Jakarta (TIP): Ifa Hanifah Misbach was 19 when her father died – and her family told her he would not go to heaven because she refused to wear the hijab, a Muslim head covering. Misbach now works as a psychologist in Bandung, West Java, where she has counselled dozens of Indonesian girls who have been ostracised, bullied and threatened with explusion from school because they too declined to wear the veil. “The impact of religious pressures, especially to wear the jilbab, when you’re young, makes it feel like you have no breathing room,” Misbach said, using the word for hijab more commonly used in Indonesia, in a report by Human Rights Watch. “I wanted to run away.”

The 45-year-old’s experience is one of many shared by women and girls in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, including cases of girls being expelled from school. Indonesia’s ideology enshrines religious diversity and the country has significant Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and other minorities, but religious conservatism and growing intolerance of beliefs other than Islam has been rising over the past two decades. Reuters