Civil Islam

Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia

Robert W. Hefner

Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE – Democratization in an Age of Religious Revitalization 3
CHAPTER TWO – Civil Precedence 21
CHAPTER THREE- Contests of Nation 37
CHAPTER FOUR – Ambivalent Alliances: Religion and Politics in the Early New Order 8
CHAPTER FIVE – The Modernist Travail 94
CHAPTER SIX – Islam Deferred: Regimist Islam and the Struggle for the Middle Class 128
CHAPTER SEVEN – Uncivil State: Muslims and Violence in Soeharto’s Fall 157
CHAPTER EIGHT – Conclusion: Muslim Politics, Global Modernity 214

Chapter One

DEMOCRATIZATION IN AN AGE OF RELIGIOUS REVITALIZATION

Global politics at the turn of the millennium has been marked by two far-reaching events. The first has been the diffusion of democratic ideas to disparate peoples and cultures around the world. A skeptic might point out that politics varies greatly among societies and movements waving the democratic banner, and political civility is not guaranteed by good words alone. Nonetheless, as with the earlier notion of nationalism (equally varied in its ideals and practice), there can be little doubt that the cross-cultural diffusion of democratic ideas is one of the defining globalizations of our age.

The second event marking world politics at the turn of the millennium has been the forceful reappearance of ethnic and religious issues in public affairs. Whether with Hindu nationalism in India, Islam and citizenship in France, the culture wars in the United States, or Islamist movements in the Muslim world, the end of the twentieth century demonstrated convincingly that high modernist reports of the demise of religion and ethnicity were, to say the least, premature.¹ The scale of the ethnoreligious resurgence also reminded us that the cultural globalization so rampant in our age does not bring bland homogenization. Rather than making everything the same, globalization brings with it vibrant contestation and localization. The growing demand for ethnic and religious “authenticity” is a notable example of this trend.² Whether the resulting upsurge of ethnic and religious identities is compatible with democracy and civil peace is a question central to this book.

Of these two developments, the diffusion of the idea of democracy at first caused the least surprise. After all, for decades it has been a truism of Western political thought that with industrialization, education, and the development of a middle class, pressures for popular political participation increase, unleashing democratic struggles like those that transformed the modern West. In the euphoria following the collapse of communism in 1989-90, policy makers’ faith in this modernist credo was, if anything, only strengthened. The Eastern European revolutions, we heard, proved that the world had arrived at “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”³ Having sailed through the troubled seas of middle modernity, it seemed, the world was about to pass into a pacific ocean of market economies and liberal democracy.

Just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, these titanic visions of an ideology-annihilating “end to history” hit an iceberg. Political realignments in Eastern Europe were followed by an upsurge in ethnic and regional conflict.⁴ In India, Bosnia, Burma, Rwanda, and several Western countries, ethnoreligious issues asserted themselves with a force not felt since the Second World War.⁵ Where before there was talk of an end to history, now there were warnings of its resumption “on traditional lines, but on a yet vaster scale—an epoch of Malthusian wars and religious convulsions, of ecological catastrophes and mass deaths of a magnitude far greater even than those of our century.”⁶

Not all observers of international events were moved to such grimly apocalyptic conclusions. But the surge in ethnoreligious violence gave rise to a new pessimism concerning democracy’s possibility. One of the more startling changes of heart was that of Harvard political scientist and U.S. State Department adviser Samuel Huntington. An upbeat spokesperson for democracy’s “third wave” a few years earlier,⁷ in 1993 Huntington presented a deeply rela-tivistic reassessment of democracy’s future. We are mistaken to assume that all societies can develop democratic institutions, Huntington argued, because the principles of democracy are incompatible with the cultures of many. The list of alleged incompatibilities underscored the enormity of the problem. “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, and the separation of church and state have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox culture.” Although Huntington conceded that a few civilizations might yet be won to the democratic cause, most, he implied, would not. The new world order was not to be that of democracy triumphant, it seems, but of primordialism resurgent.

Professor Huntington went on to argue that some among these undemocratic nations will develop interests deeply contrary to those of the West. “The fault lines between civilizations,” he warned, may soon replace “the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.”⁸ Among the most likely trouble spots on the horizon, Huntington advised, was the Muslim world. “Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years,” he observed, and in the future this “military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline” (emphasis added).⁹ Other commentators sounded equally dire warnings, hinting of a new Cold War in which a resurgent Islam might play the role earlier assumed by Leninism.

In these and other examples, analysts assessed the relationship between democratization and ethnoreligious revival, and some concluded that the two processes are often antithetical. For these commentators, there was no belter example of this negative relationship than the religious resurgence shaking the Muslim world. In the face of the slaughter in Algeria or Taliban brutalization in Afghanistan, it seemed reasonable to these observers to conclude that there was a general incompatibility between democracy and Islam.¹⁰ The silence of some Western leaders in the face of the dismemberment of democratic Bosnia suggested that these views of the Muslim question were, sadly, no longer merely academic.

In the face of this ferment, the attitude of Western policy makers toward democracy’s future went from breezy confidence to edgy uncertainty. Eastern Europe’s cruel communist winter was not everywhere followed by a democratic spring. Capitalist growth in East and Southeast Asia did not automatically bring democratic decency. And the Muslim world seemed awash in violence. Examples like these lent credence to a newly minted cultural relativism which asserted that democracy is, in the end, incompatible with many non-Western cultures.¹¹

Some suggested, however, that there is another way of viewing these deviations from the democratic plan. Rather than proving it is only possible in Western settings, these setbacks show that democracy’s achievement depends heavily on local cultural resources. For proponents of this view, democracy requires more than elections and constitutions. It depends on traditions and organizations that teach ordinary citizens habits of the democratic heart. Embedded as democracy is in local life worlds, its culture and organization will vary across societies, too. Buoyed by this confidence, students of comparative politics in the 1990s moved beyond formal institutions to understand the informal conditions that, to borrow Robert Putnam’s now famous phrase, “make democracy work.”¹²

This new wave of research stood in striking contrast to earlier discussions of democracy in Western political theory. During the 1970s and early 1980s that theory had been dominated by arid philosophical debates over democracy’s first principles. “This American liberal doctrine understood political philosophy to be a branch of legal theory.”¹³ Rather than focusing on legalistic principles, research in the 1990s took a sociological or anthropological turn. There was a heightened awareness of the multicultural nature of the contemporary world and the need to attend to this pluralism when considering democracy’s possibility.¹⁴ Now even “the West” was understood to be diverse in its cultural genealogies. With this recognition, there was a parallel expansion of interest in the variety of cultures within which democracy can work. What conditions encourage tolerance and democratic participation? Can human rights take hold in cultures whose concepts of personhood differ from those of liberal individualism? Can democracy tolerate or even benefit from the energies of public religion?¹⁵ Questions like these showed that, for students of comparative politics, the conditions of democracy’s cross-cultural possibility had become the order of the day.

In this book I examine the relationship of Islam to democratization in the majority-Muslim nation of Indonesia. For many Western observers, of course, Indonesia is not what first comes to mind when one thinks of the Muslim world. The average Westerner is perhaps more familiar with its ancient Hindu-Buddhist temples and graceful Balinese arts than with the fact that Indonesia— the fourth most populous nation in the world—is also the world’s largest majority-Muslim country. Some 88 percent of this nation’s 210 million people officially profess Islam. On these grounds alone, what Indonesian Muslims think and do should be a matter of general interest. An investigation of Muslim politics in this tropical milieu, however, has another benefit. It allows us to distinguish features of Muslim politics that owe more to Middle Eastern circumstances than Islamic civilization as a whole. Marginalized in treatments of classical Islam, Indonesia must be central to any effort to come to terms with the diversity of modern Muslim politics.

Islam and politics in Indonesia are also of interest because, after years of sustained economic growth, this nation ranks as one of Asia’s political and economic giants. With its huge domestic market and manufacturing industry, Indonesia in the early 1990s seemed poised to join the ranks of the world’s largest economies early in the twenty-first century. By the end of 1998, however, this achievement was in doubt. The financial crisis that erupted in East Asian markets in August 1997 had an especially destructive impact on Indonesia. After growing at a brisk annual rate of 6-7 percent for almost thirty years,” Indonesia’s gross domestic product shrank almost 14 percent in 1998. A poverty rate that had declined to just 13.7 percent of the population in early 1997 had [the figures have been revised down recently] shot back up to 40 percent eighteen months later. Equally alarming, a country long praised for its multicultural tolerance found itself caught in a downward spiral of ethnoreligious violence. Better off than most of the public, Chinese Indonesians (3 percent of the population) became the target of angry Muslim crowds. In a cycle of anti-Christian violence never before seen in Indonesian history, some four-hundred churches, many owned by Chinese-Indonesian congregations, were damaged or destroyed between 1997 and 1998. Indonesia’s rare flower seemed to be wilting.

The political and economic crises of 1997-99 dampened the optimism of those who had hoped that Indonesia might serve as a beacon for democracy to the larger Muslim world. For other observers, the crisis only confirmed the dim prospects for democratization in any Muslim nation. Both of these conclusions, however, miss the larger point. Indonesia does have rich civic precedents, as well as the world’s largest movement for a democratic and pluralist Islam. At the same time, however, the regime that ruled Indonesia from 1966 until the fall of President Soeharto in May 1998 was also one of the world’s most shrewdly authoritarian. The crisis of 1997-99 did not prove the earlier claims of democratic Islam a fraud, then, but underscored the scale of the challenge faced by Indonesian democrats of all faiths. This fact only makes more urgent the task of understanding Muslim politics in Indonesia and the circumstances that lead some Muslims to embrace democratic ideals.

The Pluralism of Muslim Politics

To come to terms with questions like these requires that we rethink some of our basic assumptions on Islam and democratization. The first step in such an effort is to recognize that Muslim politics is not monolithic but, like politics in all civilizations, plural. Several recent studies have reminded us that this was always the case.¹⁷ Even in the Umayyad and Abbasid empires of Islam’s first centuries there was a lively pattern of extra-state religious organizations, centered around the twin institutions of learned Muslim scholars (the ulama) and religious law; neither was totally controlled by the state.¹⁸ From a sociological perspective, the differentiation of religious and political authorities was inevitable as the Muslim community developed from a small, relatively homogeneous movement into a vast, multiethnic empire. From a religious perspective, too, the separation was necessary if the transcendent truth of Islam was not to be subordinated to the whims of all-too-human rulers.

More than Western Europe during the same period, medieval Muslim society was religiously plural, with Muslims living alongside Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others. There were several notable attempts to develop a practice of toleration, although, as in every other premodem tradition, no systematic theology on the matter was ever devised.¹⁹ Contrary to the claims of conservative Islamists today, the medieval Muslim world also knew an extensive separation of religious authority from state authority. In most Muslim countries, religious scholars developed the healthy habit of holding themselves at a distance from government.²⁰ So, too, did many of the great mystical brotherhoods that served as vehicles for popular religious participation.²¹ During the long Muslim middle ages, concepts of sacred kingship coexisted in uneasy tension with contractual notions of governance, with the result that religious leaders sometimes challenged rulers’ authority.²² For reasons that will become clearer in the Indonesian case, Muslim scholars in this era were reluctant to amplify these latter precedents into an explicit theory of political checks and balances. The full reformation of Muslim politics awaited the great upheavals of the modern era.

