Women Pushing the Limits: Gender Debates in Islamic Higher Education

In November 2008, I had driven for a few hours to attend a wedding of a friend’s relative. I have attended Indonesian Muslim weddings before and I thought I knew what to expect. I knew I would be a special guest and would be posed with the bride and groom and other members of the wedding party for pictures. I knew that there would be the formal wedding (nikah) ritual and plenty of speeches. I knew the penghulu (the marriage officiate and registrar from MORA) would give a short sermon. What I did not expect was some of the content of that sermon. He spoke at length against spousal (really, wife) abuse. He admonished the groom not to be tempted to take out stress on his wife; of course, there may be tensions, but they must be dealt with by talking and not by striking out. It wasn’t his speaking against abuse that was striking, it was the length at which he stressed the importance of nonviolent conflict resolution and that violence against the wife was grounds for divorce. In fact, he spent quite a bit of time enumerating the wife’s rights within the marriage.