Much of the scholarship on the Islamic reform movements of the past two decades acknowledges a unique feature of these movements: their youth. Around the world, what might appear to be a “return” to a traditional past has in fact been driven by urban, educated, middle-class young people seeking modern alternatives to Western and national hegemonies. Yet little of this scholarship analyzes the interesting fact that the life phase in which these young people are pursuing pious lifestyles intersects with the period in which they might be finding and marrying life partners. Nancy Smith-Hefner's new book Islamizing Intimacies does just this through a careful and longitudinally deep treatment of the romantic choices young men and women make in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. By putting heterosexual romance at the center of the analytic frame, Smith-Hefner productively decenters treatments of Islamic piety away from religiosity per se, and instead places piety in a complex of self-fashioning, including familial, economic, and demographic factors. In the process, she reminds us that although much of the expression of Islamic reform in contemporary Indonesia takes public, visible form, those forms can have very private effects. For a country in which over 40 percent of the population is under the age of twenty-four, this means that figuring out when, whom, and how to marry is perhaps the most important thing on their minds.

Romance is a fascinating subject through which to frame an analysis of Islamic piety because finding the perfect mate or jodoh has such a long history in Indonesia. A true jodoh is not simply a companionate partner, but someone who, like a perfect puzzle piece, completes the whole created from two people. From classical, mythical epics rooted in the star-crossed search for a destined partner, to the revolutionary literature of the early twentieth century in which the dream of national independence was evoked through the metaphor of a modern couple rejecting an arranged marriage, romance has never been a simply personal affair.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, is also an ideal site for this research. The city is a center for coeducational post-secondary education, with one of the top ranked state universities and a number of Islamic universities. It is therefore a destination for students from across the country who may be living away from family for the first time. Separately, it has been a site for the intensification of Islamic reform movements, including the nationally known Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah organizations, but perhaps more importantly, a host of prominent student-led organizations across these campuses. Yogyakarta's national reputation as a seat of Javanese tradition is now rivaled by its reputation as a seat of Islamic conservatism, in part because of the influence of these campus religious organizations. Smith-Hefner shows that these organizations have become the prominent community and authority for romantic and marriage decisions. Indeed, their religious leaders now perform much the same role that prior historical social forms once did in matchmaking. Further, they have blurred the older distinction between abangan and santri that Clifford Geertz emphasized in The Religion of Java.Footnote ¹

The young people Smith-Hefner came to know over the past decade were crafting, and worrying about, their life courses from a rich array of familial, national, and global models. These models offered occasionally conflicting guidance on how to find one's jodoh. Although all of them endorsed the virtue of marrying freely and without constraints, they also limited the ways through which young people might come to know each other. For example, one might imagine that socializing on and off campus would provide opportunities for young people to get to know each other, yet, as Smith-Hefner shows, the more scripturally inclined students surveilled each other and insisted that “dating is not allowed in Islam.” Many of these same students believed mass-mediated anxieties that Indonesian young people were much more sexually active than their parents’ generation and were engaging in sex with multiple partners. They have driven sales of books on how to safely date, or “gaul yang berprinsip” (principled interaction), in Yogyakarta.

The variety of forms of authority on principled dating has, Smith-Hefner argues, led to two distinct demographic outcomes. Some young, more scripturally oriented students have chosen to marry younger than their own parents did or would want for them, because when they are attracted to a suitable partner yet cannot indulge in activities where they might be tempted to become intimate, they feel they must marry. By contrast, others feel the need to wait until they have aligned all the necessary factors to establish a new household, including completing their education (even graduate school), finding employment, and identifying the ideal (sensitive, pious but not religiously “fanatic”) partner. Each of these approaches can have serious implications. The former can result in unhappy or even failed marriages (although that is neither inevitable nor the focus of Smith-Hefner's book). The latter can result in indefinite delays in marriage, with some of Smith-Hefner's informants remaining unmarried in their early thirties, an age that is considered risky for women's fertility and generally worrisome. Men and women alike can therefore find it most efficient and calming to ask a trusted religious figure to identify a suitable candidate, so as to avoid both sin and the anxiety of socializing with the opposite sex. They describe “dating” after marriage as less stressful and, importantly, more romantic.

Smith-Hefner admirably treats gender as a central feature of these changes. After all, the national heroine Indonesian women are invited to admire is Raden Adjeng Kartini, whose official biography focuses on her fervent but failed twinned desires for education and for the right to choose her own marriage partner. Smith-Hefner identifies the bilateral, hierarchical (noble), and Suharto-era currents of gendered shifts for young people, which have had different visions for female citizenship, ranging from financial autonomy to housewifery. As she argues, gender is an experiential and analytic mode through which previously “inarticulate social models and yearning may be scaled up into full-blown alternatives to dominant social forms” (p. 94), particularly when considered over the life course. These alternatives have created Islamic forms of intimacy that are attentive to a new generation's desire for individual freedoms and socially sanctioned conduct, in equal measure.