In the early modern era, reform-minded rulers in the Muslim world initiated modernizations intended to respond to the political challenge of the West. The enormity of Western colonization also prompted Muslim reformists outside the state to demand that the door of religious interpretation (ijtihad) be reopened. Over the course of its long history, the Muslim world had seen a series of religious reformations, most of which called for a return to scripture and the recorded example of the Prophet Muhammad. But the reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave this scripturalist imperative a new twist. For them, the message of Islam required that Muslims avail themselves of science, education, and modern forms of association. This reformation was intended to give Muslims not just the purity of the Word but the means for achieving cultural modernity.²³

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, Islamic modernism seemed to have settled into a staid orthodoxy. Certainly, in several Middle Eastern countries, Muslim brotherhoods continued to call for the establishment of an Islamic state.²⁴ But these movements did not play a determinant role in the politics of their homelands nor did they critically engage the terms of Muslim politics. In the postwar period the dominant political discourse in most Muslim countries was socialist and secular nationalist, not Islamist. Politics was visualized through the shapes and colors of the nation-state, and the nation to which the state was supposed to conform had, if any, an only vaguely Islamic hue.²⁵

However secure the idea of the nation might have appeared, the world of ordinary Muslims was anything but stable. In the early twentieth century most Muslims still lived in predominantly agrarian societies.²⁶ In the aftermath of the Second World War and independence, however, the circumstances of ordinary Muslims changed forever. Nationalist regimes launched ambitious programs of mass education. They also developed roads, markets, mass media, and intrusive state administrations. Local communities were opened wider than ever to outside ideas and powers. Mass migrations to cities and distant nations furthered this detraditionalization, forcing whole populations to develop new habits of livelihood and association. In the 1980s and 1990s this restructuring of life-worlds went further with the expansion of high-speed travel and electronic communications, both of which made Muslim societies even more permeable to new information and lifestyles. As in other parts of the world, the resulting “global ecumene”²⁷ heightened popular awareness of the world’s pluralism and posed serious challenges to established authorities and moralities.

In this manner, social change in our age has drawn great masses of Muslims onto a teeming public stage. Having done so, it has given special urgency to the question of the political and ethical scripts by which they are to act once there. As in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West, one response to these changes has been to call for equality, freedom, and democracy. Whatever their historical etymology, in most of the Muslim world these ideas are no longer just the stuff of Westernized academics or coffee-house intellectuals. Drawn down from the academic stratosphere into local life-worlds, democratic ideas have become one stream in the larger effort to give ethical shape to public life.²⁸

Some observers have interpreted this diffusion of democratic ideas as “Westernization” pure and simple. Native conservatives agree, although they typically equate the process with spiritual pollution. What is really at play in this process, however, is a more subtle interaction between the local and the (relatively) global.”²⁹ Viewed from the ground of everyday practice rather than the dizzying heights of official canons, the normative diversity of preindustrial societies was always greater than implied in classical Western sociology. In all societies there are values and practices that hover closer to the ground and carry latent possibilities, some of which may have egalitarian or democratic dimensions.³⁰ These low-lying precedents may not be heard in high-flying canons. Nonetheless they are in some sense available to those reflecting on what to become when the world takes a new turn. As Robert Weller has shown in his study of China’s prodemocracy movement, local actors there seized on what at first looked like the exogenous idioms of democracy and civil society to legitimate principles of equality and participation in public life. Weller demonstrates that these principles were already “present” in indigenous Chinese kinship and folk Confucianism, although in an undeveloped and politically bracketed way. ³¹ The concept of democracy proved useful for Chinese activists, then, not just because it was in the global air (although this certainly helped) but because it amplified a long latent potential in Chinese society.³²

It is for Muslim democrats as it is for Chinese. The tumult of recent decades has led many to aspire to a just and egalitarian public order. Although broadly democratic, the political discourse these Muslims are forging is not identical to Western liberalism. One reason this is so is that Muslims have looked to their religion to provide some of the terms for this new public ethic.³³

It is now a truism of comparative studies that religion in the post-Enlightenment West was marked by widespread “privatization,” which is to say, the growing tendency to see religion as a matter of personal ethics rather than public order.³⁴ The reasons for this development are too complex to detail here. We now realize, however, that the change had more to do with the peculiarities of European history and Western Christianity than with any universal modernizing tendency. We also know that this privatization was never as extensive as portrayed by some enthusiasts of Enlightenment secularism. After all, the post-Enlightenment West witnessed not merely attacks on public religion but new religious movements, such as Methodism in England, Pietism in Germany, and the Great Awakening in the United States.³⁵ It was no accident that the great French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that congregational Christianity was a vital element in the democratic culture of early-nineteenth-cen-tury America.³⁶ De Tocqueville understood that the American separation of church and state took government out of the business of coercing conformity, but it did not take religion out of public life. The arrangement relocated religion not so much to the private musings of isolated individuals but to a civil sphere of voluntary association and public debate. The result was not religion’s decline but an extraordinary efflorescence characterized by vigorous denominational competition and continual public argument. Renouncing the union of church and state, religion in America was pluralized and contested, but it was not reduced to the realm of the purely private.³⁷

In light of our revised understanding of Western religion and modernity, it should come as no surprise to us that the privatized model of religion has not gained great ground in the contemporary Muslim world.³⁸ Although classical liberals might wish otherwise, most Muslims still look to their religion for principles of public order as well as personal spirituality. What they take from their tradition, however, is not immutably fixed but reflects an ongoing interpretation informed by the changing circumstances of our world.

The participatory revolution now sweeping the Muslim world has, for example, provoked fierce debates over questions of Islam’s social meaning and by whose authority it is defined. In a pattern that resembles the competition between Protestant fundamentalists and liberal modernists in the United Slates a century ago,³⁹ the destabilization of hierarchies in the Muslim world has unleashed “competition and contest over both the interpretation of [religious] symbols and control of the institutions, formal and informal, that produce and sustain them.”⁴⁰ Mass education and mass marketing have intensified the competition, creating vast but segmented audiences for Islamic books, newspapers, and arts.⁴¹

This pluralized landscape has also seen the appearance of a host of religious activists with backgrounds and interests different from those of classically educated Muslim scholars (the ulama). Today populist preachers, neotraditionalist Sufi masters, and secularly educated “new Muslim intellectuals” challenge the monopoly of religious power earlier enjoyed by the ulama.⁴² Having originated in circles apart from the ulama, these new activists orient themselves to a broad public rather than to a few religious adepts. In place of esoteric legal debates, the spokespersons for this public Islam present their faith in quasi-ideological terms, as a source of practical knowledge “that can be differentiated from others and consciously reworked.”⁴³ Traditional scholars find the discourse of the new Muslim activism bizarrely eclectic. It mixes passages from the Qur’an with discussions of current affairs, modern moral dilemmas, and, sometimes, Western political theory. But it is precisely this heady mix that allows the new public Islam to address a diverse mass audience.

In this manner, Islam in recent years has drifted away from its earlier elite moorings into an unsteady societal sea. In a fashion that resembles the expansion of evangelical Protestantism in contemporary Latin America,⁴⁴ one segment of the new Islamic leadership has moved down-market in its appeals, crafting its message for an audience of ordinary and, sometimes, destitute Muslims. More than is the case for Latin American evangelicals (although not unlike their North American counterparts), however, others have moved up-market into the political and philosophical debates of public intellectuals. A few others, finally, have been drawn into the netherworld of off-stage intrigue and statist violence. The long-term fate of Muslim politics everywhere depends on the balance struck between these divergent tendencies.

A Muslim Public Sphere?

In many respects, what is happening in the Muslim world resembles what the German sociologist Jurgen Habermas described some years ago as the emergence of the “public sphere” in the West.⁴⁵ Habermas’s study of eighteenth-century European society emphasized that public arenas, like coffee houses, literary clubs, journals, and “moral weeklies,” helped to create an open and egalitarian culture of participation. Habermas suggests that this development provided vital precedent for the next century’s struggles for democratic representation.

Habermas has been criticized for overlooking the degree to which there were competing notions of public interaction in eighteenth-century Europe and other public spheres, not least of all religious. Habermas has also been rightly faulted for exaggerating the egalitarianism of the eighteenth-century public by overlooking exclusions based on wealth, gender, and religion.⁴⁶ Like Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on democracy in America, however, Habermas’s analysis has the virtue of emphasizing that democratic life depends not just on government but on resources and habits in society at large. Formal democracy requires a culture and organization greater than itself.

The question this comparison raises, of course, is whether the heightened participation and pluralization so visible in the Muslim world heralds an impending acceleration of the democratization process. For some observers, the answer to this question is a resounding no. These skeptics argue that the Muslim resurgence contradicts one of the central premises of democratic and Ha-bermasian theory, namely, that for a society to democratize, religion must retreat from the public stage to the privacy of personal belief.⁴⁷ Privatization, critics insist, is a condition of democratic peace.⁴⁸

As noted above, our revised understanding of religion in the West now casts doubt on this unitary view of democracy and modernity. Nonetheless some specialists of Islam have lent their voices to this pessimistic view by arguing that Muslims have a unique cultural malady that makes it difficult for them to get noxious religious emissions out of the public air. Bernard Lewis, a respected historian of Turkey and the Middle East, has invoked the oft-cited phrase that Islam is din wa dawla, “religion and state,” to observe that Muslims have an entirely different understanding of religion from that of liberal Christianity or the post-Enlightenment West:

When we in the Western world, nurtured in the Western tradition, use the words “Islam” and “Islamic,” we tend to make a natural error and assume that religion means the same for Muslims as it has meant in the Western world, even in medieval times; that is to say, a section or compartment of life reserved for certain matters…. That was not so in the Islamic world. It was never so in the past, and the attempt in modem times to make it so may perhaps be seen, in the longer perspective of history, as an unnatural aberration which in Iran has ended and in some other Islamic countries may also be nearing its end. 49

Lewis is right to emphasize that many Muslims regard their religion as a model for public order as well as personal ethics.⁵⁰ His generalization is too sweeping, however, if it implies that no good Western democrat has ever viewed religion in so comprehensive a manner. His generalization also misleads if it implies that Muslims have just one way of interpreting din wa dawla, and one way, therefore, of organizing Muslim politics.

Recent history has demonstrated that there is an enormous range of opinion among Muslims on precisely these matters. Some new activists do invoke the idea of Islam as “religion and state” to justify harshly coercive policies. They advocate a fusion of state and society into an unchecked monolith they call an “Islamic” state. They insist that the only way to enforce the high standards of Muslim morality is to dissolve the boundary between public and private and use the disciplinary powers of the state to police both spheres. The Qur’an of course knows no such concept of an “Islamic” state, least of all one with the coercive powers of a modern leviathan. The Qur’an also abhors compulsion in religion. For believers, however, the biggest problem with this arrangement is that it ends by degrading religion itself. By concentrating power in rulers’ hands, statist Islam only increases the likelihood that Islam’s high ideals will be subordinated to vulgar political intrigues. Time and time again we see unscrupulous despots wrap themselves in the mantle of Muslim piety. Not coinci-dentally, the Islam they promote is typically a neofundamentalism hostile to pluralism, justice, and civil decency.⁵¹

But the Islamic reformation⁵² of the late-modern era is greater than the claims of hypocritical dictators. In part this is so because the Qur’an and its commentaries are rich with other, pluralistic possibilities. This is also the case, however, because the politics of the Muslim reformation depends not only on the recovery of hallowed textual truths but on a reading of the realities of the larger modem world. To quote the great Syrian Muslim democrat Moham-mad Shahrour, Muslims “have been used to reading this book [the Qur’an] with borrowed eyes for hundreds of years.”⁵³ More are reading it today with their own eyes. like all thoughtful readers, however, they draw on what they see around them to enrich their understanding of the text. In so doing, they notice meanings previously overlooked. For many Muslims, the charge of this new reading is to recover and amplify Islam’s democratic endowments so as to provide the ethical resources for Muslims in a plural, mobile, and participatory world.

Civil pluralist Islam is an emergent tradition and comes in a variety of forms.⁵⁴ Most versions begin, however, by denying the wisdom of a monolithic “Islamic” state and instead affirming democracy, voluntarism, and a balance of countervailing powers in a state and society.⁵⁵ In embracing the ideals of civil society, this democratic Islam insists that formal democracy cannot prevail unless government power is checked by strong civic associations. At the same time, it is said, civic associations and democratic culture cannot thrive unless they are protected by a slate that respects society by upholding its commitment to the rule of law.

