Christendom,the ummah and community in the age of televangelism

New-style Islamic televangelism

Since the 1970s, when Indonesians first began enjoying television broadcasting, religion, and especially Islam, has been a regular topic of programming. But the way it has been covered began to change in the 1990s when then President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government restricted television licences to a few private companies. Then in 1999, a year after Suharto’s fall and the re-establishment of fully democratic institutions, the media were fully deregulated. ⁴ Whereas previously the national broadcaster, TVRI, had selected older-middle aged Muslim clerics from the government-established Majelis Ulama Indonesia (Indonesian Council of Ulama) to lecture on points of religious law, at the century’s close the private television stations started to introduce new formats like talk shows for religious programming. The private stations also put on screen a rather different kind of religious expert: highly qualified but rather younger and more informal Islamic university lecturers and professors (Howell, 2008).

However, very soon thereafter, right at the turn of the 21st century, the private stations started trying out an entirely new kind of preacher, who had few or no formal religious qualifications but could entertain audiences at the same time that he (rarely she) provided some easy-to-assimilate religious guidance. The first of this model of preacher and the one who established the formula of tuntunan (religious advice) combined with tontonan (entertainment; a show), was Abdullah Gymnastiar (popularly known as Aa Gym) (Solahudin, 2008; Hoesterey, 2008; Howell, 2008; 2013). He became an instant success in 2000, and enjoyed star celebrity status until 2006. He brought to television a particular blend of entertainment and religious uplift that he had developed earlier before live audiences, both at mosques where he guest-led services and at religious rallies. He enlivened his sermons with humorous reflections on his own imperfect efforts to please God and with gentle jokes. In rallies and radio broadcasts he inspired and charmed his audiences with catchy religious songs as well. Other star-status televangelists of the period, like Yusuf Mansur and Jefry Al Buchori (‘Uje’), had somewhat different television routines, but all in one way or another offered light entertainment along with simple religious advice. Arifin Ilham, another star preacher, had a more serious visage but his televised religious services entertained in a different way: through the awesome beauty of the venues and the mood he inspired of intense religious focus on a felt sense of God’s presence (Howell, 2010; Syadzily, 2005).

Mass habaib-led prayer assemblies (majelis shalawat and zikir)

Meanwhile, off screen, in the last half decade, the stars of a different kind of mass audience preaching have been rising. A growing number of preachers of Hadhrami Arab descent who can claim to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (figures honoured with the title habib, and collectively called habaib) have become big names in the country’s major cities, especially Jakarta. ⁵ They are making their reputations leading mass open-air prayer rallies scripted around a combination of sermons and highly emotive prayers associated with the Sufi tradition. Those prayers take up as much as 40 per cent of the three-hour mass meetings. The two main ritual forms are the zikir litanies and shalawat prayers. The sung shalawat prayers, which take up much longer segments of the prayer meetings than the zikir, are songs of blessing and praise for the Prophet Muhammad and his family. The shalawat and zikir prayers are important in Hadhrami Islamic practice. When the families of habaib sing the shalawat praise songs for the Prophet, they, as his descendants, celebrate their intimate kin connection with the one human being considered closest to God.

Habaib like Habib Munzir Al-Musawa (‘Habib Munzir’) and Al-Habib Hasan Bin Ja’far Assegaf (‘Habib Hasan’), who frequently draw ten thousand people to their city-wide prayer meetings, have to use open-air spaces to accommodate all of their jema’ah (congregants). These spaces may be a sports playing field or a stadium, but commonly their staff make an arrangement with the police to cordon off half a dozen or so blocks of a city street from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning for a three-hour late night service. These gatherings begin with great fanfare: joyously rowdy motorcycle cavalcades of neighbourhood groups arrive carrying their group’s banners and wearing its jackets; fireworks are set off; and as the habib and his family and guest speakers arrive, they are greeted with praise songs and escorted under ceremonial umbrellas onto the makeshift stage they will use for the night. For audiences sitting too far away to see the stage, the service is projected onto screens set up at intervals all down the linoleum and newspaper-carpeted street, on which the congregants have settled down to join in the programme. Subsequently, portions of the events will be posted on the habib’s web site, which will also carry notices of future meetings. Some habaib make occasional guest appearances on television, but this is a small part of their ministries.

