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Most literary analysis of the canon of Indonesian literature overlooks its religious aspect. This book is the first to discuss the construction of gender and Islamic identities in literary writing by four prominent Indonesian Muslim women writers: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy and Helvy Tiana Rosa. The narratives of the four writers are rich sources for revealing the construction of Indonesian Muslim women's identities. Within their feminist reading the writers understand that gender roles are negotiable rather than inherent. In representing women in a variety of discourses they draw multi-faceted women struggling against repression and domination, and resisting their status as powerless. Dit is het eerste boek waarin de verhouding tussen geslacht en islamitische identiteit in de Indonesische literatuur wordt onderzocht. Diah Ariani Arimbi doet dit aan de hand van vier schrijfsters: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy en Helvy Tiana Rosa. Het verhaal van deze vier vrouwen onthult de ware identiteit van Indonesische moslima's. Vanuit hun feministisch standpunt laten deze schrijfsters zien dat verhoudingen tussen man en vrouw niet statisch zijn, maar veranderlijk en onderhandelbaar. Arimbi schetst een innemend beeld van deze veelzijdige vrouwen en hun strijd tegen onderdrukking en discriminatie. Zij blijken allesbehalve weerloze zielen te zijn.

In any discussi on of the body of material known as 'Model1ll Indonesian literature' the student is at once confronted with a. paradox. We cannot speak of an Indonesian literature in the same sense that we can s peak of an 'Engli2h li teratura ( or a 'French li.t erature ' , that is of the maiR body of literary works produced within a welldefined lingui2tic area by a r.peech comrrru:111i t y sharing a common cultural traditioD over an extend ed period of time .The term 'Indon sia' afil applied to the form er Dutch empire i:ri. A2ia iii a neologism which do ~ not designat e al'1y core traditioa. The political entity now called Indonesia comprises a great v~iety of ethnic groups, each with its own language and traditional literature and its own social and the economic organisation. Certainly the languages , ~u~a - most par~ uni telligible, may have had a common now for linguistic ancestor and common cultural factors such as Hindu and Islamic influences can be found to a great er or lesser extent in all the communities of the Archip elago , but none of these influences was strong enough to influence them to unity. The greatest single unifying factor was the common experience of Dutch colonial rule. The group of people o constitute the present day Republic of I ndone sia inhabit t e territories formerly known as the Netherlands East Indies. Regarding the importance of the colonial past, Dr. A. L. Kumar writes: \"The younger generation in the different regional societies- Javanese, Acehnese, Balinese or Minangkabau as the case may be, now had a basis of common experience in the fact of Dutch rule, and by the 1920s the new idea of a united ' Indonesia ' descended from the Netherlands East Indies, had come into existence.\" ( 1)Like the political cencept of Indonesia, the modern literature to which the adjective 'Indonesian' is usually applied is a product of the twentieth century; both had their origins in the ferment of new ideas circulating in the Indies in the 1900s during the period of Dutch administration characterised by what is usually called 'the ethical policy'.The language Bahasa Indonesia likewise attained its present form only in the twentieth century. It is a development of Malayi resulting from the need to provide the many linguistic groups within the colonial population with a meats of communication and self expression which ould eventually prove to be a viable alternative to Dutch. The famous 'Oath Of The Youth' proclaimed in 1938 at the second .All Indonesia Youth Congress, which acknowledged one homeland, one nation and one language - Bahasia Indonesia, (the Bahasa Persatuan or language of unity . ) was in fact a formal recognition of a process which had been going on since the begin ing of the century. Malay was a natural choice as a basis for the ne n~t~onal language as it had been widely spo en among th people of the Archipelago since the fifteenth century, when the Malay speaking kingdom of Malacca was the principal trading power in the region, and perhaps earlier in the days of the Sumatran kingdom of Srivijaya whi ch domi na e the Straits of Malacca in the tenth to the twelfth century.