“For jannah, she created jahanam”: female piety and the gothic grammar of religious violence in Malam Seribu Jahanam

Abstract

Purpose

This article examines how Malam Seribu Jahanam (2023) transforms female piety and purity politics into a symbolic grammar of religious violence. This study focuses on Annisa, a pious daughter, bride, and suicide bomber, to show how Jannah, shame, bodily purity, and feminine virtue are narratively reorganized into a gothic structure of sacred harm.

Design/methodology/approach

This research employs qualitative literary analysis through close reading. This analysis is guided by three interrelated concepts: gendered pious femininity, aestheticized purity/purity politics, and eschatological religious violence. Primary data are drawn from novel’s key narrative nodes, including Annisa’s bombing, Hajjah Victoria’s prophecy, bridal imagery, wudu, Ramadan, whiteness, jasmine, fragrance, and Jannah/Jahanam reversal. Secondary sources include studies on women and terrorism, Indonesian Muslim piety, gendered agency, and contemporary Indonesian gothic fiction.

Findings

This article finds that Annisa’s “soleha” femininity functions as moral legibility: it makes her body trusted before it becomes violent. Purity signs such as wudu, whiteness, jasmine, and heavenly fragrance aestheticize religious virtue, yet novel contaminates them with blood, burial, shame, and ruin. Jannah becomes a compensatory horizon that legitimizes destruction, while Jahanamnames social catastrophe left for the living.

Originality/value

This article contributes to Indonesian literary studies by linking gendered piety, purity politics, and women’s religious violence within a single gothic reading. It argues that Intan Paramaditha’s novel does not merely represent terrorism; it exposes how sacred beauty can become ethically dangerous when severed from accountability to embodied others.