Recovering and amplifying elements of Islamic tradition, civil Islam is not merely a facsimile of a Western original. As Bhiku Parekh has noted, Atlantic liberalism (the version most popular among liberal philosophers in Great Britain and the United States) “defines the individual in austere and minimalist terms … as an essentially self-contained and solitary being.”⁵⁶ Of course, recent debates in the United States have reminded us that contrary to philosophical portrayals, real-and-existing democracy must always find ways to accommodate social as well as individual goods.⁵⁷ As Adam Seligman and Michael Sandel have both emphasized,⁵⁸ it is nonetheless true that the language of modem liberalism, with its image of the “autonomous agentic individual,” has often made the affirmation of social goods difficult.

As will become clearer in the following chapters, Muslim democrats, like those in Indonesia, tend to be more civil democratic or Tocquevillian than they are (Atlantic) liberal in spirit. They deny the need for an Islamic state. But they insist that society involves more than autonomous individuals, and democracy more than markets and the state. Democracy requires a noncoercive culture that encourages citizens to respect the rights of others as well as to cherish their own. This public culture depends on mediating institutions in which citizens develop habits of free speech, participation, and toleration. In all this, they say, there is nothing undemocratic about Muslim voluntary associations (as well as those of other religions) playing a role in the public life of civil society as well as in personal ethics.⁵⁹

The success of civil Islam will ultimately depend on more than the ideas of a few good thinkers. In all modern traditions, religious reformation requires a delicate balance between a changing society and its orienting ideas. The ideas must be expansive enough to attract and guide the attention of a fast-moving people. But the ideas must not run so far ahead that they leave the great mass behind. It is a premise of the present book that a democratic politics is indeed developing in the Islamic world, and it is not too far ahead of those whom it would guide. In sociological terms, the reformation depends on achieving a delicate balance between structural changes in state and society, on the one hand, and public culture and ethics, on the other.

In this book, of course, I am especially interested in the trials and tribulations of civil Islam in the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia. The Indonesian example is interesting for several reasons. It provides a striking illustration of the varied ways in which a universal religion has been adapted to local worlds. The example challenges most of our stereotypes of Muslim history and politics. It also enlarges our sense of the plural nature of modernity and the way the modern world has presented similar challenges to believers in all the world’s religions, even while allowing them different outcomes.

Civic Seedlings

Although an earlier generation of Western scholars identified its most distinctive trait as the strength of so-called Hindu-Buddhist survivals, the more distinctive quality of Indonesian Islam has long been its remarkable cultural pluralism. The archipelago that in modern times became Indonesia and Malaysia was never conquered by invading Muslim armies, smothered under a centralized empire, or supervised by an omnipresent clergy. Certainly there was the occasional despot who aspired to religious absolutism. But the striking feature of political organization in the early modern archipelago is that it was organized around a “pluricentric” pattern of mercantile city-states, inland agrarian kingdoms, and tribal hinterlands. In comparative terms, regional organization here resembled not so much the great empires of China, India, or Byzantium as the pluralized polities of early modern Europe (chapter 2).

The variety of states and societies in the archipelago had a profound influence on the subsequent development of Muslim politics and culture. Even in an era when virtually all Javanese, Malays, or Minangkabau called themselves Muslims, neither the courts nor religious scholars (the ulama) exercised monopolistic control over the practice of Islam. There were always different Muslim rulers, diverse religious associations, and alternative ideas as to how to be Muslim. From the beginning, people in the region grappled with what social theorists today sometimes regard as a uniquely modern problem—cultural pluralism.

There was nothing inevitable about the outcome of this engagement. Distributed across a vast territorial expanse and three hundred ethnic groups, the Muslim community could have dissolved into a maelstrom of ethno-lslams, in which each community claimed an opposed understanding of religion’s truth. At times local Muslim rulers did encourage exclusive or chauvinistic professions of the faith. From early on, however, the mainstream tradition recognized that there were different ways of being Muslim, and different balances of divine commandment and local culture (adat). This cultural precedent may well explain why, in the late colonial period, so many Indonesian Muslims rallied to the nationalist cause (chapter 3). In Indonesia at least, the nationalism they embraced was plural and multiethnic rather than, as in so much of Europe, premised on a single ethnic prototype.

This pattern of political and ethnoreligious pluralism was put to a test in the colonial era. The Dutch replaced the archipelago’s many states with a unified empire. The colonial government placed strict limits on Muslim participation in public affairs, trying to squeeze Islam into an illiberal version of Enlightenment privatism. Rather than reinforcing a union of religion and state, then, colonialism pushed Muslims away from the corridors of power and out into villages and society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a vast network of Qur’anic schools spread across the archipelago. The leaders of these schools were suspicious of Europeans and their native allies, and they located their institutions at a safe distance from state capitals. In the early twentieth century, when the first modern Muslim organizations were established, most showed a similarly healthy skepticism toward the pretensions of rulers.

These practical precedents for civic autonomy and a balance of social powers, however, did not yet enjoy sufficient cultural authority to serve as the basis for a reformed Muslim politics. Indeed, on this point the struggle for national independence after 1910 introduced contradictory trends (chapters 3, 4). Many Muslims, including pious ones, rejected the notion that Islam requires an Islamic state. Joined by Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and secular nationalists, these Muslims advocated a plural and democratic nation-state. Others in the Muslim community, however, insisted that the end of colonialism heralded a new age of cooperation with the state. Muslims’ ascent into government, these leaders argued, was the answer to their prayers for a deeper Islamization of state and society.⁶⁰

This dream, of course, was not merely a matter of political ambition. As in other pans of the Muslim world, Islamic reformists in the early independence era were determined to put an end to the mysticism, saint cults, and ancestral veneration widespread in native society, all of which they regarded as polytheistic deviations from Islam.⁶¹ In some of the archipelago these campaigns for religious purification were an unqualified success. On the densely populated island of Java (and a few other areas), however, the results were mixed. Javanese Muslims were divided between those committed to a more or less normative profession of the faith, known as santri, and those who spiced their piety with Javanese customs, known as abangan.⁶² The reformist campaign left a few abangan wondering whether they were really Muslims at all.⁶³ By the 1920s many were looking away from Islamic orthodoxy to socialism, secular nationalism, and Marxism to make sense of their new world (chapter 3). Although in some parts of the archipelago reformist Muslims could portray their rivals as backward heathen, then, this was not the case in Java. The abangan leadership was educated and organized.⁶⁴ The conflict between Javanists and reformist Muslims did not pit parochial traditionalists against cosmopolitan modernizers. It set two rival visions of religion and nation against each other. This was to become the basis for an enduring political argument.

By the time Indonesia declared its independence on August 17, 1945, then, the neat union of Islam and ethnicity among Javanese had been shattered; politics and religion had been pluralized.⁶⁵ Indonesians favoring a formal Islamization of state faced increasing opposition as the independence era advanced. By the late 1950s the anti-lslamist opposition included most of the military leadership, which had done battle with Muslim separatists; Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, all disproportionately represented in the ranks of the middle class; secular nationalists and modernizers; the Communist Parly; and most of the Javanist community.

As time went on, the debate between Islamists and nonconfessional nationalists became even more strident. Contrary to general expectations, Muslim parties failed to win a majority of the vote in the first national elections in 1955. The vote was evenly divided between nonconfessional nationalists and proponents of an Islamic state. With the impasse at the nation’s center, the big political parties launched furious mass mobilizations, organizing peasant associations, labor unions, cooperatives, and religious clubs. Although 88 percent of their support was concentrated on the island of Java (where 55 percent of the population lived), the Communist Party proved the most skilled at this mobilization. Having won 18 percent of the vote in the 1955 elections, the party went on to recruit twenty million people to its affiliate organizations. By 1960 Indonesia had the largest Communist Party in the noncommunist world (chapters 3, 4).

The rapid pace of the Communist Party’s growth hid a fatal organizational flaw. Although less massive than their communist rival, Muslim organizations were more evenly dispersed across the country and more deeply rooted in society. The Communists were also at a disadvantage in that they were bitterly opposed by the army high command. This struggle between the Communists, on one side, and the military and the Muslims, on the other, came to a tragic climax in the aftermath of a failed left-wing officers’ coup on September 30, 1965. In the weeks that followed, Muslims joined forces with the conservative army leadership to destroy the Communist Party; as many as half a million people died. Muslim organizations sacralized the campaign, calling it a holy war or jihad. The Muslim heritage of civil autonomy and skepticism toward state power seemed a faded memory indeed.

In the aftermath of 1965-66, the military-dominated “New Order” government made political and economic stabilization its top priority (chapter 4). To the surprise of Muslim leaders, the regime also moved gingerly to restrict independent political parties, especially—now that the nationalist left was destroyed—Muslim ones. In the face of government repression, the Muslim community split into two camps. Some sought to defend the faith through a program of Islamic appeal (dakwah), intended over the long run to revive the Islamic parties and recapture the state. Another group in the Muslim community, however, criticized this reduction of Muslim interests to state-centered struggle. The obsession with party politics in the 1950s, they said, had only polarized the nation and impeded Muslim progress. What was really needed, then, was not another campaign to capture the state but a vigorous program of education and renewal in society. The ultimate goal of this program should be the creation of a Muslim civil society to counterbalance the state and promote a public culture of pluralism and participation (chapter 5).

This intra-Muslim debate might well have remained an insignificant issue had Indonesian politics remained in a steady state. Instead, however, the rivalry between these two visions of Islam and nation eventually became one of the defining features of the New Order. This had to do with changes in society. Contrary to the expectations of its rulers, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Indonesia experienced a historically unprecedented Islamic resurgence (chapters 5, 6). There was an upsurge in mosque construction, Friday worship, religious education, alms-collection (zakat), and pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1977 the Unity and Development Party (PPP), a government-tolerated Muslim party, astonished the nation by winning the lion’s share of the vote in the capital.

Government programs had unwittingly contributed to the resurgence. Between 1965 and 1990, the percentage of young adults with basic literacy skills skyrocketed from 40 percent to 90 percent.⁶⁶ The percentage of youths completing senior high school was equally impressive, rising from 4 percent in 1970 to more than 30 percent today.⁶⁷ The educational expansion occurred after 1966, when regulations mandating religious instruction in all schools were enforced with a new vigor. Before Soeharto’s rise, most schools had implemented requirements for religious education casually, if at all. But by the early 1970s all elementary school students were receiving the same religious instruction from state-certified teachers.

A second influence on the resurgence was that many Indonesians in these years were searching for a new ethical compass for their fast changing world. They were doing so, moreover, at a time when other arenas for public association and debate had been closed.⁶⁸ Islam was “seen as a safe alternative to the heavily circumscribed political structure.”⁶⁹ After street battles in January 1974 the regime muzzled the news media. In 1978 it clamped down on campus politics. Between 1983 and 1985 the government required mass organizations to recognize the state ideology, or Pancasila (“five principles”), as their “sole foundation”; those that refused were banned. Nothing escaped the regime’s reach. It launched regular sweeps against campus activists, labor organizations, and even independent business associations.⁷⁰ The regime also reduced the two official political panics, the nationalist-oriented Democratic Party (PDI) and the Muslim-oriented Unity and Development Party, to pliant ineffectuality.

The Soeharto government also regularly meddled in Muslim affairs (chapters 5-7).⁷¹ Muslim associations were nonetheless better able to withstand the state’s repressive storm. Indeed, in their campaigns against the national sports lottery, against government regulations on marriage,⁷² and in support of Islamic banking, among others, Muslim organizations showed a striking ability to circumvent the state and influence public policy.

