Girls and Pesantren Education

In Indonesia, the pesantren as an Islamic educational institution has been commonly understood to produce an output of religiously devoted persons, the graduates being known as an ulama or a kiai. A number of ulamas or religious figures come from a pesantren background, from the national down to the village level. They are primarily male figures. Each of them is accorded a strong sense of [public] religious power and authority. But considering the large number of female pupils in pesantren, one question that might arise is whether they too would be expected to be future ulamas for their society, just like their male counterparts? What does society or parents expect when they send their daughter to a pesantren? Does a pesantren education for girls have a different emphasis from that of a pesantren education for boys, or do the aims of pesantren education manifest themselves in both male and female experiences?

In a discussion entitled “Perempuan Multikultural: Resistensi terhadap Konstruksi Agama dan Budaya” (Multicultural Women: Toward the Resistance of the Religious and Cultural Construction) held at the Faculty of Cultural Science, University of Indonesia, Jakarta, one of the speakers said the experience of women in a pesantren cannot be empowering for them. For him, the pesantren is an institution resembling a harem in the Middle East, as it domesticates its women. The segregated system of pesantren that separates male and female pupils can be understood as similar to a harem in that it limits women's mobility in their own quarters. However, a pesantren is certainly not similar to a harem as it is a public educational institution. The life of women within a pesantren were quite different as in the case of several nyai mentioned in the previous chapter; their private and public lives overlapped and are ambiguous. Although it is segregated, a pesantren as an educational institution is still part of the public domain, not a private environment like a harem. Through several conversations with pesantren staff during the fieldwork, they stat that the reason for the physical segregation in a pesantren was not for restricting the physical mobility of women in a male public space, it was more in order to maintain chastity and ‘moral’ development; the very principles that a pesantren education tried to preserve and are embedded within it.