presents a seminar about:

Islam in Contemporary Aceh Reconfigurations of Ritual, Doctrine, Community and Authority

Monday 12 September 2011 ‘Oude Sterrewacht’, room C202

Leiden, the Netherlands More info: http://visitors.leiden.edu/buildings/sterrewacht.html

PROGRAMME

Morning

Chair: Professor Kees van Dijk 09.00-09.30

Professor Léon Buskens (director of LUCIS) – Introduction: the Dutch Fascination with Aceh

09.30-10.00

Professor Michael Feener – State Shari`a and its limits

10.00-10.30

Annemarie Samuels – Improvement, Hikmah, and ‘the Sense of an Ending’: how Different Temporalities Shape the Present and the Future in Post-Tsunami Aceh

10.30-10.45

Break

10.45-11.15

Kristina Großmann – Reconfiguring Aceh’s Syariat Islam: the Agency of Civil Society and State Actors in the Drafting Process of the Qanun Jinayat

11.15-11.45

Dr Arskal Salim – Stoning, Law and Politics: Contested visions of Islamic lawmaking in Aceh

11.45-12.30

Discussion

Afternoon

Chair: Dr Nico Kaptein 12.30-13.30

Lunch

13.30-14.00

Dr Eka Srimulyani – ‘Unrecorded’ Ulama: Examining the Life Women’s Dayah Leaders in Aceh

14.00-14.30

Daniel Andrew Birchok – Entangled Genealogies, Stance, and Islamic History in Nagan Raya: Placing Islamic Reform in Context

14.30-14.45

Break

14.45-15.15

David Kloos – Becoming better Muslims: Sinning and Ethical Improvement in Contemporary Aceh

15.15-15.45

Reza Idria – Cultural Resistance against Shariatism in Aceh

15.45-16.30

Discussion

16.30-17.00

Closing remarks – Professor Michael Feener

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS 1. Professor Michael Feener (National University of Singapore, Department of History) – State Shari`a and its Limits Aceh has experienced phenomenal social change over the past decade, with extreme natural disaster and ambitious projects of reconstruction and development as well as the transformation from a prolonged period of armed conflict to one of relatively stable peace. Over the same period, Aceh has also experienced the implementation of a new Islamic legal system with expressed intentions of using the law as a tool of engineering social development in accordance with a particular set of understandings of ‘proper Islam’ and its desired role in contemporary society. These pretensions to directing social transformation have, however, been challenged by a diverse range of factors with the result that local understandings and experiences of Islam in Aceh remain diverse and contested. This paper aims to present the ways in which totalizing visions of state Shari`a in have been formulated, while at the same time highlighting the limits of their actualization in contemporary Aceh. 2. Annemarie Samuels MA (Leiden University, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences) – Improvement, Hikmah, and ‘the Sense of an Ending’: how Different Temporalities Shape the Present and the Future in Post-Tsunami Aceh In this paper I explore how Acehnese Muslims understand the tsunami as God’s will and how this understanding influences their ideas about present and future ‘improvement’. In ideas of improvement the distant future of the Day of Judgment and the afterlife comes together with the near futures of one’s personal life and of Aceh. The paper is divided into three parts. I will first focus on tsunami explanations and predestination. The second part deals with ‘the sense of an ending’ or the way in which the final ‘end’ became imminent through the tsunami. The final part focuses on how people describe the tsunami as hikmah (divine wisdom or insight) that shows in different kinds of present improvement. I will then focus explicitly on what improvement can mean in this context and how it connects the different futures discussed. In all three parts I draw attention to the ways in which Islamic understandings of the tsunami bestow meaning on present and future actions. In the first part I pay attention to explanations in which the tsunami is seen as a divine intervention. The broad repertoire of explanations for this intervention includes that of the tsunami as a punishment, as a test or a warning. Importantly, many people relate these different explanations to the need for improvement of moral and religious conduct – of themselves or of Acehnese Muslims in general. Predestination plays a major role in the temporal aspects of these explanations. It explains individual death and survival, sometimes prefigured in dreams and visions, and it makes the disaster something that should be understood as fate (takdir). Many people believe that, in the larger temporal scheme, the tsunami is a sign that the end of the world is near – a sign that is predicted in the Qur’an. I use Frank Kermode’s work on the ‘sense of an ending’ to explore how the certainty that there will be a final end bestows meaning on the time that is left until this end comes. The tsunami, prefiguring the end, made the idea of the Day of Judgment, and thus the judgment of one’s sins and merits, more present. This presence plays an important role in many people’s personal stories of moral and religious understanding and improvement after the tsunami.

