------------------------------------------------------------------------ Professor Ruth McVey is a Senior Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. April 1997
The outbreaks of public unrest that Indonesia has experienced in the past months have all involved religion in one way or another, but in quite different ways. Islam has sometimes appeared as ethnic identification, sometimes as a symbol of economic protest and at other times as an attack on bureaucratic rule. One reason for this is the historical fact of Islam's gradual and still incomplete conversion of the Indonesian archipelago. The other is the political fact that Islam is essential to the legitimacy of Indonesia's New Order regime and at the same time is the major (indeed, only credible) source of popular opposition to it.
Although the Indonesian military mobilised Islam to help it secure power in 1965, President Suharto soon acted to restrict it as a political force. The New Order leadership was nominally Muslim or secular in orientation, and it had a significant Christian component. Military men were still generally suspicious of militant Islam, which they saw as identified with regional rebellion. Moreover, Islam was now the only visible independent source of mass mobilisation, and thus it was an implicit threat to security.
Therefore the government gradually tightened the screws on Islamic political expression. Eventually, the Muslim parties were amalgamated into the United Development Party -- the PPP -- which was not allowed to use Islam in its title nor to use a religious symbol as its logo. Such restrictions, plus the increasing meaninglessness of parties under the New Order's highly controlled politics, culminated in 1985 with "a return to the 1926 charter" by the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), hitherto the PPP's most important element. With this, the NU abjured political engagement in favour of socio-economic activity, a measure as necessary under the restrictive conditions of the New Order as under colonialism.
But at the same time, the New Order needed religious endorsement. The Pancasila, the set of five principles that had been agreed on by Indonesian political leaders just before the outbreak of the revolution as the basic ideals of an independent Indonesia, had as is first principle belief in the One God. This did not give pre-eminence to Islam, or enjoin Muslims to adhere to syariah law, but the very fact that Islam was the religion of the vast majority of Indonesian people made it a critical element in determining what was defined as Indonesian.
In the immediate post-coup period, great pressure had been placed on the non-religious and on nominal Muslims to adopt piety to avoid being considered communist. The result was a great wave of conversion and rededication, involving particularly Islam, but also the other major recognised religions (Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism). Though persecution ceased after a few years, officials in the provinces have continued to exert general pressure on the population not only to adhere to a "proper" religion but to follow orthodox norms within it.
This greatly accelerated the ongoing process of Islamisation of the archipelago, and contributed to the rapid decline of local religions. At the same time, the restrictions on political party activities meant that the old boundaries between reformist and traditionalist Islam were no longer reinforced by party affiliation as they had been in the democratic period of the 1950s.
Islamic observance has generally increased greatly, and now even those parts of the population which were most secularised and oriented towards westernised modernism and consumer culture observe Muslim precepts. Indonesian Islam also appears more real as a community; its orientations are various, but it no longer is a series of groupings which can be played off against each other.
Especially from the mid-1980s, we can see a change in government policy towards Islam, moving to co-opt it rather than simply restrict its political expression. The authorities involve themselves in a great expansion and upgrading of the system of religious tertiary education. They took a positive role in the growing dakwah internal missionary movement, setting up training centres for propagating the faith, thus competing with militant fundamentalists for patronage of religious fervour.
In 1990, President Suharto endorsed the creation of the ICMI, or Association of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals. This appeared to be a means of getting a grip on the increasing Muslim intellectual ferment among the middle class. the then Minister of Research and Technology B J Habibie was made its head, presumably in part to help move Indonesian Islam to a more modern, technocratically-minded age more sympathetic to the course of the New Order.
There was much initial controversy as to whether adherence to the new organisation would mean co-option by the regime or would provide an opening for Islam to have influence in it at the highest level. Most prominent Indonesian Muslims who held public or bureaucratic positions did in fact join.
However, in the past few years, the ICMI seems to have lost much of its initial energy, and it now appears more as a vehicle for rising in the government apparatus than an arena for serious discussion, a sort of Islamic Golkar. Indeed, early this year, the Muhammadiyah leader Amien Rais found himself forced to leave his position in the ICMI leadership because his criticisms of government policy had offended President Suharto.
