RE-ORIENTING FEMALE SPIRITUAL POWER IN ISLAM Narrating conflict between warriors, witches and militias in Lombok

This article presents alternative understandings about female spiritual power in Indonesia that challenge pan-Islamic notions of male spiritual superiority. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Sasak Muslim women who claimed to strategically articulate their 'spiritual power' as members of militias engaged in intra-Muslim conflict in East Lombok. Women's assumed embodiment of spiritual power reveals a contradiction between patriarchal Islamic discourses and social praxis premised on a local understanding that female bodies endowed with spiritual power outperform men, who in Indonesia and the Malay world are generally perceived to be more potent than women in supernatural affairs. Women claimed to exercise their spiritual powers in militia combat amidst the disorder that shaped Indonesia in the aftermath of ex-president Suharto's downfall in 1998, which coincided with the rise to leadership of a Muslim woman in Lombok's largest local Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Wathan. The contested political situation erupted in militia violence and unearthed Sasak notions of female power, revealing a fluidity in the use of spiritual power that is reckoned bilaterally as opposed to the Islamic preference for male-based spiritual genealogies.