AFTER IRSHAD MANJI: FREEDOM OF RELIGION IN INDONESIA

Irshad Manji

The controversies surrounding the visit to Indonesia by the Uganda-born Canadian journalist and activist Irshad Manji has thrown into sharp relief the growing antagonism between Islamists and proponents of liberal and progressive reinterpretations of the Islamic heritage in the world's largest Muslim nation-state. Manji was in Indonesia to promote the Indonesian version of her latest book Allah, Liberty and Love.

On two occasions, Manji's appearances were disrupted. On Friday, 4 May, Manji's talk at the Salihara Cultural Centre in Jakarta was stopped by the police, acting at the behest of the Islamic Defence Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI).This led immediately to critical reactions. Yenny Wahid, the daughter of the late President Abdurrahman Wahid, deplored the police intervention. Other commentators expressed their concern over the excessive influence the FPI appears to be able to exercise. The question were raised whether the FPI was not merely beyond the law, but even able to intimidate the police. One MP, Eva Kusuma Sundari, stated that the police is simply 'powerless' against the FPI. A member of the national parliament's human rights committee, Sundari is not stranger to controversy herself -- earlier this year she was persecuted by Islamists for speaking out in favour of the constitutional rights of Christians in the name of religious pluralism.

Irshad Manji is taken away from Jakarta's Salihara Centre

Meanwhile, a formal complaint against the way the police handled the whole affair was lodged by the organizers of the event at Salihara, a cultural foundation established by the leading public intellectual Goenawan Mohamad, the founding editor of the respected weekly current affairs magazine Tempo.

MMI activists destroying Irshad Manji's book

Then on Wednesday, 9 May, members of the Indonesian Mujahedin Council (Majelis Mujahedin Indonesia, MMI) attacked an injured Manji, her assistant and several participants during a discussion session of the book at the Institute for Social and Islamic Sciences (LkiS) in Yogyakarta. In response, to this experience,  The Jakarta Post ran a piece under the title Irshad Manji is having second thoughts on Indonesia, in which she noted that -- in comparison to her earlier visit in 2008 -- it appeared there were “more conservative groups in the country this year”. Earlier, the same newspaper reported she was also considering writing a book about Indonesia.

Anti-JIL campaigner

A few days later the same newspaper ran an Op/Ed on the state of affairs in the intellectual debate on Islam in Indonesia. In this article Amika Wardana, an Indonesian research student at the University of Essex, highlights the polarization that has been affecting the Indonesian Muslim scene for quite a while, pitching the proponents for a literalist interpretation of the Indonesian doctrines, such as the FPI, against the advocates of more liberal readings, propagated, among others, by the Liberal Islam Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal, JIL) . Earlier this year, the protagonists and antagonists in what is becoming an increasingly confrontational encounter over the place of religion on both public and private life in Indonesia, have launched initiatives to battle each other -- largely online -- under the headings 'Indonesia without JIL' and 'Indonesia without FPI'.

Anti-liberal Islam demonstrators

Whereas the former are mobilizing to free Indonesia from liberal Muslims, the latter reject the FPI's monopolization of what 'real Islam' is, and condemn the front's frequent recourse to thuggery and violence. On the back of the Irshad Manji controversy, 'Indonesia without FPI'  are now threatening the national police with a lawsuit, accusing them of siding with the FPI. The anti-FPI campaign does not only consist of Muslims holding different opinions, in February this year, the Asia Times published an article under the title 'Secular Revenge', reporting on indigenous Dayaks from Kalimantan (Borneo) preventing a visit by FPI leaders to Palangka Raya in the province of Central Kalimantan . Apparently emboldened by this act of valiance, anti-FPI sentiments spread quickly to the Javanese cities of Surabaya and Jakarta.

Anti-FPI rally

The clash between different interpretations of Islam in Indonesia can be traced back to the opening up of the public space after the collapse of the military-dominated New Order Regime led by General Suharto, in the wake of the latter's resignation in 1998. Whereas the ensuing Reformasi Era presented Indonesians with unprecedented opportunities for pursuing their democratic rights, including the exercise of free speech, the other side of that coin also meant that Islamist activism, including its radical, militant, and violent variants, was also able to enter the public arena too. The first signs of growing religious antagonism can actually already be traced to the mid-nineties when the first riots and pogroms flared up as the ageing president began losing control of the political system.

JIL founder
Ulil Abshar-Abdalla

The watershed event was the fateful fatwa no. 7, issued in 2005 by the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) in which this body, dominated by conservative religious scholars, condemned the principles of pluralism, liberalism, and secularism as 'un-Islamic' (The full text in Indonesian is available here. For an analysis in English, click here). This pronouncement was not only directed against JIL, its founder Ulil Abshar-Abdalla and his intellectual mentor Nurcholish Madjid (1939-2005).

