Gender Equality Rights Discourse in Indonesia: Muhammadiyah Reading Models

Renewal in the Muslim world, still leaves problems in gender relations. Not a few, some reforms have actually reduced the role of women only in the domestic sphere. This research looks at the model of reading gender discourse in Muhammadiyah, which is known as a reformed organization in Indonesia. This study uses discourse analysis to reconstruct the gender discourse in Muhammadiyah, which is developed in varied forms of decisions, policies and ijtihad method. From this study it was found that Muhammadiyah was very appreciative of gender equality rights. Muhammadiyah has a progressive-critical reading on gender relation such as: 1) emphasizing al-ijtihad as a way to parse the problem, not leaving the problem to the results of past al-ijtihad of classical Muslim scholars; 2) not accepting the dalil da'eef (weak proposition) to be practiced, which in general is considered to be very misogynous; 3) not stop at the textual domain, but the interconnection between text and context.