Islamic prayer groups in Indonesia: Local forums and gendered responses

Islamic renewal in Southeast Asia has invited scholars to examine forums in which Muslims express devotion, including prayer groups known as pengajian in Indonesia. Because Indonesian women rarely lecture publically and often comprise the audiences of pengajian, it is assumed that these forums serve the state-sponsored project of domestication of married women into housewives. Based on fieldwork in central Java in the 1980s, this essay cites several urban women's reading group practices, especially their vernacular commentary on Qur'anic verse, as examples of 'resistant reading' and an ethnographic critique of these claims.