sharia-based laws 155
such as that of the local administration and the Regional House of
Representatives, and in police stations and the public hospital, the
regulation is widely accepted. Of the 14 female officials of the regional
administration I interviewed, only four did not agree with the regulation.
At the hospital the four senior staff members I talked to all agreed with
the jilbab policy. According to one of them all Muslim female employees,
including nurses and doctors, wear a jilbab.³⁷ At the police station it was
the same, but with one important difference. All female civil servants
who worked there wore a jilbab, but the majority of female police officers
did not. They are employed by the national police, not by the Cianjur
administration and said they were therefore not bound by Cianjur’s local
regulations. Public servants treated all women coming to their office
equally, whether they wore a headdress or not, but women who did not
cover their heads were reminded of the Gerbang Marhamah programme
and asked to wear a jilbab on a next visit.
The religious court is another state institution in Cianjur where the
female staff have to wear a jilbab. They treat female litigants coming to
court without one well, but often recommend wearing a jilbab upon
their next attendance.³⁸ Only a few judges appear to be aware of the
regulation. One reason could be that many of them come from outside
Cianjur. Judges are selected and are consequently placed at courts where
there is a vacancy and are often transferred from one court to another.³⁹
That said, all female judges wear a headdress.
5 The Relevance of Sharia-Based Laws in Indonesia to
International Treaties: Some Voices and a Critical Analysis
In this section the Kompilasi and the local Sharia-based regulations will
be analysed from two perspectives. The first takes into account a number
of international covenants that Indonesia has ratified: the Convention on
the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (cedaw),
Interview with dk, the head of the Department of Information and Public
Relations Department of the public hospital of Cianjur, Cianjur, 17 December
2011.
This differs from the court of Ciamis which, according to one of my correspon-
dents, has spare jilbabs in the office for female litigants who arrive at hearings
without one.
See Euis Nurlaelawati,Modernization, Tradition and Identity: The Kompilasi
Hukum Islam and Legal Practices of the Indonesian Religious Courts(Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010).