Routes to mass audience ministry growth and consolidation

The two forms of mass audience ministry (televangelism, and mass prayer meetings) have similar origins in existing Islamic community institutions. A common background to many of the recently famous mass ministry preachers is discovery on the religious lecture circuit, a key part of which is guest appearances at community mosques. These days, larger mosques have a semi-formal or formally constituted organizing committee, which is responsible for the programming of services. The mosque committee’s role is especially important on religious festival days, when the mosques compete to draw large numbers of worshippers by choosing the right person to lead prayers and deliver the sermon. The committees look for people who have gained a reputation for being good speakers. Larger mosques have the budget to negotiate substantial honoraria for well known figures. Note that a prayer leader (imam) need not be an ulama (a religious scholar who has mastered classical religious texts), so asking a layperson of good character to conduct a service is in no way unusual. ⁶ What is different for big occasions these days is the trend towards selecting ‘audience-friendly’ preachers, who are more likely to be entertaining laymen than highly educated ulama.

This market pressure has combined with a long-standing trend, inspired by the Modernist Muslim movement going back to Muhammad Abduh at the end of the 19th century, for the faithful to put less reliance on the ulama and their classical scholarship, and instead educate themselves in their religion, going back in their studies directly to the Qur’an and Hadith. Also, since the late 1920s the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim Brotherhood), founded in Egypt by Hassan as-Banna, has been popularizing the notion that all right-thinking Muslims should take it upon themselves to ‘call’ their complaisant fellows to recommit with full seriousness to their faith (Hirschkind, 2001). The idea of the lay ‘caller’ (da’i) spread beyond the Muslim Brotherhood movement and is now an important part of Islamic revivalism in Indonesia, where the word da’i now simply means ‘preacher’ (Howell, 2013). Both the star Muslim televangelists of the 21st century and the habaib preachers have built their reputations at least in part through lecture circuit preaching.

Another way that preachers build their followings is by contacting or building majelis taklim (study assemblies or gatherings). These ‘assemblies’ of people eager for religious learning and opportunities for collective practice are another institutional form that emerged as a named type over the 20th century (Gade, 2004; Winn, 2012). The majelis taklim spring up informally, usually at a mosque or religious school (pesantren), as an initiative of people who want to club together for some particular kind of study, like learning to recite the Qur’an. Alternatively, a preacher who is giving private religious instruction may encourage his pupils to help him draw others into the group and run the meetings, either at the neighbourhood mosque or in the homes of the learners.

Habib Hasan and Habib Munzir built their ministries primarily in this way (see Zamhari and Howell, 2012). They transformed their majelis taklim (the study gatherings or assemblies) into majelis shalawat and zikir (assemblies for shalawat singing and zikir recitation) when they found that their modestly educated would-be learners were keen not just to study the details of religious rules. So, to keep them engaged, the habaib began to spend more time with them doing the strongly emotionally coloured and participatory shalawat and zikir prayers. One of the most popular televangelists, Arifin Ilham, who is not ethnically Arab nor a habib, also developed his ministry in this way, building a number of small neighbourhood majelis taklim study circles into a city-wide, and then nationwide, majelis zikir called Az-Zikra (Howell, 2008; 2010; Syadzily, 2005).

