Chapter 1

History of Islam in Indonesia: Between Acculturation and Rigour

p. 4-50


Texte intégral

1Peripheral compared with the Middle Eastern centres of the Muslim world, Islam in Indonesia had never enjoyed a hegemonic position since its implantation in the Indonesian Archipelago around the thirteenth century. Confronted with the Hindu-Buddhist and animistic substrate of the great Classic Period in Javanese history and rivalled by Christianity, which reached the shores of the Archipelago shortly after, the history of Islam has been a complex one of syncretisms and ruptures that cannot be ignored here. Indeed, its history reveals diverse faces, varied horizons and, most of all, important fault lines of which an understanding is crucial to any study of radicalism. This Islamisation, which took place over a long period of time and is uneven depending on the region and social strata, is a key issue in Indonesia today, implicating not only debates over historical interpretation but more importantly, justifying or invalidating the hegemonic aims of a section of Indonesian Islamists.

I. A Late Entry via Old Commercial Routes

2The oldest traces of an indigenous Muslim presence in the Archipelago occur relatively late. The first inscriptions indicating such a presence date back to 1082 on a tomb found in Leran, East Java. How much these inscriptions bear on the Islamisation movement remains debatable, and it is only at the end of the thirteenth century that we can identify with certainty the presence of a Muslim principality at Samudra-Pasai, in the North Sumatra region.1

3Two principal traits characterise the spread of Islam in the Archi-pelago. The first is its arrival via Muslims of diverse ethnic and cultural origins, from Middle Easterners, Arabs and Persians, to Indians, the Cham (from present-day Vietnam) and even Chinese, all of whom followed the great commercial routes of the epoch. Islam — a cultural element amongst others — was thus part of the vast tide of exchange, treading the same path as Hinduism and Buddhism centuries ago. Like the faiths that preceded it, that of the Prophet gained a foothold in the Palatine societies of the Archipelago through the communities of traders dotting the antique maritime network between the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Local rulers adopted the dominant religious, social and commercial culture of their time, thus assuring renewed prosperity for their principalities.2

4The second important characteristic of this Islamisation was its duration. Far from the lightning conquests by the Arabs in the Mediterranean basin or in North India, here Islam came into contact with societies that were in part politically well structured and culturally coherent, such that it was obliged to make considerable adaptations. At the start of the sixteenth century, almost two centuries after the beginnings of Islamisation, the Portuguese voyager Tomé Pires described a limited Islamisation in coastal areas west of Sumatra, north of Central Java and in Eastern Java as well as in little pockets throughout the Moluccas. From then, it advanced very slowly from one post to another, notably in Java, centre of the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Mahapahit, until the sixteenth century.3 The Majapahit kingdom could not withstand the growing strength of the Demak sultanate, which embarked on the conquest of Central Java and the Sunda region in West Java around 1526–1527, bringing the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Pajajaran to its end. Many of the future bastions of Islam such as Madura, some of the small Sunda islands, Sulawesi and Kalimantan, were untouched by Islam till the end of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. These were but the coastal areas. Progression towards the interior did not begin till much later: the grand sweep of Islam in the vast rice plains of Java only occurred in the nineteenth or even twentieth century.

5Slow and belated, this Islamisation clashed against the Europeans, who were present in the region from the sixteenth century onwards. In the Moluccas, the Portuguese traders were succeeded by Catholic missionaries such as Saint Francis-Xavier, whose success was hampered by the new domination of the Dutch reformists. The latter adopted at a very late stage — only in the first half of the nineteenth century — a more favourable policy towards Catholic missionaries. Nonetheless, so as to avoid any conflict in these Muslim regions, the Dutch exercised a strict control over Christian movements in general till the end of the colonial period.

6Therefore, on the eve of the Second World War, Indonesia presented a religious physiognomy characterised by a backdrop of highly active local religions and the presence of a very small minority of non-Muslim com-munities that nonetheless constituted the majority in numerous provinces in the east of the country: Nusa Tenggara was made up of an overwhelming majority of Catholics, northern Sulawesi and the Moluccas were mostly Protestant, and the western part of New Guinea was essentially animist but endowed with very active Christian missionaries. This uneven spread of the world religions created seams of cohabitation but also potential fractures and, most of all, pitted the notions of a unitary state and an Islamic state against each other.

7On top of spatial geography came social geography. This latter was subtler and consisted of concentric circles of varying religious attitudes radiating from Islamised cells. In the ‘centre’ lie the most orthodox milieux, called santri, the principal agents of Islamisation. The term initially applied to students of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) but was gradually stretched to encompass very devout Muslims. Going back as far as at least the sixteenth century, these learning centres played a capital role in the spread of Islam. Gathering tens or even hundreds of students around a religious master (kiai in Java), the pesantren became engines of change in the Archipelago. They led to the clearing of forests, assured minimum education for numerous young people and were one of the rare means of social ascension in a rigid society. Till today, most of the religious education taught outside of schools is dispensed by thousands of Islamic boarding schools (14,556, figure from the Ministry of Religions in 2004) to millions of students.

8Another major institution of Islam in Indonesia, the Sufi brother-hoods (tarekat) played a complementary role, often in tandem with the pesantren. The majority of these brotherhoods originated from Arabia, the destination of many pilgrims from the Archipelago since very early on. The important orders of Indian origins such as Chattariyya and Naqshbandiyya were spread by Indonesians returning from Medina, and Qadiriyya wa Naqshbandiyya itself, though the only orthodox order founded by an Indonesian, retained its centre in Mecca.4 We still know little about the development of Sufism in the Archipelago before the nineteenth century, although the importance of some Sufi poets has been recognised in North Sumatra. From the nineteenth century onwards, these Sufi orders penetrated the social fabric more profoundly in some areas due to their role in anti-colonial movements. Subsequently, with the rise of Muslim re-formism calling for greater ‘purity’, they occupied an intermediate position between the santri milieux of pure orthodoxy and the general population attracted by heterodox spiritual movements such as the Javanese kebatinan (Javanese mysticism). Combining with existing beliefs, the influence of Islam extended far beyond the classic Muslim milieux just described to create different layers of syncretic practices. There is abundant literature on the phenomena of acculturation. Without going into too much detail of these scientific debates, we shall point out the most obvious traits.

9First, and in contrast to widespread opinion, these influences were not one-way, that is, it was not the case of a pure Islam moving from the centre in the Arab world towards the periphery in the Archipelago, where it would be broken down by contact with Hindu-Buddhist culture. In fact, some heterodox practices present in South-east Asia, such as certain divination rituals, originated from Egypt or even Arabia and were imported by Indonesian pilgrims.5 Whatever its origins, syncretism was undoubtedly cultivated in the Archipelago. The persistence of ill-defined beliefs (generally called ‘animist’ for lack of a better term) amongst a large part of the rural, nominally Muslim population (following their ruler’s conversion), as well as the predilection of local elites for philosophical and mystical speculations strongly influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism, gave rise to a multitude of religious practices more or less linked to Islam. Particularly pregnant in Java, this propensity for syncretism led certain authors to identify a “religion of Java” to account for the scale of the phenomenon.6 More recently, the historian Merle Ricklefs defined and very convincingly described this “mystic synthesis”.7 More generally, in the santri milieux as well as in scientific studies, the term abangan was used to designate nominal Muslims who did not fulfil the minimal obligations of their religion and who maintained or developed in loco attitudes that were unacceptable for their more orthodox fellow believers. Some, for example, have long considered that thinking about the five daily prayers dispensed one of the obligation to actually accomplish the prayers, or that retiring to a place favourable towards meditation and tranquillity of the soul was the equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca.8 Highly diverse and covering a multitude of practices, this category of abangan originally designated only some Javanese Muslims. Today it has been extended to encompass all Muslims earlier known as ‘statistical’ in the Archipelago. Although highly contested, the santri /abangan dichotomy is useful to our study in pointing out important tensions pitting one section of the Muslim community, inspired by the dakwah (preaching) spirit, against fellow believers who often try to resist the former’s attempts to impose new ‘correct’ religious behaviour.

10In spite of its multiple facets, Islam in Indonesia retained an important capacity for mobilisation throughout its history. The existence of currents critical of the established religion patronised by the sultans endowed Islam in the Archipelago with a revolutionary aspect, despite the quietism displayed by its elites. It served as a convenient outlet for most of the peasant upheavals, which were triggered by exasperation in the face of hunger, oppression and misery, articulating material demands in spiritual terms.9 With the advance of Dutch colonisation in the nineteenth century, these religious revolts acquired an increasingly clear political dimension. At the beginning of the 1820s, pilgrims returning from the Arab peninsula wanted to introduce Wahhabi puritanism, then popular in the sacred sites of Islam. The revolt of the padri10 in Minangkabau country in West Sumatra was directed against the population, then the local aristocracy, guilty in their eyes of practising an Islam that had strayed by its concessions to adat or local custom. This veritable civil war, which lasted until 1838, showed how then religion was already a catalyst in a conflict with multiple causes. The padri’s demands were economic (control of the coffee trade was one of the issues), political (riding on the theme of a legitimate battle against dishonourable rulers guilty of maintaining good relations with the Dutch, who went on to defend the local aristocracy) and cultural (consumption of tobacco, cockfights, traditional dances, dressing styles were questioned), but all the recriminations were expressed in religious terms.11

11The Java War of 1825–1830 led by Prince Diponegoro against the Dutch constitutes another example of the mobilisation process of fol-lowers. It also attests to the continuum that existed between Islam and pre-Islamic beliefs in this domain. Son of the Sultan of Yogyakarta and one of his concubines, Diponegoro led his revolt in the name of diverse causes. A Muslim with a santri religious education, he called for a battle against the infidels (the Dutch) and for the triumph of ‘real religion’. However, in accordance with Hindu ascetic practices, for the majority of Javanese peasants who fought with him, he was also the ratu adil (just king), the reincarnation of Vishnu.12 Far from contradicting each other, these religious justifications were mutually reinforcing, thus proving that syncretism did not exclude radicalism.

12This often dissenting role of Islam led the Dutch to suspect Muslim leaders. Contrary to the British in neighbouring Malaya, the Dutch did not always manage to obtain the support of Muslim rulers. Concerned above all with trade, they succeeded in associating with certain rulers, most of whom were Muslim (including the Sultans of Siak, east of Sumatra and of Pontianak, south-west of the island of Borneo, both sayyid Arabs of high descent), while suppressing recalcitrant sultanates who did not acknowledge Dutch pre-eminence. The last resistance movement led by traditional authorities in the name of Islam disappeared with the end of the Aceh War in 1903. Henceforth, the fight in the name of Islam would be situated on another level and would follow other modalities.

II. Reformist Mutation and the Beginning of Political Islam

13As the last resistance movements against the Dutch — henceforth masters of the greater part of the Archipelago — were coming to an end on the brink of the twentieth century, Islam in Indonesia underwent a fundamental mutation. Following in the footsteps of India and the Middle East, Islam in Indonesia was influenced by a powerful reform movement that profoundly renewed its relationship with the West. The fathers of Muslim reformism such as the Indians Shah Wali Ullah (died 1762) and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (died 1898); the Persian Djamal al-Din al-Afghani (died 1897); and the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh (died 1905) acknowledged the undeniable technical superiority of Europe vis-à-vis the Muslim world and attributed this lag to a corruption of the divine message. According to this movement generally known as ‘Salafiyya’, the rigidity of the founders of the four schools of law (mazhab) when attempting codification between the eight and ninth centuries had doomed Islamic societies to sclerosis and suffocation. Unable to adapt to modernity, these societies had been by-passed, then colonised by the West. To regain the paths of wealth and power, the reformists advocated a return to a Qur’an free of all obscuring commentary, the adoption of European technical progress, a combat against fatalism and the recognition of freedom and intelligence. They wished to see a reopening of the ‘door of ijtihad’ (independent legal reasoning) which would pave the way for new interpretations of the divine message, an indispensable condition for an Islamic reading of modernity. Muslim reformism has always had an ambivalent relationship with the West. Fascination with the West’s success engendered a wish to imitate it, leading Muhammad Abduh and the majority of ‘modernist’ thinkers to adopt the fundamentals of European philosophical and political principles and recommend that these be applied in their own countries. Nevertheless, it was unthinkable for them that the principles of Islam be constrained in adapting to this modernity. Convinced of the superiority of the Muslim religion, they intended to seek the beginnings of the political liberalism of Enlightenment Europe in different Qur’anic concepts such as ijma (the consensus of the ulama) or shura (consultation). ‘Concordism’13 or ‘conciliatory apology’14 were the opposing perspectives, demonstrating the great potential for misunderstanding that already existed. Without realising it, these thinkers had positioned themselves close to the West’s register of values and principles, inviting comparison and frustration. The fragile equilibrium between their desire to engage society in a process of modernisation and the necessity of maintaining the framework of their religion created tension and sparked numerous debates. From this perspective, all Muslim reform can be seen as a difficult exercise that aims to define what is eternal in Islam and what is no; what can and cannot be ceded in times of contingency. As the outcome of perilous equilibria and permanent compromises, advancement was regularly questioned since there was no central authority to take charge of acquired gains. This tendency was reinforced by the development of a fundamentalist current on the extreme end of reformism that was much more intransigent vis-à-vis the West. Inspired by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (died 1791), this current aimed to restore Islamic teachings and dogma to their original purity while cultivating an absolute idealisation of primitive Muslim society. The question was no longer that of constructing new interpretations from the fundamental texts of Islam but simply of following the Qur’an to the letter. Gaining ascendancy with the dynasty of Ibn Saud in the land of Hejaz, which later became Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism resonated throughout the Muslim world (between 1804 and 1818, then as of 1924). Modernists and fundamentalists formed the two extreme poles of reformism. Both noted the decline of the Muslim world and the urgent need to react, but while the former intended to negotiate and build a compromise between Islamic principles and Western values, the latter established itself as a counter-model to this modernity.

