or contributing to tumult during a rally. This image of militancy does not straightforwardly correspond with dominant notions of modest female subjectivity and is often tied to exclusionary behavior on the men’s part. Women reported feeling uncomfortable overhearing objectifying comments or sexual “jokes” by their male counterparts.

While (married) senior women are rarely around in activist groups, senior men often take on leadership positions. Some draw charisma from their history as activists in the ‘98 movement but are now clearly distinct from youth masculinity. In contrast, akal (rationality) as a key characteristic of mature, authoritative masculinity is emphasized in these figures (Nilan & Demartoto, 2012, pp. 282–286). Leadership is based on notions of seniority and charismatic power to a large extent (Anderson, 1990). Deference toward seniors is deeply engrained in Javanese (and, more broadly, Indonesian) society and language ideology and was instrumentalized politically during the Suharto regime (Errington, 1998; Keeler, 1987; Siegel, 1986). While activist leaders would invite junior activists to address them through the less hierarchical Mas (older brother), they were still regarded as holding charismatic power and treated with the utmost respect. However, younger men also aim to prove their courage to their seniors to earn respect themselves (Nilan & Demartoto, 2012, pp. 282–286). While they can assert their courage through pemuda militance, there is no model for militant female subjectivity. Young women therefore face difficulties asserting themselves on the level of activist subjectivity due to the masculine qualities tied to them. This can partly explain why junior male activists were often close to male activist leaders, whereas young women felt excluded from the “inner circle.”

Navigating Leftist Activism and Normative (Islamic) Womanhood

Militant subjectivity also stands in explicit contrast with ideas around female piety, which has become increasingly normative since the 1990s and is often policed through women’s bodies (Smith-Hefner, 2007). Despite their movement’s emphasis on social over personal Islamic morality, young female activists are subject to moral evaluation to those standards and experience considerable pressure to conform to normative Muslim womanhood by their parents, extended families, and wider society. Afina, for instance, was worried to observe women, including former lecturers, in her hometown wearing increasingly modest clothing, because this put more pressure on herself to conform. An additional layer of moral pressure is added due to the association of leftism with atheism, immorality, and uncontrollable sexuality (Duile, 2018). Young women would experience condemnations by acquaintances on social media, accusing them of being atheists or “not having a religion” (tidak beragama). While pressures to conform to a pious life are a reality, to some extent, for young Muslim men and women alike, women are policed much more rigidly due to the moral panic surrounding female sexuality, whereas men often have more leeway to shift back and forth between activist and pious comportment (Wieringa, 2009). ⁶

While a few female activists outright rejected the demands of modest Islamic subjectivity and blended in more with male activists to some extent as a result, most were at least ambivalently committed to it without wanting to give up their leftist activism. The tension they experience between their commitment to leftism and Islam results precisely from the fact that, instead of breaking with the past, like the pious women in Brenner’s (1996) or Mahmood’s (2012) accounts, they attempt to balance their Muslim principles with leftist activist registers. Mahmood critiques the universalization of an emancipatory “liberal secular” notion of freedom in which the subject is understood as autonomous, distinct from society rather than inherently shaped by its norms. Since, according to her, strictly observant Islam strives for ethical monism, pious Muslim women’s freedom does not aim at challenging normativity but at inhabiting a devoted subjectivity as fully as possible (Mahmood, 2012, pp. 11–25, 148f.). Similarly, Brenner (1996) distinguishes between freedom and autonomy to indicate that pious women giving up the latter can be an act of freedom (pp. 687f.). However, unlike Mahmood’s ethnography which portrays women who seemingly embrace their pious subjectivity without questioning, she discusses young women’s ambivalent thoughts about their choices and the different moral registers they encounter, just like my interlocutors today. In the second generation, this loss of autonomy is increasingly obvious as conservative moral discourses around female Muslim subjectivity have become ever more hegemonic. Young women today did not necessarily choose this form of orthodoxy themselves but have been brought up within these discourses. However, their own understanding of freedom does not consist in “self-willed obedience” to religious morals (Mahmood, 2012, p. 137) nor in the total absence of external limitations, but in adopting an interpretation of Islamic morality that emphasizes social questions over questions of personal virtue.