The star habaib preachers leave the organization of the neighbourhood group meetings to the locals, and task a few paid staff to liaise with them. Otherwise the habaib concern themselves only with visiting the neighbourhood gatherings and planning the monthly meetings where the majelis community as a whole periodically manifests. The habaib keep no attendance records, nor is there such a thing as formal membership in the majelis. The habaib do act as spiritual directors for some of their followers, somewhat in the manner of the syeikh (masters) of Sufi orders, but the habaib give no initiations and require no oaths of obedience. Their associations are thus highly open and fluid, and invert the flow of movement characteristic of the religious communities that form around a kyai (the charismatic head of a traditional Islamic boarding school [pesantren]) or a syeikh (master) of a Sufi order. Thus, the habib goes out into the wider society looking to inflame complaisant Muslims with the desire for religious improvement, while the traditional man of Islamic knowledge (kyai or syeikh) waits at his residence for petitioners and spiritual aspirants to search him out.

New religious forms, North and South

These brief characterizations of mass audience Islamic ministries in 21st-century Indonesia reveal some similarities to what Lambert (1999) has called ‘new religious forms’ in late modern Christian-heritage countries, but there are also some differences. The most obvious similarity is the fluidity of religious community evoked by the Muslim mass-audience preachers. In the case of the celebrity televangelists described, the parallel is hardly coincidental. Wherever it is used, television, as a virtual means of social connection, reaches audiences who are under no social pressure to patronize any particular preacher, and the channel changer makes patronage of multiple preachers easy – and often brief.

Christian television ministries typically arise out of, or form, physically embodied churches, and even if these cannot claim the exclusive commitment and regular patronage of viewers, they project an imagined sense of belonging to something like a local church, along with the intimacy of local church-like exclusive membership (cf. Bruce, 1990). In contrast, Indonesia’s Muslim televangelists do not attempt to draw viewers into a self-standing, bounded (if virtual) community. Even televangelists who have achieved national stardom continue on the preaching circuit, where their stardom enables them to command top remuneration. They visit mosques all across the country without regard for the very slight differences in religious practice that reflect the traditionalist (e.g. Nahdlatul Ulama) or Modernist (e.g. Muhammadiyah) inclinations of the mosques’ benefactors. At most, those televangelists who have developed branded programmes of personal development sold through short courses, books and CDs inspire some sense of fellow feeling among people who are currently working on that preacher’s approach. Thus the sense of community generated by Indonesia’s Muslim televangelists echoes and amplifies long-standing patterns of fairly fluid face-to-face Muslim community centred on non-exclusive, only faintly ideologically differentiated, mosques, pesantren (traditional religious schools) and tarekat (Sufi orders).

Aficionados of a particular mass ministry preacher may nonetheless be able to visit the community mosque where that preacher regularly contributes sermons. Also, several of the large ministries built around leading televangelists do have major centres of operation where viewers can do short study programmes and attend services directed by the televangelist. Both Abdullah Gymnastiar and Arifin Ilham, for example, have such establishments where followers can come to deepen their understanding of the preacher’s particular approach to religious self-development. Visitors thus have an opportunity to enact Muslim community using, on that occasion, the somewhat distinctive ritual style of one of those preachers. Ilham, as noted, has a majelis zikir, called Az-Zikra, which puts on regular services at Al Amru Bittaqwa Mosque in Depok (on the southern edge of Jakarta). He has also built a large intentional community, Bukit Az-Zikra, exclusively for his jema’ah (congregants) at a strategic location on the motorway between Jakarta and Bogor. ⁷ Gymnastiar maintains his Pesantren Daarut Tauhid in Bandung, to which people come, as it were, on pilgrimage to attend the services he leads and take his commercial religious education and spiritualized personal development programmes. In any case, as part of the Islamic revival, these and other Muslim televangelists try to inspire rededication to a presumed unproblematically uniform ‘true Islam’. So the sense of community that is explicitly promoted is the community of all Muslims, the worldwide ummah, not a particular congregation or movement within it.