14The two currents sometimes converged. Some of those close to Muhammad Abduh were not indifferent to Wahhabi fundamentalism. The Syrian Rashid Rida, for example, pursued the analysis of his Egyptian master but added a certain radical inclination. His journal, Al-Manar (The Lighthouse), sometimes served as the vehicle for the rigid reflections of Ibn Hanbal, one of the ulama who inspired Wahhabism, and references to the conciliatory theologian al-Ghazali were replaced by the fundamentalism of Ibn Taimiyya, the most radical opponent of the medieval judi-cial schools (mazhab) and of Sufi ‘innovations’ (bidah). This doctrinal inflexibility developed from the interwar years through the birth of a political Islam conceived as a means to fight against Western imperialism. The Association of Algerian Ulama of Ben Badis, the Muslim Brotherhood of Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, then in the 1940s the Jama’at-i Islami of Mawdudi in India were milestones in the radical criticism of Western modernity that inspired radical Islamic movements decades later.

15Islam in Indonesia was also affected by the different branches of the reformist movement.15 While Wahhabism, as we noted, reached the shores of the Archipelago from the first decades of the nineteenth century but did not experience any notable development in the decades following the padri war in West Sumatra, the modernist current16 was more successful due to Malay-language journals published in Singapore and Sumatra by pilgrims converted to the ideas of Muhammad Abduh and his disciples.17

16The ideas spread by these journals first nourished the identity claims of some Muslim groups. They inspired a desire for emancipation as well as principles of organisation amongst the Hadrami — Arabs or descendants of Arabs from Hadramaut, who founded the first Muslim organisation in Indonesia in 1901.18 In 1912, a guild of batik (the traditional Javanese fabric) traders transformed itself into the Union of Muslim Traders (Sarekat Dagang Islam), which subsequently became the spearhead of Islam in Indonesia under the name of Sarekat Islam.19 The association’s preoccupations were, in fact, more social, economic and political than religious. Its initial objective — the protection of a corporation’s interests — were extended to the whole Muslim community, but its leaders, particularly its president H.O.S. Tjokroaminoto, injected the organisation with contemporary political ideas. Very much influenced by socialism, Tjokroaminoto intended to adapt Islamic principles to this new doctrine. Under these favourable conditions, Marxist influence grew considerably within Sarekat Islam until 1921, the year of the historic rupture when all the so-called ‘red’ sections of Sarekat Islam joined the newly created Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

17This divorce reinforced the formal alliance between Sarekat Islam and the other important reformist organisation of Indonesian Islam: Muhammadiyah. Founded in Yogyakarta in 1912 by the son of a religious civil servant, Muhammadiyah took off very well, widening its network of mosques, schools and charity associations. The majority of its members were also affiliated with Sarekat Islam, and one of them, H. Agus Salim, was responsible for the official rapprochement between the two organisations and the eviction of the Marxist domination within Indonesian Islam.20

18Despite its firm opposition to communism, Muhammadiyah repre-sented the moderate tendency of the reformist movement, open to the world and to modernity. Another organisation, Muslim Union (Persatuan Islam or Persis), founded in 1923 in Bandung, represented the more radical tendency. Applying a legalistic, even literal reading of the Qur’an and of the Sunna, Ahmad Hassan, its principal theoretician, fitted Persis with a defensive outlook, one that was deliberately aggressive towards other faiths or other branches of Islam. Through their journal Pembela Islam (The Defenders of Islam), Ahmad Hassan and his collaborators squared off with the Ahmadiyya partisans of the Qadyani branch (an Islamic movement of Indian origins which they considered heterodox21), as well as traditionalist Muslims, some modernists accused of moral laxness and, of course, Dutch and Indonesian Christians, resulting in the journal being banned for several years.22 Despite its very limited size — numbering at the most hundreds of militants by the end of the 1930s — Persis gained a considerable audience. A prolix writer, Ahmad Hassan published more than 80 treaties and helped to spread Rashid Rida’s ideas in Indonesia.23 In a way, Persis made up one of the matrices of identity-based tensions, which developed at regular intervals in Indonesian Islam. Subdued in periods of prosperity when the Muslim identity of Indonesia was appeased, its vindictive and accusatory stance served as a convenient recourse in times of crisis. Intransigent and quick to blame Muslim leaders engaged in processes of negotiation and compromise, it egged on the religious con-science of fellow believers.

19The quasi-monopoly of the public scene by leading Muslim reformist organisations during the first two decades of the twentieth century did not leave their compatriots indifferent. Two groups ended up liberating them-selves from this guardianship at about the same time. The first was the traditionalists. Partisans of an Islam bound by a framework of rules as defined by one of the four schools of law (mazhab) — in the case of Indonesia, the Shafi’i school — the traditionalists were not spared the winds of change blowing through Indonesian Islam. Critical of some practices they deemed close to associationism (shirk),24 they too intended to start a movement emphasising greater orthodoxy so as to enable a Muslim revival. They also wanted to open up education to the teaching of non-religious subjects then considered as ‘Western’. However, they remained very attached to certain rites denounced as non-Islamic (innovation, bidah) by the reformists, in particular, prayers for the dead (tahlilan, talqin), the cult of saints and the visiting of sacred tombs (ziarah kubur). These religious disagreements made for an uneasy relationship with the emerging Muslim reformist organisations. In 1926, the traditionalists decided to create their own association, symbolically named Renaissance of the Ulama (Nahdlatul Ulama, NU).25

20The second rival group that emerged was the secular nationalists, also called ‘religiously neutral’ (netral agama). Coming together as of 1927 in Soekarno’s Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI), these activists wished to confine religion to the private sphere. Uniting a large part of the Westernised elite of the country but able at the same time to express popular resentment against the colonisers, these secularists soon exercised a great influence on the whole nationalist movement.

21At a time when Soekarno’s nationalism emerged as an alternative to an Islam-inspired nationalism, partisans of this latter were mired in infinite quarrels. Pulled in different directions by multiple currents and tugged between dominant personalities increasingly intolerant of Tjokroaminoto’s authoritarianism and all wishing to play the leading role, the Islamic Association (Sarekat Islam, SI) split into several dissident movements.26

22The interwar period thus saw the formation of two antagonistic traditions within Indonesian Islam: one of union and the other of rupture. The golden age of collaboration between Sarekat Islam and Muhammadiyah had nourished a powerful myth of unity for an entire generation, a myth that was subsequently often revived. However, during the same period, Muslim Indonesian leaders discovered the mirages of an illusory power that often they did not know how to share. The legacy of this period also included personal quarrels, divisions and schisms. Unable to manage disaccord within their organisations and arbitrating with difficulty conflicts between purely religious authorities and more political personalities, Indonesian Islamists used and abused the creation of new movements, often transcient, setting a pattern that would influence political Islam till today.

23The Japanese Occupation between 1942 and 1945 marked the history of Indonesian Islam in two major ways. First, it allowed for the reconstitution of the union. The need for a structured Muslim movement at their bidding in the subtle game of checks and balances they were playing between different currents of Indonesian nationalism, pushed the Japanese authorities to unite the Islamic organisations in the Archipelago under the Consultative Council of Muslims of Indonesia (Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, Masyumi) in 1943. Most importantly, the Japanese authorised the creation of Hizbollah militias, thus allowing political Islam to become an armed revolutionary force. By forming and organising combat units for the defence of religious values, the Japanese widened the spectrum of expression for Islamic claims: political articulation was made possible through Masyumi and use of force through its militias. This was a mutation whose full implications were manifested at the moment of the declaration of independence.

III. Indonesian Islam between Muslim Democracy and Integral Islam27

24Between Independence in 1945 and the advent of the New Order in the mid-1960s, Indonesian Islam saw the emergence and then the failure of a powerful and original phenomenon — a democratic Muslim current. Supported by the Masyumi party, which at one time federated over all Muslim organisations of the country, this project, and its failure, left a lasting imprint and supplied a clear lesson on the complex and fragile alchemy that can push a moderate Islamic approach favourable towards democracy and limited secularity, down the slope of intransigence and intolerance.

A Muslim Democracy Project

25Created in November 1945, the Masyumi party was for a long time the main political formation in Indonesia and apparently also the largest Muslim party in the world. Within Masyumi was spelt out and defended the ideal of a Muslim democracy, one that substituted the simple demand of an Islamic state for political and parliamentary struggle. This project was initially undertaken jointly with the traditionalists of Nahdlatul Ulama, but the latter formed their own political organisation from 1952 onwards and Masyumi remained essentially the representative of reformist Islam.

26The party’s Muslim democracy ideals were not clearly defined until the late 1940s. It was then that a group of young leaders, heirs of the modernist current from the beginning of the century, took over the leadership of the Masyumi party and thus of the political Islamic com-munity. Led by Mohammad Natsir, its members, amongst whom figured future prime ministers and ministers, were the products of the so-called ‘ethical’ policy implemented by the colonial government in the first decades of the century.28 Educated in Dutch schools expressly established for locals, they received a Western education and were familiar with Enlightenment philosophy and the great European and American political thinkers of the nineteenth century. Drawing upon this background, they militated for a rereading of Qur’anic principles in the light of Western modernity, in line with the Muslim reformism of their predecessors.29 Sidelined during the occupation by the Japanese, whose policy of exploitation of Islam depended more on the traditional figures of the Muslim community, they found themselves in 1945 in the best position to take up the challenge that Soekarno had issued to the leaders of Islam. In 1945, the future president of the Republic of Indonesia presented under the name of Pancasila the five principles that constitute till today the ideological base of the Indonesian state: nationalism (kebangsaan), inter-nationalism or sense of humanity (perikemanusiaan), consensus democracy (permusyawaratan), social prosperity (kesejahteraan sosial ) and belief in a unique god (Tuhan yang maha esa).30 The last of these beliefs (belief in a unique God), which would soon take centre stage, led the leaders of the Muslim community to abandon all previous calls for an Islamic state and to orient their combat towards a democratic state. Founding Indonesian identity on its pre-Islamic past — the etymology of the term Pancasila and the principle of a unique god (Tuhan yang maha esa) is Sanskrit — the state ideology accepted by Masyumi was opposed to the idea of unquestioned Muslim government in the Archipelago. The absence of any direct reference to Arabic-Muslim concepts excluded it from the restricted field of Islamic references and as such was viewed by Muslims as an unwitting step towards a certain form of secularism. Most importantly, it stripped Muslim parties of any exclusive right of interpretation. During the delicate negotiations that preceded the adoption of the state ideology, Soekarno cunningly compromised on what he deemed less important, such as making the principle of a unique god the first of the five principles of Pancasila. But he and his nationalist friends were firm on what they held as essential. At the proclamation of independence on 17 August 1945, he thus refused to honour a compromise that they had arrived at a few weeks ago on the mention of “the obligation for Muslims to respect Islamic law”. This compromise, later named the Jakarta Charter, had created an automatic link between the status of a believer and that of a citizen, and was therefore unacceptable for the secular nationalists and worrying for the Christians.31

27Imprecise as they were, none of the five principles contradicted the ideology of the Muslim party. Their universal character, which allowed for Islamic interpretations, made Pancasila seem like a step towards the Masyumist ideal. In his speech of June 1945, Soekarno indicated to Muslims that the path to take for the implementation of this Islamisation was participation in a Western-inspired parliamentary democracy. In sum, Pancasila seemed indigenous enough to tempt an Islamic party conscious of the need for a national identity. It also seemed sufficiently open to Muslim values to allow for a reading that would conform to Islamic ideals. Democratic confrontation, the price to pay for spreading these ideals, was even more easily accepted by the core of Masyumist leadership (centred around Soekiman and Mohammad Natsir) since it corresponded to their own profound convictions.

