The only positive I can offer for Suharto was that he kept a thumb on the radicals. The hijab came after his fall primarily when the radicals claimed their power.
He repressed everybody, not just the radicals. Newspapers and magazines that pursued corruption cases got their publishing license revoked. He engineered the ouster by force of Megawati from the PDI, which is why she established PDI Perjuangan, the largest political party in Indonesia today. In the final years of his reign political activists began to disappear, never to be found alive anymore.
Suharto forced his brand of Pancasila and secularism to everybody, yet at the same time emphasized that being an atheist was tantamount to being a communist, which made you eligible to legal excommunication or worse. This was the guy who engineered the killing of between 400,000 to 2 million suspected communists after 1965, with help from religious organizations. People had to show that they had a religion, or else. This mindset persists in Indonesia today.
So, on one hand wearing a hijab to your government office job was an overt act of defiance, but on the other hand not having a religion made you ineligible for government job to begin with. Even today the second requirement for all government jobs is profession of faith to one God (the first being Indonesian citizenship).
It might be difficult to fathom to outsiders, but the jilbab is seen by many as a symbol of freedom of faith and morality, at odds with Suharto’s secular corruption. There is no debate that Suharto’s government was highly corrupt, thus secularism in Indonesia is forever tainted by it.
In late 90s Suharto began moving closer to religion and promoting his brand of it, hoping to secure lasting support from religious groups for his dynasty as he (correctly) predicted the rise of the nationalists, marching behind Megawati. He was looking for a deal similar to the one made by the Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia. Give him and his family unconditional support, and in exchange he’ll let the hardliners define society as they wish and keep Sukarno followers at bay. Read up on Habibie’s ICMI.
There are so many twists and turns in Indonesian history worthy of Game of Thrones. To hear a simplistic claim on the rise of the jilbab in Indonesia is comical.
My question still stands. Are the hijab wearing women of today stronger in their faith than the women of the days where hardly anyone wore a hijab.
I’m not a woman, so I’m not in the best position to answer it. However, if I were to hazard a guess the answer is yes, but not by much and not universally. It doesn’t turn one into a hardliner. As a matter of fact it can give one a measure of safety to speak
against hardliners. If two women with jilbabs have a disagreement, then it’s just opposing opinions. If one of them doesn’t wear a jilbab, then there’s an automatic suspicion that the jilbabless lady is against Islam.
What about the Muslim women at the turn of the 20th century and before that basically found no embarrassment from being topless? Are the hijab wearing women of today stronger in their faith than those topless women?
You will find that the topless women and the hijabed women belong to two different groups, by ethnicity and religion.