Ismira Lutfia – A scholar on Tuesday called on Islamic leaders, Muslim organizations, students and scholars to take responsibility for their part in supporting a spate of patriarchal laws that erode gender equality in Indonesia, a scholar said on Tuesday.
Syafi'i Anwar, who heads the International Center for Islam and Pluralism, addressed the implementation of Shariah-inspired bylaws by local administrations in Indonesian provinces and districts.
He told the opening of a two-day conference on gender equality and women's empowerment in Muslim societies that such bylaws reinforce outmoded values that placed women in a subordinate position and consigned them largely to domestic roles.
"This tendency to implement Shariah-based bylaws is often directly or indirectly supported by government policies formulated for pragmatic political reasons," Syafi'i said.
He added that regional government leaders tend to depend on moral arguments when imposing such laws and cite a failure of secular laws to address "moral decay."
He said 65 cities or regions in Indonesia have implemented some sort of Shariah-based bylaw, including ones that required Muslim women to wear veils or imposed curfews.
Examples of such rules include a regulation on prostitution issued by the government of Jakarta satellite city Tangerang in 2005. The bylaw banned women from being seen in public places after midnight and called for police to consider those who break the curfew to be prostitutes.
Though some of these bylaws have criminalized women, poor people or minority groups, some districts claim that crime rates in their areas have dropped significantly since the bylaws came into effect, Syafi'i said.
However, he said that implementation of similar bylaws is on the decline. "It seems that the Indonesian people, who are generally moderate in their religious practices, cannot accept such strict and exclusive regulations," Syafi'i said.
He said a 2008 global public opinion poll indicated large majorities in Muslim or Muslim-majority countries expressed desire for more gender equality, including 91 percent of the Indonesian population.
The head of the East and Southeast Asia regions of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, or Unifem, Jean D'Cunha, said during her opening remarks that about half a billion women are currently living in 45 countries with a Muslim-majority population and in about 30 more countries in which Muslims compose a significant minority of the population.
She said that pervasive stereotyping of Muslim men and women in those countries inappropriately imposed social, economic, cultural and political differences between Muslim men and women.
"We must reject this stereotype," D'Cunha said, adding that the religious foundations of Islam promoted equality and justice between men and women.
The UN Representative to Indonesia, El-Mostafa Benlamlih, said that Islam strongly influenced various aspects of life in many countries, including the way men and women interacted with each other.
"The general perception is that Muslim women are denied of a number of basic rights," Benlamlih said, adding that despite progress in Muslim countries toward equality, there was still room for improvement.
Arguing that Muslim women should not be granted their human rights was to wrongly argue that under Islam women were less than equal to men, Benlamlih said.
"We have to ensure that the voice of women's rights and gender equality advocates are not silenced," Benlamlih said.