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Interestingly, the tsunami is not only thought of as a lesson to improve moral and religious conduct, but also as a way to improve general living conditions. Many Muslims in Banda Aceh referred to this through the concept of hikmah. In the context of the tsunami, hikmah is used to explain that we can see God’s wisdom in the tsunami because of the present improvements in Aceh. These improvements can include religious ‘lessons’, but also better houses, peace, improved international relations and many other things. Not unimportantly, the building back better discourse of the state and international organizations ties in to this broad improvement narrative. I will thus ask the question of what ‘improvement’ looks like for many Acehnese. What expectations and aspirations come together in the idea of the future as ‘better’ (lebih baik)? Near future improvements of oneself and society, divine wisdom and improvement of one’s merits in regard of the distant future of the final end, then, come together in the particular temporal worldviews in which the tsunami is understood. 3. Kristina Großman MA (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main) – Reconfiguring Aceh’s Syariat Islam: the Agency of Civil Society and State Actors in the Drafting Process of the Qanun Jinayat Post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh is currently undergoing a process of political, socio-cultural and legal transformation, in which the engineering of the future Syariat Islam plays a prominent role. Since the year 2005 a broad alliance of activists, state actors, academics, and religious scholars promote a progressive and substantive Qanun Jinayat (Islamic criminal law). Khairani Arifin, the former general secretary of the civil society organization RPuK (Women Volunteers for Humanity) and Al Yasa Abubakar, the former head of the Dinas Syariat Islam (Syariat Islam office) are key actors in the codification process of the Islamic criminal law and, despite of their different standpoints concerning Syariat paradigms they established a proactive cooperation. For analysing their agency within the drafting process of the Qanun Jinayat, I compare two legal texts: The Rancangan Qanun Jinayat (Draft Islamic criminal law) and the Qanun Jinayat passed by the former provincial parliament DPRA in the year 2009. Abubakar initiated and pursued the drafting of the Rancangan Qanun Jinayat aiming to codify the first versions of the Islamic criminal law, the Qanun 12, 13, 14/2003. Arifin in close cooperation with other local, national and international law and women’s rights organizations pushed forward the participation of the civil society in the codification process, which is legally mandatory by law according to the Qanun 3/2007 1 , by conducting seminars, expert meetings and consultations. Abubakar and Arifin submitted manuscripts, in which they promoted their philosophy, fiqh (jurisprudence), and material as well as formal cores of the future Islamic criminal law. Some parts of Abubakar’s manuscripts were literally copied in the Rancangan Qanun Jinayah, his demand of including zina (adultery) was allowed and the introduction of rajam (caning) was explicitly excluded. Arifin’s amendments concerning the inclusion of sexual harassment, rape and child abuse and the DNA test as proof of rape were adapted in the Rancangan Qanun Jinayat. She states that the access to institutions and committees, which are responsible for the coordination, wording and harmonization of the draft legal texts, e.g. the Dinas Syariat Islam, the Biro Hukum, and the Tim Asistent was satisfying, but little influence could be carried out on the legislative and executive level. The Rancangan Qanun Jinayat was, after a three years long process of redrafting, submitted to the DPRA in the year 2008 but rejected, mainly because the contents were too much at odds with the contents of the original Qanun 12, 13, 14/ 2003. While the redrafting of the rejected Rancangan Qanun Jinayat was still ongoing, the former DPRA passed in a rush, two weeks before the end of their legislative period in the year 2009, a highly contested version of the Qanun Jinayat, evading the common deliberation process. This version includes, next to the adherence to international conventions in the preamble, like the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of 1

Qanun Aceh Nomor 3 Tahun 2007 tentang Tata Cara Pembentukan Qanun, BAB VI Partisipasi Masyarakat

