Indonesian Women Are Under Increasing Pressure to Wear the Hijab

Indonesia, a Muslim-majority nation of 280 million people, has witnessed growing religious conservatism in recent years — a movement that has extended across different facets of Indonesian society, including a new sense of Islamic identity politics and actual politics. This rising conservatism has disproportionately affected girls and women in the country. One of the most notable examples of this treatment is the discriminatory dress codes many women are now subjected to. Specifically, many have been forced to start wearing the hijab — the Muslim headscarf also locally known as jilbab — according to a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.

About 75% of Muslim women in Indonesia today wear the hijab, up from only 5% in the late 1990s, according to HRW. This is largely thanks to recent legal decisions. In January 2021, a student at a public school complained about how she was made to wear the hijab even though she’s not Muslim. This led to the Indonesian government issuing a decree banning regional governments and public schools from mandating religious elements on student uniforms in February. The rule was canceled by the Supreme Court a few months later in May, with a panel of three male judges saying that children under 18 have no right to choose their clothes.

But social pressure plays a significant role, too. “Women and girls face social pressure and threats of possible sanctions unless they comply with the regulations,” HRW stated in its report, including facing bullying and intimidation to wear the hijab. In one case, a high school student in Sumatra was told she must wear the jilbab as part of her school uniform because she is a Muslim, and was bullied for refusing to do so.

“My daughter lost her confidence, felt pressured, and had her rights abused,” the student’s mother, Siti Rokhani, said, according to the HRW report. “[I found out] the school has no rule that requires female Muslim students to wear the jilbab. The mandatory jilbab happened because of ‘an appeal’ from Islamic class teachers.”

According to HRW, in at least 24 of Indonesia’s 34 provinces, girls who did not wear the jilbab were forced to leave school or withdrew in response to the pressure to do so. Some female civil servants, including teachers, doctors, school principals, and university lecturers, lost their jobs or felt compelled to resign.

“Women’s vulnerability only increases further with regulations that have to do with women’s bodies. That vulnerability exists in the form of persecution, threats, intimidation, physical violence, rape, eviction, harassment, and many other things,” Zubaidah Djohar, poet, activist and an alumna of an Islamic boarding school in West Sumatra, told the FBomb.

Following a public speaking engagement about the hijab last February, Djohar received death threats that promised hacking and poisoning. Djohar filed a report to the police, but there has been little indication of a meaningful investigation taking place.

“Law enforcement officers must take a role. They shouldn’t remain silent. I don’t want Indonesia to become worse; so easy for anyone to destroy women’s dignity just because she rejects a discriminatory rule of the majority,” Djohar said. “I want to protect my daughter [and] Indonesian girls from a sickly regulation that could easily turn a woman’s body into a battlefield of sins and rewards.”

“The jilbab violation is not merely a matter of clothing. This is a problem of justice for women to choose their own identity,” a petition calling for a stop to the discriminatory regulations, signed by more than 800 Indonesian public figures, reads.

Djohar said the Indonesian government must respect the different backgrounds of every student.

“The state must protect the diversity of expression among its citizens. Not all Muslim women wants to wear the hijab, or feels like they have to wear the hijab … Those who want to wear the hijab should feel free to do so, and vice versa. There is no need to force the difference in faith to other women,” she told the FBomb.

Elaine Pearson, acting Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement called on Indonesian President Joko Widodo to overturn the “discriminatory, rights-abusing provincial and local decrees that violate the rights of women and girls.”

“These decrees do real harm and as a practical matter will only be ended by central government action.”