IN the country that is home to the largest number of
Muslims on the planet, Islamic political parties have never managed to command
a majority in national elections. And there have been Muslim leaders more
willing than mainstream politicians to jump to the defence of religious
minorities under attack.
Yet
intolerant Islam is on the march. The last synagogue on the crowded island of
Java, sealed off by Islamic radicals since 2009, was torn down in May. On
Lombok, not far from the Australian playground of Bali, there are families of
the Ahmadiyah Muslim sect still living in camps after they were driven from
their homes as heretics seven years ago.
This is
Indonesia, where home-grown and imported variants of Islam jostle with a new
democracy and rapid economic development. Also in play are other great faiths,
Christianity and Hinduism included, and less well-known traditions, such as
Javanese spiritualism. The results are by turns paradoxical, reassuring and
worrying.
The
campaign of terror that peaked in the Bali bomb attacks has been checked, by
and large, by tough, often lethal, police action. But beyond the headlines
there has been a change in the mood and outlook of mass Islam that no
neighbouring nation can ignore.
Singapore-based
scholar Martin van Bruinessen is editor of a new book with a misleadingly bland
title, Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam, that sets out to explain
the "conservative turn" in the faith of more than 200 million people
who live on our doorstep.
"If
you ask me what I find threatening in Indonesian Islam, it's not the
terrorism," van Bruinessen says. "Terrorism has been reduced to a
level that society can live with. The police are efficient, they will catch
most of the would-be terrorists.
"It
is this conservative trend that I find much more worrying than terrorism. It
reduces the freedom of minorities in the first place, and the freedom of many
people within the Muslim majority to develop their views."
Not so
long ago, when the dictator Suharto was still in power, Indonesia was
celebrated for presenting a "Islam with a smiling face". Behind the
scenes, of course, not everything was bliss. Muslim groups were prominent in
the mass slaughter of "godless communists" after the 1965 coup. And
the rebel fighters of Darul Islam, a post-war movement demanding an Islamic
state, held territory as late as 1963 and continue to inspire today's jihadis.
Even so,
after Suharto's fall in 1998 there was an undeniable upsurge of violent
inter-communal conflict, jihadi movements, terror attacks and agitation for
sharia law. Things are calmer now but there remains a corrosive level of
religious intolerance and thuggery - and authorities are too willing to look
the other way.
Every
year the West has fewer experts to explain to outsiders what is happening in
Indonesia. At work are profound changes in the academy, its funding and the
interests of students. Now retired, van Bruinessen is a member of that
fast-disappearing breed of specialists in Indonesian Islam.
The
University of Melbourne's Tim Lindsey is acutely aware of this, which is why he
has set up the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society. He hopes to pass
on the knowledge of retired experts and to encourage a new generation of
scholars.
There is
a lot at stake. "This is incredibly important for Australia's
future," he says. "The issue about Islam in Indonesia is not
terrorism. The position of Islamic political parties in Indonesia, where Islam
as a religion will stand in the constitutional and civil arrangements of the
state - there are really big issues that Indonesia is still working through.
"Questions
of religious intolerance, of Islamic hardliners attacking people they think are
doctrinally unsound - these are serious questions of human rights and the role
of government; these are mainstream questions."
British
anthropologist Andrew Beatty saw these questions worked out intimately in
village life in East Java, where he went to live with his family in 1992. The
result was a fascinating, rather dispiriting book: A Shadow Falls in the Heart
of Java.
"This
was an island where people of radically different ideology - orthodox Muslims,
Hinduised mystics and animistic peasants - managed to live together in
harmony," he writes. "But the Java we first knew and the Java we left
in 1997 were different places.
"The
transformation - long prepared but still unexpected - was quite sudden and
shocking. A puritan, ideologically driven Islam had made rapid progress,
pushing aside older traditions, disturbing an ancient pact that allowed
ancestral spirits and pre-Islamic deities a place among the prayer houses.
"The
gentle world that we had known - of Muslims and mystics, of dancers and shadow
plays - was in eclipse. And with the rise of an assertive (Muslim) piety,
neighbourhoods and communities were splitting. Inside every family a struggle
over the faith was taking place. And not only in Java. Repeated wherever
Muslims live, this will decide the future shape of the Islamic world.
"Indonesia
... shows us better than anywhere how to live peacefully with cultural
difference. That diversity and respect for pluralism are now under threat.
Almost uniquely in the Muslim world, Java still has the cultural means to
confront the challenge. It has lessons for us all."
What
Beatty chronicles at village level, van Bruinessen's book analyses within mass
movements as important in Indonesia as they are unknown to most Australians.
The
Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama are the two leading Muslim associations of
Indonesia. With about nine million and 38 million followers respectively, these
are "probably the largest and most complex organisations (in) the entire
Muslim world," van Bruinessen says.
Founded
in 1912 by an official of the Yogyakarta sultanate, the Muhammadiyah set out to
steer a middle course between accommodation of old Javanese culture and a
reformist purging of practices alien to Islam, such as intercession of saints
and magic.