28As of 1948, the eruption of the Cold War in Indonesian politics encouraged the democratic-Muslim current within political Islam. Hitherto Masyumi had willingly fought in the name of a revolutionary identity, in line with the Marxist groups, but little by little, as the influence of the communist party grew, its secularist doctrine and increasingly obvious alignment with the Eastern block worried the Muslim party. In September 1948, an uprising by the communists against the new agreements concluded with the Dutch government and violent confrontations between the communists and the Muslim militias in the Javanese town of Madiun led to the definitive rupture between the two currents.32 The gap widened further and communism came to be identified as the principal enemy of Indonesian Islam. On the contrary, the Western democracies came to be seen as reliable allies, and Masyumi launched major ideological and diplomatic efforts to seal this alliance, thus reinforcing its preference for a model of parliamentary democracy inspired by the West.33

29A third series of events encouraged, paradoxically, the moderation of the reformist current and its inclination towards parliamentary democracy. This was the emergence at its margins of a radical Islamic movement that refused to postpone the proclamation of an Islamic state. Between 1949 and 1963, armed movements operating under the name of Darul Islam (Abode of Islam) in various regions attempted to impose by force the Islamic State of Indonesia (Negara Islam Indonesia), as proclaimed by their leader Kartosuwiryo on 7 August 1949.34 These movements in West Java, South Sulawesi and Aceh were led by leaders of Muslim militias who had defeated the Dutch during the so-called revolusi fisik (revolutionary fight) period and who had then refused — sometimes for economic and social reasons — to return power to the central government. For the political adversaries of Masyumi, Darul Islam became the symbol of a retrograde and violent Islam, incapable of constructive political engagement. As such, so as not to fuel these criticisms, the Muslim party distanced itself from the radical solutions advocated by the rebels and slowly abandoned simplistic mottos based on calls for the sharia and an Islamic state.

30Thus propelled by the events that shook the country between 1945 and 1950, Masyumi disassociated itself from the doctrine hitherto dominant in Indonesian reformist Islam that made no distinction between politics and religion. This new ideological posture, which was an important step towards a form of secularism, marked Masyumi’s actions while in power, as well as the formulation of its programmes.

31The main party in the government between the end of the 1940s and the second half of the 1950s, the Muslim party under the leadership of Mohammad Natsir adopted a moderate and pro-West policy devoid of any religious sectarianism. During this period, its principal political allies were the Christian parties (Catholic and Protestant), and its political propositions, developed in the course of successive congresses, displayed a slow secularisation. Calls for an immediate application of Islamic law gave way little by little to a minimalist application of Islamic law, organised within a parliamentary framework. Leaders of the party applied themselves to expunging their propositions of all that could symbolise a retrograde Islam: equality between men and women in all areas was recognised and corporal punishment was explicitly rejected. Masyumi had no acknowledged model then. Its members were especially critical of the Gulf monarchies, considered as deplorable examples of backward Islamic government.

32A fervent supporter of parliamentary democracy, Masyumi was one of the rare parties — along with the small Indonesian Socialist Party of Sutan Sjahrir (Partai Sosialis Indonesia, PSI) — to steadfastly oppose the ‘Guided Democracy’ of President Soekarno. As of 1957, Soekarno deemed too unstable the political situation of his country and wished to in-stall an authoritarian regime founded on a social consensus of Javanese-inspired values of mutual aide. Several leaders of Masyumi, including its leader Mohammad Natsir, opposed this change in direction and from January 1958 onwards lent their support to a regional rebellion known as Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia, PRRI). Although supported by certain elements of Darul Islam, itself at loggerheads with the central power, PRRI’s rebellion did not signify a real break in the religious policy of the party. As of mid-1958, Mohammad Natsir and his companions found themselves ostracised. The revolt had just been wiped out militarily by the Jakarta government in spite of American logistical support. While hiding out in the Sumatran jungle, they founded a ‘United Republic of Indonesia’, an ultimate and derisory attempt to wrest control from Soekarno. Contrary to its name, it instituted a federation of 10 states, which were free to choose their mode of government ‘according to their cultural specificities’. This project remained a chimera. Only the preamble of the Constitution was written, which shed much light on the intentions of its founders. Obviously inspired by Pancasila, it comprised five principles sketching out a parliamentary democracy open to the major religions.35 Thus, from their position on the margins of political life and with all the latitude that clandestinity conferred upon them, the Masyumi leaders confirmed the values that had always guided their action: an open and tolerant religion and an unswerving attachment to parliamentary democracy and human rights.

33The rebellion of PRRI failed definitively soon after. Its promoters were arrested and Masyumi was banned in August 1960 on the basis of the involvement of its militants. Masyumi’s failure was complete: in trying to create a federal state, save parliamentary democracy and protect Indonesia from communist influence, the rebellion had instead strengthened the Jacobin centralised state, provided a pretext for Soekarno to install his ‘Guided Democracy’ and reinforced the influence of PKI in the government. Moreover, Masyumi leaders’ all-out fight for a Muslim democracy left but few traces ultimately since the reformist current actually became increasingly intransigent and closed in upon itself.

Bitterness and Hardening of Attitudes

34Important as they might have been, the steps taken by Masyumi towards a Muslim democracy were no less fragile. This ideological posture was the result of a choice made by the leaders under Mohammad Natsir, but it was criticised by some within the party and was weakened considerably after the unexpected failure of the Muslim party in the 1955 elections. The majority of Indonesian observers expected these legislative and constitutional elections organised at the end of 1955 to consecrate Masyumi’s victory, by the sheer fact that the population was predominantly Muslim. Its leaders thus approached the date with confidence. Their rupture with the traditionalists of Nahdlatul Ulama, who had broken away from Masyumi three years ago in 1952, did not cause them undue worry. Extremely sceptical of the political capacity of the ulama, they did not consider the party created by the latter a real challenge.36 This proved to be a grave mistake. Winning only 20.9 per cent of the votes, Masyumi arrived in the second position behind its nationalist rival PNI, which obtained 22.3 per cent. Nahdlatul Ulama, which gathered 18.4 per cent of the votes, deprived Masyumi of a resounding electoral victory and, most importantly, dealt a fatal blow to its monopoly of political Islam. The communist party, its old foe, reaped 16.4 per cent of the votes.

35The distribution of power resulting from the elections did not leave Masyumi with any alternative in the short term. Having long nursed hopes for exercising sole power, it found itself obliged to cooperate with its rivals instead. This unexpected situation brought about a sharp re-evaluation of the strategy it had adopted up till then. It forced the party into a sort of political schizophrenia that saw it defend a very Western conception of parliamentary regime in the face of Soekarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’, while at the same time maintaining within the Constitutional Assembly an intransigent attitude on Islam more in line with Islamist radicalism.

36This new stance of the party was particularly centred on the call to have the famous Jakarta Charter included in the preamble of the Constitution. This project imposed Islamic law on Muslims, establishing an automatic link between the status of a believer and the status of a subject of Islamic law, thus nullifying all efforts at liberating the political sphere from religion. The project defended by all the Muslim parties in the Constitutional Assembly between 1957 and 1960 was thus a democracy circumscribed by an immanent norm and in which the believer was granted a restricted political freedom. Faced with the equally intransigent supporters of Pancasila, this demand was repelled by 269 votes versus 199.37 However, as it disposed of a blocking minority (to be adopted, the new Constitution had to be approved by two-thirds of the members), the representatives of Islam were caught in a political impasse. This encouraged Soekarno’s authoritarian bent and in July 1959, the Constitutional Assembly was dissolved.

37One of the key explanations for the contradictory positions taken on the ground and in the Constitutional Assembly was indubitably the fragile legitimacy of the reformist leaders within the party. The main leaders (Mohammad Natsir, Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, etc.) had taken advantage of circumstances to move away from a literal reading of the Qur’an and confer some autonomy to the political sphere but lacked the necessary religious authority to inscribe it in the doctrinal corps of their party. As such, when the mediocre election results of Masyumi during the elections and the development of the political situation in Indonesia seemed to confirm the failure of their policy, they fell back on a much more classic conception of the link between Islam and politics, based in particular on the call for the sharia — an advocation all the more strident as it served to mask the absence of a well-conceived and unifying institutional project.

Repression

38Seen as symbols of the resistance to President Soekarno’s authoritarian streak by their supporters and as culprits of the rebellion that threatened national unity by their enemies, the Masyumi leaders paid a heavy price with the installation of ‘Guided Democracy’. Despite promises of am-nesty, the leaders involved in the PRRI revolt were confined upon their return to Java. Mohammad Natsir was placed under house arrest in Malang (East Java) in 1960. In 1962, he was transferred to the military prison at Keagungan Road in Jakarta. At this time, a large number of the senior leaders of the Muslim party, including some who did not support the rebellion, were confined. Others lived in semi-clandestinity. An informal network soon sprung up around the Al-Azhar mosque in the new district of Kebayoran, where preaching (dakwah) activities and themes (the denunciation of Christianity in particular) that would remain part of the Masyumist current for many years were developed. The key actor behind this fragile revival was the ex-member of Parliament from Masyumi, Hamka, who was part of the Muhammadiyah management. In spite of the protection of the head of the army, General Nasution, he was finally arrested in 1964.

39Within a few years, the circumstances that had enabled the emergence of this powerful democratic-Muslim current — the communist threat, political recognition and the need to distinguish itself from Darul Islam — had disappeared. The advances made by the progressives, significant though they may have been, were never durably etched into the definition of the party’s identity; in the face of an iniquitous repression and a blocked political horizon, a section of Indonesian Islam took the path of ideological hardening.

IV. Islam and the Birth of the New Order

40The forces of political Islam entered the New Order with similar hopes: to be recognised for their role in the elimination of the communist threat. However, each group came to this period with a different past. Nahdlatul Ulama had remained active in Parliament, attempting to rival the PKI in its influence on the president and within the legislative system, while the reformist forces had been essentially marginalised for some years. Masyumi was dissolved in 1960 and the majority of its leaders imprisoned. Radical Islamism of the Darul Islam movements had just been dealt a physical blow by military operations: their principal leaders had been killed — Kartosuwiryo in West Java in 1962 and Kahar Muzakkar in Sulawesi in 1965.

41With the disappearance of the two pillars of Indonesian secularism — the Communist Party and the Soekarnist left — during the violent transition of 1965–1966, the New Order regime, led by General Soeharto, started to rule in a drastically different political and religious situation. The regime took advantage of this vacuum to establish its own political party, the Functional Groups (Golongan Karya, popularised under its acronym Golkar), which went from electoral victory to victory between the years 1971–1997. Its early electoral successes can be attributed to the armed forces’ manoeuvres and its support of the regime’s candidates. Subsequently, its incontestable economic successes won the regime some popular support. Yet, the New Order still teetered between consensus and repression.38 Major social, political and religious tensions were exacerbated throughout this period. This explains the violent end of the regime in the 1990s and the difficulties encountered in the transition to democracy.

42The Islamic policy of the regime was dictated not so much by religious considerations — that is, the defence of Javanism against political Islam, as is commonly held — as it was by personal interests and the demands of an increasingly personalised rule, giving rise to an attitude towards Indonesian Islam that can be characterised as overwhelmingly opportunist and necessarily fluctuating. Indeed, a rereading of the major events of the 1970s and 1980s shows swings between distrust, repression and manipulation. Moreover, this policy was sometimes counterproductive: the president attempted to suppress political Islam in the 1980s but ended up promoting it; a few years later, when he tried to create a conservative and submissive Islam, he encouraged instead the renewal of a democratic Islam, as well as the birth of another reactionary but largely uncontrollable current.39

Helping the Rise of the New Order

43The New Order of General Soeharto was born of the failure and suppression of the “30 September 1965 Movement”, the day of the assassination of the main senior armed forces generals.40 The regime was put in place gradually by the army, who worked hand in hand with the anti-communists in the first two years to eradicate the PKI and remove Soekarno from power. Traditionalist Islam played a crucial role in the first phase of the regime’s establishment.