Although the Islamic resurgence displayed the pluralization of authority seen in other Muslim countries, it also showed the impact of state controls. With its regulations recognizing only five faiths (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) as legitimate options tor its citizens, the New Order effectively outlawed the indigenous religions practiced in local communities across eastern Indonesia, Kalimantan, and interior Sumatra. Anthropologists working in these areas in the 1970s and 1980s provided vivid accounts of the deleterious impact of these policies on indigenous religions, and, conversely, their role in catalyzing conversion to Christianity or Islam.⁷³ State policies had a similar impact on abangan Islam. Over the past thirty years the institutions through which Javanist Islam once operated as a public alternative to orthodox Islam have declined, whereas institutions for Islamic education and devotion have grown (chapter 4).⁷⁴ Upset by Muslim participation in the anticommunist massacres⁷⁵, some 3 percent of ethnic Javanese converted to Hinduism or Christianity in the first years of the New Order.⁷⁶ Others look shelter in mystical associations. Both developments pale, however, in comparison with the growing numbers of Javanists who have adopted a more pious profession of Islam.

Political observers have long suspected that the relative decline of Javanist Islam has serious political implications. In the 1950s, after all, secular and abangan Muslims formed the core of the Communist and Nationalist Parties. Opposition to political Islam became one of the rallying cries of the populist left. The conversion of nominal Muslims to a more mainstream Islam has been seen by many observers, then, as portending enormous changes in Indonesia’s political landscape.

The consequences of the resurgence are more complex, however, than a simple shift from secular-nationalism to “conservative” Islam. As the growing public interest in Sufi mysticism has illustrated, many Indonesians prefer an independent and tolerant spirituality to the controlled Islam of the state.⁷⁷ Equally important, as Muslim students in the anti-Soeharto movement showed, many pious youth find democratic and egalitarian values in their reading of Islam. Indeed, although conservative Islamists disapprove, the remarkable feature of the resurgence was that its central streams were democratic and pluralist (chapters 6, 7).⁷⁸ In the 1990s Muslims were the single largest constituency in the prodemocracy movement against Soeharto.

But not all has been sweetness and light for Indonesian Muslims. In the last years of his rule, Soeharto changed course and, rather than suppressing Muslims, courted them. The president’s rapprochement was in part intended to counterbalance his worsening relationship with powerful military commanders. But Soeharto’s actions also reflected his awareness of the strength of the Islamic resurgence (chapters 6, 7). Whatever his precise motives, the president’s policies had an electrifying impact on Muslim affairs. Having obstructed organized Islam for twenty years, in his last twelve Soeharto encouraged it. He supported the establishment of an Islamic bank, expansion of the authority of Muslim courts, an end to the prohibition on the wearing of the veil (jilbab) in schools, the founding of an Islamic newspaper, abolition of the state lottery, expanded Muslim programming on television, increased funding for Muslim schools, and the appointment of armed forces leaders sympathetic to (conservative) Islam.⁷⁹ Among conservative Muslims in the 1990s there was talk of a “honeymoon” with Soeharto.

In political terms, however, the opening to the Muslim community was always circumscribed. Muslims seen as too critical or democratic were excluded from presidential favor. Rather than a civil Islam, in other words, Soeharto sought to create a regimist Islam untroubled by his authoritarian ways. As it became clear that mainstream Muslims were interested in democratic reforms, the president upped his ante. From 1996 on, his strategists began to make stridently anti-Christian and anti-Chinese appeals in an effort to divide the opposition along ethnic and religious lines. Responding to these overtures, a few Muslim ultraconservatives moved out of the opposition into alliance with the regime. They collaborated in the campaigns of intimidation and terror that marked Soeharto’s final years (chapters 6, 7).

Soeharto’s actions betrayed the principles of Pancasila pluralism earlier promoted, if often hypocritically, by his regime.⁸⁰ In exploiting ethnoreligious divisions for personal power, Soeharto also made a dangerous run on the reserves of civic decency in society. Civil society, and civil Islam, were threatened by the uncivil depredations of the state.

The state itself was far from unitary, however. By the end of Soeharto’s rule, there were many decent people in the military and bureaucracy who were shocked by Soeharto’s desperate dealings. In the face of Soeharto’s repression the state elite split into rival factions—some opposing the president, others supporting him. The state’s loss, however, was not civil society’s gain. As had been the case in the final years of Soekarno’s rule,⁸¹ intra-state rivalries led some among the elite only to intensify their efforts to exploit divisions in society. Fortunately many in the state, and the great majority of people in society, rejected these uncivil abuses. In the first months of 1998 Muslim and secular democrats joined forces in a prodemocracy campaign that ultimately brought Soeharto down (chapter 7).

What guided Soeharto throughout his career was not, as many once thought, his commitment to a consistent ideology, least of all the tolerant Javanism attributed to him a generation ago. Soeharto’s obsession was power, and he was happy to change ideological garb to keep it. A master of divide and conquer, he played religious rivals against one another until none could stand on their own. On this point Soeharto’s actions reflected less an “idea of power” unique to Javanese culture than a strategy of divisive control widely used by authoritarian rulers. The tactic threatened the most precious of Indonesia’s democratic resources: the depth of tolerance and nationalist pride among citizens of all faiths.

In the end, Indonesia survived Soeharto. Its long-term prospects look hopeful, although its democratic transition is still young. More specifically, although Soeharto stepped down in May 1998, most of his supporters did not. Despite the victory of pro-reform parties in the elections of June 1999, then,. the road toward justice and reconciliation is still far from clear.

What is apparent, however, is that democratic consolidation will require not just a civil society of independent associations (although these are important too) but a public culture of equality, justice, and universal citizenship. In this majority-Muslim society, and in the aftermath of a great Islamic revival, the creation of such a public culture of democratic civility will be impossible unless it can build on the solid ground of civil Islam. While affirming the legitimacy of religion in public life, civil Islam rejects the mirage of the “Islamic” state, recognizing that this formula for fusing religious and state authority ignores the lessons of Muslim history itself. Worse yet, without checks and balances in state and society, the “Islamic” state subordinates Muslim ideals to the dark intrigues of party bosses and religious thugs.

The Indonesian example reminds us, then, that while a civil society and civic culture are required to make democracy work, by themselves they are still not enough. A healthy civil society requires a civilized state. In the Indonesian case, such a state would work with, rather than against, the greatness of its citizens and the humanitarianism of civil Islam. On the challenge of these achievements, the Indonesian story has much to tell.

Notes

For notes on this chapter, please reference the text.

Chapter Two

CIVIL PRECEDENCE

A key theme in modern social theory has been that the traditions a society inherits from the past shape its ability to respond to the present, often in ways actors themselves do not fully understand. Dutifully engaged in business in an effort to confirm he is among God’s elect, the Calvinist entrepreneur who helps create modern capitalism in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism¹ provides the prototype for this sort of analysis, in which a precedent from the past is projected into the present to create something unexpectedly new. In the heyday of modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists set out for non-Western locales in the hope of finding precedents for modern development like these. Like Weber, most researchers were interested in cultural inheritances that might facilitate the emergence of the two institutions thought pivotal to the making of the modern world—market economies and political democracy.

From the start this kind of comparative inquiry was plagued by conceptual shortcomings. The models of democracy and capitalism used in these investigations, first of all, were often so idealized as to undermine comparison with non-Western societies. Typically, for example, the image of the West used in the analysis was a stripped-down model of the Anglo-American experience, squeezed of its political complexity so as to fit into the modernization corset. Convinced of the benefits of such simplifications, researchers often found themselves confused upon arriving in a foreign setting, uncertain of what they should look for. In identifying precedents for modern market economies, for example, should one look for a tradition of moneymaking? Or is the critical issue technology and efficient institutions for capital accumulation? Or is the key perhaps an entrepreneurial class willing and able to extract surplus value from a reluctant labor force?

The answer to these questions all depends on what one believes is essential for a modern economy and society. Rather than grappling with questions like these, however, modernization theorists tended to create simplified prototypes of the modern West and then look for their counterpart in developing societies. Inspired by an exuberant reading of Weber’s Protestant Ethic (and ignoring the complex analyses of his Economy and Society),² field researchers interested in capitalism looked for local miniatures of Weber’s Calvinist entrepreneur—as if market growth did not also depend on an array of “embedding” institutions in state and society.³

In the years since modernization theory’s demise, social researchers have achieved a deeper understanding of the difficulties of such cross-cultural comparison. They have done so in part by recognizing that the West is not unitary but richly plural in its traditions. They have also recognized that the social and historical richness of the “non-Western” world cannot be adequately conveyed by simplistic polarities of modernity and tradition. Modernity is multiple, and the premodern world equally so.

Buoyed by this critical confidence, comparative research on politics and democratization in the 1980s and 1990s took an anthropological turn. Researchers realized that even in the West the roads to political modernity have been many, not one. The history of democratic government in England has differed significantly from that in Germany, and Germany’s history differs from that of Italy or the United States. Rather than assuming that democratic government everywhere emerges from the same specific institutions or events, then, scholars began to look for something more general—a polymorphous social resource that, in different times and places, provides a precedent for democratic life.

Two social entities popularly identified as having these generic qualities are “social capital” and “civil society.” Social capital consists of accumulative cultural endowments that facilitate the performance of certain social tasks.⁴ Stated differently, and to steal a sentence from the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, social capital refers to “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions.”⁵ Based on an analogy with economic capital, the idea here is that the effective performance of social tasks requires not merely material goods but institutions for coordinating specifically social resources as well.

Expressed in so general a fashion, one could imagine social capital for all kinds of purposes: to heighten religious piety; to maintain sexual virtue; or perhaps to promote a public appetite for bird watching. In most contemporary research, however, the concept has been applied to a narrower array of issues, based on theories of what it is that has made the world modern. Like modernization theorists a generation ago, researchers have been particularly intent on identifying social capital that might enhance the prospects for modern markets and democracy.

In cross-cultural studies of capitalism, the social capital paradigm has helped to correct the view that all that is needed for economic growth is to clear the market of political obstacles, “get prices right,” and let the market do its job. As was made apparent by efforts in the 1990s to introduce a market economy to Russia, however, real-and-existing markets are never self-contained or naturally self-organizing. They are affected by, among other things, the politics, work habits, and morality of their host society. Rather than being everywhere the same, then, capitalism varies across cultures. The state and law play a minor role in business in Taiwan compared to the United States and Western Europe. Multimillion dollar deals that in the United States are struck only after scrutiny by a small army of lawyers are, among overseas Chinese, settled with a handshake.⁶ Every market is embedded in society in ways like these, and capitalism depends on a social capital of networks and norms not everywhere the same.⁷

Building on insights like these from economic sociology, political researchers have deployed the concept of social capital in an analogous fashion to analyze the conditions that make democracy work. Studies of this sort emphasize that democratic governance depends not just on formal elections or constitutions but on informal endowments found in society as a whole. These endowments include a political culture emphasizing citizen independence, trust in one’s fellows, tolerance, and respect for the rule of law. These cultural resources are in turn best fostered, it has been argued, through a peculiar social organization known as civil society.

The concept of civil society means widely differing things in different theoretical traditions. In its most common usage in the 1990s, however, the notion refers to the clubs, religious organizations, business groups, labor unions, human rights groups, and other associations located between the household and the state and organized on the basis of voluntarism and mutuality. The idea here is that for formal democratic institutions to work, citizens have first to acquire the habit of participating in local voluntary associations. It is through such “networks of civil engagement,” one hears said, that citizens learn the habits of participation and initiative later generalized to the whole of political society.

Much of the inspiration for this idea originated in Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous nineteenth-century study Democracy in America. Drawing on ideas first developed by Montesquieu, de Tocqueville regarded intermediary associations as vital for healthy democracy. Fascinated by Americans’ ability to develop democratic institutions compared to the French inability to do so, de Tocqueville argued that the key difference was that Americans had “carried to the highest perfection” the civic habit of common effort in organizations independent of the state.⁸ In attempting to explain this peculiar American aptitude, de Tocqueville highlighted the role of churches and small-town government. These institutions draw Americans out from the confines of their private lives, de Tocqueville said, into public projects where they learn “habits of the heart” conducive to a democratic good.