Constantly at risk of being perceived as non- or anti-religious, the young women refer to the theological exegesis of leftist Muslim intellectuals whose ideas they encounter online or in public lectures to emphasize the synergies between Islamic and socialist principles. In this, they challenge the conservative understanding of strictly observant Islam and distinguish between dogmatic (religi) Muslims and being religious (beragama). Novi explained: “Talking about [leftism] is very conflict prone. Especially with my parents because they are religi people. To them, leftist is atheist. Even though, according to Gus Fayyadl, leftism does not at all equal atheism [laughs].” Novi here refers to Muhammad al-Fayyadl, a prominent progressive Muslim leader with theological credentials. Her friend Afina claimed that while the methods of scripturalist Islam and their own movement might be different, they shared the goal of fighting injustice (ketidakadilan) and tyranny (kezauliman), affecting the rakyat kecil (the small people). In conversations, female activists regularly argued that the struggle for social change was at least as morally valuable as personal virtuousness, reinforcing Rinaldo’s findings among female NU activists that “piety can also be expressed through participation in the public sphere” (2010, p. 423).

An important feature of inhabiting a religious and activist subjectivity at the same time is clothing practices. The female activists mostly stick to a mainstream modest Islamic clothing style: long trousers or a long skirt, a long-sleeve T-shirt or blouse, and a long headscarf, which they sometimes combine with elements of the activist style, for instance by wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt with an activist print on top. ⁷ Some of them express ambivalence, such as Dessi, a political science student who laughed at my question about her being pious and, pointing to her headscarf, replied half-ironically, “well, judging from the symbols it looks like it, doesn’t it?” Being monitored by their parents and wider society, many of the women experience it as necessary to position themselves as visibly Islamic to avoid being seen as immoral. At the same time, they stress that they wear the headscarf voluntarily as expression of their religiosity. The ambivalence expressed in these seemingly contradictory accounts stems from frictional ethical registers. This friction concerns the modest female subjectivity implied in Muslim discourses, on the one hand, and socialist as well as feminist militancy, on the other hand, and leads to “fragmented, painful and sometimes original ways of inhabiting a world where none of the available vocabularies can be fully inhabited, even when they are invoked” (Pandolfo, 2007, p. 332).

While the public aspects of male subjectivity facilitate activist leaders’ radical rethinking of Islamic morality from personal piety to the social, it leads to a painful lacuna for many women whose subjectivity is strongly determined and policed by hegemonic piety discourses. As a result, many of them experience a sense of ambiguity as to how to be a good Muslim and a good leftist simultaneously.

The Freedom of Youth and the Constraints of Adulthood

Despite their feelings of frustration and exclusion in leftist groups, many young women experience their time as student activists as one of comparative autonomy and exploration. They discover new (political) perspectives, participate in activities of their own choosing, stay out late to attend political discussions and develop dreams for the future. Many argue they had gained increasing awareness of what their own principles were through this practice, creating an even greater of what they perceived to be freedom of mind. Crucially, they regard their commitment to leftist activism as profoundly ethical, enabled through this newly won autonomy. Some emphasize autonomy as a positive character trait of theirs, such as Afina, who recalled accounts of her “rebelliousness” and assertiveness against her parents in important decisions. Contrasting herself with her sister who, obeying their parents, had ended up as a single mother abandoned by her husband, Afina argued that her autonomy (otonomi) had served her well and enabled her to act ethically.

Against this sense of relative autonomy, the young women experienced distress around its presumed temporal limitations tied to their status as youths and students. Young women are subject to growing parental pressure to conform to moral womanhood by getting married and having children. Until they find a suitable fiancé, their parents invariably want their daughters to come back home. Novi expressed her ambivalent feelings concerning her own aspirations and her parents’ wishes:

Oh, I feel very happy and comfortable [here]. There are books, discussions. It’s not the same in my home region. . . . Our thinking here is free. I am happy here, but there is one thing—family—that obliges me to go back. That means, likely I will go back even though it is hard for me leaving this behind.