Whatever government efforts to co-opt or control Islam, the religion has become the major locus of intellectual ferment in Indonesia, and of debate on the proper character of government and society. One reason for this is because political repression, while it hit Islamic parties hard, has been much less harshly pursued against individual Muslim leaders.
Islam's importance for regime legitimacy is such that it is a relatively protected venue for debate. However, it is also the case that more active and original thinking seems to be going on among Muslims than among secular nationalist circles. The importance and intellectual character of Islamic discussions can be seen from the fact that leading Muslims such as Abdurrahman Wahid, Amien Rais and Nurcholish Madjid are now perhaps more prominent for the ideas they represent as individuals than for their organisational associations. This is the reverse of the situation in the 1950-65 period, when what mattered were party and organisational affiliations, ranking and factional manoeuvres.
The rapid growth of a middle class has brought various bourgeois ideological preferences into the Islamic debate. They include the idea of a "civil society" of people having the right to organise and express themselves outside of and perhaps in opposition to the government. This was the idea behind the Nahdlatul Ulama leader Abdurrahman Wahid's personal refusal to join the ICMI.
It is interesting to note that Wahid, leader of the "traditionalist" NU, took a stand rejecting intimate relations with those in political power, though before 1965 the NU had sought this as a party. On the other hand, Amien Rais, leader of the "modernist" Muhammadiyah, had initially approved membership in the ICMI as a means of giving Islam access to political decision-makers. This reflects the difficulty nowadays of distinguishing between what is modernist and what is traditionalist in contemporary Indonesian Islam; the old labels don't fit, and everything is in ferment.
Among the issues that are debated are questions like human rights and social justice. In particular, Muslim thinkers have been concerned with how to aid ordinary people to cope, materially as well as spiritually, with the challenges of rapid socio-economic change. Within Islam there are also movements rejecting the rampant cosmopolitanism and capitalist materialism seen as characteristic of the present order. These tendencies may be pietist, seeking withdrawal from mainstream society, or they may ally with nationalist sentiment to criticise the status quo.
In particular, the New Order's identification with international capitalism and the ethnic Chinese minority (seen as rich, non-Muslim and alien) has been a lively subject. Amien Rais has been perhaps the most notable proponent of this line of criticism, and his removal from the ICMI leadership is a reflection of its sensitivity as far as the government is concerned. Perhaps the biggest question is how and whether such ferment among Muslim intellectuals relates to the question of social justice and the linkages (or absence of links) between the government and the common people.
The recent riots (in Situbondo in October, Tasikmalaya in December and West Kalimantan in January and February), to mention only the major incidents, all involved religion but were probably related more directly to general socio-economic frustration and the feeling that redress was not to be had through legal channels. The riots did not give any convincing sign of having non-local inspiration or being connected with the debates going on among leading Muslims. This does not mean, however, that such a linkage may not arise in the future, if the underlying causes of the social unease are not addressed. After all, the intellectual ferment among the Muslim elite has come about in good part because of a shared unease about Indonesia's headlong acceptance of international capitalism, consumer culture, and wide economic disparity.
Implicitly or explicitly (as in the case of Situbondo, where a courthouse was attacked, and in Tasikmalaya, where police posts were burnt), the actions were also criticisms of officialdom. It was widely perceived that attacks on Chinese and Christians were as much attacks on the regime as on those population groups for their own sake; that what was behind them was widespread popular discontent. So far, the government has attempted to discredit such outbursts and deflect attention from itself as object of the protests by charging that they were acts of people wanting to sow hatred between religious and ethnic groups. And it has revived early New Order close supervision of the populace, setting up watch posts in every district to report signs of unrest.
The great question is how religious leaders and established groups will relate to such malaise. Will they end by formulating and focusing the general feeling of unrest, and thus force government reform? Or will they succeed in bridging the gap between government and populace in a manner which stabilises the existing political system and ensures Islam's position at its core? They may eventually simply withdraw from the social fray, for it brings grave dangers of Islamic disunity as well as government repression. If they opt out, however, it is likely that others will take up the challenge of addressing relations between society and the state, and that Islam may be marginalised from the process of determining Indonesia's political future, as it was in the formative years of the independence movement.