Indonesia: The battle over Islam
Margaret Scott's book review in The New York Review of Books sets out the features of this ideological battleground, headlined Indonesia: The Battle Over Islam. The three books reviewed are:
Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present by M.C. Ricklefs, University of Hawai‘i Press.
Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values by Carool Kersten, Oxford University Press.
Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance Without Liberalism by Jeremy Menchik, Cambridge University Press.
Scott begins her review with these paragraphs:
The
Islamic State’s butchery and takeover of territory in Iraq and Syria
dominate the headlines, but a much less violent yet little-known
conflict exists in Indonesia, where more Muslims live than in all of the
Middle East. It is a battle to define Islam in Indonesia and it matters
because it is taking place in one of the few democracies with a Muslim
majority. There are more Muslims in Indonesia who can be loosely called
progressives than there are anywhere else, but they are in constant
struggle with conservative Muslims. This is a political fight as much as
it is a religious one.
Since 1998, when the dictatorial
president Suharto was forced to resign, Indonesians have been fashioning
an active but flawed democracy that must contend with an entrenched
oligarchy and a corrupt political elite. At the same time, a dramatic
Islamic revival is underway that pits pluralist Muslims who favor an
open society against Muslims who claim that it is the responsibility of
the state to enforce their puritanical version of religious piety.
Note:
Muslims make up 87.2 percent of the population (250 million people as
of 2010), Christians 9.8 percent, Hindus 1.7 percent, Buddhists and
Confucians 0.8 percent, and unspecified 0.4 percent. It is illegal to be
an atheist in Indonesia.
Scott continues and points to the fact that:
Indonesia
is the world’s fourth-most-populous country, yet to most outsiders its
history and culture are largely unknown. That it consists of more than
17,000 islands strewn along the equator and has 350 ethnic groups who
speak more than seven hundred languages gives a hint of its complexity.
In Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java, Ricklefs describes the
political tumult in postwar Indonesia, especially the confrontation
between Muslims and Communists in 1965 that led to one of the worst
massacres since World War II and ensured Islam’s deeper and deeper hold
on politics and society. Ricklefs’s book, along with Carool Kersten’s
Islam in Indonesia and Jeremy Menchik’s Islam and Democracy in
Indonesia, describes how Islam has shaped contemporary Indonesia and
what is at stake in the recent politics of the country—that is to say,
the politics that arose after the end of Suharto’s thirty-two-year
dictatorship.
Suharto’s military regime, which Ricklefs calls an
aspiring totalitarian state, was founded on the bloodbath of 1965 and
1966, in which more than 500,000 people, many accused of being
Communists, were slaughtered by the military or civilian militias, often
made up of Muslims. Hundreds of thousands more accused leftists, mostly
farmers and workers who were usually nominal Muslims or actively
opposed to Islam, were imprisoned and their families were shunned.
Ricklefs writes that this mass murder and rounding up of Communists and
fellow travelers helped make possible the top-down state control of
religion. Those opposed to Islamization had for the most part been
eliminated.
In the later years of the Suharto regime, however,
many young Indonesians used the only alternative open to
them—religion—to turn the Islamic revival into a movement to redeem
Indonesia from dictatorship and the humiliating corruption of Suharto’s
New Order. They formed the core of the Reformasi movement that took to
the streets in the late 1990s and demanded that Suharto resign, which he
eventually did. Some dreamed of a liberal democracy, while others held
that Islamic authority was the answer. Everyone—liberals, moderates, and
Islamists—claimed to be democrats. (A tiny fringe of decidedly
antidemocratic, violent Islamists existed in the shadows, and the advent
of the democratic era allowed them to come out into the open.)
Once
the lid of dictatorship was lifted, separatist movements emerged. East
Timor, the former Portuguese colony that had been invaded by Suharto’s
troops in 1975, demanded and won a vote for independence in 1999.
Indonesian troops and military-backed militias killed more than a
thousand civilians before they pulled out after the vote. Christians and
Muslims fought sporadically in parts of eastern Indonesia, and in 2002
in a single day a home-grown terrorist group that received funds from
al-Qaeda killed more than two hundred people by setting off two bombs in
Bali, the island directly to the east of Java.
There was also an
explosion of political participation, with scores of new parties and a
more outspoken style of journalism. Despite deep cleavages, liberals,
moderates, and Islamists managed to build a democratic political system,
abolishing the military’s veto power over parliament and introducing
direct elections. This is what distinguishes Indonesia from Egypt,
Syria, and Libya, where the euphoria of the Arab uprisings gave way to
breakdown, war, or, in Egypt’s case, military rule because civilians
fearful of the Muslim Brotherhood’s power invited General Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi and his forces to take over.