Novi here stresses her own preference, while equally emphasizing the moral obligation bound to the institution of the family. Youth is often understood as a phase of life in which autonomy can be performed and developed and is further regarded by young Indonesians as a period of transition, during which individuals develop the ability for moral judgment (Lloyd, 2005; White, 2016, pp. 5–7). While more progressive ideas might be around in the city, the young women associate conservative and “backward” (tertinggal) New Order-influenced morality with home regions. Considering the centrality of marriage and children as criteria for adult womanhood (Nilan et al., 2016, p. 25), the parents ‘admonitions are thus a call to inhabit a socially acknowledged adult female subjectivity. Being set back to such a restrictive morality is a prospect that causes the young women to fear they would not only lack political community but also lose their freedom to remain politically active. This fear is not unsubstantiated given the absence of married women in most of the activist groups. Afina explained that her choice of a husband would decisively determine her future because “once a woman gets married, he has full decision-making competence over her.” Nonetheless, the necessity to honor one’s parents and maintain family harmony is deeply engrained in young women’s understanding of morality as Novi’s comment exemplifies (cf. Geertz, 1961; Keeler, 1987, p. 51f.). The women even go so far as to say that not marrying and having children is considered a sin that might rebound on their parents. Thus, they find themselves in the dilemma of choosing between their autonomy and acting respectfully toward their parents.

Over the years, many of my interlocutors have given in to these expectations at least to some extent, moving back home and/or getting married to a parentally accepted spouse. However, unlike a monist account would make us expect, for many this did not constitute a straightforward choice between one or the other conflicting moral discourse. Novi, having moved to Jakarta with her new spouse, started to work for a human rights NGO, while Afina remains unmarried and works as a university lecturer in her provincial hometown. Even her seemingly private decision to not compromise in choosing a spouse and thereby postponing marriage beyond socially acceptable norms takes on an ethico-political dimension since it is an insistence on her activist female subjectivity (Brenner, 1996). Furthermore, the emergence of female voices like Affiat’s (2021) in relevant leftist Muslim publications promises to re-connect the issues of socioeconomic and gender equality ethically and politically and to contribute to leftist Islamic discourses.

Conclusion

Progressive Muslim intellectuals distinguish themselves from both, revivalist Islamic and feminist attempts to influence the Indonesian state. Therefore, the dividing line between the state and strictly observant Islam regarding gender does not run straight in this ethnographic case study. Leftist Muslims understand their progressive oppositional project as radical, in the sense of “at the roots,” of Islam yet oppose the direct involvement of religion in politics, while state policies are in part informed by a reactionary understanding of gender relations, shaped by New Order and revivalist Islamic discourses. Turning away from hegemonic discourses that define strictly observant Islam as primarily constituted through piety or personal morality, leftist Muslim intellectuals instead emphasize socioeconomic matters as a key component of their “radical Islam” and the basis for their political struggle.

Female activists do not see it as a contradiction to be Muslims and leftists in a mixed-gender setting, challenging dominant conceptions of strictly observant Islamic female subjectivity. However, in addition to the broader anti-leftist discourse, hegemonic conceptions of womanhood emphasizing modesty lead to significant moral pressure on female activists. I have therefore argued that while male activist leaders’ prioritization of social over personal ethics allows young women to engage with a broad range of social and political issues, it does not sufficiently consider gendered implications. Female activists are therefore often left to struggle with the conflicting demands on their moral subjectivity on their own—an ethical challenge they cannot easily resolve within existing discourses of womanhood.

As a result, many young women experience their participation in the sphere of progressive political expression as precarious. As Brenner noted, the free act of giving up individual autonomy may not be reversed easily, and the effects of earlier pietist movements are felt down the generations with consequences for women’s activism in the contemporary moment. This complicates Mahmood’s perspective on freedom who, critiquing the notion of a subject as distinct from society, argued that pious Muslims enact freedom through their full commitment to pious virtues. By contrast, I have shown that my interlocutors as young women in the first or second generation of the piety movement in Indonesia embrace an understanding of ethical freedom that involves a degree of personal and political autonomy. Without giving up their commitment to being good Muslims, they make considerable efforts to counter the premise of submission under totalizing normativity. Emphasizing social morality over personal piety, they do not necessarily resolve but balance these frictional ethical registers in their lives, thereby modeling new forms of progressive Muslim female subjectivity for the future.