44The Javanese ulama, some of whom were major landowners, had already played a leading role in the battle against the implementation of the agrarian reform proposed by the communists. When the latter became the target of brutal repression after 1965, these religious dignitaries sometimes lent their backing to the massacres.41 Some ulama declared that the PKI was “kafir harbi ” (infidels hostile to Islam, a term that implies a state of war and legitimises violence), as well as “bughat” (illegitimate rebel), proclamations that were rapidly relayed to militants.42 The protection accorded by certain dignitaries to communists notwithstanding, the involvement of the religious organisations was so extensive that even the army, itself the primary perpetrator of this violence, had to intervene in January 1966 to inject some restraint.43

45Aside from this participation in the anti-communist repression, what is rarely mentioned is the preponderant role played by Nahdlatul Ulama in the constitutional genesis of the New Order. As the only substantial political organisation still on the scene, the traditionalist Muslim party provided the Soeharto regime with an indispensable legitimacy in its early years. The PNI, divided into a left and right wing, had been discredited by its close association with Soekarno, “Father of the revolution”; Masyumi was still banned; and the PKI was battling repression. Out of the four big parties, only one, Nahdlatul Ulama, the traditionalist Islamic party that was mostly Javanese, was left standing against the army. Anti-communist, it complied with the ‘constitutional’ installation of a new regime, although its leaders quickly detected its authoritarian tendencies. These leaders thus played a leading role in the convocation of an extraordinary session of the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat Sementara, MPRS), which relieved Soekarno of the presidency and named Soeharto president ad interim.44

46Another important player in the establishment of the regime was the ‘modernising’ intelligentsia, composed of secular, often socialist-minded intellectuals. These were mostly Muslims but also included Christians, Hindus and agnostics. In the aftermath of the bankrupt years under Soekarno, they focused on economic development, which was henceforth to be carried out with international support (the United States, but also Japan, Taiwan, Europe, etc.). The country was then in the throes of an economic crisis and suffered from soaring inflation rate. At the same time it was embroiled in a worsening conflict with the nascent Federation of Malaya, which was building itself up after a belated independence. Preoccupied by the urgent economic crisis, the theoreticians of the new regime wanted religion to remain in the private sphere. Convinced that it was parliamentary democracy that had led the country down the path of political and economic chaos at the beginning of the 1960s, they were persuaded that the people were not ‘mature’ enough for mass democracy. The ideologists of the New Order were but reviving the observation already established by Soekarno at the end of the 1950s as he set about installing ‘Guided Democracy’; only later did they realise that this combination of progressive idealism and ‘elitist avant-gardism’ paved the way for the authoritarianism of Soeharto. In 1966, their priority was to rid Indonesian politics of its ‘primordial links’ (ikatan primordial ). To this end, the party system had to be changed and Islam depoliticised without, however, reining in its growth as a religion. Together with the opportunism mentioned above, this strategy was to serve as the basis of all of Soeharto’s policies from 1966 to the mid-1980s.

Javanisation or Islamisation?

47Contrary to the legend hawked by contemporary Muslim radicals, from the start the New Order advocated policies relatively favourable to the five recognised religions. The leaders of the regime did not cede to the

48demands made by the young intellectuals of the daily newspaper Mahasiswa Indonesia (Indonesian Students) for real secularism in the New Order.45 As early as 1966, the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly (MPRS) made religious education compulsory from primary to university level. The Ministry of Religions also grew in importance with its personnel swelling by 60 per cent, an increase that far outstripped the growth of other ministries at the time.46 In certain PKI strongholds, indoctrination programmes were implemented. In West Java, southern Sulawesi and other regions, local officials enforced the sharia, in conformity with the Jakarta Charter but in opposition to the Constitution, which had not recognised its validity.47 Even within the Ministry of Religions, Islamic law had its supporters: a draft law on the marriage of Muslims, submitted to Parliament on 22 May 1967, mentioned yet again the Jakarta Charter and affirmed that “laws in accordance with the sharia [could] be promulgated [specially] for Muslims”.48 Such a formulation flew in the face of efforts by jurists working on a civil code for all Indonesians. This draft bill was rejected.

49Finally, contrary to the dominant Islamist discourse, Soeharto extended a very limited protection to traditional religious groups lying outside of the five recognised religions: during the first two years of the regime, more than 100 mystic organisations suspected of having links with the communists were banned.49

50The advent of the New Order seemed at first to install a renewed balance between, on the one hand, Muslims longing for public recognition for their religion (the santri Islamic circles) and, on the other hand, abangan Muslim leaders and non-Muslims who called for some form of secularism. However, this delicate balance was progressively tilted in favour of the latter. Distrust of political Islam grew rapidly within the regime. The modernising Muslims were the first on the receiving end but traditional Islam soon felt its effect too. Undoubtedly, Nahdlatul Ulama, an association of traditionalist ulama with proven anti-communist credentials, was a partner of the regime, but the constant references to the Jakarta Charter within NU circles were worrying. Relations soured during the electoral campaign of 1971 when the Ministry of Religions, then in the hands of the traditionalist organisation, denounced the principle of loyalty of all civil servants towards Golkar. The army became increasingly critical of NU, which found itself marginalised. After the first elections of 1971, it lost the post of Minister of religions, considered vital by the ulama.

51Traditionalist Muslims were not the only ones disappointed by this period of the New Order. Two other groups — the students and the democrats — saw their hopes rapidly dashed too. The new electoral law of 1969 opted to maintain the system of representation that concentrated power in the hands of the political parties, at the expense of local political forces; most importantly, it conferred upon the president the power to name 100 out of 460 MPs in the Parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), thus crushing any hopes of democracy. The profound bitterness that seized the modernist Muslims circles is crucial in understanding the process of radicalisation within Indonesian Islam.

The Mutations of Modernism

52In the aftermath of the 1965–1966 crisis, the advent of a New Order op-posed to Soekarno’s regime had sparked off great hopes amongst the leaders of the former Masyumi. Deprived of their organisation, then mostly thrown into prison, they had envisaged occupying a leading role in the renewed political landscape, in the name of their martyr. These plans were never realised. The close similarity between the new regime’s strategy in dealing with the two currents of political Islam, modernist and traditionalist, and that of ‘Guided Democracy’ revealed itself soon enough.

53As early as December 1965, while the majority of the Masyumi leaders were still in prison, a committee for the coordination of Muslim activities was created to bring together Islamic organisations militating for a rehabilitation of Masyumi. Several army officers lent their support to this committee. They wished to see the influence of Nahdlatul Ulama diminished and felt that the modernist current could not be deprived of representation for much longer.50 Soon, however, the party was reminded by the ruling power of its rebel past. On 26 January 1967, General Soeharto

54announced that the armed forces and the families of the soldiers who had suffered during the campaigns against Darul Islam and then the PRRI rebellion were not ready for a rehabilitation of Masyumi.51 By the middle of 1967, supporters who wished to see the return of the modernist Islamic group on the political scene found themselves in an impasse. Finally, abandoning all hopes of rehabilitating their party, the ex-leaders of Masyumi decided regretfully to undertake the foundation of a new political formation, the Party of Muslims of Indonesia (Partai Muslimin Indonesia, Parmusi). This was authorised by the ruling power in 1968, but only emerged later, on the express condition that ex-Masyumi leaders be barred from leadership positions.

55The definitive neutralisation of the modernist group in politics was carried out in two stages. In 1969, the ruling power backhandedly stirred up trouble within Parmusi, then imposed one of its men, H.M.S. Mintaredja, as head of the party. Having lost all credibility amongst the old supporters of Masyumi, Parmusi won only 5.4 per cent of the votes in 1971 (from 20.9 per cent in 1955). The second stage of neutralisation was part of a larger political reorganisation designed to bring about the stability deemed necessary for economic development. Under the new law governing political parties, three groups were authorised. One of these was Golkar, which had institutionalised the idea of functional groups concretised under Soekarno. It was not strictly a political party but a grouping — this status allowed it to bypass restrictions imposed on other political formations, which were not allowed representation in villages.52 Two ‘opposition’ parties were to be artificially created to provide a semblance of democracy, including one that would gather all religious organisations (notably, Muslim and Christian) under one party. A product of the naiveté of the ongoing ‘political engineering’, this party ultimately comprised only Muslims under the fold of the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP), but it was soon torn under the strains of personal quarrels, at times stoked by the ruling power. The Christian parties found a place within the other ‘opposition’ party, the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), meant originally to rally the secular nationalist current (PNI and others).

56In addition to being eliminated from the political scene, the ex-leaders of Masyumi also had to face serious generational conflicts. They did not receive the support of the young Muslim activists who had played a leading role in the beginnings of the New Order. From 1964, harsh criticism of the major Muslim organisations started circulating in some modernised Islamic boarding schools in Java. The young santri directed their criticism as much against Nahdlatul Ulama, accused of opportunism, as against Masyumi, considered too Westernised.53 Moreover, the main leaders of the Youth Movement of Masyumi (Gerakan Pemuda Islam Indonesia, GPII) — E.Z. Muttaqien, Soemarsono, Achmad Buchari, Anwar Haryono — had also been imprisoned following the arrests of their older members. Thus, they could not participate in the events of 1965–1966 and had left the field open to the Association of Muslim Students (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam, HMI). Though very close to the modernist circles, this association had always maintained a certain distance vis-à-vis the party of Mohammad Natsir. Following the advent of the New Order, some of HMI’s leaders made it known that they regarded the leaders of Masyumi more as ‘leftovers’ of the old regime than as heroes who deserved a place in the new regime.54

57From this tense context of the late 1960s emerged a new generation of Muslim intellectuals. In 1967, a small discussion group known as Limited Group gathered regularly at the home of Professor H.A. Mukti Ali in Yogyakarta, of which the main moderators were Ahmad Wahib, Djohan Effendi and Dawam Rahardjo.55 Sharing the same sympathies in Jakarta was Nurcholish Madjid, president of HMI since 1966 and great hope of the modernists. Often called ‘Natsir muda’ (the young Natsir), he maintained an excellent relationship with the ex-chairman of Masyumi, who saw in him the possibility of regeneration. The disillusionment of the ex-Masyumists was to be as deep as their hopes had been high. On 3 February 1970, Nurcholish Madjid gave a lecture before student orga-nisations entitled “The necessity of renewal in Muslim thought and the problem of the integration of the umma”. His analysis was based on the very harsh judgement that the Muslim parties were an utter failure. For Nurcholish, the leaders of Muslim parties had lost all credibility in the eyes of the public and the majority view within the Islamic community was “Islam yes, Partai Islam, no! ”.56 This lecture was seen as a betrayal by the ex-Masyumists. Natsir and those close to him thundered against the sekularisasi (secularisation) called for by Nurcholish.57 Indubitably, this polemic contributed to the bitterness of the Masyumist leaders and as such, to a radicalisation of their views.

58An institution, the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, DDII), played a capital role in this process of doctrinal hardening. Born in 1967 of a need for renewal within the Indonesian Muslim community, this organisation was a temporary solution for the ex-leaders of Masyumi. With Islamisation via politics henceforth impossible, the leaders of Masyumi thus decided to engage in politics via Islamisation. Dakwah became a central element of the Islamist discourse.58

59With hopes of seeing their former party rehabilitated progressively dashed, DDII became the refuge for Masyumist identity as well as the site of its mutation. The organisation launched a very active publication policy, particularly of the monthly Media Dakwah, which became the vector of a Wahhabi-inspired rigorism. Moderate, confident and remarkably open-minded in the 1950s, the Masyumist leaders, like the majority of Islamist movements worldwide, increasingly suffered from a siege mentality. The West, hitherto regarded as an ally against the communists, was now viewed as a threat, and there was a drastic change in tone towards Christians. During this period, reformist Indonesian Islam opened up considerably to international Islamist networks, not without implications for its ideological development.59

V. Compromise, Manipulation and Repression

60Disappointed with the development of the new regime, Islamic parties and organisations became one of the main opposition forces from the end of the 1970s. Secular students (with rather socialist leanings) were the first to rise up against the regime’s corruption in numerous demonstrations against the New Order in 1974 and 1978, but they were soon brought to heel by strict regulations on campus. In the long term, it was political Islam that better resisted the regime’s pressures.60 The many occasions when the regime had to bend before the mobilisation of Islamic organisations leads us to rule out any univocal assessment of the period.

Gains from Mobilisation

61In July 1973, the government proposed a bill on civil marriage aimed at protecting women’s rights. It marked a not inconsiderable retreat for Islamic law in this domain: Muslim marriages had to be validated by civil registration; Muslim men seeking divorce or to take on a second wife could only do so with the authorisation of a civil court; a Muslim woman could marry a non-Muslim.61 This retreat of Islamic law led Islamic organisations to mount a powerful protest movement. Acting as a substitute for national representation, the army bypassed Parliament and directly engaged in negotiations with the ulama.62 The outcome of this most unorthodox procedure, a reworked bill, was finally submitted — and voted — in Parliament. The law, promulgated on 2 January 1974, fulfilled almost all of the wishes of the Islamic groups: only Muslim marriages registered at the Ministry of Religions retained their validity; the article guaranteeing the possibility of inter-religious marriages disappeared;63 and henceforth authorisation for polygamous marriages would be given by an Islamic court (in theory, only if the first wife’s approval has been obtained and under specific conditions).

