Julia Suryakusuma
*) The writer is the author of Julia’s Jihad.

YOU can’t put a good woman down, let alone a whole community of women! And you can’t put them down even if they’re the women of “Al-Firdaus” (Paradise), the pseudonym I‘ll use for a well-known radical pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Central Java.

Al-Firdaus is known for its hard-line “fundamentalist” stance, which means the notion of gender-equality is a