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Discrimination against Women), also rajam (stoning to death) for committing zina (adultery), and defines homosexual relationship as a crime. The governor rejected to sign the Qanun Jinayat and it is not yet published in the law gazette Lembaran Daerah Aceh. Major religious scholars, amongst them Abubakar, activists and intellectuals criticize the drafting process and content of the Qanun Jinayat and perceive its passing as a political step of the outgoing parliament to weaken their successors. The Qanun Jinayat is not yet implemented but the executive and legislative avoid the further settlement of the sensitive topic Qanun Jinayat and rejected until now putting it on the prolega list 2009-2014 for further discussion in the DPRA. The paradox content and unclear status of the Qanun Jinayat manifests the current vibrant and still ongoing reconfiguration process of the future Syariat Islam, in which civil society, state actors and politicians try to accommodate their often diametrical standpoints and interests, and struggle about the power and authority to define Aceh’s Islamic normative framework. 4. Dr Arskal Salim (Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London, UK) – Stoning, Law and Politics: Contested Visions of Islamic Lawmaking in Aceh This paper looks at contested visions of Islamic lawmaking in Aceh with a special reference to a stoning to death as a penalty for people in Aceh who committed adultery. Drawing on Buskens (2000) and Menski (2006) on competing triangle legal orders, I would like to look further by pondering the quadrangle relationship between customary rules, religious norms, state laws and international principles and their intricate interactions on the issue in question. Dealing with the recent legislation of the controversial stipulation of stoning to death (rajam) in Aceh local regulation (qanun) on Islamic penal law (jinaya), this paper investigates how political changes have (re)directed the trajectory of Islamisation of law in Aceh over the course of at least five years. In addition, by explaining tensions between diverse groups, jurist scholars and social activists in Aceh over the issue in question, the paper demonstrates how various (in)formal sources of law (i.e. historical legal fact, Islamic legal jurisprudence, international human rights convention and Indonesian national constitution) are invoked to justify their respective views. The paper will finally assert that each of those four legal sources has always been in contest and it is not easy to establish the right balance between these competing aspirations as none of them could ever be entirely silenced. 5. Dr Eka Srimulyani (IAIN Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh) – ‘Unrecorded’ Ulama: Examining the Life Women’s Dayah Leaders in Aceh2 In various works on Islam in Indonesia, the existence of female religious leaders or ulama are rarely uncovered. This is partly due to the paradigm used in these studies, which only concentrate on the formal or official religious public domain. This discriminates an informal public [religious] domain or a space of unofficial, private politics (Bourdieu, 1977; Nelson, 1974) that women used to be part of it. This research is about female ulama, locally known in Aceh as teungku inong, and in this paper I only focus on them who came traditional dayah backgrounds. In general, the public religious roles of female ulama, which are more private, have been marginalised from mosquebased religious rituals or activities in which men dominate. While the roles and status of the female ulama, who organise regular religious meetings for (mainly) women are socially quite high within the community in terms of religious authority and their leadership in their dayah institutions. This research is carried out in present-day Aceh where shari’a Islam has formally applied since 2002, and where the presence of gender issues increased particularly in the post- conflict and post-tsunami 2

Data are taken from my research project during 2008 – 2009, and from my postdoctoral research project funded by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Netherlands (2010 – 2012).

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period; these issues have been contested and to some extent even (re) negotiated. In this context, the roles of female ulama have become more strategic and deserve to be studied and recognised. This study indeed also address the variety of contexts in which Muslim women live, which so far was mainly given attention in the Middle Eastern context. 6. Daniel Andrew Birchok MA (University of Michigan, US) – Entangled Genealogies, Stance, and Islamic History in Nagan Raya: Placing Islamic Reform in Context This paper examines the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century history of affinities between different groups of Muslims in Seunagan, a region on Aceh’s southwest coast roughly congruent with the present day administrative district (kabupaten) of Nagan Raya. Locals in Seunagan recognize three ideal types of Islamic practice reported to have coexisted in the region since the 1950s (i.e., a mystical complex associated with a local family of Sayyids, reformist activism identified as “Muhammadiyah,” and the intellectual tradition of the Naqsyabandi sheikh Muda Waly). Those in Seunagan sometimes assimilate these three strands of practice to a common sociological framing positing a continuum between “traditionalist” and “modernist” Islam. However, they are more likely to articulate each as separate strands of practice. Moreover, affinities between groups of Muslims have underpinned or undermined ties between these three emergent classes in different ways depending on social and historical circumstances. These ties and divisions have occurred in several interrelated fields, including sensibilities regarding proper ritual practice, biological and educational genealogies, questions regarding historical relationships to the region, relationships to specific places and types of place within Seunagan, and political and patronage networks. In generating and circulating sociological types of Muslims in Indonesia, scholarly accounts have tended to assume differences in the stance of groups of Muslims on fundamental issues of religious practice, for example approaches to the semiotic qualities of sacred texts, as primary. Fundamental differences in religious practice remain paradigmatic even in accounts where other factors, for example political or kinship affiliations, are central. Yet the ways in which Indonesian Muslims articulate their relationships to like-minded associates do not necessarily grant this kind of primacy to questions of proper practice, as the examples from Seunagan show. Recourse to other fields, for example genealogy or relationship to place, do not diminish an otherwise explicitly Islamic solidarity, as these fields are experienced as mediating such a solidarity and not as merely politically expedient. It would be a mistake to take any of these fields as primary or determinate as they are all understood to be integral to questions of affiliation within a broader field of Islamic communities of practice. My discussion of Nagan Raya’s history suggests ways of reflecting on issues related to Aceh’s recent past, present, and future, especially since the beginnings of the 1998 implementation of what has come to be known as syariat Islam. These include, but are not limited to, the relatively successful production of discourses of consensus surrounding these legal reforms, the highly visible resurgence of a group of ulama claiming the mantle of Acehnese traditionalism, and some of the ways Acehnese have participated in the targeting of so called “aliran sesat,” strands of belief and practice taken to be heretical.

