The Muslim woman in Indonesian cinema and the face veil as ‘other'

The aftermath of 9/11 saw the production of images in the Western media that suggested the link between Islam and the oppression of Muslim women. In response to the often vilifying Western discourse about Islam and Muslim women is the emergence of films by Indonesian filmmakers intent on representing a more peaceful and tolerant image of the faith. These films now belong to a recently identified genre of ‘Islamic cinema'. Representations of ‘strong', career-minded, highly educated, and vocal veiled Muslim women in Indonesian cinema came to counter the silent and passive veiled woman circulating in Western mass media. While these representations have been mostly unproblematic and often championed as ‘positive’, the face veil or cadar is contentious. In the 2011 film Khalifah by Indonesian filmmaker Nurman Hakim, the cadar is a visible marker of otherness, a political, cultural and national problem to be solved. This article discusses the ways in which the veiled body in Indonesian cinema has become inscribed with many meanings and argues that varieties of the veil are used to distinguish between Indonesian identity and the Other.