It is always delightful to find a modern voice coming out of the Islamic milieu. It is a remonder that humanity exists everywhere however often shouted down.
Yet Islam must truly confront the evils built into their polity and do it faster. It needs to be a united effort that gathers all sects and must surely take the lead of Gandhi to simply impose the doctrine of non violence. That alone applied completely allows Islam to shed the Seventh century and barbarism.
If that is not an option then those who espouse violence must be confronted and plausibly ejected by followers of Islam. That is what this lady is effectively doing.
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A Former First Lady Presses On for a Tolerant, Feminist Islam
JAKARTA,
Indonesia — The transgender Muslim women gazed around the reception
room with wonder. It was loaded with lavish tributes from foreign
rulers: gold filigreed swords from Kuwait, elaborately painted Chinese
urns and elegantly framed Quranic verses. Finally the host, Sinta
Nuriyah, 69, breezed into the room in her wheelchair, passing by a giant
bust of her husband, Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president and a powerful voice for moderate Islam.
The
women, wearing head scarves and traditional gowns, had come to Ms.
Sinta for advice. Their Islamic school for women had been shut down by a
local hard-line organization amid a nationwide crackdown on lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender organizations, and they were at a loss as
to how to reopen it.
Ms.
Sinta, wearing a batik shawl and a veil that partly covered her hair,
was in typical good cheer, listening intently and finding pauses in
conversation to offer counsel. “Reach out to the regional district
head,” she said. “All people have the right to worship God, not just
some people. That’s the truth in Islam.”
She
offered a beaming smile to the assembled women, clasping their hands
and embracing them as they crowded around her wheelchair for selfies.
“There’s nobody else in Indonesia like her, who cares this much about marginalized groups,” Shinta Ratri, the leader of the school, gushed.
Since her husband’s death
in 2009, Ms. Sinta, a women’s studies major who was paralyzed from the
waist down after a horrific car accident in the ’90s, has carried forth
the family’s campaign for a feminist and tolerant Islam. “We live among
different religions, ethnicities and cultures,” she said in an
interview. “It’s necessary that we stand up to extremists.”
Tears
have been appearing in Indonesia’s pluralist fabric in recent years, as
hard-line Islamic groups that were once at the margin of national
politics exert ever greater influence. Jakarta’s first Christian
governor in generations, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known as Ahok, is
facing prosecution for “insulting the Quran,” after a vigorous campaign
by Muslim hard-liners to have him unseated.
Ms.
Sinta was one of the few leading Muslim figures who stood up for Mr.
Basuki after he was charged last year, praising him in a recent
television appearance as “brave enough to step forward and take a
position from the dominant group.”
Her
activism on behalf of minorities frequently puts her in the cross hairs
of the hard-liners. For the last 16 years, Ms. Sinta has made a point
of touring Indonesian cities during Ramadan, holding interfaith
breaking-the-fast ceremonies to promote tolerance.
Last
year, at a Catholic church in Semarang, she was confronted by a
hard-line Muslim group whose members accused her of promoting the mixing
of two religious traditions. The dispute was widely reported in the
national news media, with the leader of the regional division of Banser,
a Muslim militia with a moderate orientation, announcing that it would
mobilize to protect Ms. Sinta’s events in the future.
“They
have to be confronted,” Ms. Sinta said of the hard-liners, who tried to
disrupt numerous interfaith events she headlined last year. “If they
aren’t, they will take heart and become even bolder.”
Ms.
Sinta is also in a struggle to promote women’s rights. On a talk show
to be broadcast later this month, the host asked her why she was opposed
to polygamy, saying he had heard about a man who was perfectly fair to
all 12 of his wives.
“Who can be fair to multiple wives?” Ms. Sinta asked.
“There are some who can!” a few women in the audience shouted.
“There aren’t!” Ms. Sinta responded flatly.
Eventually the host, Andy Noya, had enough. “Rise up, men, we’re being attacked!” he said jokingly.
Later,
Mr. Noya, noting that Ms. Sinta had become a provocative figure in
Indonesia, asked why she insisted on breaking the fast with people of
different faiths.