It is also a barely veiled rejection of some of the key principles of the Pancasila state doctrine which has governed Indonesian politics since independence. Moreover, it was taken by organizations such as the FPI as a license to go after fellow Muslims they deemed as deviants. Since then, liberal and progressive Muslims have been pushed into the defensive. As Amika Wardana observed:

There are at least two major obstacles undermining Muslim intellectualism: The lack of political will and the inability of public officials to preserve the freedom of religion and free speech; and the silence of the majority — moderate Muslims — toward intolerant and violent actions perpetuated by Muslim thugs. [...] In short, while we may lose hope in the current regime tackling the current intolerant and repressive actions campaigned by Muslim thugs, we have to approach the majority of moderate Muslims to stand up against them. 
Only by winning the hearts and minds of the majority will we envisage religiously tolerant environment of exuberance for Islamic intellectualism.

SECOND THOUGHTS? AN ASSESSMENT OF ISLAM AND STATE IN INDONESIA

LSE IDEAS, the centre for the study of diplomacy, international affairs and strategy at the London School of Economics, hosted a seminar on Islam and the State: A Southeast Asian Perspective, featuring Dr. Bahtiar Effendy, a lecturer at State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah in Jakarta, with Prof. Gilles Kepel, Director of the Moyen/Orient/Méditerranée Programme at Sciences Po in Paris and holder of the Phillipe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs, acting as discussant, and Tan Sri Dr Munir Majid, head of the Southeast Asia International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, in the chair.

Dr Effendy's talk was largely based on his book Islam and the State in Indonesia (2003), a published verion of his PhD thesis at Ohio State University, defended in 1994. Notwithstanding the fact that Indonesia's political landscape has changed unrecognizably since the fall of Soeharto's New Order Regime, Effendy's study has only been updated with a relatively brief  'post-script' containing just a summary discussion of developments from 1999 to 2000. While earlier parts of the book contain valuable discussions of the role of a new Muslim intelligentsia in creating the 'New Islamic Intellectualism' of the 1970s and 1980s, which transformed the debate on religion and politics from a legal-formalist and exclusivist into a substantialist and inclusivist discourse, there is no mention of the rise of two ensuing generations of Muslim intellectuals, consisting of scholars from the State Islamic Universities in Jakarta and Yogyakarta (including Effendy himself) and younger intellectual-activists connected through networks such as the Jaringan Islam Liberal (JIL, Liberal Islam Network) or associated with the young cadres of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), referred to as NU Muda. Part heirs, part critics of the pioneers of this substantialist Islamic discourse they have been instrumental in the further shaping of an Indonesian variant of Islamic civil society.

Dr Bahtiar Effendy

Also from Effendy's presentation it was difficult to get a clear sense of where he sees Indonesia going. Having identified the early twentieth-century, the end of the Cold War, and post-9/11 as three key moments when the discussion of the relation between Islam and modernity and between religion and politics became particularly acute, he then restricted his discussion primarily to the domestic Indonesian context. 

Throughout the Soekarno and Soeharto years, Islamic political parties were considered as potential contenders for political power and were therefore clamped down on. Only in the 1950s, when a system that can be described as liberal and democratic was allowed to briefly flourish, were Islamic parties able to profile themselves uninhibitedly. This was reflected by their unsurpassed success in the 1955 elections, when the four Islamic parties together received 43% of the vote --- still, not a majority in a country that is 85-90% Muslim. Evidently, even then, large segments of Indonesia's Muslim intelligentsia did not want Islam as the basis for statehood.

The New Order Regime approached the Islam with the same suspicion as Soekarno had in the 1940s and during the 'Guided Democracy' of his later years. Islamic Parties were generally reduced to an outsider role in the political process  It was not until the 1970s, when this earlier mentioned new generation of intellectuals and technocrats formulated a non-formalist alternative Islamic discourse. Because it was no longer regarded as explicitly anti-state the state allowed more room for this kind of activism. In fact, the Muslim intelligentsia were not only co-opted in the government's development policies; eventually the state itself saw the usefulness of religion for driving its own objectives. and began boosting its own Islamic credentials. The power of Islamic courts was strenghtened in regards to personal and family law, the country began experimenting with Islamic banking, and the government established a kind of Islamic think tank, the 'Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals' (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia, ICMI), led by Minister of Technology and later Vice-President and President B.J. Habibie.