Building on this Tocquevillian premise, contemporary enthusiasts of social capital and civil society have set out for distant shores to look for participatory precedents like these. In an influential study, for example, Robert D. Putnam has examined why patterns of government vary so greatly between northern and southern Italy. In the south, he claims, politics has long been plagued by corruption, violence, and organized crime. “The southerner … has sought refuge in vertical bonds of patronage and clientelism, employed for both economic and political ends.”⁹ By contrast, local government in the north works relatively well because, Putnam argues, people have long relied on “networks of civic engagement.” The latter are evident in everything from choral groups and lay religious associations to business partnerships and political parties.

When, in good Tocquevillian fashion, Putnam turns to explain the difference between northern and southern Italy, he finds that “social patterns plainly traceable from early medieval Italy to today turn out to be decisive in explaining why, on the verge of the twenty-first century, some communities are better able than others to manage collective life and sustain effective institutions.”¹⁰ Indeed, since the great Norman kingdom of the twelfth century, Putnam argues, the south has been characterized by an autocratic political culture. The Norman kingdom that created this uncivil polity has long since passed, but, Putnam implies, its lawlessness, patron-clientage, and corruption live on.

In contrast to the south, Putnam observes, northern Italy, even in medieval times, began to create self-governing communes, “oases amidst the feudal forest.” The north did so because it responded to the violence and anarchy of medieval Europe with horizontal collaboration rather than vertical hierarchy. Although the communal system was not democratic in the modern sense (because full rights of participation were restricted to patricians), civic life drew large numbers of people into horizontal associations.¹¹ The resulting networks of civic engagement heightened public trust, smoothed institutional performance, and provided a “culturally defined template for future collaboration.”¹²

Putnam’s thoughtful insights became axioms of the 1990s’ literature on civil society. Especially influential was his structuralist claim that the real key to democratic culture is popular participation in laterally organized “civic” associations. Putnam gave this conviction an almost mathematical precision, saying that “the more horizontally structured an organization, the more it should foster institutional success in the broader community.” Conversely, Putnam observed, “membership rates in hierarchically ordered organizations … should be negatively associated with good government.”¹³ Horizontal groupings are “democracy-good,” it seems, and vertical ones “democracy-bad.”

In retrospect, this appealing little formula appears too simple. As America’s extremist militias remind us,”horizontalism” is no guarantee of democratic civility. Organizations like right-wing militias or the Ku Klux Klan may well display the independence from government and rank-and-file effervescence we associate with civil society. Contrary to Putnam’s alluring formula, however, these exclusive associations can also breed intolerance and sectarianism. From examples like these, it is apparent that lateral association does not guarantee any specific political outcome. The political impact of civic associations depends not just on their formal structure but on the discourse and practice they help promote. In assessing whether associations “make democracy work,” then, we have to look carefully at what their members actually say and do. In particular, we have to examine the way their members relate to one another and to outsiders, and ask whether the overall pattern contributes to a public culture of inclusion and participation or uncivil exclusivity.

This first shortcoming in the civic-associational model of democratization points to a second. If horizontalism is not all good, not all verticalism is bad. Vertical structures may not only coexist with civic organizations, but, by preserving the peace or building bridges over troubled waters, they may actually strengthen a public culture of civility and participation. This was famously the case, for example, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Netherlands. There the social peace was threatened by the uncivil rivalries among the country’s three major religious groupings: Roman Catholics, Orthodox Protestants, and Liberal Protestants. (In the late nineteenth century secular humanists were added to the mix.) Peace among these social groupings was maintained by vertical organizations coordinated by nonclerical representatives from each pillar. The idea behind this arrangement was that pillar leaders should negotiate an equitable share of state resources so as to ensure that their followers did not fight with people from rival pillars. In this manner, vertical coordination helped to maintain horizontal peace. As the Dutch sociologist Anton Zijderveld has observed, this arrangement was in some ways “authoritarian and elitist.” But it nonetheless allowed a “remarkable social and political pacification,” one that eventually facilitated modern Dutch democracy.¹⁴

Examples like these remind us that associational explanations of what “makes democracy work” are inherently incomplete. One has to examine not just civic organizations but their synergistic interaction with public culture and the state. This conclusion also implies that modern democratization always involves more than just projecting old associations into new social terrains. As Peter Evans has remarked in a review, of the literature on social capital; there is nothing simple about “scaling up” micro-level social capital to generate solidary ties and social action on a scale that is politically and economically efficacious” for society as a whole.¹⁵ Institution-building efforts like these depend not only on civic associations but on the state. Without a state to expand their democratic role, “networks of civic engagement” may get lost in the backstreets of society rather than open on to a democratic public sphere.

These simple theoretical lessons are directly relevant to the Indonesian example. Modern Indonesia has been plagued by a recurring inability to make good on the promise of its civic endowments. Indonesian society in general, and Muslim society in particular, has been blessed with an abundance of civic resources. Muslims learned long ago to live with ethnic and regional diversity.¹⁶ They showed a healthy skepticism toward the all-controlling state. These cultural precedents might well have served as the raw material for a Muslim political reformation. But their amplification into public discourses and practices has often proved difficult. This was partly so because most of the ruling elite who dominated Indonesian society, rather than consolidating precedents for civility and pluralism, ignored or abused them. The colonial policy of divide and conquer had an especially corrosive impact on native civic traditions. The postcolonial state continued this legacy; the Soeharto regime brought it to perfection.

This failure of civic consolidation, however, has not been the state’s fault alone. The movements for Islamic reform that arose in the nineteenth century decried many of the accommodations devised by local Muslims to live in a plural world. Rather than drawing on local history to deepen democratic precedents, many reformists looked away from their world, back to an idealized golden age. As specialists of Islam have emphasized (chapter 1), there are abundant resources in Muslim tradition for democratic politics. But for these raw materials to become effective democratic endowments, Muslim thinkers have to be willing to learn from their own history as well as from high doctrines. Politics in Indonesia has often made this delicate balance of religious idealism and political empiricism a difficult achievement indeed.

PROMISE BROKEN

At first sight, the archipelagan region that today makes up Indonesia seems an unlikely candidate for ever having enjoyed even a limited culture of pluralism and participation. After all, in the early modem era (sixteenth to seventeenth century), the region was inhabited by more than three hundred ethnic groups living on some six thousand inhabited islands separated by marked divisions of language and culture. Although by the early modern period the majority of coastal people in the area had come to profess Islam, many of the larger islands’ hinterlands maintained locally oriented ethnic religions. Even coastal Muslim territories were cross-cut by regional and ethnic divides.

Trained in modernization theory, a Westerner reflecting on this diversity might be tempted to conclude that it was the result of traditional societies long lost in historyless slumber and about to be awakened by the detraditionalizing energies of the West. Like the polarity of “tradition” and “modernity” on which it is based, however, such a conclusion overlooks the dynamism that has long characterized this region.¹⁷ The archipelago’s diversity is not the result of traditional torpor but a decidedly unlinear encounter with forces at work in this region for the better part of a thousand years. European colonialism had a major influence on the latter stages of this history, but its role was less progressive than modernization models typically imply. In fact, the European interregnum reinforced absolutism, reified ethnicity, and undercut integrative processes already at work across ethnic and territorial divides.

By the time the Dutch began to make regular appearances in the archipelago in the early seventeenth century, the region’s coastal principalities were in the second century of an economically expansive and Muslim-pioneered “age of commerce.”¹⁸ The trade that moved through this great commercial zone was multifaceted, but its most lucrative circuits involved the transport of spices, cloth, rice, and gold from eastern Indonesia to commercial centers in southern Sulawesi, Java, the Malay Peninsula, and Sumatra. From these ports goods were shipped to China, India, and southern Arabia, creating a trading zone comparable in scale to that of the eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period.

As in the Mediterranean world, the archipelagan trade had long influenced regional culture and politics. Earlier, in the first centuries of the common era. commercial exchange between the archipelago and India and China catalyzed the emergence of the area’s first states. Shortly thereafter, this same trade facilitated the diffusion of Buddhism and Hinduism from India to royal courts throughout the region. Although the remote islands of eastern Indonesia and the inaccessible interiors in the west were not dramatically transformed by this movement of people, goods, and ideas, the region’s major states were forever changed.

Many of the more conspicuous elements in this cultural complex showed strong Indian influences. These included the use of Sanskrit-derived alphabets; Indian legal ideas; political regalia emphasizing the divinity of the ruler; and, consistent with the cult of sacred kings, rituals identifying the court as a microcosm of the universe and a meeting point between heaven and earth. In the peculiar blend of Hinduism and Buddhism characteristic of the archipelago, some rulers were presented as incarnations of Buddhist boddhisattvas, Hindu gods, or both. As this example shows, high religion in the pre-lslamic era was hitched to the cart of dynastic politics.¹⁹

By the time Europeans finally arrived, then, the Indonesian archipelago had enjoyed more than a thousand years of civilizational efflorescence. In fact, at the time of the European arrival, the archipelago was experiencing a vast re-newal of cultural and commercial energies, on a scale that invites comparison with renaissance Europe. Trading expeditions from India and, especially, southern China (after the ascent of the Ming dynasty in 1368) stimulated commercial activity. This in turn had a far-reaching impact on archipelagan society. Rather than stimulating the growth of empire, political power remained dispersed across a host of mercantile city-states and inland agrarian kingdoms. Until the Europeans imposed their rule the archipelago never knew a centralized empire like those in the Middle East or China. If anything, in fact, the region’s state organization resembled the pluricentric pattern of early modern Europe. Historical sociologists like Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, and John Hall. among others, have long identified Europe’s multipolar organization as one of the keys to its gradual democratization.²⁰ There were times when it looked as if the archipelago’s pluralism held a similar democratic promise.

The civilizational dynamic at work in the early-modern archipelago was evident in many spheres. At the time of the European arrival, Malay—a language originally spoken in small settlements on the Malay Peninsula and in Borneo— was becoming the lingua franca for regional commerce and religion.²¹ Malay achieved this prominence not through conquest but as the public language for a multiethnic world. Islam was also spreading across coastal portions of the archipelago at this time, in a manner that invites comparison with the expansion of Protestantism in early modern Europe. The Muslim advance came not on the heels of conquering nomads or slave armies but through commerce, urban growth, and a new cosmopolitan culture.²²

There had long been a limited Muslim presence in the archipelago. Arab and Central Asian Muslims had played an important role in southern China’s trade as early as the eighth century. No doubt a few had settled for short periods in archipelagan ports, but in this early period they appear to have been quarantined within small communities of expatriate foreigners.²³ Significant local conversion to Islam occurred only later, after the Indian branch of the Southeast Asian trade fell into Muslim hands after the great Muslim conquests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²⁴ With the Indian and Chinese branches of the trade in Muslim hands, and with trade itself heightening social intercourse, Islam spread to trading posts around the archipelago from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. For a while, the new religion even found a significant following in coastal Thailand and Cambodia.²⁵ In the Philippines, Islam’s advance from the south toward Luzon in the north was halted only by the sixteenth-century arrival of the Spanish.²⁶

Keeping the comparison with European Protestantism in mind, scholars have long wondered how much the Islamization of insular Southeast Asia was related to a (relatively) “democratic” transformation in political and ethical culture. For the early centuries of Islam’s diffusion the answer to this question seems to be, rather little. The longer-term answer, however, requires a more complex assessment.

Clearly, in the first instance, the coming of Islam to the Indonesian region replaced a hierarchical Hindu-Buddhism with a religio-political tradition that was almost equally “raja-centric,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Anthony Milner.²⁷ Ordinary people’s identification as Muslim usually followed the ruler’s conversion to the new religion. Once established, some of these now Muslim states engaged in warfare with their heathen neighbors. A most famous case occurred on the island of Java, where north-coast principalities joined forces in the sixteenth century to attack older Hindu kingdoms in the center and west of the island.²⁸ In most of the Indonesian region, however, one sees little evidence of the systematic destruction of Hindu temples that marked Muslim conquest in India or the vehement and often bloody iconoclasm of Reformation Europe.

