How Arab nationalism and Islamic reformist movements erased women's reproductive authority in Tuareg (Berber) and Minangkabau societies

Abstract

While scholarship on Islamic reformist movements-such as the Sanusi among the Tuareg and the Padri among the Minangkabau-has long emphasized their role in consolidating orthodox religious authority and purifying local Islamic practices, comparatively little attention has been paid to how these reforms systematically devalued and erased forms of reproductive labor that were historically central to Muslim women's social, economic, and spiritual authority. Existing studies have primarily framed these movements as doctrinal or political responses to colonial encroachment and local heterodoxy, yet they often neglect the ways in which the daily, embodied labors of women-in kinship, birth, ritual, and transmission of indigenous Islamic knowledge-constituted a foundational, self-evident architecture of community life that posed an implicit challenge to patriarchal religious hierarchies. This paper argues that the imposition of reformist orthodoxy in both the Tuareg and the Minangkabau contexts cannot be disentangled from a broader project of Arab nationalist and patriarchal consolidation, which actively obliterated the sacred economies of reproductive labor as sites of indigenous women's epistemic agency. By tracing how the Sanusi and Padri movements reframed local gender norms under the banner of a purified Islam, this study demonstrates that what has been upheld as 'authentic'Islam is historically a patriarchal reinterpretation-one that privileges male authority and marginalizes women's central roles in sustaining Islamic ummah through their reproductive labor. Grounded in existing anthropological and historical scholarship and framed through decolonial and Islamic feminist theory, this paper contributes to scholarship on Islamic reform by demonstrating how patriarchal movements such as the Sanusi and the Padri obliterated forms of reproductive authority that sustained Muslim women's cultural and spiritual labor. As such, this research highlights that such erasure was not incidental but integral to the imposition of patrilineal nasab over matrilineal or matrifocal/matriarchal systems that had long defined Tuareg and Minangkabau social structures. By tracing how the ideological labor of reformist orthodoxy concealed and devalued these indigenous forms of reproductive authority, this study exposes the historical contingency of 'orthodoxy' itself. Rather than accepting Islam as a static, patrilineal inheritance, this paper situates it as a contested terrain where the suppression of matrilineal inheritance must be recognized as a deliberate strategy to consolidate patriarchal religious and genealogical power.