In
election after election, Indonesians have never given a majority to
Islamist parties. Polls consistently show that support for democracy is
high, hovering around 70 percent, as is voter turnout (69.6 percent in
the 2014 election). Nonetheless, politicians often race to out-Islamize
one another. Ricklefs describes the increasing cooperation and collusion
between powerful politicians and conservative Islamic leaders in
Indonesia’s democratic era. His story is about Islamization, yet is also
the story of the greatest threat to Indonesia’s democracy: its gradual
erosion from within by conservative elites.
In countries with a
Muslim majority it is hardly surprising that the place of Islam in
society becomes the central political issue. But the gap between how
Indonesians have voted and the power of conservative political forces is
enormous. All three authors under review consider 2005 a watershed year
in which the state deferred to conservative rather than pluralist
versions of Islam. This happened with the connivance of Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, widely known as SBY, a former general who started a party
called Partai Demokrat and was directly elected president in 2004. Under
SBY, Ricklefs notes, “it became less a case of the political regime
setting the religious agenda than the reverse: religious dynamics
shaping the political regime.”
Something extraordinary happened
on July 26, 2005, when SBY opened the national congress of the Ulama
Council, or Islamic religious leaders—a once-toothless organization that
Suharto had set up in 1975 as part of his system of social control.
Ricklefs quotes what SBY told the council:
We
want to place [the council] in a central role in matters regarding the
Islamic faith, so that it becomes clear what the difference is between
areas that are the preserve of the state and areas where the government
or state should heed the fatwas from [the council] and ulamas.
In
fact, fatwas issued by the council are not binding and have no legal or
legislative standing at all, but because SBY gave the council authority
over Islamic issues they have been immensely influential.
Ricklefs
asks why SBY handed over to an unelected council the power to pronounce
on issues concerning Islam. Perhaps, he writes, it was done “from
political calculation (that is, as a means to winning support in an
increasingly Islamized society) or from personal piety, but we can
hardly doubt that its implications are significant.”
The books by
Carool Kersten and Jeremy Menchik trace the widespread consequences of
the power of the Ulama Council. First, SBY empowered a council that had
turned dramatically conservative in the new era largely because the
rules were changed, as Kersten notes. On the council, Islamic vigilante
groups, such as the Islamic Defenders Front, pro-sharia groups, and even
pro-caliphate groups were given equal standing with the two large-scale
moderate Islamic organizations that had been formed early in the
twentieth century, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah.
The
conservative trend didn’t stop there. The council issued fatwas
condemning secularism, pluralism, and liberalism as being against Islam.
These tendencies were soon called Sipilis, designed to sound like
syphilis. Conservatives often invoke Sipilis as the Western-inspired
disease that will destroy Indonesia. The council also issued a fatwa
calling for the banning, as deviant, of the sect of Islam called
Ahmadiyya. There are perhaps 500,000 Ahmadis in Indonesia who believe
that the Indian preacher Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is a messiah. Many Muslims
consider this belief heretical.
With
some exceptions, every Indonesian must choose one of the six religions
proclaimed as official—Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Confucianism. Most Ahmadis consider themselves Muslim and
choose Islam, which, in turn, makes them deviant since the Ulama Council
has banned Ahmadiyya as un-Islamic. Under SBY, the council declared
itself the arbiter of religious orthodoxy. Secularists, pluralists,
liberals, and Ahmadis were the first to be deemed in violation of
orthodox Islam, and Indonesia’s tiny community of Shia Muslims was soon
included. (In recent months, Indonesia’s gay community has become the
council’s newest target.)
In 2006, SBY announced the creation
throughout the archipelago of “interreligious harmony forums” that were
supposed to bring together local leaders to advise local governments on
the construction of new houses of worship. This meant that the power to
decide the contentious issue of whether and where a mosque or church
could be built was placed in the hands of forums in which Muslims
outnumbered any other faith. (In Christian-majority areas of eastern
Indonesia, Muslims have been prevented by these forums from building
mosques, underscoring the problem of allowing majority rule on religious
issues.) In his public speeches, the president emphasized the claims of
religious harmony—by which he meant the need for religious minorities
to quietly accede to conservative Islam—over claims of equal rights for
citizens regardless of religion.