The habaib, whose ministries are primarily live, do regularly meet their jema’ah at their neighbourhood learning circles, which are associated, however loosely, with the larger majelis shalawat dan zikir (shalawat and zikir assemblies). But at the mass rallies that the habaib convene (their signature events), the jema’ah are largely anonymous. The very scale of the rallies means that the connection a habib has with his audience has to be technologically mediated by projectors and sound equipment. The habaib do strive to create a sense, as it were, of community within community (the majelis within the ummah). Branded merchandise and photos of the habib are for sale at the rallies, and staff and many young people wear the majelis jackets. Moreover, a majelis shalawat or majelis zikir is a named group, not just a branded programme of practice (in contrast to Gymnastiar’s Manajemen Qolbu [Heart Management]). But the lack of any formal institutional structure linking the neighbourhood groups with the habaib, and the absence of membership records both evidence a casual approach to participation and community boundaries.

An important question, however, is whether these new Islamic religious forms have any significant disciplining power, which is, after all, the raison d’être of the revival movement of which they are a part. Indeed, revivalists, telling a cautionary tale, commonly contrast the Muslim ummah with the church in Europe, which may have maintained its presence in people’s lives but no longer strongly shapes the behaviour of many people who identify as Christians. On the one hand, Indonesian commentators routinely lament the way the new-era entertainer preachers have ‘dumbed down’ religious teaching, reducing it to a few catch phrases and hit songs, or perhaps to an hour spent viewing a service. ⁸ Nonetheless, the face-to-face meetings that the televangelists and mass rally preachers do have with their followings bring people together in ways that not only enliven their felt sense of Muslim community but also provide social support for individual efforts at intensified, correct piety. Moreover, the books and DVDs produced by the preachers enable ongoing home study, which aids the internalization of movement norms. The popular format of the easy, step-by-step guidebook for personal improvement through psychologized Islamic spiritual practice, pioneered by Gymnastiar and used by many other popular authors (Muzakki, 2009), also helps keen learners to adopt the religious disciplines recommended by the preacher they admire.

A particularly remarkable similarity between the new Islamic religious forms discussed here and late modern religion in Europe and North America (identified by Davie, 2006; Hervieu-Léger, 1993; 2006; Lambert, 1999; Knoblauch, 2008; and others) is the central place given to opportunities for intense emotional expression. The habaib preachers started out trying to teach dry, scripturalist Islam, in keeping with the rationalist agenda of the wider, heavily Islamic Modernist-influenced revival movement. But this did not work for the less privileged urbanities whom they were trying to reach. What they did like, and what has brought huge crowds to the monthly meetings of the habaib, are the vibrantly intense sung shalawat prayers (Zamhari and Howell, 2012). And the televangelist Gymnastiar became wildly popular not just because he was a charming storyteller, but also because he included in the religious services he led very much the same kind of simplified and emotionally super-charged zikir litanies as fellow celebrity televangelist Arifin Ilham used (Hoesterey, 2008; Howell, 2008). Those two television stars became at once famous and notorious for moving their audiences to tears.

Studies pointing to the importance of emotion in late modern European religiosity often link it to ‘self-spirituality’ (that is, to the increased importance of immanent divinity, sought through cultivation of the ‘inner self’, as opposed to a distant and stern transcendent deity approached principally through obedience to his rules) (Lambert, 1999: 322). In such contemporary European ‘self-spirituality’ the inner self becomes the arbiter of religious authenticity (Hanegraaff, 1996; Heelas, 1992; 2009). It thus self-authorizes religious choice, not just of religious affiliation, but also of particular parts of belief complexes and practices (Hervieu-Léger, 2006; Pessi, 2013). In European-heritage regions, ‘spirituality’ is increasingly contrasted to ‘religion’ (as in the phrase ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’). Heelas and Woodhead (2005) found that in the UK such spirituality, which they identify as ‘subjective life spirituality’, is commonly (although not exclusively) pursued outside the ‘congregational complex’ in what they call the ‘holistic milieu’. Islamic revival is working towards the very opposite: the surrender of self to the way of life God prescribes and the recommitment of nominal or misguided Muslims to some conception of normative Islam. But ‘rational’ appeals are not the only means to inspire closer conformity to revivalist conceptions of orthopraxy. Emotive ritual is also being deployed to inspire such conformity, and can be effective. This is so particularly if emotive ritual is performed collectively, as the shalawat prayers and zikir litanies are in the mass revival ministries (recalling Pentecostal services and Catholic charismatic revival meetings). So even if the multitude of Islamic advice coming these days from so many different religious authorities requires Muslims to make individual choices (driving individualization), the collective zikir and shalawat rituals help to create a strong sense of belonging in a religious community, giving ballast to one’s faith and motivation to follow whatever version of the faith’s moral disciplining regimes a particular religious collectivity endorses.