The
bigger and more traditional Nahdlatul Ulama appealed to villagers and local
businesses that clung to a much wider range of practices and beliefs than those
sanctioned by the reformist canon of the Koran and the sayings of prophet
Mohammed.
NU
produced Abdurrahman Wahid, who parlayed his opposition to the Suharto regime
and political Islam into a historic role as Indonesia's first elected president
in 1999.
As a
modernist organisation, the Muhammadiyah and its urban middle-class supporters
built up a vast network of schools, colleges, universities, hospitals,
orphanages and mosques. By the middle of the 2000s, both Muhammadiyah and NU faced
infiltration by organisations linked to radical Muslim groups operating
internationally. One of these challengers, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which hankers for a
global caliphate under sharia law, also has a foothold in Australia.
What
happened in Indonesia is recounted in van Bruinessen's book by Ahmad Najib
Burhani, a scholar at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.
In 2005,
there were attempts to co-opt Muhammadiyah mosques, schools and universities by
activists of a radical movement that took shape as a political party, the
Prosperous Justice Party, inspired by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
Conservatives
within the Muhammadiyah, already in the ascendant, shared some common ground
with Muslim Brotherhood ideology. Yet they joined forces with Muhammadiyah
liberals to protect their organisation against the PJP.
A few
years later, when the Muhammadiyah staged its 2010 congress in Yogyakarta,
staff wore Javanese costumes, complete with ceremonial daggers. There was
Javanese music and dance, reflecting an organisation more at ease with local
culture and less hidebound than was thought. But the struggle between liberals
and progressives has left the Muhammadiyah unstable - only "shakily
moderate", in Najib's formula - and this is one reason Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual
leader of the Bali bomber group, has dismissed it as banci, an Indonesian word
meaning hermaphrodite or sexless.
As for
the PJP, it has had a dramatic fall from grace because of a corruption scandal
to do with Indonesia's beef import quota, a reminder that there is more to this
trade than the troubles of Australia's cattle industry.
This
pattern - of troubling shifts in Indonesian Islam that, under analysis, offer
some reassurance - is repeated in the book chapter on Solo, the city in central
Java notorious for jihadi groups and for vigilantes who harass Westerners in
hotels and bars. Yet, as scholar Muhammad Wildan points out, there has been no
serious push to impose sharia locally.
And it is
the very weakness of orthodox Islam in Solo that gives these groups their
"radical edge", for the city is a peculiar stronghold of Java's court
tradition, which intermixes Hindu, Buddhist and animist elements. "Only a
fraction of society supports the Islamic radical groups in the city,"
Wildan says.
The van
Bruinessen book also charts the paradoxical failure of a sharia campaign in
South Sulawesi, a region with a long history of militant and rebellious Islam.
Even here, it may be that "sharia is not a very marketable political
commodity", says researcher Mujiburrahman.
Yet
another chapter follows the Suharto-era Indonesian Council of Muslim Scholars
as it struggles to reinvent itself as a servant of a divided Muslim community.
After the 2001 attacks in New York it contrived to condemn terrorism without
abjuring warlike jihad, thereby exposing itself to criticism from hardliners as
well as progressives. Academic Moch Nur Ichwan says some of its other fatwas on
public morals, religious pluralism and minorities "have been used or
abused" by Islamists to foment intolerance and violent conflict, including
expulsion of Ahmadiyah families from their homes in Lombok.
He says:
"Many critics consider (the council), because of the disproportionate
influence of the relatively few radical members and the absence of balancing
progressive voices, as a potential threat to human rights, freedom of thought
and freedom of religious practice and conscience."
In van
Bruinessen's book, there is a tension between deep unease and reassurance. He
says: "I am worried and I want my readers to be worried, but I also want
them to see that things cannot be reduced to a simple black and white view.
There is resilience, there are still many liberals, many progressives, but they
are no longer the dominant voice in Indonesian Islam."
Much of
it is mainstream, not Muslim, politics, he says, as President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono and his rivals play the religious card. If intolerant Islam always
had its backers in Indonesia, democracy has amplified them.
"It
is true that democratisation opens space for many new voices, including
intolerant voices," van Bruinessen says. "(But this is) a fairly
dangerous hypothesis because it might lead you to anti-democratic
conclusions."
One
remedy that may surprise some is for Australia to keep up close relations with
Indonesia's military as more and more officers who know nothing but democracy
rise through the ranks.
Retired
brigadier Gary Hogan, who served as defence attache in Jakarta, argues there is
a lot to be said for perpetuating personal ties with Indonesia's military and
helping it to modernise culturally. Hogan has in mind two objectives vital to
our national interest.
"One
is that Indonesia remains stable, and the other is that Indonesia remains
secular," he told an international affairs forum last month in Melbourne.
"There
was a time when it was almost the Islamic republic of Indonesia back in the
1940s - it was a close-run thing.
I think we want the republic of Indonesia,
not the Islamic republic of Indonesia, as our neighbour."
Bernard Lane is a writer with The Australian newspaper where this article was first published on 13th July 2013