Andreas
Harsono, the representative of Human Rights Watch in Indonesia, has
effectively exposed the link between the council’s fatwas, SBY’s
rhetoric about religious harmony, and the violent attacks by Islamist
vigilantes on Ahmadiyya and Shia mosques as well as churches. He has
also documented how the state bureaucracy, local authorities, and local
police have increasingly accepted the council’s fatwas as legal rulings
that need to be enforced. For instance, Harsono says that in January
Ahmadis were forced to leave their homes on Bangka Island after they
were expelled by the local interreligious harmony forum.
For
Kersten, a senior lecturer on Islam at King’s College London, the 2005
fatwas marked the high point of the polarization between what he calls
progressive Muslims and reactionary Muslims in Indonesia. Liberals
resisted the fatwas, condemning the state for sanctioning the ideology
of puritanical, antidemocratic Islamism. But the fatwas had the intended
effect: liberals and progressives have been increasingly marginalized.
“Unfortunately,” Kersten writes, “this growing antagonism is no longer
confined to a war of words, but emerges through the persecution,
dehumanization and outright murder of perceived ‘deviants.’”
Progressives
certainly have not given up. Kersten’s book describes their resistance,
but it is a dry account and doesn’t capture the intense efforts of
intellectuals, activists, and voters to hold on to the rights and
freedoms they have won and that many others in the broader Muslim world
seek. An enormous struggle has been taking place.
Jeremy
Menchik, who teaches at Boston University, describes the views of
Islamic leaders on tolerance, and his book helps explain why
conservative Islam is so potent. He starts with the Indonesian
constitution, which promises religious freedom but also requires belief
in one god, thereby entangling the Indonesian state, with its five
hundred local branches, in religious affairs but also leaving unclear
much about the relation of the state to religion. The lack of clarity
causes contention. In 2010, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court—one of the
new Reformasi institutions—agreed to rule on the constitutionality of a
forty-five-year-old blasphemy law. Liberals hoped that the court would
decide that religious freedom trumped the state’s attempts to enforce
piety. The liberals lost. The court’s decision was a heavy blow to the
pluralist conception of a democratic state based on human rights. The
court ruled that the “state—consistent with the mandate of the
Constitution—also has a responsibility to upgrade piety and noble
character.”
Menchik rightly underscores the importance of this
decision in furthering what Ricklefs calls the steady Islamization of
the Indonesian state. Ricklefs argues that the ruling “seems to confirm
that the state should act as the servant of religious authorities more
than the other way around.”
According to Menchik, along with the
Sipilis fatwas and the empowering of the Ulama Council, the ruling
entrenched the notion that it is the proper task of the state to enforce
piety. He calls the result “godly nationalism,” which means that;
as
long as citizens believe in one of the state-sanctioned pathways to
God, they become full members of civil society and receive state
protection and other benefits of citizenship…. For a godly nation to
endure, it must privilege some beliefs and prosecute acts of deviance as
blasphemy.
Menchik
writes that the embrace of godly nationalism by Indonesia’s political
elite and the leaders of the main Islamic organizations allows for a
degree of tolerance in Indonesia, but without genuine liberalism.
Religious nationalism gives the state the power to limit pluralism by
excluding nonbelievers, heterodox groups, and any other fringe sect. As a
result, Ahmadis are beyond the boundary of Indonesia’s “generally
tolerant brand of Islam.” But more than that, he thinks their exclusion
tends to increase solidarity among Indonesia’s fractious Islamic
organizations.
Menchik’s concept of godly nationalism contributes
to the understanding of nationalism in Indonesia, but his book doesn’t
convey just how deeply contentious these ideas are for Indonesians,
especially for liberal Muslims and for religious minorities. The Ulama
Council labeled Ahmadiyya a deviant sect in 2005 and put pressure on the
government to issue, in 2008, a decree making it a crime for Ahmadis to
practice their beliefs. After the decree was proclaimed, vigilante
groups started attacking the sect.
Liberals and activists then
came together to form the National Alliance for the Freedom of Faith and
Religion. They planned a rally at Jakarta’s National Monument to
denounce the banning of Ahmadiyya as an affront to religious freedom. On
the day of the rally in June 2008, they were attacked by some five
hundred rampaging robed men from the leading vigilante group, the
Islamic Defenders Front. The vigilantes used pepper gas and bamboo
staves, some with nails, to attack people at the rally. About seventy of
the demonstrators were injured and eleven wound up in the hospital. The
police mostly watched. Eventually there were a few arrests of
vigilantes. Many liberals view that attack and the subsequent
Constitutional Court ruling that the state had the right to enforce
piety as the low point in Indonesia’s aspirations for a plural
democracy. In 2014, Freedom House downgraded Indonesia’s status from
free to partly free.