Finally, in the sidelining of religious experts in favour of lay leaders we find a strong parallel between new century Muslim religious forms and late modern religion in the global North. In the early-developer countries this has been read as part of an overall ‘collapse of hierarchy’ (Lambert, 1999). Not only has the social distance between priest and parishioner diminished, but people want to relate (if at all) to a God who is not so distant, and who is more loving than punishing – or just loving. In partial contrast, popular Indonesian revivalists like Arifin Ilham and Ary Ginanjar do vividly evoke the tortures of the grave in their ministries, ⁹ but those images come at the beginning of an emotional arc leading from repentance to joyful appreciation of the mercy of the loving God (Howell, 2008; 2010; 2013).

Conclusions

While questions concerning the impact on religious community life of industrial and post-industrial change have mostly been explored through studies of the early-developer societies in predominantly Christian-heritage countries, this article has addressed the question of whether later-to-industrialize Muslim-heritage societies, often characterized as uniquely communal and resistant to modernizing social differentiation, reveal patterns of religious change analogous to those in the ‘global North’. Specifically, is there evidence in these societies of individualized religiosity and new forms of religious sociality that accommodate and even cater to it?

Looking at new forms of Islamic ministry in Indonesia, we have seen that there are indeed some closely analogous forms. Significant among them are the kinds of ministry examined here, which have enjoyed striking popularity in recent years. These are the mass audience ministries, among which I have distinguished two partially overlapping types: new-generation celebrity televangelism, and the mostly off-air but internet-connected ministries of high-profile Hadhrami-descent preachers (habaib) who attract tens of thousands of city folk to open-air, ritually rich rallies. I have shown that despite differences of creed and the specificities of the post-colonial political context, these ministries do have a number features deemed characteristic of the ‘new religious forms’ that Lambert (1999) identified in his review of the literature on religion in late modern European-heritage societies. These features are: fluidity of participation; the central place given to intense emotional expression and interiorized spirituality; and the ‘collapse of hierarchy’. As in European-heritage societies, in the Islamic ministries examined here ‘collapse of hierarchy’ is evident in the new prominence of lay people as guides to spiritual development and the preference for a conception of divinity that is more immanent than transcendent and more loving than punishing. Fluidity of participation, especially, evidences individualized religiosity. The now common use in Indonesian speech of the English loan word ‘seeker’ (and also its literal Indonesian rendering pencari) to describe inspiration shopping in effect acknowledges the prevalence of individualized religiosity in Indonesian Muslim life.

While the social attributes of the Indonesian mass-audience Islamic ministries have been compared here to those found by Lambert in his review of the whole spectrum of late modern religiosity in Christian-heritage societies, even closer parallels can be seen in a subset of the European and North American new religious forms: Pentecostal and evangelical Christian renewal churches. ¹⁰ Particularly in small non-denominational start-up churches and the mega-churches into which some of them balloon, ministry that is formed around an entrepreneurial individual is central to movement success (see Ellington, 2010; Maddox, 2012; Swatos, 2012). The celebrity Muslim televangelists and habaib mass rally preachers described here are just such growth-oriented entrepreneurs and, like their Christian counterparts, are successful in large measure because of the innovative ways in which they use new media and popular culture to reach audiences. And, as in the global North, in Muslim Asia such ministries seem well suited to accommodating free-flowing seeker spirituality. It should be noted, however, that in the Islamic revival context, few ‘seekers’ are looking to find faith for the first time or to change religions. Rather they seek especially satisfying occasions for recharging their existing commitment to Islam through experiences of closeness to God, or hope to find settings where they can glean appealingly packaged pointers for personal spiritual development in an approved Islamic fashion.