“Because we’re all siblings,” she said. “We have to always look out for one another.”
Nothing about Ms. Sinta’s early years predicted how high she would rise.
Born
in 1948 in the rural East Javanese town of Jombang, she was the eldest
daughter and one of 18 children of a calligrapher father who had one
wife. She was educated at a local Islamic boarding school for girls,
where she impressed teachers with her religiosity and academic ambition.
Mr.
Wahid, a charismatic young teacher at the school whose father was the
leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, fell
in love with the outspoken and beautiful young woman, then only 13. He
would visit her house after school to play chess with her father,
eventually asking for permission to marry his daughter.
But
Ms. Sinta told her father she was not interested. “I was too young, and
love hadn’t blossomed yet,” she said. It was considered scandalous that
a girl from an ordinary family would turn down Mr. Wahid, but her
father left the decision to her.
It was the unlikely start of a great romance.
After
Mr. Wahid moved to Cairo to study, and struggled in class, Ms. Sinta
wrote him: “Mankind shouldn’t always fail in life. If right now you’re
failing in your studies, then you shouldn’t also fail in love.”
He
took the opening, writing then from Baghdad, where he had moved, to ask
her to marry him. This time, she was ready, but because he would not
come home from Iraq for three more years, his grandfather represented
him at the marriage ceremony.
After Mr. Wahid returned to Indonesia in 1971, Ms. Sinta earned a degree in Shariah law
and then left college to start a family, eventually having four
children while making and selling candies and frozen treats to help
support them.
In
1992 she returned to school, taking graduate courses at the University
of Indonesia in the newly created women’s studies department. “I wanted
to look into the extent to which religion shapes the lives of women, and
also the extent to which women influenced religion,” she said.
That
was also the year of the auto accident. Ms. Sinta, who was flung from
the vehicle, found herself lying in the road, unable to move. She
remembers it as a hellish, depressing time in the hospital surrounded by
those who had had strokes and been in accidents. After a year of
physical therapy, she was finally able to move her arms, but she
remained paralyzed from the waist down.
Ms.
Sinta, who had begun using a wheelchair, wanted to continue her
studies, but the women’s studies classes were on the building’s fourth
floor. When the elevator broke down, Ms. Sinta asked friends to build a
stretcher out of bamboo and had campus security guards hoist her to
classes every day. “I’m someone who if there’s something I want, then
I’ve got to have it,” she said.
While
she was carried on the stretcher, she would joke that she was General
Sudirman, an anti-colonialist war hero who carried on the fight from a
stretcher after being wounded. “Just like General Sudirman struggled for
an independent Indonesia, I struggled for my own future,” she said,
laughing.
For
her senior thesis, she studied the health effects of pregnancy on child
brides. That brought her into contact with an old school friend, and
she got a glimpse of how differently her life could have turned out. “My
friend had 16 kids, because her husband was a prominent preacher who
wanted to have 25 children,” Sinta said, shaking her head.
In
1999, after the dictator Suharto stepped down, her husband became
Indonesia’s first president to win a contested election. Whereas the
notoriously corrupt Suharto family lived lavishly, Ms. Sinta urged her
husband to project a democratic humility, one reason the family is still
remembered fondly in Indonesia. “We didn’t need to act or wear clothes
like we were kings,” she said.
Her
husband was impeached after two years in office for failing to maintain
order in the tumultuous early years of Indonesia’s democracy. But they
both remained active in public affairs. Ms. Sinta established a network
of progressive Islamic boarding schools for girls to promote gender
equality in some of the most rural and conservative parts of the
country.
“It
isn’t easy erasing teachings that have already penetrated deeply,” she
said, noting that while senior clerics objected to her revisions to the
classic curriculum for girls Islamic boarding schools, others had
embraced it.
She
says she worries deeply about whether Indonesia’s moderate Muslim
institutions were capable of turning back the tide of fundamentalist
Islam.
“Now
our struggle is even weightier,” than earlier struggles against
colonialist and imperialist powers, she said, “because the people we are
facing down aren’t foreigners, but are from our own nation.”
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