All was not a matter of quietistic conversion, however, as implied in Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed.²⁹ From Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud’s monumental Java in the Fourteenth Century, we know that pre-lslamic Java had a vast network of Hindu-Buddhist monasteries, temples, and shrines. In comparison with South Asia, where Hindu temples survived Muslim conquest, the temple tradition in Java seems to have experienced a sudden and stupendous collapse. Syncretistic compromises survived, of course. As with the wayang tradition of shadow puppetry in Java, however, the great majority did so by clothing themselves in what was at least superficially an Islamic garb.³⁰ On Java, travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occasionally stumbled on odd mountain hermits and mystics, many of whom called themselves Muslim even though their ritual clearly owed much to the pre-Islamic tradition.³¹ Even in these instances, however, the tendency was for public religion to be represented as Islamic, even though pious Muslims might question the accuracy of such characterizations. In this manner, and with the exception of Hindu kingdoms in Bali and a small pocket of Hindus in eastern Java, no Hindu clergy, communities, or temples survived in Islamized areas of the archipelago.

IMPERIAL ISLAM AND ITS OTHER

Eventually imperial Islam became the state religion in most of the archipelago’s coastal kingdoms.³² The raja was identified as supreme defender of the faith and, not coincidentally, religious scholars (ulama) were subordinated to the authority of the court. In Java, the Malay Peninsula, and southern Sulawesi this raja-centric Islam also helped to create an environment in which the concern for Islamic orthodoxy was relaxed, allowing localized or syncretic traditionsts to survive in court ritual and folk religion.³³ At a few times and in a few places, of course, some Muslim rulers promoted a strict application of Islamic law. We know, for example, that there was a peak of scriptural influence the early seventeenth century, when some of the most powerful sultans acquired the trappings of absolutist rule.³⁴ In Aceh, Ternate, and Banten (in West Java) apostates were threatened with execution, and religious minorities were forced to convert.³⁵ Some of these absolutist states also enforced classical Islam’s harsh criminal penalties (hudud), including amputation of limbs for theft. It was no coincidence that this period of strict application of the shariah (divine commandments or law) coincided with the archipelago’s commercial boom and the efforts of local sultans to tighten their grip on society.

In most of the early modern archipelago, however, the law was applied with a gentler and more pluralistic hand. Where Muslim judges (qadi) operated at all, they were appointed by the ruler, often on the basis of family ties rather than a mastery of Islamic law.³⁶ Shariah was not used as the sole source of law in most regional courts. Religious scholars did consult Muslim legal digests, some of which incorporated recognized elements of the shariah, particularly on matters of marriage, divorce, sexuality, inheritance, slavery, and commerce. In general, however, legal codes in precolonial times drew on varied sources, and the application of shariah was at the discretionary judgment of the ruler. As Sir Thomas Raffles remarked of Java’s legal administration in 1817, this discretionary power was “a prerogative liberally exercised.”³⁷

Whatever their influence in matters of law, during most of the early modern period Muslim rulers experienced serious checks on their authority. The great commercial boom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular, gave rise to struggles to limit royal authority. When the Dutch and English first arrived in the archipelago, they “were frustrated by the difficulty of finding monarchs who could make decisions binding on their subjects.”³⁸ In trading centers like Melaka (to the northwest of today’s Singapore), royal authority sat lightly on the local population, and the merchant class, especially, enjoyed considerable freedom. In matters of state, a pluralist balance of political power was seen in institutions like the dual monarchy in Sulawesi, where power was divided between a king and chancellor. Elsewhere in eastern Indonesia councils of wealthy merchants advised and even appointed kings.³⁹ In the trading city-state of Buton in eastern Indonesia, the checks on royal power went even further. In that kingdom, local governance was organized with reference to the Sufi doctrine of the Seven Grades of Being. Here, however, this well-known Sufi doctrine was deployed in a way that severely curtailed the sultan’s power. The result was that sixteen of twenty-eight Butonese sultans were relieved of their positions, and one was actually executed.⁴⁰

Such precedents for pluralism and participation in state affairs can be dismissed on the grounds that, as was indeed the case, most of them drew on indigenous political ideas as well as Islamic ones. But this overlooks the fact that Muslim politics must always be contextualized in a way that allows its general principles to operate locally. At the very least, the history of the early modern archipelago shows that there was no inherent “civilizational” obstacle to Muslims pressing for a devolution and pluralization of power. It is equally clear, however, that subsequent developments in the archipelago ensured that these efforts to restrict royal power would not be amplified into a serious alternative to raja-centered Islam.

The single most important reason for this turn of events is that the arrival of Europeans brought about a decisive shift in the balance of power between rulers and urban merchants. The Europeans were determined to secure a monopoly over the most lucrative sectors of the archipelago trade, especially Indonesian spices. On their arrival in the area in 1499 the Portuguese “sank or plundered every Muslim spice ship they could.”⁴¹ When treaty arrangements proved ineffectual the Europeans seized Melaka, a prosperous entrepot which Europeans called “Venice of the East.” Over the next century the Portuguese and Dutch captured or sunk most of the large-tonnage junks used by native peoples, destroying one of the world’s great private shipping fleets. In seventeenth-century eastern Indonesia the Dutch went further, seizing control of the spice islands and even enslaving populations who resisted Dutch demands for monopoly control of the trade.

What had once been a dynamic and multipolar civilization, then, began in the early modern era to move in an absolutist direction. The Europeans destroyed the independent trading class, and tilted the balance of regional power to centralizing despots willing to collaborate with Europeans against native merchants. It is, of course, foolish to speculate as to what Southeast Asia might have become had Europeans not colonized the region. At the very least, however, we can see from this brief history that Muslim politics in the Southeast Asian region was varied from the start. At a few times and in a few places, there were pluralist tendencies not just in politics but in literature and religious practice as well. In his epic examination of culture and society in the Malay world the historian Denys Lombard observes that during the early modern period one began to see the “emergence of the notion of the individual” in law. education, and literary creation. Javanese and Malay legal traditions emphasized individual rather than collective responsibility; the tradition of trial by ordeal was suppressed; education was opened to people from varied social backgrounds; and the hikayat literature of urban areas highlighted real heroes rather than idealized archetypes. One exception to these trends concerned women: they were excluded from this emerging culture of moral individualism, even though their role in pre-lslamic times had been one of complementary balance rather than subordination.⁴²

However varied its possibilities, this social momentum was not sustained so as to allow an enduring reformation of Muslim politics and culture. There were uncivil forces waiting in the wings, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they triumphed: European colonialism imposed a system of racial and ethnic apartheid on native society and drained these civic energies. Having allied with royalty against the merchant class, the Europeans eventually turned on the aristocracy, subjecting them, too, to the cunning of Colonial control. Ironically, however, the European usurpation of royal authority revived the fortunes of popular Islam, creating unexpected political opportunities.

When reflecting on this example of reformation manque, it is helpful to remember how fitful was the comparable process of political democratization in Western Europe. The first limited experiments in civic republicanism in northern Italy in the early modern period were largely extinguished by the wars with Spain. Republican ideals then made their way to the Netherlands and England, where they played a role in efforts to limit royal power.⁴³ Even then, however, the evolution of civil society was fitful and uncertain, awaiting a modern economic change that would do away once and for all with the settled hierarchies of old. For a brief period Muslim Southeast Asia, too, showed signs of a struggle for a more pluricentric and participatory polity. Its revival would have to await the great transformations of the modern era.

FROM DYNASTIC TO PROTONATIONAL ISLAM

After its initial adventures, Dutch colonialism advanced in a piecemeal fashion across the archipelago. A few territories, such as coastal Java, were colonized as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Others, however, such as the sultanate of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, were not effectively subjugated until the early twentieth century, and even then only at a great military cost.⁴⁴ Only in the mid-nineteenth century were the Dutch able to launch a systematic colonization of native society. Their effort was stimulated by their rivalry with the British, whose swift progress in nearby Malaya encouraged the Dutch to transform their piecemeal holdings into a continuous colonial expanse.

The colonial government’s attitude on Islam ranged from cautiously suspicious to openly hostile. Viewing Muslim ulama through much the same Calvin-ist lens as they did the Church of Rome, Dutch authorities in the early nineteenth century required “Mohammedan priests” to secure passports for travel around the East Indies. In 1825 colonial authorities raised the cost of passports for the Mecca pilgrimage. Several years later they issued instructions discouraging native officials from making the pilgrimage and forced returned pilgrims to take examinations before allowing them to use the honorary tide, haji. At the end of the nineteenth century the authorities launched a program of secular education designed to, among other things, immunize the native elite against Islamic appeals. The crown jewel in the Dutch policy was set in place in 1889, with the implementation of recommendations from the renowned orientalist Snouck Hurgronje, relaxing controls on “religious” Islam while stiffening those on “political” Islam. This approach, and the secular-modernist perception of religion it implied, was to have a lasting effect on state-Muslim relations.⁴⁵

Surveying the variety of cultures across the archipelago, some government advisers argued that Islam was no more than “thin veneer” over a largely non-Islamic culture. This idea appealed to those who wished to justify the suppression of Islam on the grounds that it was a threat to colonial rule.⁴⁶ In Java, in particular, nineteenth-century colonial administrators developed a “structure of not seeing,”⁴⁷ overlooking Islamic influences in Javanese tradition, while exaggerating and essentializing the influence of pre-Islamic ideals. In the aftermath of the brutal Java War (1825-30), colonial scholars worked to create a canon of Javanese literature that romanticized pre-Islamic literature as part of a Javanese golden age spoiled by the arrival of Islam. Dutch Orientalism overlooked the fact that the proportion of Islamic-oriented literature in modern court collections was much greater than the so-called renaissance literature (pre-Islamic classics rendered in modern Javanese verse) presented by colonial scholars as the essence of things Javanese.⁴⁸ A similar purging of Islamic influences from Javanese traditions took place in some high arts, most notably in the wayang tradition of shadow puppetry.⁴⁹

Colonial legal policies effected a similar essentialization. Under the direction of Cornelis van Vollenhoven, the “adat law school” worked under state direction to develop what amounted to a system of legal apartheid. A classic example of the colonial “invention of tradition,”⁵⁰ European experts divided the native peoples of the Indies into nineteen separate legal communities. Islamic law was recognized in each community’s legal canons only to the extent that colonial advisers ruled that local custom (adat) explicitly acknowledged it.⁵¹ In this manner, colonial authorities reified the distinction between adat and Islam. As James Siegel’s study of Aceh and Taufik Abdullah’s of Minangkabau both demonstrate,⁵² the Europeans’ distinction between endogenous “custom” and exogenous “Islam” imposed an artificial separation on a highly unstable relationship. In the decades preceding the European conquest, legal traditions in western Indonesia had already begun to accord a greater role to Muslim textual commentaries.⁵³ Growing Muslim influence only stiffened the Dutch resolve implement their Islam-restricting policy.⁵⁴

This policy of co-opting elites while subjugating society eventually undermined the authority of the native rulers who collaborated with the Europeans. Pressed by colonial programs, the peasantry came to see their rulers as mere lackeys of the Europeans. As indigenous rulers lost their legitimacy, that of the Muslim leadership only increased. The great historian of Java, Sartono Kartodirjo, has described the consequences of this leadership crisis in the case of Java. He notes that while in the previous era some Islamic scholars (the. ulama) had been employed in royal service, the Dutch secularized government administration, removing religious leaders from influential posts. Marginalized in government circles, Muslim leaders nonetheless “displaced that elite in exercising political authority over the peasantry.”⁵⁵ As colonial, programs penetrated the countryside, native society was shaken by peasant protest movements. At first these were of a localisit nature, but many eventually acquired a more general face:

