Sakdiyah Ma'ruf
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Sakdiyah Ma'ruf | |
|---|---|
 Ma'ruf in 2015 | |
| Education | Gadjah Mada University |
| Occupations | Comedian, translator, interpreter |
Sakdiyah Ma'ruf is an Indonesian stand-up comedian. She is known for addressing Islamic extremism in Indonesia within her comedic routines.
She was born into a family of Hadrami-Arabic descent in Pekalongan, Central Java.[1] She has described the community in which she was raised as being preoccupied with its Arab identity and with the notion that it has a better sense of what “the truest and purest Islamic teachings” are than other communities in Indonesia.[2]
Her parents, she has stated, were “very conservative” in most ways during her childhood, pressuring her “to marry one of her distant cousins,” as her mother had done.[1] She told The Huffington Post, she was raised “with the default expectation that I would grow up into a decent, Muslim girl who will continue preserving her religious and ethnic identity by carefully grooming herself through childhood and adolescence to earn the love of a rich and respected man from the community.” But, she has said, she “grew up resenting marriage and told my mom that I didn’t want to ever get married. I said this all while still in high school.”[1]
Despite their conservatism, however, Ma'ruf's parents allowed her to be “exposed to all Western pop culture, from Full House, Roseanne to MTV.”[1] In fact she “taught herself English by watching sitcoms like The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Seinfeld and Full House, all of which featured subtitles in Indonesian.”[3] From the time she was in grade school, she has said, she enjoyed “U.S. sitcoms and comedy features.”[2] Around the time she was in middle school, “she discovered that the stars of her favorite shows were actually stand-up comics. Her path became clear.”[3] When, in 2009, she watched a DVD of Robin Williams' Live on Broadway several times, she was set on pursuing comedy. She began doing stand-up, which, she says, “teaches me to be completely honest with myself, my experience and my flaws.” She began with “mild” material “about myself being an old-maid in the eyes of Arab descent community.” In time she began addressing issues within Islam such as violence.[2]
Ma'ruf received a bachelor's degree in English from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta in 2009. Her dissertation was about stand-up comedy. As of November 2014, she was completing her master's degree at UGM. “I am the only girl from my Islamic elementary school that has been given the chance to earn a Master’s degree,” she said.[1]