62In subsequent years, numerous occasions arose when pressure from Muslim organisations caused the government to back down or, on the contrary, to inflect positive law according to their wishes. In 1978, in order, amongst other aims, to recognise the specificities of Javanese spirituality, the government proposed to the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR) that local beliefs (kepercayaan) be ac-corded the same status as the five official religions (local burial and marriage rituals, for example, would no longer have to be conducted through the five recognised religions but would be officially valid in them-selves). This initiative provoked an outcry in the militant Islamic milieux and the government had to back down once more.64 In the same year, in response to a previous demand from Muslim organisations, the Ministry of Religions banned Christian missionaries from addressing persons of another faith. A second decree in 1979 elaborated on this ban and was also signed by the Ministry of the Interior. These two resolutions effectively put the brakes on Christian missionaries without appeasing the complaints of the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, DDII), ready as ever to accuse the authorities of being lax in the implementation these decrees, in favour of Christianity.

63These concessions aside, the regime steadfastly pursued its strategy of controlling political Islam. The early years of the 1980s were thus marked by fierce tension generated by the project to impose Pancasila as the bed-rock (asas tunggal, literally ‘sole basis’) of all parties and social organisations in the country. Debate within the Islamic movements was particularly acrimonious because inscribing “the belief in a unique god”, the first principle of Pancasila, as their founding belief was equivalent to forcing them to renounce their specificity. Nonetheless, subjected to immense pressure, the majority of movements acceded. Amongst the Islamic organisations, the Association of Muslim High School Students (Pelajar Islam Indonesia, PII), as well as a section of the Association of Muslim Students (Himpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia, HMI), which was close to the modernist Muslim milieux, refused to adopt the new status; the latter gave birth to a new clandestine organisation, the Association of Muslim Students-Council to Save the Organisation (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam-Majelis Penyelamat Organisasi, HMI-MPO).65

64By 1985, the government’s ideological control of the entire political and social fields seemed complete. Nonetheless, some Islamic organisations adroitly adopted strategies to get round regulations such that the effect of the concessions they made was limited. The NU obeyed the asas tunggal injunction but kept the mention of Islam in its “objectives” and “faith” (aqidah). At the same time, aware that it could not play a major role within, it dispensed its members from supporting the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP), the ‘official’ Islamic party. In so doing, it strengthened the governmental party Golkar but also and especially its own lobbying power: the ulama would henceforth be courted by all the political parties and by the government. The Muham-madiyah used the same ploy as the NU, while the Indonesian Islamic Propagation Council (DDII), not having the status of a social organisation but one of a ‘foundation’ (yayasan), was not affected at all by this asas tunggal regulation.

65Indonesian Muslims look back on this policy of ideological homogeni-sation as proof of the tribulations political Islam suffered under Soeharto. Yet the impact of the formal concessions made by these organisations to the regime remains difficult to evaluate fully. One thing, however, is clear: it marked a turning point in the Islamic policy of the regime, which from then on made overtures to a political Islam it considered as tamed. While the concessions of the 1970s had been obtained through pressure, the ruling power would henceforth pre-empt the demands of Islamic orga-nisations and attempt to draw closer to some of them. This signified the end of a dark period of oppression in the historiography of Indonesian Islam and the start of a period where the value of Islam would finally be recognised by the ruling power.

A Policy of Manipulation

66Outside of this official policy, the Soeharto regime maintained a very ambiguous relationship with the radical Muslim milieux. The nature of these links is one of the biggest controversies in Indonesian Islam’s recent history. From the end of the 1960s onwards, some within the new regime seem to have envisaged exploiting the old network of Darul Islam (DI), the Islamist rebellion which had ignited several regions of the Archipelago in the 1950s. The reach, if not the reality, of this act of manipulation remains highly debated. As it is still impossible to gain access to official sources, this subject has to be treated with the greatest prudence.66

67In fact, the question of which strategy to adopt in dealing with the supporters of an Islamic state in Indonesia was bitterly debated at the beginning of the New Order. The issue was complex, for if some of the DI lieutenants had reached a compromise with the ruling power, symbolised by the oath of loyalty (Ikrar bersama) taken by 32 DI officers, this was far from being the case for everyone, and the number of veterans in the DI was large: 12,000–15,000 men at the peak of rebellions between 1956–1957.67

68It would appear that one of the strongmen of the regime, General Ali Moertopo, third deputy director of the Office for the Coordination of Secret Services (Badan Koordinasi Intelijen Negara, BAKIN) and, most importantly, personal assistant of President Soeharto, proposed allowing ex-DI members to reorganise to a limited degree under the tight control of the authorities. His then hierarchic superior and head of BAKIN, General Sutopo Yuwono, along with some others, were opposed to this approach, deemed too risky.68 It seemed to have even incurred the wrath of some top officers in West Java who had fought against the Islamist rebellion for the last 13 years between 1949 and 1962, as it would weaken their past efforts at maintaining order.69

69Ultimately, General Moetopo’s vision triumphed, and he launched his Special Operations Service (Operasi Khusus, Opsus) in the adventure of Islamism. Accounts and analyses differ as to the starting date of this operation, but most agree on the reality and varied motives of this opera-tion: to fight against communism, use of these groups for electoral pur-poses, and the control and neutralisation of these very groups.

An Attempt at Political Co-optation: GUPPI

70As we have seen, one of the key wishes of the New Order strategists was to create a new party, Golkar, as the political base of the regime. They observed from the 1955 elections results that entire segments of Muslim opinion could be swayed in their political choice by a few ulama. They then decided to attempt to capture this docile electorate by reactivating an old organisation of West Java, the Association for the Improvement of Islamic Teaching (Gabungan Usaha Perbaikan Pendidikan Islam, GUPPI). Thus from the 1970s, Ali Moertopo’s men undertook a tour of Islamic boarding schools to propose a modernisation of their teaching, widened to include non-religious subjects, as well as disburse funds in exchange for supporting Golkar. This initiative was a huge success — the first GUPPI congress gathered more than 1,000 kiai (also often heads of Islamic boarding schools) and more than 5,000 in 1975.70 GUPPI also benefited from the recruitment of 60,000 new religious teachers after 1966, when religious classes became compulsory in all public schools, a measure taken to counter the communist influence. GUPPI thus became one of the pillars of influence for the Ministry of Religions, particularly in the Islamic education system.71

71Beyond potential electoral gains, GUPPI was also supposed to “moder-nise Islam”, which signified getting rid of the “spices” (bumbu-bumbu) of Arab culture, which had penetrated Indonesia with the Islamic reform movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The wearing of the headscarf and the ban on traditional Javanese ceremonies were thus cited as “Arab incursions” into Indonesian culture.72 Yet such objectives were far from the minds of the GUPPI ulama, being mostly very conservative rural people. As such, GUPPI was very unsupportive of the government’s draft bill on marriage (mentioned above) and, a few years later, of its attempt to legalise mystical Javanese beliefs, which the ulama regarded as a form of polytheism and condemned as ‘associationism’ (shirk, see Glossary) in Islam.73

72BAKIN’s game plan of using GUPPI was certainly risky and some religious officials with a moderating influence were placed in key positions so as to control the organisation, for example, K.H. Muhammadun, who had displayed his ability to appease Darul Islam from 1961–1962 and K.H.S. Qodratullah, an official agreeable to the secularisation policy.74

73According to Heru Cahyono, the first political use of the ex-members of Darul Islam took place in January 1974 during the riots known as Malari. These “anti-Japanese” student riots were actually a result of the internal rivalry in the army between the generals Moertopo and Sumitro. Cahyono argues that Ali Moertopo used the veterans of the Karawang (West Java) rebellions and the kiai in GUPPI, amongst others, to create trouble in the capital.75 This adds another interesting perspective to the majority of analyses put forward thus far, which point to the use of these networks before the legislative elections of 1977 to “discredit, once again, militant Islam to prevent an eventual success of PPP”.76

Opsus and Komando Jihad

74GUPPI represented but the political face of a hidden instrumentalisation of the ex-members of Darul Islam. New revelations by members of the Darul Islam network, published in 2004, revealed that the reality of these operations was much more complex. The relationship between BAKIN and Darul Islam seemed to be one of mutual expedience, with each organisation trying to use the other to serve its own aims.

75Thus we know today that as of 1965–1966, the rebellion leaders in West Java were offered arms in exchange for collaborating in the hunt against the communists. According to one of the DI leaders, Danu Mohammad Hasan, Ali Moertopo gained their confidence when he intervened vis-à-vis Soeharto to save the movement from annihilation, which would have been possible during the massacre of communists that marked the beginnings of the regime.77 Danu, one of signatories of the Ikrar bersama pact would thus have ‘worked’ with (if not for) BAKIN, thanks to his personal relationship with Moertopo.78

76In the ensuing years, the desire of Kartosuwiryo’s former lieutenants to breathe life into DI coincided once again with the interests of the regime’s henchmen. Just as the group was seeking funds to organise a gathering of its ex-members, Danu Mohammad Hasan suggested turning to BAKIN, which in turn saw this as yet another way, in addition to GUPPI, to seize votes from DI in the upcoming 1971 elections. Danu thus offered his aid to Aceng Kurnia, a former bodyguard of Kartosuwiryo and key figure behind the organisation’s revitalisation. The Movement of Muslim Households (Penggerakan Rumah Tangga Islam, PRTI, literally, ‘activation of Muslim households’), a sort of committee working for the DI rebellion, received funds from BAKIN to organise a gathering of former DI members in Bandung in April 1971. Even as secret service officers were speaking in favour of Golkar, a process of consolidation was secretly being implemented. Several other such meetings followed, which allowed for the reconstitution of old networks, all under the benevolent eyes of Moertopo’s men.

77In 1974 a historic meeting of the leaders of the old bastions of DI (Aceh, West Java and South Sulawesi) took place, during which it was decided that leadership of this movement should be handed over to Daud Beureueh, who had presided over the Acehnese rebellion. According to ICG, two years later in 1976, Danu Mohammad Hasan and Gaos Taufik (military leader of the structure created in 1974) decided to form Komando Jihad (Commandos of the Holy War) to launch the revolution.79 A few weeks later begun a series of bombings, notably in Sumatra — the first of several that would rock the country for many years to come.

78The operation was uncovered in 1977–1978 when the Indonesian press reported the shocking arrest of 185 persons, presented as members of a new Komando Jihad.80 The majority were put on trial at the beginning of the 1980s. While the Muslim press fiercely denounced this manipulation during the trial,81 the reality of the engagement of the activists concerned was not contested at first, apart from Islamist circles and human rights organisations.

79Concerning this irrefutable upsurge in Islamist violence that rocked Indonesia at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, it remains difficult to assess as much the reality as the influence, role and real impact of the provocations led by some elements of the regime. Did they also manipulate Imran, founder of the Council of the Islamic Revolution of Indonesia (Dewan Revolusi Islam Indonesia)? Too young to have participated in Darul Islam, this activist made a name for himself by attacking a police post in Cicendo, West Java before hijacking a Garuda DC 9 in Bangkok in March 1981.

80What we do know for certain is that it was the very real discord over whether to work with BAKIN or not that partially led to the splintering of the DI into more or less rival factions — a phenomenon we shall examine later.82 In 1978, the rivalry between two potential successors to the imam of Negara Islam Indonesia ended with the triumph of Adah Djaelani Tirtapradja (head of Jihad Fisabilillah, who had chosen this strategic alliance that would produce future jihadists) and with the assassination of his main competitor, Djadja Sudja’i, head of the rival faction, Jihad Fillah.83

81Of course, the tortuous operations of Opsus were not the cause of Muslim radicalism in Indonesia, of which the matrix was Darul Islam. It started recruiting in earnest throughout Java in 1976 through its Komando Jihad, and it was during subsequent trials that the names Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and Abdullah Sungkar (presumed founder of the Jemaah Islamiyah) emerged for the first time. They were first arrested in 1978 for their links to the new DI and for having carried out recruitment for the Jemaah Islamiyah or the Jemaah Mujahidin Anshorullah.84

82These events hardly troubled public opinion and capped in a way what seemed like a brilliant success of the regime’s Islamic policy, crowned by the adoption in 1984 of Pancasila as asas tunggal by all Muslim organisations. Alternating adroitly between opportunistic concessions, authoritarian re-compositions and secret manipulations, the New Order also managed to encourage the representatives of a docile Islam while dis-crediting, even eliminating, potential supporters of an Islamic opposition. The previous year, the Komando Jihad episode had wound down with trials following the destruction of Adah Djaelani’s Jihad Fisabilillah. During the trial in 1983, Danu Mohammad Hasan, ex-DI commander for Java and Madura and key figure behind the rapprochement with BAKIN, publicly accused Moertopo of having manipulated his group. The following day, he died of poisoning. In May 1984, it was the turn of the craftsman of this convoluted policy to die: Ali Moertopo was struck, so it was reported, by a heart attack.85

83Twenty years later, this apparent triumph of the regime needs to be, at the very least, qualified. Firstly, because some networks managed to regenerate and subsequently escape dismantlement and secondly, because the clever tactics of Opsus neglected to take into account one fundamental fact: radicalism, particularly Islamic radicalism, feeds on its own failure. In so cunningly entrapping the veterans of Darul Islam, Moertopo and his henchmen had unwittingly created a generation of martyrs with whom new militants could later identify. Emerging evidence of manipulation ended up having a counter-effect, lending itself easily to Islamist propaganda. This was especially so because, on several occasions, the brutality of the clampdown provoked indignation well beyond the circles of militant Islam. In the same year of 1984, clashes broke out in the working-class district of Tanjung Priok (port of Jakarta) between ordinary citizens and military district guards (babinsa), who were accused of having entered the forecourt of a mosque to take down an anti-government poster without first removing their shoes. Several people were arrested. On 12 September, a demonstration was organised to demand their liberation, leading to a big march on the police post. The army opened fire on the crowd, causing 30 deaths according to official estimates. Very soon, it came to light that this figure was very much an underestimation and that the army had got rid of dozens of bodies. The obvious abuse of the repressive machinery made this affair one of the key episodes in the martyrdom of radical Islamism.86

84In the mid-1980s, the Islamic policy of the New Order was thus a mixed success. The initial objective of persuading public opinion that militant Islam represented a danger to the continuity of the regime had to a large degree produced a reverse effect: for many Muslims, it was actually the ruling power that now appeared to be a threat to Islam. This conviction spread throughout the Archipelago via the militant Islamic networks inspired by the methods of the Muslim Brotherhood, networks which enjoyed a monopoly in a good many places, paradoxically because of the tight control of the political sphere that it alone managed to escape. Their influence became even more important as Indonesia was then gripped by a powerful movement of religious revival which the ruling power, in an amazing turnaround of its Islamic strategy, decided to follow.

