Hongsok Lee
At the last Wednesday forum of even semester, Dr. Annisa R. Beta's recently published book, Pious Girls, was introduced and discussed. She is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow (2023-2025) and a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is also a co-founder of Anotasi and Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka (Annotation and Open Ethnography Network). She completed her PhD from the National University of Singapore and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the same university.
The speaker, Dr. Beta, studied a group of young Muslimwomen in Indonesia. Her research shows that a new type of young Muslimwomen is emerging. She introduced the two research questions of her study: 1) How do influential young Muslim women’s groups and figures invite their followers to understand what it takes to be the ideal feminine pious subject? 2) How, conceptually, does the term ‘Muslimwoman’ offered by Miriam Cooke and Saba Mahmood’s work on embodied practices as key to the formation of pious self, and how does it explain the formation of this idealized pious self among young women?
Brain Beauty Belief, published in 2014 by designer Dian Pelangi, a favorite of many hijabers, explains that intelligence is important in a woman's life and that passion plays an important role in a woman's career. The speaker quoted the following passage from the book: "To be a true Muslim woman (muslimah sejati) is not just about the hijab. Muslim women have to have akal (intellect) and akhlak (virtuous disposition). I summarize it with the tagline brain, beauty, and belief" (Pelangi & Aprilia, 2014, p.12). This emphasizes that intelligence, character, and belief are more important than wearing the hijab itself.
As mentioned in the research question, the speaker introduces Miriam Cooke's concept of Muslim woman, saying "new media produce radical connectivity across the globe and foster a new kind of cosmopolitanism marked by religion. Cosmopolitanism is at once unifying and diverse because the more people identify with and connect to each other the more will their identities be hybrid and split among the multiple groups in which they act and want to belong. Those threatened by such hybridity in Muslim women may try to cage in the proliferating identities. The sign of the cage is the veil (whether mandated or forbidden[DJ1] )" (cooke, 2007, p.141). Cooke's argument that the hijab, or veil, can be a means of limiting the proliferating identities leads to an exploration of how the essential identity of the Muslimwoman can be defined. The speaker also presents Mahmood's argument for the importance of embodied practice for the formation of a pious self: “Belief as the product of outward practices, rituals, and acts of worship rather than simply an expression of them” (Mahmood, 2012, p. xv). Through Cooke's concept of Muslimwoman, the speaker explored how young Muslim women's groups make use of such "foundational singularity" to engender and curate the ethical feminine subjectivity. Mahmood’s concept further demonstrated that its borders are set not by non-Muslims or Islamist men but by the Muslim women themselves. Taken together, she concluded that “in this sense, Muslim women become a discursive site where the production and circulation of moral acts of ethical female subjectivity are exhibited, shaped, and contested.”
Through the above discussion, Dr. Beta argues that Muslim woman and their identity marker need to be moved out of the framework of a singular causal relationship with the external, masculine, imperialist actors. Instead, she argues that Muslim women and modest clothing practices should be understood as part of a discursive formation of femininity in the context of neoliberal ethical regimes, where choice becomes a necessary tool for identification.
At the end of the presentation, she presented the ideal Muslim woman as 1)Ambitious and career-oriented, 2) Willing to learn and change, accepting domestication, and faithful to God (beriman), 3) presents embodied practices, but more importantly looks inward to the ‘soul’ through knowledge of oneself and highlight the will to improve (memantaskan diri). In her conclusion, young women are encouraged to take responsibility for their own transformation and are expected to be enterprising as part of their submission to God. She also emphasizes agency in acts of worship. These are acts that focus on transforming the self and renewing the soul with the good fate promised through these transformations. The choice for young Muslim women, therefore, is to understand the importance of self-transformation and to cultivate and manage the self. Through this, they will be reward with God's love, as well as spiritual and worldly achievements.