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WEARING A RED hijab and all-encompassing gown, Sakdiyah Maruf cuts an unusual figure in a dark, smokey Jakarta bar as she reels off taboo-breaking jokes to laughter from a rapt audience.
She is a rare character in Indonesia – a female Muslim stand-up using humour to challenge prejudice against women and rising religious intolerance.
Despite resistance from those who believe a woman’s place is not on stage cracking jokes, even within her own family, the 34-year-old has forged ahead and is winning fans at home and abroad.
In the country with the world’s biggest Muslim population, she does not shy away from sensitive subjects. Her jokes touch on topics ranging from Jakarta’s recent religiously-charged election – which saw the Christian incumbent ousted by a Muslim – to sex and alcohol.
“Hijab, niqab, burqa – it saves you from a bad hair day,” she said to laughter from the crowd in the Indonesian capital, a typical gag that gently pokes fun at her own religious customs.
Maruf jokes about how women were not allowed to attend public events in the small, conservative community on Java island where she grew up, and that she is seeking to be more progressive by trying “to have sex even though I am married”.
For the slight, unassuming lady, comedy is a playful form of resistance to a creeping conservatism she believes is eroding the rights of women in her homeland.
Indonesia has long been praised for its inclusive brand of Islam but this reputation has been tarnished by a rise in attacks on minorities and the growing influence of a vocal hardline fringe.
The comedian sees an alarming trend of “more rigid and conservative practices of religion” which she believes tend to marginalise women, and is particularly concerned about issues including early marriage and domestic violence.
For Maruf, humour is the perfect weapon to tackle such trends.
“The message can be very aggressive but it can be delivered in a very subtle way,” she told AFP. “You speak to people’s hearts instead of only their minds.”
‘Are you for real?’
Maruf comes from a traditional family in the provincial Javanese town of Pekalongan, an unlikely background for a witty, word-wise stand-up.
She became interested in comedy at an early age by watching US sitcoms such as Roseanne and Full House, a love that she carried with her to university, where she started performing stand-up in 2009.
Depending on the audience she will either perform in English – which she studied at university – or the main Indonesian language of Bahasa.
Sakdiyah Maruf still has a day job working as an interpreter at conferences, but regularly performs in comedy clubs and nights in Jakarta, where she lives.
In the early days, the comic would lie to her parents when she performed at university or headed into Jakarta for shows, believing they would disapprove, but as she became successful it was far harder to conceal the truth.
She says she has managed to reach a kind of uneasy truce with her family.
“We have disagreements sometimes, but they are cool with it,” she explained.
But the greatest resistance has come from conservatives who don’t think Muslim women should be comedians at all.
“One woman came up to me after a show and said ‘are you for real, are you wearing this hijab for real?’,” she recalled.
Still, Maruf has not been put off and her irreverent brand of humour has won her fans outside Indonesia.
In 2015 she was awarded the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent established by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and last year took part in a BBC-run global stand-up jam.
Her humour seems more relevant than ever as concerns escalate about declining religious freedoms in Indonesia after the jailing this month of Jakarta’s Christian governor for blasphemy, a verdict that sparked criticism inside the country and abroad.
But Maruf remains confident that Indonesia will remain a tolerant country — not least because a devout Muslim woman like herself can still get up on stage and crack jokes.
She said: “If you can write ‘Indonesian conservative Muslim female stand-up’ in one sentence, why be so pessimistic?”
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Good on her. More like her please.
@Matty Kineven: Middle East tour in 2018.
@Martin Flood: If only we were there yet. If only this woman could travel around the middle east and do what she loves without fear of being murdered in the streets if she mocks her religion. This lady is precisely the kind of person that we want empowered in the middle east.
@Matty Kineven: I agree with you. But we all know there will be a follow up story in a few weeks that’s she’s been hacked to death in the name of Allah by a mob. It’s tragic.
@Northern Craic: Agreed. I thought that also. I hope we’re wrong.