VI. A New Islamic Order: Mutation of the Soeharto Regime

85Establishing with certitude the chain of events leading to the complete change in attitude of the New Order towards political Islam remains a delicate task. There were many factors at play. Firstly, as mentioned above, there was an unquestionable religious revival at work throughout the Muslim world that also affected the inner circles of government. Using

86Malaysia as an example, some wished to compensate for the undeniable Westernisation of the country — an outcome of its rapid modernization — by nurturing its Islamic identity, following the only model considered as being able to stand up to a homogenising globalisation. More prosaically, the souring of relations between General Soeharto and a section of the General Staff concerned with the growing hold of the presidential clan on the economy led the old dictator to seek other sources of backing to replace this weakening support. Finally and most importantly, this ‘re-legitimisation’ movement of Islam as the social, cultural and political foundation of Indonesia generated its own dynamic. It encouraged normative changes to justify its growing role. Conspicuous piety became the new standard for social promotion, in government as well as in media circles.

A More Favourable Atmosphere

87Numerous events attested to the change in attitude of the regime vis-à-vis Islam from the end of the 1980s. Indonesian law saw an increasingly obvious influence of Islamic law in very diverse fields. In 1991, the progressive Munawir Sjadzali, then Minister of Religions, failed to make the ulama accept the equal division of inheritance between boys and girls during debates about the law on Islamic courts and the Compilation of Islamic law (Kompilasi Hukum Islam). The project was initially aimed at reactualising Islamic law in the Indonesian context, protecting local tradition (adat) as well as women’s rights. But secularists complained that it ended up standardising the law in favour of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).87 That same year, the authorities withdrew the ban on the headscarf (jilbab) in public schools. In 1993, it gave in to pressure by Islamic organisations and discontinued a very popular lottery.

88Other measures such as the ban of the tabloid Monitor and the imprisonment of its editor for having featured the Prophet Muhammad in a poll, the posting of about 1,000 Muslim preachers to far-flung zones of the Archipelago thanks to funding by the Ministry of Religions, the establishment of an Islamic bank (Bank Muamalat Indonesia) and Soeharto’s first pilgrimage to Mecca, together with his promise to help finance the construction and renovation of religious buildings, were seen as signs of the regime’s willingness to build a closer relationship with political Islam.88

89Besides, Islam in its entirety benefited from this more favourable atmosphere: in drawing closer to the authorities, Nahdlatul Ulama thus obtained greater legitimacy, more freedom in preaching and a multiplication of subsidies for its schools.89 As one of its leaders who had rejoined the government party explained:

“Preaching activities have grown tremendously since the reconciliation with Golkar. During the joint Golkar/NU religious study sessions (pengajian), followers who call themselves Muslims feel obliged to come as it is the village or district head (lurah) who invites them. This is the advantage of joining Golkar. There are 50 per cent more people in the pengajian, not only NU members, but also others, often nominal Muslims (abangan), those who still do not perform the prayers but who wish to learn the texts.”90

90During this period, Islamisation of the Archipelago escalated: many abangan (re)discovered their religion, at times either pressurised by other villagers or to gain greater access to the bureaucracy. This phenomenon, called the “santrisation” of the Javanese regions, even gave rise to ‘reconversions’: some Javanese who had converted to Christianity or Hinduism after 1965 returned to Islam in the 1990s.91

ICMI or Islam at the Heart of Power

91The most significant sign of this mutation in the regime was the creation of the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia, ICMI), which soon became the symbol and vehicle for the growing influence of the militant Islamists within the regime. Its creation in 1990 under the patronage of B.J. Habibie, then Minister of Research and Technology, was the linchpin of the subtle strategy implemented by the Soeharto regime to exploit the Islamic devout milieux. The modernist Muslims, who easily made up the majority within the association, pinned their hopes on it as the long-awaited instrument of their social and political recognition, or even, for some of them, of revenge against the traditionalists of Nahdlatul Ulama. However, at the same time, the association also encouraged the birth of a ‘regimist’ Islam, which — as much out of opportunism as out of support for a vacillating authority — engaged in the dangerous game of radicalism.92

92ICMI was born of the volition of two persons. The first, Imaduddin Abdurrahim, a charismatic Muslim intellectual, was the key organiser of the Salman group in Bandung. Rejecting both the scholastic arguments of the traditionalists and the exclusivity of the modernists, Imaduddin embodied both the Muslim revival in the student milieu and the profound desire for unity of a community tired of theological discord. His imprisonment lasting a few months (1978–1979) by the New Order regime also allowed him to join the haloed company of Muslim political prisoners.93 In 1990 Imaduddin and a few other Muslim intellectuals keen to pull political Islam out of its isolation (including Dawan Rahardjo) found valuable backing from the ruling power. Two ministers were called upon to sponsor the new organisation: Emil Salim, a respected intellectual and Minister of the Environment, turned down the request. B.J. Habibie, Minister of Research and Technology, accepted. This brilliant engineer had built most of his career in Germany, where he had reached management level at Messerschmitt. Even if B.J. Habibie did not as yet possess the reputation of a devout Muslim, he was a passionate visionary who personified a modern Islam, open to the latest in technology and capable of taking up the challenge of the West with projects worthy of an industrialised country, one of which was aeronautic construction (Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara, IPTN) at Bandung, and the other, naval construction (Penataran Angkatan Laut, P.T. PAL) at Surabaya. His position strengthened by the development of these industries, B.J. Habibie also advocated emulating Malaysia’s development model, fascinated as he was by the technological Islamism fused with ‘Asian values’ of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s New Economic Policy (NEP).

93In the eyes of B.J. Habibie, patronage of ICMI offered another advantage: the political leverage that he lacked. Isolated within government, he owed his career solely to his status as the protégé of President Soeharto. The hefty funding that his risky “technological challenges”94 required earned him much hostility in the inner circles: neither project was profitable in the long run but instead absorbed a sizeable portion of the state’s finances. Thus in 1994, Indonesia discovered with stupefaction that a part of the reforestation funds (400 billion rupiah) obtained through the taxation of rich logging companies had been allocated to bail out the aeronautic construction of IPTN at Bandung.95

94The success of ICMI was probably due to the fact that Habibie was one of the few within the inner circle to take the ‘return’ of Soeharto to Islam seriously. The president’s attachment to Javanese mysticism had been well known for 20 years, but it was only after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991 that the regime’s mutation, in which ICMI would play a fundamental role, really left an impression. The new organisation was particularly welcomed in the santri Islamic milieux. Only a few independent personalities particularly critical of the government such as Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, and intellectuals such as Djohan Effendi or Deliar Noer, refused to join.96 Rapidly, however, the new organisation came to reflect the profound divisions cutting through the militant Muslim milieux. Three disparate groups fought over the moral leadership

95of ICMI. The first comprised the technocrats of the regime, allies of B.J. Habibie or leaders of the official party Golkar. Within this group, Azwar Anas, Harmoko and Haryanto Dhanutirto hoped to use to their advantage the Islamic revival that Indonesia had experienced since the start of the 1980s to counter-balance the influence of the army. The second cate-gory comprised Muslim personalities such as the intellectual Nurcholish Madjid or the ex-minister Emil Salim, who represented a current then known as neo-modernist, moderate and eager above all else to see the social role of the values of Islam recognised.97 Finally, the third group was made up of Muslim leaders (Amien Rais, Adi Sasono, Lukman Harun, etc.) who, on the contrary, wished to use ICMI as the vehicle for their political ambitions. They put themselves forward as the spokespersons of a Muslim community long bullied by the authorities and feeling victim of the increasing influence of the Christian minority in the country.98 It was within the third group that a mostly fundamentalist theme was developed. Pressurised by radical thinkers such as Imaduddin, ICMI wanted to equip itself with the means to counter the influence that it felt was being exercised on public opinion by the Christians. It launched its own daily, Republika (The Republic), and set up a centre for studies: the Center for Information and Development Studies, CIDES, designed to challenge the analyses of the influential Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies, CSIS, considered as biased towards Christianity and Javanese mysticism (kejawen).

96In its early years, ICMI was an unquestionable success. It encouraged the normalisation of relations between the ruling power and militant Islam and helped convince organisations such as DDII, hitherto very hostile to the New Order, to adopt a much more conciliatory attitude. In return, it enabled some of its adherents or sympathisers to obtain ministerial posts through a new system of affirmative action in favour of Muslims. As such, after the 1993 elections, four of its members acceded to important ministries in the new government while the number of Christians diminished from six to three.99 In Parliament (DPR), around 300 members were more or less linked to ICMI, a position that accorded multiple economic and political advantages.100

97These patent successes notwithstanding, ICMI ran soon enough into contradictions and misunderstandings inherent since its debut. Its communitarian, at times sectarian, outlook, which its local preachers lost no time in relaying to the most remote corners of the Archipelago, fuelled a deleterious atmosphere that sparked off the first inter-confessional confrontations.101 T his image of intolerance alienated the most liberal of its personalities. On the political scene, the increasingly evident manipulation of the organisation by the ruling power and the way it was being made use of in offensives against the government’s main opponents caused more and more embarrassment within its ranks and led some democrats, who had believed it was possible to maintain a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the regime while being involved with ICMI, to keep their distance.

98One of the first political targets of ICMI, from within the Muslim community itself, was the chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, an uncontrollable and iconoclastic opponent of the authorities. Son of an ex-minister, he was the archetypal product of a half-Western, half-Islamic education, an intellectual whose open-mindedness was partially due, no doubt, to his frequenting the cosmopolitan milieux of Jakarta since his childhood. Familiar with the writings of Karl Marx but also the medieval Muslim scholars al-Ghazali and al-Mawardi, who advocated moderation in politics, he married concern for the commoner (rakyat) with a propensity for polilical compromise. Grandson of the founder of Nahdlatul Ulama, Hasyim Asy’ari, a prominent landowner, he was discerning enough to be receptive to the interests of a certain santri bourgeoisie, but most of all, felt he should elevate his kiai heritage by attaining higher posts. Shortly after having refused to join ICMI, Abdurrahman Wahid clashed head-on with the Soeharto regime. In accepting to lead Forum Demokrasi, an organisation founded in opposition to the Muslim organisation, he denounced the exploitation of Islam by an authoritarian and increasingly contested government. The latter retaliated with attempts to discredit the ebullient leader. In 1994, when his mandate as the head of Nahdlatul Ulama ended, the ruling power pushed forward an opponent to challenge him, inaugurating a series of major political crises that would mark the last years of the Soeharto regime.

99More divided than ever, Indonesian Islam thus experienced in the mid-1990s an undeniable movement of revival whose most radical expressions now coincided with the interests of an increasingly desperate regime.