The potential following of earlier social movements was… limited by their particularized demands and the narrowing effect of reliance on regional cultural traditions. At a time when increasing communication was broadening the horizons of the peasantry and making localized groups aware of their common sufferings, common aims, and common adversaries, the time had come to develop an intellectual or ideological definition of this wider community. Since a modern-style nationalist ideology did not exist, it was natural that Islam should fulfill this need.. ..For an important period in the history of Java, then, Islam was seen not as marking off one segment of society from the rest, but as supplying the political definition of “national” identity and the focus of resistance toward the colonial ruler.⁵⁶

Through these and other activities, European colonialism forever changed Muslim politics in Indonesia. The Europeans destroyed imperial Islam, under-mined the authority of native rulers, and unwittingly reinvigorated popular Islam. This new, societally based Islam was different, of course, from the raja-centric traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. European control of the state led Muslim leaders to develop a cautious and critical attitude toward government, and forced them to rely on their own resources to develop their institutions. Their situation contrasts with the experience of Muslims in much of the Middle East or even nearby Malaya. In Malaya, particularly in the native states subject to indirect rule (where sultans retained a significant measure of authority), the British encouraged cooperation between state authorities and Muslim leaders, not least of all by vesting sultans with the responsibility for guarding and promoting the faith.⁵⁷

In Indonesia little such collaboration existed between colonial rulers and Muslims. The tendency instead was for Muslim institutions to distance themselves from the state by locating themselves deep in native society. In Java and other areas of the archipelago, for example, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the spread of a vigorous little institution known as the pesantren, a Javanese variant of the pan-Indonesian Qur’anic boarding school. As the Dutch pacified the countryside, improved roads, and introduced economic programs, Java’s native population steadily grew. The population fanned out across the countryside, opening the last of the island’s frontier regions to settlement. Muslim teachers took advantage of these migrations, moving out from the north coast, where they had earlier been concentrated, and establishing pesantren across the interior of the island, where the influence of textual Islam had been weak. These Islamic boarding schools have continued to play a central role in the religious and political life of traditionalist Islam to this day (chapter 4).⁵⁸

Pesantren are organized around the leadership of a Muslim scholar (Arabic, alim; pl. ulama) and his retinue of students (Jav., santri). In earlier times the institution depended for its sustenance on gifts from the pious as well as on the economic activities (usually agricultural) of student boarders. The schools served as centers for the study of the Qur’an, hadith (words and deeds of the prophet as recorded in written canon tradition), and classical Islamic commentaries; their educational function was made all the more important by state hostility toward Islam. Colonial-era pesantren were also important because they provided a translocal network for native authority apart from the state. In Java and Sumatra many of the movements of prenalionalist anticolonialism were led by graduates of these schools. In the national era (1945 on), Islamic scholars have provided the leadership for Indonesia’s largest social and political organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama.⁵⁹

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this same community of independent Muslims supplied the lion’s share of native entrepreneurs. In contrast, Javanese political elites recruited to government service were notorious for their disdain of hard work and lack of commercial acumen. Their preferred avenue of social mobility was government office, which they used as a platform for meddling in business affairs. Although in colonial times most large enterprise was controlled by Europeans or Chinese, pesantren nurtured an ethic of initiative and independence.⁶⁰ The struggle for national independence would give the bearers of this tradition an opportunity to expand their social role.

CONCLUSION: SCALING UP AN SHUTTING DOWN

As these remarks on pesantren illustrate, there was a significant organizational precedent for extra-state Muslim associations in late colonial Indonesia.⁶¹ Their vitality was all the more impressive in light of the fact that although nominally committed to a variant of European liberalism, in practice colonial authorities institutionalized a system of centralized power, state monopolies, and racial chauvinism. In comparison with the English in Malaya and India, the Dutch commitment to education and political participation was also meager.

In such an environment it is not surprising that Muslim institutions survived by keeping their distance from state power and emphasizing autonomous self-organization. Despite this civic precedent, however, Muslim leaders had difficulty using this experience as a source of new political ideals, for several reasons. One had to do with the nature of authority in traditionalist Islam itself. Although Muslim society as a whole was characterized by considerable economic initiative and pluricentric organization, the structure of authority in most Muslim institutions remained unambiguously hierarchical.⁶² Religious leaders exercised a near-total authority within Qur’anic schools, buttressed by popular beliefs in their sacral powers. As Abdurrahman Wahid (the leader of Nahdfalul Ulama elected president of Indonesia in 1999) observed in 1977, in traditional pesantren the chief resident scholar (kyai) exercised an “absolute authority” over his students and staff. Pedagogical methods (known as srogan) emphasized rote memorization and silence in the presence of the kyai. Although a few senior students (santri ndalem) might be allowed to eat with the kyai, his living space and family were otherwise segregated from students. Even after leaving school, senior santri were supposed to show obedience to their teacher, visiting him at the end of the annual fasting month and sending the best among their own students to study with him. The kyai‘s authority was based on the perception of him as not merely a teacher but an heir to knowledge and power transmitted in an unbroken line from the Prophet Muhammed. Consistent with this view, the offspring of kyai were (and still are today) regarded as possessing an in-born knowledge (ilmu loduni) giving them a special capacity for learning and leadership.⁶³

Unlike the all-encompassing hierarchy of, say, caste in premodem India, this institutional authority was not linked to a uniform hierarchy in society as a whole. Java’s wars, religious pluralism, and colonial conquest made a settled hierarchy of this sort impossible for any but restricted portions of the population. Nonetheless, the nature of authority in pesantren made it difficult for Muslim leaders to draw on the institution’s critical relationship with the state as a precedent for a democratic reformation of Muslim politics.

The example again underscores that, by itself, a vigorous tradition of extra-state association does not guarantee a democratic public culture. For civil structures to become effective precedents for civic ideals, at least three additional conditions must be met. First, native intellectuals have to look into their own social experience and derive from it a odel of political culture that affirms principles of autonomy, mutual respect, and voluntarism. Second, and equally important, influential actors and organizations must then work to generalize these democratic values and organizations beyond their original confines to a broader public sphere. Third, and last, if these principles are to endure, they must be buttressed by an array of supporting institutions, including those of the state.

In early twentieth-century Indonesia there were few ncentives for traditionalist Muslims to engage in such a critical rethinking of their political tradition. Prestige hierarchies in the traditionalist community rewarded traditional religious skills, such as memorizing the Qur’an, studying law, or mastering mystical arts. There was little reason to depart from this pattern, especially if innovation might only offend other believers.

Certain considerations reinforced these structural disincentives. Early on, the Dutch authorities concluded that the most effective policy toward mass-based Islam was noninterference in religious affairs combined with forceful repression of political activism.⁶⁴ Although in nineteenth-century Java numerous rebellions took place under the banner of Islam, pesantren leaders soon recognized the dangers of political involvements that were too direct. A few years after its founding in 1926, for example, at a time when nationalist Indonesians were calling for changes in the colonial order, the traditionalist Nahdtatui Ulama issued a statement affirming the compatibility of European rule with Islam.⁶⁵

There was little in traditionalist society in the late colonial period, then, to leverage a critical reflection on Muslim experience and abstract from it the terms for a revitalized Muslim politics. As we shall see, the potential for such a creative reformulation was not entirely lacking. However, it would be another half-century before events would bring forth a generation of leaders willing and able to view their own history as a cultural resource for political reformation. By then, however, the project of Muslim renewal would face a host of new obstacles.

Notes

For notes on this chapter, please reference the text.

Chapter Eight

CONCLUSION: MUSLIM POLITICS, GLOBAL MODERNITY

In an article a few years ago the Turkish sociologist Serif Mardin offered a wryly inconclusive answer to the question of whether the ideals of democracy and civil society are generalizable to the Muslim world. “Civil society is a Western dream, a historical aspiration,” he first avers. The dream is premised on values that reach back to Greek times, entailing notions of moral autonomy and individual self-creation. Given its cultural genealogy, Mardin implies, the ideal of civil society will be of limited interest outside the West, because the notions of personhood and agency on which it is based are incompatible with most cultures.¹

Mardin’s remarks capture well a relativist view of democracy and civil society widespread in academic circles in the late 1990s. The argument was that democracy depends on a cultural history unique to the West more than it does on liberties and powers widespread in our age (chapter 1). A gifted observer of Islam and the West, however, Mardin himself begins to doubt this conclusion as he moves deeper into his discussion. He observes that civil society in the West was not merely the product of ancient cultural precedents but of an emergent modern organization. The power of the Church and its separation from the state, urban autonomy, the rivalry between kings and feudal lords, civic associations, and the eventual rise of an independent bourgeoisie—these particularities were part of a general dynamic that helped to heighten civil participation and create a countervailing balance of power.²

Mardin then observes that in recent years “bit and pieces” of this pluricentric social organization have begun to appear even in non-Western contexts, including the Muslim world.³ He cautions, however, that we should not assume that either democracy or civil society is about to triumph in Muslim nations. Although “many modern Muslim states are beginning to acquire a skeleton of institutions similar to those” seen in the West, “the dream of Western societies has not become the dream of Muslim societies.” It has not yet done so, Mardin suggests, because Muslim societies are heir to a “collective memory of a total culture which once provided a ‘civilized’ life of a tone different from that of the West.” That culture’s core values were not autonomy and self-determination but faithful adherence to an awesome revelation.⁴

In light of the Indonesian example, Mardin’s portrayal of the Muslim imagination may be too textual and unitary for generalization to all Muslim societies. The social imagination of Muslim Indonesians, we now realize, has been filled with disparate dreams. But Mardin’s analysis correctly underscores a general truth concerning democratization. The process depends not just on formal elections and constitutions but on a delicate interaction between society and the state. On the one hand, democracy requires a civic organization characterized by voluntarism, independent associations, and a balance of powers between state and society as well as among civil organizations themselves. All these things help to create commitments and balances congenial to democratic habits of heart. But these activities are still not enough if they remain the stuff of isolated groupings. Democracy ultimately requires a public culture that draws on these separate experiences to promote universal habits of participation and tolerance. This civic culture “scales up” (chapters 1,2) the democratic habits learned in, among other places, civic associations, making their best features available to the whole of society.

Recent discussions of the conditions that make democracy work have all been consistent in emphasizing that democracy depends not just on the state but on cultures and organizations in society as a whole. Different authors have stressed one side of this latter duality as opposed to the other. Some insist, for example, that culture is the truly critical variable for democracy, as if civility and participation were only matters of getting discourse right. Others emphasize the mediating influence of civic organizations (chapter 2). In the end, however, democratization involves not one of these phenomena but both in mutual and ever emergent interaction.

The Indonesian example also makes clear, however, that these two developments come to nothing if they are not reinforced by a third above and beyond society: the creation of a civilized and self-limiting state. As in Indonesia, the culture of civility remains vulnerable and incomplete if it is not accompanied by a transformation of state. This is to say, once again, that civil society is not opposed to the state but deeply dependent on its civilization. The state must open itself to public participation. At the same time, independent courts and watchdog agencies must be ready to intervene when, as inevitably happens, some citizen or official tries to replace democratic proceduralism with netherworld violence. As vigilantes and hate groups regularly remind us, not all organizations in society are civil, and the state must act as a guardian of public civility as well as a vehicle of the popular will.

Observations like these remind us that democratization dances not just to the beat of one drum, least of all an ancient one, but to a contemporary rhythm of organizations and values. Inasmuch as this is so, then, the key to democracy’s possibility is not singular but multiple. It builds on strategic interventions at many points in the democratic circle: civil associations, a free press and judiciary, the egalitarian diffusion of wealth and opportunity, and, always, public support for citizens and leaders committed to these goals. Even in the smoothest-running political systems, democracy is not all-or-nothing, but enduringly incremental.