Ricklefs, too, writes critically of the SBY years:
There
is now no significant opposition to the deeper Islamisation of Javanese
society. There is only difference of opinion about what shape Islamic
life should take, the extent to which variety and pluralism within Islam
are acceptable or desirable, how Islamic society should relate to the
significant non-Muslim minorities in its midst, and what role Islam (or,
indeed, religion more generally) should play in public life.
Ricklefs does not believe that the effects of conservative Islamic ideas on society and the state can be reversed:
Therefore
Liberals of all persuasions, secularists, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists
and kebatinan [Javanese mystics] adherents cannot hope for a secular
public space but must hope for a religiously neutral one, in which all
beliefs can take part on equal terms. That is, however, a challenge in a
nation where the overwhelming majority of the populace—according to
2011 estimates, some 86 per cent, or over 211 million people—are
Muslims.
He
may be too pessimistic. There is no question that conservative Islam
has gained ground, but it is also true that many Indonesians are
committed to the democratic changes that have taken place since 1998 and
don’t want them rolled back. In many ways, the presidential election of
2014 turned into a referendum on Indonesia’s democracy.
Ricklefs’s
book was written before that campaign took place. Prabowo Subianto, the
former general who was responsible for the disappearances of
pro-democracy activists in the late 1990s, ran as a nationalist
strongman. He was opposed by Joko Widodo, called Jokowi, who ran as a
committed democrat and an advocate of Reformasi. He was the first
leading politician not connected to the New Order elite.
Note:Marcus
Mietzner’s book, Reinventing Asian Populism: Jokowi’s Rise, Democracy,
and Contestation in Indonesia (East-West Center, 2015), is an insightful
look at the campaign and why Jokowi won.
Prabowo
had become a master of post-Suharto politics, in which changing
coalitions compete, with much corruption, for patronage and power. The
political elite flocked to him, and so did the main Islamist party.
Jokowi’s lead in preelection polls dwindled in the face of Prabowo’s
financial resources and a coalition that included conservative Islamic
parties, such as the Prosperous Justice Party, the United Development
Party, and the National Mandate Party. The Islamic Defenders Front also
supported Prabowo. But in the final days, Reformasi activists came out
for Jokowi, as did a large number of volunteers mobilized by social
media, including rural farmers, the urban poor, and Christians and
members of other religious minorities. Jokowi won by a small margin.
It
was as if the 2014 election was repeating the battle for democracy of
1998, although many Islamists, vital to the movement back then, were
missing, having joined Prabowo’s camp. Their absence is affecting
Jokowi’s presidency. Those who elected him had high expectations, but he
is a weak president. He does not control the parliament, and even the
party that nominated him refuses to support all of his proposals. Jokowi
now seems to be settling into a SBY-style truce with the elite.
His
election, though, has opened up political space for liberal Muslims.
For instance, young intellectuals in Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) have
championed Islam Nusantara, or Islam of the Archipelago, that stresses
the tolerant, pluralist nature of Indonesia’s traditionalist Islam, the
legacy of the blending of Islam with local culture that Ricklefs so
masterfully describes. Although the group claims that it originated
hundreds of years ago, its modern version was started by young NU
liberals who have worked to stop the growing influence of Islamists.
They hoped Jokowi’s election would reinvigorate the liberals in the
fight to define Islam.
It won’t be easy. There has already been a
backlash by conservatives. Moreover, the leadership of NU seems
determined to turn Islam Nusantara into a vehicle for advancing its own
interests. What started as an intellectual movement to promote an
Indonesian-style Islam that values pluralism and the equal rights of all
citizens has been transformed by NU leaders into a campaign to sell
Islam Nusantara as an antidote to the Islamic State. A ninety-minute
movie has been made, called The Divine Grace of Islam Nusantara. It
celebrates shadow puppets and the mystic rituals of NU, while condemning
the Wahhabi strand of Saudi Islam as the enemy of Indonesian Islam and
the fount of Islamic State ideology. NU leaders are now planning a
global conference on Islam Nusantara, and Jokowi has endorsed the
campaign.
Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy
Analysis of Conflict, based in Jakarta and the leading expert on
terrorists in Southeast Asia, says the claim of NU leaders that Islam
Nusantara can challenge the Islamic State is absurd. Those drawn to the
Islamic State would never be influenced by the version of Islam
portrayed by Islam Nusantara—in Indonesia or anywhere else. Jones sees
this use of Islam Nusantara as a publicity campaign by NU leaders.
