The Hijab Issue Is Finally Settled

At last, the hijab dispute has been put into writing. After days of moving from campus to ministry offices, press releases and social media, the issue found what the columnist calls its proper destination: a formal rule.

The controversy emerged after Asma Wafa Ahdinayang resigned as a student of Indonesia’s Defense University over a hijab dispute. She viewed her decision as part of an effort to uphold her religious teachings. In response to public demands, the university rector issued a circular stating clearly that Muslim female cadets in undergraduate and diploma programmes may wear the hijab during all educational and training activities.

That wording matters. The university moved from the passive phrase “there is no prohibition” to the explicit statement that hijabs are “permitted.” In bureaucratic practice, the columnist argues, the difference is not minor. A written legal document binds institutions and gives every level of the administrative hierarchy a shared operational guide, while personal interpretations can produce confusion.

The episode also prompts a larger question about public governance: why does a country with such a long democratic process still repeatedly spend national energy resolving administrative disputes over the hijab?

The columnist recalls a 1982 national school-uniform guideline. Although it did not explicitly say that the hijab was banned, public-school authorities interpreted the absence of a clear provision as a basis for prohibiting Muslim girls from wearing one. The dispute lasted almost a decade, bringing protests and forcing some students to choose between access to education and their religious convictions. In 1991, the government issued a new regulation explicitly allowing Muslim students to wear the hijab in public schools. More than four decades after the 1982 guideline, the same policy tension has resurfaced in a different educational institution.