A second conclusion follows from this first, namely, that there is no one-size-fits-all democracy but a variety of forms linked by family resemblances. Democracy’s values of freedom, equality, and tolerance-in-pluralism do not come with unbending instructions for all places and times. The general values take their practical cues from the particularities of the place in which they would work. Even in modern Western Europe, we know, the balance struck among democratic values has varied across countries and epochs. In an earlier era when each nation was organized around a dominant religion and ethnicity, for example, the problem of tolerance loomed less large than it does today, as European nations become immigrant societies. Similarly, as societies change, people perceive old arrangements in a new light and shift the balance among democracy’s values accordingly. The system of religious “pillars” that underlay Dutch democracy in the nineteenth century (chapter 2) is no longer popular among Dutch youth because it is seen as repressive rather than protective of their religious rights, in which many have lost interest. Or, similarly, gender and family roles once seen as central to Western civility are today questioned by those who would elevate individual freedom above family unity.

These examples remind us that even in the West the balance struck between community and individuality, public and private, and rights and duties change over time. Freedom, equality, and pluralism are highly generalized values, to say the least. As first principles of democracy they come with few instructions as to precisely where they should apply or how they should be balanced. This would not be a problem, of course, if the principles always worked in synergistic harmony, the promotion of one necessarily enhancing the others. However, modern history shows that these first principles come with no guarantee of easy compatibility. Private property may strengthen liberty while corroding equality. Affirmative actions to improve the lives of long marginalized groups may be seen as assaults on the rights of others. Demands for sexual freedom may offend believers who insist that promoting such values in their houses of worship denies them their freedom.

Democratic values are not realized, then, through their magic-wand absolutization in all social spheres. The practice of democracy requires a balance among its core values, and that balance inevitably varies over time and place. If the latter were not true, democracies would show none of the variation in freedoms and responsibilities that they do. Liberal philosophers might see this variation as a fatal flaw, wondering how democracy can flourish if the social achievement of freedom, equality, and tolerance is not everywhere the same. But because it depends on a culture larger than itself, democracy is not one structure but many related and flexible forms. Not everything can be relative, of course; certain value concerns remain the same. But the sameness is one of family resemblance rather than mechanical replication.

Inasmuch as variation of this sort exists in the West, we should not be surprised to see that democratization in the Muslim world will strike its own balance among values. Like Western civic democrats not long ago, Muslim democrats may prefer a stronger commitment to public moral education than contemporary Western liberals do. But this variation is not a deviation from the democratic plan but proof of its contextual realization.

Its daunting specificity aside, the Indonesian example illustrates clearly the fragility and variability of the democratic process. In this Southeast Asian country, there have been precedents for power-diffusing associations since the arrival of Islam more than five centuries ago. In a few city-states early in that history, local organizations converged with a remarkable economic dynamism to limit royal authority, disperse social power, support spiritual individualism, and inspire dreams of contractual government (chapter 2). The possibility that such contractual precedents might be drawn up into a broader reformation of Muslim politics was diminished, however, by an unholy alliance of absolutist monarchs and European power. Later, the secularizing policies of the Dutch unwittingly eroded the moral authority of imperial Islam. In so doing, European colonialism encouraged the emergence of a society-based popular Islam. It was this tradition, not the aristocratic Islam of the courts, that underlay new visions of Muslim politics in the twentieth century.

In that same century, however, Muslim scholars discovered that theirs was no longer the only voice claiming to represent society but one in a chorus with secularists, socialists, and multireligious nationalists. Muslim politics had met the pluralism of our age, and there was no going back. Although conservative scholars were unhappy with the new cacophony, the result was not a narrowing of the Muslim political voice but its enrichment. In the first decades of the twentieth century Muslims listened to the words of the nationalist anthem land made much of it their own. In the independence era they learned the language of democracy and constitutionality, and took enthusiastically to its forms. In matters of civic association Muslims showed themselves second to no one. None of their rivals could match the breadth and vitality of their associations. Even under the New Order, Muslims were better able than others to resist state controls and nurture alternative ideas of the public good.

This new politics of Muslim pluralism had difficulty, however, when it attempted to stand back and learn from its own history. Indonesian Muslims boast a proud legacy of tolerance, autonomy, and skepticism toward the all pretending state. They deepened those civic habits in modern times. When it came to “scaling up” from this experience to devise principles of government, however, some scholars balked. The world in which they lived seemed less glorious than the golden age of Islam. Rather than generalizing from their own remarkable achievement, many looked away, toward a shimmering ideal of an “Islamic” state whose seamless union of governance and society risks subordinating Islam’s high ideals to low politics. As had occurred with nationalism and socialism in the modern West, the very radiance of the high ideal caused a blindness toward context and interpretation.

But the problem of modern Muslim politics was not merely a matter of seeing things right. It was political, too. Fiercely uncivil rivalries with socialist, communist, and, later, conservative nationalists forced Muslim politicians onto the defensive. Pushed to the comer, they fought back, using simplistic rallying cries for solidarity against the enemy. They and their rivals spent themselves on uncivil wars rather than democratic consolidation. These zero-sum battles drained society’s coffers of the social capital required for democratic reformation.

Despite thirty years of authoritarian rule, Indonesia today is witness to a remarkable effort to recover and amplify a Muslim and Indonesian culture of tolerance, equality, and civility. The proponents of civil Islam are a key part of this renaissance. Civil Muslims renounce the mythology of an Islamic state. Rather than relegating Islam to the realm of the private, however, they insist that there is a middle path between liberalism’s privatization and conservative Islam’s bully state. The path passes by way of a public religion that makes itself heard through independent associations, spirited public dialogue, and the demonstrated decency of believers.

This civil democratic Islam makes sense, of course, only if one believes that Islam is compatible with, or even founded on, democratic values. No one can deny that this conviction is a matter of interpretation, and conservative Muslims have the right to insist it is not theirs. Like many in the West in the early twentieth century, some among the latter still see all the opportunity but none of the dangers of the modern state. They would use the awesome power of state technologies to dissolve the wall between public and private, and force citizens to virtue. Inasmuch as they do this, however, these conservatives betray principles other Muslims hold dear: that their great faith insists there can be no compulsion in religion, and that it does indeed count freedom, equality, and justice among its core values.

In Indonesia, however, statist Islam has become the minority view. There is no denying that serious differences remain over the terms of Muslim representation in government and the economy. And there is also no denying that some politicians will use low appeals to Muslim exclusivity to blunt the drive for an inclusive Muslim politics. But the majority have learned that they make their understanding of God’s commands more relevant when they relate them to an ecumenical interpretation of Indonesian history and culture. The majority have also learned from Soeharto’s excesses that the critical skepticism of their forebears toward the all-subsuming state is an attitude still relevant for politics in our age.

In the end, then, Muslims are part of our shared world, and Muslim politics is part of our shared but plural modernity. Contrary to earlier forecasts, religion in our age has not everywhere declined, nor been domiciled within a sphere of interiority. Modernity has witnessed powerful religious revivals. Not a reaction against but a creative response to the modern world, the most successful of these religious reformations have thrived by drawing themselves down into mass society and away from exclusive elites. Having moved into the public realm in this manner, some among the refigured religions tap popular energies only to direct them toward authoritarian ends. Some replace plural economies of meaning with a homogeneous religious currency. But these repressive standardizations inevitably unleash contestive heterogenizations. Just as nineteenth-century America saw a struggle for Protestant hearts and minds, the Muslim world today witnesses fierce contests over the meaning and social relevance of religion.

Inasmuch as this great religious transformation has occurred, Muslims face choices similar to all us moderns. The refiguration of their tradition is taking place in a world of migrations, urbanizations, and communications that render borders permeable to transcultural flows.⁵ In this setting, traditions laying claim to ultimate meanings face a common dilemma: how to maintain a steadied worldview and social engagement while acknowledging the pluralism of the age.

One response to this predicament, a repressively organic one, is to strap on the body armor, ready one’s weapons, and launch a holy war for society as a whole. In today’s world of bureaucratic leviathans, this option typically involves the seizure of state and, from there, the forced imposition of organic unity on an inorganic social body. This option has its enthusiasts not just among conservative Muslims but among antipluralist radicals in all modern societies. However, the history of the twentieth-century West, in particular, has shown that this option exacts an awful price. It oppresses minorities, antagonizes nonconformists among the majority, and robs society of the freedoms necessary for pacificity and dynamism. Nonetheless, as a strategy for holding power, this option may have an easy appeal, and self-serving elites may be willing to pay its price. In his final years Soeharto of Indonesia was willing to pay that price, and the violence of 1998 showed its awful consequence.

A second strategy for religion’s reformation renounces organic totalism for separatist sectarianism. Like the Essenes of ancient Israel under Roman rule,⁶ proponents of this option take refuge in the uncompromised purity of small circles of believers. In a complex society rather than a desolate desert retreat, however, this path brings with it regular reminders of one’s marginality. Because most view their religion as public ethics as well as private devotion, however, this choice is unlikely to win as many followers among Muslims as it has in some other modern traditions.⁷

There is a third option for a refigured religion, a civil one. Rather than state conquest or separatist isolation, this approach accepts the diversity of public voices, acknowledging that this is, in some sense, the nature of modern things. What follows after this varies widely, but the underlying pluralist premise remains. The civil option may promote public religion, but distanced from the coercive machinery of state. It strides proudly into the public arena but insists that its message is clearest when its bearers guard their independence. Religious voices must be ready to balance and critique the state and the market, rather than give both a greater measure of social power.⁸ Here is a religious reformation that works with, rather than against, the pluralizing realities of our age.

The option elected by any religious community will be determined, of course, not by the timeless truths of scripture but by the struggle for influence among rival bearers of the Word. In the Muslim case, we know that some will claim that the Word demands the dissolution of the fragile barriers separating state from society. They will insist that the state leviathan is needed to make people good. But the markets, media, and migrations of our age make any enduring institutionalization of such a statist Islam difficult. It may be attempted, but again and again it will fail. Virtue will give way to hypocrisy and abuse, and religion itself will be threatened. The arrangement fails because it is so out of step with the pluralism and movement of our age, and because, unchecked by any balance of power, rulers inevitably abuse the truths over which they claim rights of control. For Muslim believers, then, the real danger in the union of Islam and state is that it ends by subordinating Islam to state. Faced with this peril, other Muslims will look to democratic ideas, and some variant of civil Islam, to guard their great faith and maintain an ethical compass amid the roaring flux.

Plural in its origins, there is no single modernity; nor is there one final formula for civility and democracy. Certainly, as Serif Mardin noted above, Muslim societies should and will have their own dreams. However, the restructuring of life worlds that characterizes our age has become so massive that it guarantees that, more than any prior epoch, large numbers of people will continue to be drawn to ideas of a civil and democratic sort. The implementation of these ideals will, of course, vary; it always has. So, too, will the balance societies strike between public morality and private freedom or between individual liberty and communitarian good. But this variation only reminds us that the real key to democracy’s cross-cultural appeal is not imitation or “Westernization” but dialogue and contextualization.

The lessons from Indonesia lead me to a closing observation, a normative one, and one that I, an American anthropologist who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, was able to relearn only with the help of Muslim friends. The conclusion is that we believers in civility and democracy must show greater confidence in the relevance of these ideals for our age. This confidence has nothing to do with the alleged Occidental origins of democratic ideals, a mythic charter that, I have suggested, only clouds the issue by telling Muslims and others that their own experience is not what is most directly relevant to democracy’s possibility. Rather than on grounds of genealogy, then, our democratic confidence should be based on the conviction that the message of freedom, equality, and plurality is not narrowly circumscribed, as some prophets of the new civilizational relativism argue. Democratic ideals are broadly appealing because they respond to circumstances and needs common across modern cultures.

This is not to suggest that the outcomes of today’s democratic struggles, whether Indonesian or others, are guaranteed. There is no end of history, no definitive triumph of democratic ideals. Ours will remain an age of democratic trial, and, for better or for worse, history’s verdict will vary. But of this the Indonesian experience should make us certain: that the desire for democracy and civil decency is not civilizationally circumscribed. This simple hope will remain a powerful force in public politics and religion for years to come.

Notes

For notes on this chapter, please reference the text.