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7. David Kloos MA (VU University Amsterdam) – Becoming better Muslims: Sinning and Ethical Improvement in Contemporary Aceh This paper deals with the problem of sinning. Although hardly discussed in studies of Aceh, this is a basic concern for many ordinary Acehnese. Normative Islam is always directed at reducing sins, through practices of discipline and self-discipline. Still, few people believe that a life without sins is possible, and many people worry about this. While thinking about and dealing with sins through practices of repentance is a very personal matter, these ideas and practices are also based on cultural patterns, varying according to age, class, and gender backgrounds. My paper, based on extensive ethnographic and historical research in two different communities (a city neighbourhood in Banda Aceh and a rural village in Aceh Besar), tries to identify some of these patterns. What do ordinary Acehnese actually consider as sins, and how do they repent? What are the existing sanctions, and how are these experienced and discussed in different social circles? The study of this topic also bears relevance for the ongoing debate on islamisation, whether in Aceh or the wider Muslim world. In academic and non-academic commentaries, Islam in Aceh has been represented mostly through a strong emphasis on official norms, (state and local) institutions, and discourses. Underlying this emphasis is the idea that most people in Aceh agree with these norms, implying homogeneity and unproblematic legitimacy. My paper challenges this notion by focusing on the moral ambiguities felt by ordinary Acehnese when it comes to dealing with ‘bad’ behaviour 8. Reza Idria MA (IAIN Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh) – Cultural Resistance against Shariatism in Aceh Even though many Islamist groups demand and support more officialized and totalized implementation of Sharia in Aceh, there are also those who argue that Sharia has been used by the authority as a “tool” to dominate power and to intimidate rivals. The opponents of Sharia have recently seen injustice, discrimination, Arabization rather than Islamization in Aceh nowadays. However, many Acehnese people are indeed afraid of being labeled anti-Sharia, due to their entrenched religious and cultural reasons. Thus, many of them do not publicly confront nor reject Sharia but use various cultural forms to express their resistance to the authority’s version of Sharia. This fact is what I will identify as types of cultural resistance towards Shariatism in Aceh. According to social theorists, cultural resistance is the practice of using meanings and symbols to combat a dominant power. The term resistance covers a wide variety of forms of collective actions, as “weapons of the weak”, and may take the defensive form of concealment including the ambiguous form of mimicry which may be read from above as mistakes but viewed from below look more like mockery. The strategy adopted is “defensive”, “subversion rather than confrontation” (J.C. Scott, 1985 & 1990; Burke, 2000). F. Bailey (1993) coined mode of resistance such as “pilfering, feigned ignorance, sabotage, arson, wangling, fiddling, dodging,” and so on. In short, some cultural activities of the Acehnese may be analyzed in this way when we define it as a cultural resistance to the dominant and elite culture. This paper aims to study the forms of cultural resistance towards the implementation of Sharia in Aceh and particularly focuses on cultural activities that oppose the Sharia authority. Furthermore, my research deals with the questions how Acehnese cultural-based groups have challenged the officialized and totalized Sharia, how they use cultural forms as a mode of resistance and how this is related to the process of democratization in the region. Cultural resistance against Shariatism in Aceh can be found in the form of cultural events and literary works such as art performances, literary writings (novel, poetry, hikayat), music concerts, miss contests, film festivals and many more. 7

In particular, I will focus on three groups that are among the widely known groups in the capital of Banda Aceh, promoting cultural resistance to criticize the way Sharia is interpreted and implemented by government and radical Islamists. They are: (1) Sekolah Menulis Dokarim, the school for creative writing and thinking that also runs an annual event called “Festival Film Arab” (Middle Eastern Film Festival), (2) Violet Grey, the Acehnese Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender group that created many events and art performances for promoting and empowering its community, including organized a controversial event called the Acehnese Queer’s festival, and (3) Tanggoel Rebel and friends, a group that promotes punk ideology and life style in Banda Aceh and their “struggle” fighting against Wilayatul Hizbah (Sharia police) . This paper will analyze how the three local groups understand and use cultural forms as a means of resisting shariatism in Aceh.

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