Rather than focusing on a global campaign, if NU leaders were using
Islam Nusantara to promote pluralism within Indonesia, as the young
intellectuals hoped, it would mark a welcome shift away from the
“conservative turn.”
Even though NU is threatened by conservative
Islam, many of the movement’s leaders gave support to conservative
tendencies in the past. The current head of NU, for example, was in
charge of drafting the Sipilis fatwas. And although NU celebrates its
own tolerance, the form of tolerance it practices is selective. It did
not extend to Communists or leftists in 1965, when NU’s militias were
willing executioners, and it doesn’t extend to Ahmadis or Shias or gay
Indonesians today. In February, NU’s chairman, Said Aqil Siradj, called
for a new law banning all gay activity in Indonesia. As Ricklefs’s book
shows so well, too often in Indonesia’s new politics, politicians, the
elite, and even NU powerbrokers have collaborated with Islamists and
conservatives; the result has diminished the quality of Indonesia’s
democracy.
Indonesia has its own jihadists. Jones estimates that
at least five hundred Indonesians have gone to Syria. That is less than
two per million Indonesians, as compared with forty-three per million
from Belgium. Jones and others say that one important reason few
Indonesians are drawn to the Islamic State is that they have a
relatively tolerant society with a political system that can work.
Jokowi’s victory shows that a good many Indonesians are doing their part
in trying to sustain their democracy. It is still an open question
whether Indonesia’s political elite and its elected officials are
willing to support an open society.
Margaret Scott teaches at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service and is a cofounder of the New York Southeast Asia Network.
Other recent reviews Scott has written for the TNYRB include:
Indonesia: The Saudis Are Coming
In
1980, Saudi Arabia started an all-expenses-paid university in Jakarta.
The Institute for the Study of Islam and Arabic (LIPIA), housed in a
modern building sheathed in blue reflective glass, has produced tens of
thousands of graduates trained in a strict, puritanical Salafi Islam in
stark contrast to the relaxed, pluralist local Islam practiced by many
Indonesians. Salafi Islam claims to restore the orthodox practices of
the early days of the Muslim religion. Classes at LIPIA are taught in
Arabic. Men and women are segregated; men are encouraged to grow beards
and adopt Salafi dress with ankle-length linen pants and sandals, and
women must be completely veiled. Jeans, music, and television are
prohibited. The curriculum emphasizes learning the Arabic language and
the study of Islam.
Now Saudi Arabia intends to dramatically
expand the university, from 3,500 graduates to ten thousand graduates a
year. It will sponsor a brand-new campus in Jakarta as well as branches
in Medan, Surabaya, and Makassar.
Update
Indonesia’s New Islamist Politics
On
April 17 Indonesians will go to the polls to elect a new national
government. It is the fifth general election since 1998, when General
Suharto was overthrown after thirty-two years of military dictatorship.
Indonesia’s democracy has survived for two decades, but today it is at
risk, facing its own version of the authoritarianism and religious
nationalism that threaten so many other societies.
President Joko
Widodo, known by everyone as Jokowi since he was elected in 2014, is
expected to win a second term. Five years ago, he ran as a pluralist
democrat and as the first leading politician to rise from local, direct
elections after the repression and corruption of the Suharto era, known
as the New Order. He was praised by President Obama and others as a
moderate Muslim leader of a tolerant, Muslim-majority nation that proved
that Islam and democracy are compatible.
But Jokowi has changed,
and so has Indonesia. In late 2016 his ally Basuki Purnama Tjahaja,
known as Ahok, a Christian and ethnically Chinese politician, was
running for governor of Jakarta. That September he said in a speech that
people should not be fooled by religious leaders who told them that
according to the Koran Muslims couldn’t vote for non-Muslims. As a
result of his careless comment, an alliance of conservative Muslim
leaders, hard-line Islamist vigilantes, and a network of
Saudi-influenced preachers accused him of misinterpreting and ridiculing
Islam’s holy book and organized a series of rallies that were the
largest in Indonesia’s history. The capital, Jakarta, was flooded with
more than 700,000 Muslims demanding that Ahok be charged with blasphemy.
In April 2017 he was defeated in the governor’s race by Anies Baswedan,
a Muslim who had been supported by the protesters. Ahok was convicted
of blasphemy and imprisoned for two years. (He was released in January.)
Indonesian troops on alert as Widodo wins more than half of votes
Joko Widodo: red; Prabowo Subianto: tan.
Indonesia riots: six dead after protesters clash with troops over election result
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