100Founded in 1987, the Indonesian Committee for Solidarity with the Muslim World (Komite Indonesia untuk Solidaritas Dunia Islam, KISDI) was a good illustration of the mutations of Muslim reformism that led to the birth of this turbulent ‘regimist’ Islam. KISDI originated from the old Masyumi networks sheltered by the Indonesian Council for the Propagation of Islamic Faith (DDII). Mohammad Natsir himself, the ex-chairman of Masyumi and founder of DDII, led the inauguration ceremony of the movement. At that time, several former leaders of the Muslim party filled the leadership ranks of KISDI: K.H. Hasan Basri, head of the Council of Indonesian Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI), H. Husein Umar, then secretary-general of the Council for Faith Propagation, and K.H Kholil Ridwan, president of the Grouping of Islamic Boarding Schools of Indonesia (Badan Kerjasama Pondok Pesantren se-Indonesia, BKPPI).102

101The head of the new organisation, H. Ahmad Sumargono, was then leader of the Preachers of Jakarta Corps (Korps Mubaligh Jakarta), another organisation close to DDII.103 KISDI was formed to “defend the rights of Muslims wherever they are” and effectively, its international dimension dominated till 1993 with operations in aid of the Palestinians, the Moro in the Philippines, Kashmir and Bosnia. However, from the end of the 1980s, its leaders made their presence felt on the Indonesian political scene by intensive lobbying in Parliament on behalf of Islam. Ahmad Sumargono lobbied in particular for laws on religious courts and education, for the right to wear the headscarf in public schools (1991) and for the banning of gambling.104 Very close to DDII, KISDI also attacked Sino-Indonesians (“unpatriotic business”), “kristianisasi ” (the supposed Christianisation in all fields) and communism (reincarnated in the new and small Democratic Party of the People, Parti Rakyat Demokratik, PRD). Marginal at the beginning, KISDI, via its political actions, its organisation of major demonstrations and the thundering declarations of its leaders, weighed in considerably on public debate in the beginning of the 1990s. The organisation quickly seized the opportunities that had sprung up with the regime’s new attitude towards Islam. More than DDII, which was still very much affected by the trauma at the start of the New Order, KIDSI was run by activists of the next generation — Ahmad Sumargono and Husein Umar, but also the lampoonist Adian Husaini — who unabashedly seized what they perceived as a historic opportunity. In the name of ‘threats’ to the interests of Muslims in the world, in general and particularly in Indonesia, they harnessed their troops to the wavering power of general Soeharto.

Notes de bas de page

1According to Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot, the stela of Leran was most probably uprooted from its original cemetery somewhere “outside of Java and the Malay world” for use as a ship ballast. “La stèle de Leran (Java) datée de 475/1082”, in Archipel 67, 2004. For a synthesis of the different theories regarding the Islamisation of the Archipelago, see W.J. Drewes, “New Light on the Coming of Islam to Indonesia?”, in Ahmad Ibrahim et al. (eds), Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, Singapore, 1985, p. 407, and Merle C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (4th edition), Stanford University Press, 2008, 496 pp.

2The Aceh Sultanate experienced much prosperity when Melaka fell into the hands of the Portuguese in 1511 and Muslim merchants from Melaka settled in Aceh.

3A Muslim presence was found within the court of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom from as early as the fourteenth century, according to the work of the French epigraphist Louis-Charles Damais (Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient [Befeo], Paris, various articles beginning from 1951).

4Martin van Bruinessen, “L’Asie du Sud-Est”, in Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (eds), Les voies d’Allah. Les ordres mystiques dans l’Islam des origines à aujourd’hui, Fayard, Paris, 1986, pp. 274–284; Werner Kraus, Islamische Mystische Bruderschaften im heutigen Indonesien, Institut fuer Asienkunde, Hamburg, 1990, 205 pp.; “Some notes on the Introduction of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya in Indonesia”, in Naqshbandis. Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, Workshop papers Sèvres, 2–4 May 1985, 1990, Istanbul, Paris, pp. 691–706.

5For examples of these exchanges, see Martin van Bruinessen, “Global and Local in Indonesian Islam”, in Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, Kyoto, September 1999: 46–63.

6Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java, Illinois: Free Press, 1960, pp. XV–392, a much debated work. For a synthesis of critiques, see Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1985, pp. XIV–550.

7Merle C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java. A History of Islamization from the Four-teenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries, EastBridge, Norwalk, 2006, XII–263 pp.

8James L. Peacock, Indonesia: An Anthropological Perspective, Goodyear, Pacific Palisades, California: 1973, p. 168.

9For an exhaustive list of these movements in Indonesia from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, see Raynaldo Ileto, “Religion and Anti-Colonial Movements”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 3 (From c. 1800 to the 1930’s), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 193–253.

10The term derives from the expression “orang Pidari” (men of Pidari), in reference to those who embarked on the pilgrimage to Mecca from the Acehnese port of Pidie. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., E.J. Brill, Leiden, 13 volumes, 1960–2005, vol. 8, p. 237.

11Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy. Central Sumatra, 1784–1847, Curzon Press, London-Malmo, 1983, pp. XII–300.

12Peter Carey, “The Origins of the Java War 1825–30”, in English Historical Review, 91, 1976: 52–78.

13Using Maxime Rodinson’s expression, L’Islam: politique et croyance, Fayard, Paris, 1993, p. 333.

14For Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, Seuil, Paris, 1992, 251 pp.

15On the Modernist Muslim movement, see Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900–1942, Oxford University Press, London-New York-Singapore, 1973, pp. 129–161; Michael F. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds, Routledge Curzon, London, 2003, XI–294 pp.

16For convenience, we qualify as ‘modernist’ the branch of reformism open to the contributions of Western modernity. This current also had other aims, particularly, that of ‘purifying’ Islam of practices seen as heterodox. For this reason, it is some-times labelled as the ‘purifying movement’ (gerakan permurnian). For a detailed ana-lysis of the aspirations of this current, see Fauzan Saleh, Modern Trends in Islamic Theological Discourses in the 20th Century. A Critical Survey, Brill, Leiden, 2001, chapters 2 and 3. See also R. Michael Feener, Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, XX–270 pp. On the in-fluence of Javanese haji in the nineteenth century, see the work of Merle C. Ricklefs: Polarising Javanese Society. Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930), KITLV Press, Leiden, 2007, p. 25 ff.; “The Middle East Connection and Reform and Revival Movement Among the Putihan in 19th-century Java”, in Eric Tagliacozzo (ed.), Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement and the Longue Durée, NUS Press, Singapore, 2009.

17This was the case of Sjeich Muhammad Alkalali, native of Minangkabau, who, after a stint in the Middle East, settled in Singapore and edited from 1905 the publication Al-Imam, which spread in the Malay language the ideas of Rida’s Al-Manar.

18This organisation, Jami’iyyah Khayr (Humanitarian Society), was soon torn apart by a violent quarrel between the conservative elite made up of sayyid families and the young leaders more open to modernity. One of them was a Sudanese who founded in 1915 a new organisation, Al-Irsyad, which exercised a great influence in the reformist milieux of Indonesia. The term sayyid (feminine sayyida, plural sâda or sâdat), which literally means ‘chief’ or ‘master’, is a honorific title accorded in Muslim societies to those who are reputed to descend from the Prophet Muhammad (see, for example, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. IX, 1997, “Sharîf” article, § 3 “Sayyid and Sharîf”, pp. 323–333).

19For a history of Sarekat Islam, see the brilliant synthesis of Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Cornell University Press, Ithaca-London, 1990, 365 pp.

20Ibid., pp. 218–219.

21The Ahmadiyah of the Qadiyani branch are the most heterodox of the Ahmadiyah, considering their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet, as opposed to the Lahoris, who consider him only as a renewer of the faith (mujaddid ).

22Howard M. Federspiel, Persatuan Islam. Islamic Reform in Twentieth Century Indonesia, Modern Indonesia Project, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1970, 247 pp.

23Syafiq A. Mughni, Hassan Bandung, Pemikir Islam Radikal, Pt. Bina Ilmu, Surabaya, 1980, XI–155 pp.

24Shirk, literally ‘associationism’, is the sin of ‘associating’ someone with Allah, that is, equating the two by attributing qualities and powers belonging solely to Allah to the person. This applies not just to the association of men with God, but also, for example, to the attribution of powers possessed only by God to saints.

25Grey Fealy, Ijtihad Politik Ulama, Sejarah NU 1952–1967, LKiS, Yogyakarta, 2003, 437 pp., and Andrée Feillard, Islam et armée dans l’Indonésie contemporaine, les pionniers de la tradition, L’Harmattan et Association Archipel, Paris, 1995, 379 pp.

26In 1933, following an argument with Tjokroaminoto, Sukiman, one of the leaders of SI, was expelled from the party. The branches of SI that disapproved of this deci-sion created a committee called Persatuan Islam Indonesia and associated with the Partai Sarekat Islam Indonesia (PSII) Merdeka of Yogyakarta to create another party, the Partai Islam Indonesia (PARTII). In the ensuing years, two new movements separated from Sarekat Islam, thereafter moribund because of its leaders’ obstinate refusal of any cooperation with the colonial government. 1936 saw the birth of the League to Make the PSII Conscious (Barisan Penyadar PSII). In December 1938, a new schism occurred within Sarekat Islam and Partai Islam Indonesia was formed. For the details of these quarrels and schisms, see Deliar Noer, 1973, pp. 129–161.

27We use the term ‘integral Islam’ in reference to integral Catholicism as defined by the French sociologist Émile Poulat to describe a current which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, militated for the maintenance of Catholic truths as they have always been taught, without concessions to modernity or liberalism, as well as for the advent of a purely Catholic society. More recently in Indonesia, the term Islam kafah (Ar. kaffah) has appeared amongst Muslim groups calling for a total submission to religion.

28For the effects of this policy, see R. van Niel, The Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Elite, W. van Hoeve Ltd, La Haye-Bandung, 1970, X–314 pp.

29Deliar Noer, 1973.

30For the genesis of the national ideology and its evolution, see Marcel Bonneff et al., Pantjasila, trente années de débats politiques en Indonésie, Edition de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, 1980, VII–427 pp.

31The Jakarta Charter became a central element of the Islamists’ claims. See Chap-ter Four.

32For this complex period, see the classic George Mc T. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 952, XII–490 pp.

33During this period, the leaders of Indonesian reformist Islam travelled more frequently in the West than in the Arab world. On reformism during the 1950s and 1960s, see Rémy Madinier, L’Islam indonésien entre démocratie musulmane et islam intégral, Histoire du parti Masyumi, Karthala, Paris, forthcoming.

34Cees van Dijk, Rebellion Under the Banner of Islam. The Darul Islam in Indonesia, Nijhoff, La Haye, 1981, XV–409 pp.

351. Belief in one god as a unifying trait.

2. To guarantee and honour fundamental human rights.

3. A government based on consensus and democracy.

4. Organisation of society in a federal manner.

5. Solidarity with all nations of the world.

Busjairi Badruzzaman, Boerhanoeddin Harahap Pilar Demokrasi, Bulan Bintang, Jakarta, 1982, pp. 154–155.

36Andrée Feillard and Rémy Madinier, “Entre traditionalisme et modernisme, l’expression politique de l’islam en Indonésie”, in Françoise Cayrac-Blanchard, Stéphane Dovert and Frédéric Durand (eds), Indonésie, un demi-siècle de construction nationale, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2000, pp. 217–268.

37Adnan Buyung Nasution, The Aspiration for Constitutional Government in Indonesia. A Socio-legal Study of the Indonesian Konstituante (1956–1959), Pustaka Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1992, XII–552 pp.

38David Reeve, Golkar of Indonesia: An Alternative to the Party System, Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1985, XIV–405 pp.; Françoise Cayrac-Blanchard, L’Armée et le Pouvoir, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1992, 241 pp.; Adam Schwarz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards (Australia), 1999 (1st edition: 1994), XII–533 pp.; Douglas Ramage, Politics in Indonesia: Democracy, Islam and the Ideology of Tolerance, Routledge, New York, 1995, XVII–272 pp.

39Robert Hefner, Civil Islam, Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, Princeton University Press, Princeton-Oxford, 2000, p. 72.

40After 1998 Indonesian historians started researching on this episode that is as im-portant as it is controversial. See Asvi Warman, Suharto, Sisi Gelap Sejarah Indonesia, Ombak, Yogyakarta, 2004, 205 pp.; Asvi Warman, Pelurusan Sejarah Indonesia, Tride, Yogyakarta, 2004, 315 pp. The responsibility of the PKI leader Aidit has not been questioned, but the decision to act seems to have stemmed from a very small group within the party. The speeches of Soekarno from 1965–1966 condemning the massacres were also published in 2004.

41As such, the editorial of the traditional Islam daily Duta Masyarakat called for the annihilation of the communist party: “The most legitimate and best judgement is to annihilate them [the communists], their roots, their accomplices, their supporters, and all who act openly or secretly for them.” Cited in Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 64; NU vis-à-vis Negara: Pencarian Isi, Bentuk dan Makna, LKiS, Yogyakarta, Bekerjasama Dengan Asia Foundation, 1999, p. 72.

42Greg Fealy, 2003, p. 338.