I’m actually just soooo bord with Muslims at this stage …zzzzzzz
A Muslim women who makes jokes at her own religions expense, groundbreaking. Something most of us in the west do on a daily basis but because she’s Muslim it’s deemed something out of the ordinary. Woop-di-doo.
@Anna Bee: Don’t be so incredibly ignorant. Given her surroundings and culture, she is actually putting her life at risk. She’s got more guts than you’ll ever have. Woop di doo indeed. Go Google Qandeel Baloch and see what can happen to young ladies who deviate from the norms in these societies.
@Matty Kineven: That’s exactly the problem Matty, even moderate Muslims in these place are willing to murder her because she pokes fun at their religion. In the west religion isn’t so enshrined in our identity that we’re willing to kill for it. It isn’t ignorance to point out the facts. A few years ago someone burned a Koran there was uproar across the world from Muslims, a Muslim burns 22 people at a concert and the rest of Muslims remain silent, says everything really doesn’t it.
@Anna Bee: I totally agree. My apologies, I thought I detected a different tone in your comment than the one you obviously intended.
@Anna Bee: silent? They warned the authorities up to 5 times before the atrocity
@Red Marauder: Link red?
@Anna Bee: they are not silent, and this time again they were not. It is just that it is NOT reported on the mainstream medias.
@Anna Bee: we just bury babies in septic tanks, rape kids in schools and deny women the right to choose whether or not they want to keep a child… ya that’s much better. As for your point about Muslims remaining silent, do you know many Muslims? A lot of them may not have heard about Manchester, there was a bombing in Libya last week too, 20 plus school kids died on a bus… where was the uproar from the west?
@Anna Bee: There have been marches by Muslims in solidarity with the victims of the Manchester bombing.
Your comment that “the rest of Muslims remain silent” is just you ignoring reality to justify your own hatred.
An old Muslim schoolfriend of mine in the UK has a different complaint. He says that there is more effort put into the marches shouting “death to the UK” than there would be expressing outrage over the bombing in Manchester. They will turn out to march to decry the society rather than show any sympathy for victims. It comes from the top down. Imams and seniors will put quiet pressure on to remain silent and stay low. As someone else said, if you want real outrage from the Muslim community burn a Koran and they will hit the streets en masse. As he’s continuously reminding me that the distance between what people see as moderate Muslims and that of fundamentalists can be about the same as the thickness of a rizla paper. It’s a problem for them to sort out and no one else.
Great to see. The empowerment and emancipation of women is the cornerstone of a better society.
THIS IS WHAT WE NEED. SJW have nearly made jokes illegal at this stage.
@Heroin Chic: irony overload
@Deborah Behan: not at all.
How do every Islamic joke start? By looking over your shoulder..
Be honest.. Does my bomb look big in this?
Why the scarf is it raining ?
@Mike Cantwell: She probably doesn’t want to be spat at or have someone throw battery acid in her face.
@Mike Cantwell: you wear a scarf when it rains?
@Mike Cantwell: women in the Middle East put on these cloaks because they were being raped and it was a defence against it. Unfortunately it became a symbol if a woman didn’t wear it she was up for anything. F’ed up of what?
@Deborah Behan: Actually Deborah it’s worse than that. In many cases women are forced to wear them under threat of violence, either by their family or by their community. The reason for this is because the men see the women as their property and they don’t want THEIR woman to be raped or even looked it. Some women who wear them by choice have been brainwashed into thinking they should wear them, it’s hideous. It’s a custom that predates Islam but unfortunately was picked up by Islam and continues to this day.
Ayan Hirsi Ali exposes the ugly face of Islam so has a fatwa on her head. She had to flee to USA after the murder of Theo Van Gogh (holland) for producing this video. He had his throat slit on the streets of Amsterdam and got a bullet to the head:
https://youtu.be/aGtQvGGY4S4
@gregory: it don’t see the relationship between this and the article
@Red Marauder: Female Muslim, risking the potentially lethal wrath of her coreligionists. Not that difficult to see, Red.
They would want to be searching all the bags going in to one of her shoes,
Sounds good I’d like to see her show .
Bonny Fearnon
Bommy Fearnon
@Mondoburley: Got there…
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