INDONESIA: Following in Her Father's Footsteps - Her Way

When Yenny Wahid became an assistant to her father, the former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, a decade ago, officials asked her to sit separately from him at public events. She was a woman, and sitting next to a man - especially the president - was seen as taboo in the socially conservative country, home of the world's largest Muslim population.

But Yenny Wahid always got her way. Using typical Javanese politeness and displaying calm confidence, she would say her presence was necessary as her nearly blind, stroke-afflicted father needed his medication. ''My goal was for them to get used to my presence,'' she says. ''Now, I can sit wherever I want.''

The 35-year-old is sitting in an office of Jakarta's Paramadina University, before attending several other appointments and public speaking engagements. But this six-months-pregnant woman, seen in Indonesia as a major emerging political force, has no plans to reduce her busy schedule.

Wahid is a campaigner with AKKBB, the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Faith, which campaigns to uphold secular law.

She is also director of the Wahid Institute, founded six years ago to promote moderate Islam. With sharia being partially implemented in Aceh province, many moderate groups hold fears that rules they see as backward - such as punishing unmarried women for venturing outside alone or with unrelated men - might spread across Indonesia. And with radical views often providing radio and television sound bites, Wahid says the struggle against rising conservatism is the key to preserving peaceful co-existence.

''The radicals have a way of framing issues in black-and-white terms to get people to agree with what they are doing,'' she says.

Recently, when her alliance campaigned against the proposed anti-pornography law - which, they argued, criminalised a West Javan traditional dance and the wearing of West Papua's penis gourds - radical groups publicly stated that this meant the alliance supported pornography.

''It's like the US prohibition movement, [which] tried to blackmail politicians into agreeing with their ban on alcohol by saying, 'If you don't support it, you're not a good Christian','' Wahid says. ''We say this is not what Islam is about. We are calling for the reinterpretation of the Koran according to the modern times.''

She says Indonesia's current government is particularly sensitive to pressure that often comes from small but noisy radical groups in the country, where religion plays a key role in the political arena. ''The national leadership is rather insecure about their standing when it comes to being a Muslim,'' Wahid says. ''We have to make sure the political spectrum is not changed so much and the radicals are not accommodated so much.''

Yenny Wahid was born Zannuba Ariffah Chafsoh Rahman Wahid, the second of the late president Wahid's four daughters. She and her sisters were raised to be strong, independent women. When she was 23, she worked as a researcher for Fairfax during the East Timor conflict and won journalism's highest award, the Walkley, together with Age and Sydney Morning Herald journalists. She resigned when her father was elected in 1999 and, following his impeachment for alleged corruption, she completed a master's degree in public administration at Harvard in 2002.

In a country where another former president's daughter - Megawati Sukarnoputri - became president herself, it is easy to see why the charming and fiercely intelligent Wahid is often asked whether she will follow in her father's footsteps.

''I don't have the power he [president Wahid] had,'' she says. ''I'm a woman. It's a limitation … Besides, I'm on sabbatical now, I just got married recently [to lawmaker Dhohir Farisi from the Great Indonesia Movement Party].''

The Islam Yenny Wahid grew up with is of the inclusive, liberal kind, promoted in the world's largest Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama, founded by her great-grandfather Hasyim Asyari in 1926. The group, which now has 40 million members, was formed in opposition to the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia, which tried to ban influences on Indonesian Islamic practices by Hinduism and other ancient faiths.

As debates are held across Indonesia this year on the merits of sharia, Wahid points out that in 1945, when Indonesia's founding fathers were writing the constitution, her grandfather, Wahid Hasyim, the country's first religion minister, rejected a clause insisting on sharia. He had argued that it would alienate the country's many ethnic and religious groups, which would seek independence and destabilise the country.

But Wahid fears the spread of sharia beyond Aceh's borders ''is always a possibility'' as even secular politicians sometimes support sharia in order to get the backing of radical Muslims. The radical influence is cultivated in part through some ''pesantren'', a network of Islamic boarding schools across Indonesia, many of which, Wahid says, use a religious curriculum written hundreds of years ago.

Wahid works alongside her mother, Sinta Nuriyah Wahid, a women's rights and moderate Islam activist paralysed from the waist down after a car accident in 1993, who uses her status as former first lady to introduce more modern teachings to pesantren clerics. ''The main thing for us is they open the door for debates to happen. If there is an open door, there is a chance for us,'' Yenny Wahid says.

Groups linked to religions other than Islam have joined the AKKBB alliance. The alliance promotes religious tolerance through the Riyanto scholarship, named after a young Nahdlatul Ulama member who died as the result of a terrorist bombing while he guarded a church on Christmas Eve 2000 during a radical campaign of burning churches.

Asked if she can quantify her popularity in Indonesia, the young woman who attracts crowds greater than 10,000 people when her alliance leads demonstrations and peace marches, is coy.

''I don't have any followers myself. I have Twitter followers!'' she laughs.

But, she says, she has recently noticed a change in Indonesian society from the days when she was asked to sit separately from her father at public events. ''When I give speeches to the grassroots, teenagers kiss my hand - and more and more young men are doing it. I thought, 'This is really surprising'. Maybe there is hope.''