Dismantling Patriarchy: Women Ulama Reclaiming Religious Authority Over Gender Equality

(by Ruby Kholifah, AMAN Indonesia)

I do believe that gender and faith are compatible. Despite the spreading of engagement with women faith organizations, women religious leaders, and inter-faith communities, unfortunately the number of women with religious authority is still limited. The knowledge production over religion is still dominated by men with the absence of gender sensitivity, which implies bias interpretation and misconception to women’s rights in islamic perspective.

When Indonesia Women Ulama Congress (KUPI) began in 2017, it was intended to reclaim religious authority by promoting values of monotheism, mercy, enjoyment, equality, mutuality, justice, nationality, humanity, and universality. These values are promoted using three approaches: Makruf (fairness), mubadalah (mutuality), and genuine justice. It is a movement led by women cleric/ulama with the support from different background of women’s groups.

In promoting Islam as rahmatan lil’alamin (a mercy to all creation), where women and men are equally enjoying the rights to peace and sustainable development, our organization has been supporting the women ulama in two strategy;

AMAN with other organizations, are supporting the spreading of transformative knowledge of women ulama. To create women friendly interpretation, women ulama introduce the islamic study methodology reform, which is not only focusing on the classical islamic text, but also considering the voices of women victim of violence against women are credible to be used as analysis unit as well as human rights instrument to create women friendly fatwa. 

The framing of questions under fatwah developing is not focusing to pro and contra questions, rather to have affective questions that brings curiosity among religious leaders to seek islamic text references that support the creation of women friendly fatwa. For instance to release fatwa about child marriage prevention, the women ulama draws the key concept from the Quranic verses such as Q.S Ar-Ruum 30:21 about marriage goal is to create sakinah family, where love, mercy and compassion are foundational values. Other key concept is the command to avoid unqualified and weak generation  stated in the Surat An-Nisaa, 4: 9, and the command to become the best believer that engaged actively in the society stated under Surat Ali ‘Imraan, 3: 110. 

We are interested to bring the transformative knowledge of KUPI into the different groups of muslims, by promoting new narratives on gender equality in the perspective of Islam. The reason to create a new narrative on gender equality is to widen the acceptance of gender equality and justice from islamic perspective to male-dominated groups. 

The narrative of  mubadalah (mutuality or reciprocity introduced by Dr. Faqihudin ) brings basic concept that women and men are created equally and granted the rights to enjoy happiness, well-being, and prosperity equally. Therefore both need to work in partnership to achieve happiness and prosperity. 

The narrative of genuine justice (keadilan hakiki introduced by Dr. Nur Rofiah), understanding women as the creation that has  specific roles in the reproduction,  intellectual, and spiritual capacity, therefore in perceiving the women, the perspective of intersectionality need to be applied. 

The forum was organized by Women Leading Change, with the support of Melinda Gate Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and many mores. I am happy to be part of the conference and share about the new development in Indonesia, which we believe resonance to other part of the world. ***