In the democratic transformation that followed the fall of Soeharto in 1998, more than 181 new political parties emerged, of which 42 bore an Islamic or Islamist signature. It also spelled the return of the legal-formalist political and religious discourse. There was a sense of deja-vu, as it became clear that the Islamic parties still bore a historical stigma, according to Effendy. The majority of the Muslims preferred a substantialist understanding over the legalist interpretations associated with political Islam. As an explanation for this hesitation, Effendy suggests that three factors played a role: the fear it may thwart Muslim social mobility, the fragmentation of the community due to the competition between a plethora of Islamic parties, and the sense of alienation felt by younger generations of Muslims, who never experienced the struggles during the first fifty years of independence. Again, elections results reflected these sentiments. Between 1968 and 1998 support for Islamic parties oscillated between 15 and 30%. In the three free elections that have been held since then the Islamic parties received 37% (1999), 38% (2004) and 24% (2009) of the votes.

Effendy concludes that the intellectual transformation effectuated between 1970 and 1990 still dominates at the expense of the advocates of a legal-formalist Islamic model: The Jakarta Charter of 1945 (forcing Muslim citizens to abide by Islamic law) was never inserted into the constitution and only select elements of Islamic law have been implemented. As long as Muslim politicians do not disrupt the idea of a nation state they wuill be allowed some maneuvering space, but the exact place of Islamic principles in the political constellation is still not defined. Whereas Effendy expresses the hope that political and religious elites will reach an appropriate settlement, he gives no indication what such an agreement should encompass. Nor did he tell anything about the vibrant intellectual milieu in which younger scholars, intellectual-activists, and writers current discuss possible scenarios for a future civil Islam.

Prof Gilles Kepel

As the author of Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Gilles Kepel responded by providing a wider context by drawing on examples from other parts of the Muslim world. Comparing developments in Indonesia with those in Turkey and Algeria, he sees similarities in the implicit association of Islam by its detractors as threatening to the nation-state and a step backwards, or their use of political Islam as the scapegoat hampering state-building and development. However, when political opponents of authoritarian regimes want to challenge the incumbents they often opt for employing an 'Islamic vocabulary', although this must not be automatically equated with legal-formalist aspirations. 

In the same vein, Kepel further suggests that Turkish civil society-building has more of a 'Muslim' dimension than that it envisages an Islamic -- let alone Islamist -- agenda. It is important to acknowledge the sheer diversity of Islamic discourses, with civil society movements on one end and totalitarian Islamist ideologies on the other end of the spectrum. Given this multitude of voices, the questions to ponder are: Who controls Islamic discourse?; Why do so many different groups feel the need to take recourse to rhetoric coated in Islamic idiom and symbolism?; What are the reasons for the resurgence of cultural Islam? Returning to the Indonesian situation, Kepel ventured the speculation that, notwithstanding all the criticisms, whether there is not something to Clifford Geertz's  (in)famous taxonomy  distinguishing between between Santri (pious, practicing Muslims) and Abangan (syncretic Javanese belief and practices professing nominal allegiance to Islam).

In response to a query whether aside from the legal-formalist aspirations of Islamic parties and the substantialist view of the proponents of cultural or civil Islam, there are no initiatives on the part of Muslim activists to address other 'substantial' issues such as economic developments, generic human rights, justice etc., Effendy claimed that this was not the case. According to him, those driving the Islamic agendas continue to subscribe to legal-formalist interpretations focussing on ritual practice and symbolism. The Chair Dr. Munir Majid doubted whether this is so. Invoking the distinction between the Islamic notions of  fard ayn (individual obligations) and fard kifaya (collective obligations), he admitted the former tend to be overamplified, but the later offer a vehicle for social activism and civil society building.

Yours truly was also surprised that Effendy did not recognize the remarkable parallels, rightly noted by Kepel,  between the historical trajectories in Indonesia and Turkey (apart from an anecdotal reference to the personal friendship of ex-President Habibie with former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan --dating back to their student years in Germany). Perhaps it is a lack of familiarity with developments in the latter country, that prevented Effendy from detecting the undeniable commonalities in the Indonesian and Turkisch experiences with Islam in the public sphere and the accommodation of religion and politics. 

In spite of his discussion of  the intellectual trends circulating among Indonesian Muslims in the 1970s and 1980s, Effendy's presentation missed an updated account of developments during the past turbulent decade and failed to venture beyond a narrow focus on the issue of statehood and Islamic parties role in the formal political process, and unpack the development of substantialist Islamic discourse. For an intellectual from a generation who can be considered to have inherited the legacy of 1970s New Islamic Intellectualism he almost seemed disenchanted and having doubts whether it had all been worth the effort..