RECONFIGURING ‘PRINT ISLAM’: The Biographies of Women’s Mushaf in Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines the changing material forms of the Qur’anic mushaf and their significance for reconfiguring ‘print Islam’ in contemporary Indonesia. Scholarship on Indonesian Islamic print culture has largely followed two trajectories: ideological contestation and the formation of Muslim publics, and the expansion of Islamic publishing through commodification, market differentiation, and middle-class religious aspirations. The proliferation of differentiated mushaf suggests a further development, as Qur’anic publications are increasingly produced for particular readers, practices, and aspirations, including recitation, memorisation, mobility, and gender. Drawing on publishing catalogues from Cordoba, Syaamil, Jabal and Alfatih, alongside interviews with Muslim women who own mushaf for women, this article examines women’s mushaf as a significant manifestation of this development, particularly through their gendered aesthetics, female exemplars, thematic guidance, pedagogical features, and portable formats. Drawing on Igor Kopytoff’s concept of the “cultural biography of things,” we argue that the proliferation of differentiated mushaf reconfigures ‘print Islam’ by revealing market differentiation and singularisation as interconnected processes. Although produced and circulated as commodities for segmented religious markets, individual mushaf acquire distinctive biographies and forms of value through acquisition, gifting, handling, annotation, repeated use, and personal attachment. This perspective shifts attention from print as a medium for circulating religious ideas, forming publics, and addressing differentiated markets to the social lives of printed religious objects as they become particular and meaningful things within everyday religious practice.