Indonesian schoolgirls face 'harassment' amid growing pressure to wear the hijab

Rini Widiastuti, a classical Javanese dance teacher, has for years been pushing back against what she calls the "hijabisation" of Indonesian women and girls.

While she and her family are Muslims, the increasing number of women wearing the hijab - the Muslim headscarf known locally as jilbab - either voluntarily or due to social pressure, worries her.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), about 75 per cent of Muslim women in Indonesia today wear the hijab, up from only 5 per cent in the late 1990s, as Islamic identity politics spreads across the nation.

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The trend has not escaped even schoolgirls, an issue which has led Widiastuti to cross swords with authorities on several occasions.

In 2014, she clashed with her granddaughter's primary school for forcing girls to wear the jilbab. When Widiastuti moved the girl to another school closer to home five years later, she received a letter from the head teacher informing her of "compulsory Muslim attire".

To protest, Widiastuti shared the letter on social media, which garnered widespread attention and worked to her advantage. "My granddaughter was allowed to attend school without wearing the hijab afterwards, but I had earned a lot of enmity from my neighbours and other parents as a result."

Her granddaughter is now in a junior high school, and to her dismay, the issue has emerged yet again.

"Although my family and I are Muslims, we don't see the hijab as part of our cultural expression. If I'd wanted my granddaughter to wear the hijab, I would've sent her to a religious school," said Widiastuti, who lives in Yogyakarta.

"When my granddaughter started junior high this year, she was determined to wear the hijab only for her religious studies class. We had been told that was the bare minimum," she said. "But she kept getting harassed by her peers and teachers so that by the end of the first month, she started wearing it more often. By the end of the second month, she wore full hijab on a daily basis."

Widiastuti, 50, added that her granddaughter had decided to cave in because she had been unable to cope with the incessant bullying at school.

Widiastuti's experience is not an isolated incident. In late July, Indonesian social media was inundated with news of an unnamed schoolgirl in Bantul, Yogyakarta - some 52.2km from Widiastuti's hometown of Gunung Kidul - having a nervous breakdown after being forced by her teachers to wear the hijab.

Eko Suwanto, a member of the regional Yogyakarta council, condemned the incident. "The provincial government must ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future. Every citizen is free to exercise his or her religious freedom," he said.

The local authorities later warned that schools found to have forced girls into wearing the headscarf would be sanctioned.

But human rights activists say it is often regional by-laws and regulations that inspire school administrators to impose mandatory hijab wearing. Andreas Harsono, a researcher at HRW, said in the case of school attire, forcing students to don the hijab has violated their rights as human beings.

Indonesia has seen a string of new regulations concerning school attire over the last four decades.

A 1982 decree under Education Minister Daoed Joesoef made no allowance for the hijab to be worn in school settings. In 1991 Education Minister Fuad Hassan issued a new regulation allowing "religious attire" to be worn by Muslim students for the first time.

Subsequently, an ambiguously-worded 2014 decree under Minister Muhammad Nuh further elaborated on the "Muslim school uniform". This came to be interpreted by state school administrators as a signal to make the hijab compulsory.

In a 2019 interview, Nuh denied making the hijab mandatory. "Any Muslim girl, any schoolgirl basically, from primary to high school, could choose, wearing jilbab or not. If a Muslim schoolgirl chooses not to wear the jilbab uniform, it's not a problem. She could choose to do that," he said.

But his clarification may have come a little too late.

In January 2021, Indonesian netizens were scandalised when a video surfaced in which the parents of a Christian schoolgirl in Padang, West Sumatra, argued in vain against a teacher who insisted that their daughter wear the jilbab, despite being a non-Muslim.

The following month, responding to public outcry over the incident, Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarin, along with his counterparts at Home Affairs and Religious Affairs, issued a joint decree condemning the practice of forcing students to wear the hijab.

The decree effectively allowed any student or teacher to choose what to wear in school, with or without "religious attributes".

But a conservative Muslim group filed a judicial challenge against the decree and in June the Supreme Court ruled against it.

Harsono said that the joint ministerial decree was never going to be effective due to the existence of "at least two regulations at the national level, about 60 regional ones at both provincial and municipal levels, and thousands issued by individual state schools across the country", all of which can be interpreted to support mandatory hijab.

He continued by saying that the push for mandatory hijab is also prevalent in the civil service.

Ifa Hanifah Misbach, a former lecturer at a state university in Bandung in 2004, said there was a great deal of peer pressure from her colleagues for her to wear the hijab on campus, despite the absence of regulation to do so.

"I became a focal point of gossip among my colleagues. When my blazer was accidentally lifted once, it became widely talked about and I was getting dirty looks."

Misbach eventually resigned to apply for work at a private university.

HRW claimed that women who work in government departments and other state institutions continuously face pressure to wear the hijab, or risk not getting promoted or even face dismissal.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, Harsono said, the best way to move forward is for the education minister to issue a new regulation on school dress code and rescind its 2014 predecessor, in clear language which stresses the non-compulsory nature of hijab for Muslim students.

He added the new regulation must work in conjunction with the Ministry of Home Affairs nullifying the dozens of regional regulations that facilitate the practice of mandatory hijab at state institutions.

Widiastuti is among those awaiting action by the central government.

"I'm part of an embattled minority Muslim group who wishes to preserve their Javanese cultural heritage. It would be nice to know that our rights are protected."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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