43This tragic episode in the history of Indonesian Islam has since become an important part of the heritage of the young Muslims of NU who call themselves “post-traditionalist”. They have attempted since 2000 to retrace the history of the massacres by interviewing survivors. By contrast, this process has not been under-taken by the “modernist” Muslims whose stance is far from auto-critical, despite the reported involvement of Muhammadiyah in the massacres. See Hasan Muarif Ambary, “Gerakan Islam di Masa Orde Lama, Orde Basu dan Reformasi”, in Konferensi Nasional Sejarah Indonesia VII, conference (Indonesia Hotel, Jakarta, 28–31 October 2001), p. 14, cited in Asvi Warman Adam, “Tragedi tanpa akhir”, in Kompas, 18 September 2004.

44It was a member of NU, Achmad Sjaichu, who, while heading the parliament, supported a motion to call an extraordinary session of the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly (MPRS) to examine the role of Soekarno in the 30 September movement. It was yet another NU deputy, Nuddin Lubis, who made a motion in February 1967 requesting the convocation of the assembly (MPRS). See Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 83; 1999, p. 96.

45François Raillon, Les Etudiants Indonésiens et l’Ordre Nouveau: Politique et Idéologie du Mahasiswa Indonesia (1966–1974), Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, 1984, pp. 36–37.

46Donald Emmerson, “The Bureaucracy in Political Context”, in Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Puye (eds), Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978, p. 95.

47Robert Hefner, 2000, p. 80; François Raillon, 1984, p. 207.

48Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 103; 1999, p. 129.

49Robert Hefner, 2000, p. 84.

50Allan A. Samson, “Islam in Indonesian Politics”, in Asian Survey, December 1968: 1001–1017.

51K.E. Ward, The Foundation of the Partai Muslimin Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1970, p. 25.

52According to the ‘floating masses’ concept developed at that time which portrayed illiterate villagers as prey for unscrupulous politicians and who thus had to be protected.

53Lance Castles, “Notes on the Islamic School at Gontor”, in Indonesia, 1 April 1966: 30–45.

54K.E. Ward, 1970, p. 31.

55Marcel Bonneff, “Les intellectuels musulmans, le renouveau religieux et les transformations socio-culturelles de l’Indonésie”, in Catherine Clémentin-Ohja (ed.), Renouveau religieux en Asie, École française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 1997, pp. 195–210; Greg Barton, “Neo-modernism: A Vital Synthesis of Traditionalist and Modernist Islamic Thought in Indonesia”, in Studia Islamika, vol. 2, no. 3, 1995: 1–75.

56Cited in Greg Barton, 1995. The text of Nurcholish Madjid’s lecture was published in the volume: Nurcholish Madjid, Islam Kemodernan dan Keindonesiaan, Mizan, Bandung, 1987, 344 pp.

57The reaction of the ex-members of Masyumi against this secularisation project was even more violent given that it was taking up the gist of the ideas developed by the Masyumi leadership before the elections of 1955, but which were never imple-mented because of their dismal showing at the polls.

58Yudi Latif, Indonesian Muslim Intelligentsia and Power, ISEAS, Singapore, 2008, pp. 350–352.

59See Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

60The demonstration in 1974 opposed the economic policy of the regime, the substantial power enjoyed by the private assistants of Soeharto, the leverage of Japanese capital, corruption, lack of democracy and the so-called dwifungsi (‘dual function’: military officers also occupying civil functions). In 1978, they demonstrated against the absence of democracy but also from this point on, against Soeharto himself. See Françoise Cayrac-Blanchard, 1992, p. 166; Robert Hefner, 2000, pp. 78–79, is a detailed analysis of the “Malari” affair, the acronym for malapetaka lima belas januari (Catastrophe of 15 January), which saw violent demonstrations in Jakarta, and whose suppression broke the spirit of “secular modernisers”.

61Azyumardi Azra, “The Indonesian Marriage Law of 1974. An Institutionalization of shari’a for social changes”, in Azyumardi Azra and Arskal Salim (eds), Sharia and Politics in Modern Indonesia, ISEAS, Singapore, 2003, pp. 76–95.

62Leo Suryadinata, Military Ascendancy and Political Culture: A Study of Indonesia’s Golkar, Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens-Ohio, 1989, pp. 66–69; Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 145; 1999, p. 149.

63This left the question of inter-religious marriages unresolved and dependent upon local civil authorities: such marriages were outlawed in Jakarta 12 years later and then elsewhere in Indonesia at the time of the Kompilasi Hukum Islam (Compilation of Islamic Law) (see Glossary) in 1991. The conversion of one of the spouses before marriage is thus required.

64Paul Stange, “ ‘Legitimate’ Mysticism in Indonesia”, in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 22, 2, 1986: 79–80; Andrée Feillard, 1995, pp. 150–154; 1999, p. 150.

65Cees van Dijk, “Survey of Political Developments in Indonesia in the second half of 1984: The National Congress of the PPP and the Pancasila Principle”, in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 19, 1, 1985: 177–202. The HMI-MPO was formed in 1985 and it remained clandestine till the fall of Soeharto.

66The debate on the links between some officers of the secret service (BAKIN) with radical Islam was timidly launched in 2004. During a televised debate on Metro TV, the chief editor of Tempo Bambang Arimurti stated that these officers had simply “blown on the fire” (kipas) of DI. A discussion on the subject was also held at the Institute of Legal Assistance (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum) in Jakarta on 8 March 2004. Several works on this subject have been published, but their rigour has been questioned as they were written by militants or ex-Islamists such as Al Chaidar or Umar Abduh. See in particular: Umar Abduh, Komspirasi Intelijen & Gerakan Islam Radikal, CedSos, Jakarta, 2003, pp. IV–VIII, 173. The report by the International Crisis group, “Recycling Militants in Indonesia: Darul Islam and the Australian Embassy Bombing”, in Asia Report, no. 92, 22 February 2005, 21 pp., was the first to expose the exploitation by DI itself of General Ali Moertopo’s tactics aimed at countering it.

67International Crisis Group, 22 February 2005, p. 3.

68Interview with the general Sutopo Yuwono, Jakarta, 19 July 1991 in Feillard 1995, p. 97; 1999, p. 120; see also International Crisis Group, 22 February 2005, p. 6.

69Interviews, Jakarta, 1991 and 2004.

70Heru Cahyono, Peranan Ulama dalam Golkar 1971–1980, Pustaka Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1992, p. 86.

71Heru Cahyono, 1992, pp. 78, 115.

72Heru Cahyono, 1992, p. 91.

73The ulama of GUPPI (who voted for Golkar) were, nonetheless, subject to pres-sure by the ulama of the traditionalist Islam party, Nahdlatul Ulama, who accused them in 1971 of “selling religion”. As of 1978, Golkar founded a Council for the Preaching of Islam (Majelis Dakwah Islam, MDI), which henceforth rivalled GUPPI in influence to the benefit of the minister of religions, Alamsyah Ratuprawiranegara (Heru Cahyono, 1992, p. 194).

74Heru Cahyono, 1992, p. 186.

75Heru Cahyono, 1992, p. 166 and p. 164, note 53.

76A report by the International Crisis Group indicated, without specifying the source of this information, that it was the fall of Saigon, followed by the approach of the 1977 elections in Indonesia, that led to the implementation of this plan of manipulation. International Crisis Group, “Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia: The case of the ‘Ngruki Network in Indonesia’ ”, in Indonesia Briefing, no. 20, 8 August 2002, p. 6. A later ICG report no. 92, 22 February 2005, showed that these special relations with DI dated from earlier on, that is, 1965–1966.

77International Crisis Group, 22 February 2005, p. 3.

78According to Heru Cahyono, Pangkopkamtib Jenderal Soemitro dan Peristiwa 15 Januari ’74, Pustaka Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1988, p. 195. General Moertopo had fought on the side of some of the leaders of Darul Islam (including Danu Mohammad Hasan) within the Hizbullah militia founded by the Japanese in 1944, which, under the control of Masyumi, played a big role in the fight against the return of the Dutch colonials in the subsequent years.

79International Crisis Group, 22 February 2005, p. 7.

80In fact, the term Komando Jihad was used by the accused during the trial at the beginning of the 1980s, as well as Jemaah Islamiyah (literally ‘Islamic Community Group’), to designate the new organisation of DI from the 1980s onwards. Inter-national Crisis Group, 8 August 2002, p. 5.

81‘Gerakan kaum Machiavelli”, in Kiblat, 20 April–5 May 1978. The majority of the accused received more or less heavy sentences, but one of them, Abdullah Umar, was executed in 1989.

82See Chapter Three.

83Abdul Syukur, Gerakan Usroh di Indonesia, peristiwa Lampung 1989, Penerbit Ombak, Yogyakarta, 2003, p. 21.

84International Crisis Group, 8 August 2002, p. 7. The two names seem to be used interchangeably in the trial documents.

85His death raised many questions, Abdul Syukur, 2003, p. 22.

86The other key episode was that of Lampung (on this, see Abdul Syukur, 2003). On the Tanjung Priok affair and especially the subsequent trials of the regime’s opponents — Islamists, but also secular nationalist opponents such as General Dharsono, see Tapol, Indonesia: Muslims on trial, Tapol, London, April 1987, 114 pp.

87Andrée Feillard, 1995, pp. 277, 293; 1999, pp. 388–390. On the impact of the Kompilasi, see the excellent study of Euis Nurlaelawati, Modernization, Tradition and Identity, The Kompilasi Hukum Islam and Legal Practice in the Indonesian Religious Courts, ICAS publication series, Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 97–111. Local tradition was given some space in the Kompilasi: property acquired during marriage became joint property, which reflects the institution of harta bersama or gono gini in Javanese, an institution common in this country where women earn an income from their multifarious activities. Second, the adopted child has a status equal to that of a biological child in Indonesian society. The Kompilasi ruled that an obligatory bequest be made between the adoptive parties. Third, the Kompilasi grants orphaned grandchildren a right to shares in their grandparents’ estates. The ulama complained of deviation from Islamic law on the last two points, while feminists in general complained of persisting gender biaises.

88Ahmad Iman Mawardi, “The Political Backdrop of the Enactment of the Com-pilation of Islamic Laws in Indonesia”, in Azyumardi Azra and Arska Salim (eds), 2003, p. 135.

89Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 225–250; Azyumardi Azra and Arskal Salim (eds), 2003, 363 pp.

90.Interview with Saiful Mujab, Yogyakarta, 12 August 1991, cited in Andrée Feillard, 1995, p. 243; 1999, p. 327.

91Robert Hefner, 2002, p. 122.

92It was the anthropologist specialising in Indonesia, Robert Hefner, who, to our knowledge, was the first to use this term in Civil Islam, Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, 2000, XXIV–286 pp.

93On this episode and the mutation of Imaduddin from opposing martyr to an integral Islamist, see the scathing (and somewhat condescending) account by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples, Vintage Books, 1998, 439 pp.

94Using the title of a book by François Raillon, Indonésie 2000: le pari industriel et technologique, ETP-Comité Sud-Est asiatique du CNPF, Paris, 1988, 214 pp.

95The reimbursement of the Forestry Ministry by IPTN was supposed to have been carried out through the payment of 5 per cent royalties on the sale of each aircraft (Tempo Interaktif, 25 July 1998).

96All denounced this as a manoeuvre by the ruling power to exploit Islam for its own purposes.

97Greg Barton, 1995.

98Robert W. Hefner, “Islam, State and Civil Society: ICMI and the Struggle for the Indonesian Middle Class”, in Indonesia, no. 56, October 1993: 1–35; Adam Schwarz, 1999, pp. 176–177.

99Yet the most committed militants were not entirely satisfied with the composi-tion of the government: according to Imaduddin, only the “bureaucrats” received the ministries, not the representatives of the “true ICMI”. Adam Schwarz, 1999, p. 183.

100Robert Hefner, 2000, p. 142.

101See the declarations by Lukman Harun and Zainuddin MZ, in Adam Schwarz, 1999, p. 181.

102Firdaus Syam and Ahmad Suhelmi, Ahmad Sumargono, Dai & Aktivis Pergerakan Islam yang mengakar di Hati Umat, Dyatama Milenia, Jakarta, March 2004, p. 227.

103Born into a Javanising (kejawen) and priyayi (minor Javanese aristocracy) family in Central Java on 1 February 1943, the young Ahmad was brought up in Jakarta by his uncle, a betawi (Batavian). Betawi children, as Sumargono told his biographer, must go through two traditions: learning to read the Qur’an (ngaji ) and to fight (main pukulan). Thus he learnt the kanugaran martial arts but later rejected this period of his childhood as pagan (jahiliyah), a time when he “moved away from God”. Attracted to religion from the time he started school, he was soon giving sermons at the mosque on Fridays. An admirer of Soekarno as his family was close to PNI, it was at the Faculty of Economics at university where he encountered the Association of Muslim Students (HMI), which would introduce him to the Masyumist milieux. See Firdaus Syam and Ahmad Suhelmi, 2004, pp. 19–51.

104H. Ahmad Sumargono, Saya Seorang Fundamentalis, Global Cita Press, Bogor 1999, p. VI.


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