Islamic Dress Code Stirs Controversy in Indonesia

On January 11, Elianu Hia, the father of a student at a state high school in the Indonesian city of Padang, West Sumatra, secretly recorded a meeting that he and his wife had with a member of the school’s staff. The couple requested the meeting to raise concerns about a requirement that their daughter wear a jilbab, or Islamic head covering, while attending classes.

They brought along a letter, signed by the grade 10 student, declaring that she refused to wear the Islamic garment – and for good reason: she was Christian. 

The school official told Elianu Hia that despite her religion, his daughter would still be required to wear the head covering as per existing school rules. The father was angry. “How would you feel if your child was made to follow rules [from a private non-Muslim foundation]?” he told the official. “If this was a private school rule, that would be fine, but this is a public school.”

The official was adamant. “This is the school regulation at SMKN2 Padang,” he said. “This is a mandatory jilbab rule.”

Elianu Hia subsequently posted the video to Facebook, where it whipped up an immediate storm, prompting heated media coverage, extensive press commentary, and social media protests targeting the education office in West Sumatra. In the face of the protests, the school soon backed down and agreed that students could attend classes without wearing the jilbab.

The Padang school controversy shone a light on a host of local by-laws and regulations that determine what Indonesian women and girls can – and cannot – wear in schools, within the civil service, and at government offices.

According to a recent report from the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW), requirements for women to don Islamic headwear have increased considerably in recent decades, in line with the rise of an exclusive, intolerant version of Islam.

The 98-page report, released in March, documents numerous cases in which Christian and other non-Muslim students and teachers were also forced to wear the jilbab, an Arabic word meaning “partition,” which is usually combined with a long skirt and a long sleeve shirt.

“Over the past two decades,” the report states, “women and girls in Indonesia have faced unprecedented legal and social demands to wear clothing deemed Islamic as part of broader efforts to impose the rules of Sharia, or Islamic law, in many parts of the country.”

The rules have tightened considerably since 2014, when the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a national regulation on school dress that has been widely interpreted to require female Muslim students to wear a jilbab as part of their school uniform.

Yaqut Cholil Qoumas, Indonesia’s recently appointed minister of religious affairs, has described the Padang case as just “the tip of the iceberg,” saying that the mandatory jilbab regulation has been used “to discriminate, to intimidate, and to pressure schoolgirls.”

The mandatory dress codes for women reflect the the growth of Middle Eastern variants of Islam, which advance a much more austere vision than the syncretic forms in which the religion has historically been practiced throughout the Indonesian islands.

The transformation dates back to the 1967-98 rule of President Suharto, in which rapid economic growth and urbanization seeded growing Islamic observance. According to HRW, a threshold was crossed in 1999 when Suharto’s successor, B.J. Habibie, signed the Special Status Law for Aceh, a devoutly Muslim region on the western tip of Sumatra. Intended to help resolve a long-running separatist insurgency in Aceh, in part by empowering Islamic conservatives opposed to the largely secular Free Aceh Movement, the law gave Aceh special permission to apply Shariah, or Islamic law – the first time in Indonesia’s post-independence history that such an allowance had been made.

While the law did not give other parts of the country the legal authority to impose Shariah, conservative Muslim regencies in West Java and West Sumatra used it as a pretext to make the jilbab compulsory in schools in 2001, followed shortly by other regencies on the islands of Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. 

Decentralization reforms introduced in 2004, which devolved powers to lower levels of government, have seen such measures proliferate. One academic study cited by HRW found that, by April 2019, more than 700 Shariah-inspired ordinances had been adopted across the Indonesian archipelago – many of them targeting women and girls. 

In June 2014, the government issued an ambiguously worded national regulation about Girl Scout uniforms that has been interpreted by officials and schools around the country as requiring all female Muslim primary and secondary school students to wear a jilbab as part of their school uniform.

Currently, most of Indonesia’s almost 300,000 public schools, particularly in the country’s 24 predominantly Muslim provinces, now require Muslim girls to wear the jilbab beginning in primary school. Similar requirements also pertain to women working in the civil service or government offices.

One 27-year-old woman, recalling her time as a student, recalled to HRW the laborious regulations with which women and girls must deal. 

“The headscarf must be thick, no hair is to be seen, and the jilbab must be broad enough to cover the chest,” she said. “The shirt must be long enough to cover the hips. Those who wear shorter, thinner jilbabs, showing their hair, will be reprimanded, summoned to the counselling office, then given demerits.”

Ifa Hanifah Misbach, a psychologist in Bandung, says that some young women and girls are traumatized by the mandatory jilbab regulations and the peer pressure and the bullying that often flow from them. As she told HRW, “The impact of religious pressures, especially to wear the jilbab, when you’re young, makes it feel like you have no breathing room.”

According to the HRW report, these Islamic dress codes not only perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes, but they block young women from participation in large sections of society and stigmatize those that refuse to conform. Such garments also pose practical dangers. Women run the risk of having their clothes getting caught in motorcycle wheels, particularly if also required to ride side-saddle, as they are under Aceh’s Shariah-inspired laws. The report cites another case in which 10 Girl Scouts wearing long skirts died when they were swept into a river during a hike in Yogyakarta. The search and rescue team said that the long skirts had limited their physical movement and ability to avoid drowning.

Given the prominent attention it attracted, the Padang school incident may end up being a turning point. A few weeks after the incident, the Indonesian government issued a decree banning public schools from making religious attire mandatory for teachers and students. 

In announcing the new rules, Minister of Education and Culture Nadiem Anwar Makarim said that many state schools had “misinterpreted” the 2014 regulation on uniforms. "The essence of this decree is that students, teachers and education officials have the right to choose,” he said. “Wearing religious-oriented attire is an individual decision."

Under the new decree, local governments and school principals were required to revoke any mandatory jilbab regulations by March 5, and sanctions were to be imposed on any local government head or school principal who does not comply as of March 25. The government can withhold education funds to schools that choose to ignore the decree.

The decree does not cover Islamic state schools and universities controlled by the Religious Affairs Ministry; nor does it include Aceh, whose special Shariah dispensation remains intact. There is also the thorny challenge of implementation in a nation as far-flung and decentralized as Indonesia, where conservative Islamic groups remain influential. 

But it is nonetheless a welcome sign that the government recognizes the right of girls and women to participate in Indonesian society, free from burdensome dress codes. “I do not think it is a problem if more people wear the jilbab,” said Alissa Wahid, a Muslim activist quoted by HRW. “But when it becomes mandatory, that’s where there’s a problem.”