In Europe and North America, the contemporary non-denominational Protestant revival was preceded by earlier revival movements (the so-called First Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s and Second Awakening of the late 18th and early 19th centuries), which were also propelled by individual preachers with a calling and flair for revival ministry. In the main, those ministries emerged within the established denominations of the time. And even if revival preaching resulted in schism, and itinerant preachers who carried revival to socially marginal and frontier areas operated fairly independently, their ministries coalesced or were absorbed into the denominational community church pattern. Recently, however, that pattern of start-up ministries melding into and being overshadowed by regionally and nationally coordinated denominations seems to be weakening, with new non-denominational preacher-focused ministries now seizing market share that mainstream denominational churches have been unable to hold or take (Ellington, 2010).

In contrast, in Muslim Southeast Asia, where local community places of worship (mosques) have traditionally been established by charitable individuals independent of any ecclesiastical hierarchy, villagers and elites could in principle attended whatever mosque suited them and similarly could seek advice from any ulama or spiritually powerful syeikh they chose. The mosque was not the focus of anything like a parish. Peasants and courtiers were constrained in their choice of place of worship and source of spiritual guidance not by any religious establishment norms but only by the difficulties of pre-modern travel, their own material resources, the weight of any significant patron’s preferences (if any) and tenancy or other service obligations that might tie them to the land or palace. In practice, those constraints were often quite limiting for villagers, as most had very limited means and were illiterate. Nonetheless, the tradition of the wandering santri (students of Islamic knowledge), who went from teacher to teacher to acquire religious knowledge, was a model well known, even though few village youths had the means to undertake such a quest.

The present Indonesian trend for small-business model Islamic ministries with a muted commercial tone but revival-valorized growth orientation can be seen as an extension of that older pattern of often shifting and overlapping religious community formation. Contemporary entrepreneurial preachers’ use of the new electronic media (especially television, mobile phones and the internet) simply supercharges the growth potential and geographical reach of their ministries. So does their use of entertainment genres, which nationally successful televangelists have adopted not just from local culture (like a style of joking common in the pesantren world [see Millie, 2009]) but from popular globally-circulating musical and television drama and talk-show formats familiar to viewers of American Christian televangelism. Such entertainments may add to the appeal of a Muslim preacher with the skills and charm of a showman, but the size of the ministries of several of the habaib preachers demonstrates that such ‘mundane’ forms of charisma as comes from the talent to entertain can also be used with great success in the late-modern Islamic religious market when combined with charismatic powers of saintly mediation. Again, such attributions of supramundane powers of blessing are common in successful Pentecostal and charismatic Christian ministries that we know from North America as well.

Whatever the ‘starting point’ of institutional change, and regardless of who has come to resemble whom, in both regions (the European Christian-heritage counties of the ‘global North’ and the Muslim-heritage countries of Asia) entrepreneurial ministries utilizing the tools of the new media are drawing more and more people into personally significant engagement with religious figures outside their local areas. And despite the cacophony of voices of religious authority that come through the media (new and old), the new model ministries are helping to strengthen the perceptions of believers that they are active members of a global community of the faithful.

It is important to note, however, that the religious field in many Muslim-heritage countries and regions is far more constrained than that in European-heritage early-developer societies. Despite the proliferation of types of religious material and media, forms of religious association, and voices of religious authority catering to the growing numbers of better educated Muslim seekers, religious individualization in Indonesia and in many other 20th-century new nations is circumscribed in ways little seen in European-heritage countries. Particular historical circumstances, including the postcolonial global geopolitics of Islam and each country’s own history of national identity formation and religious administration, limit the expression of religious individualization in countries with substantial Muslim populations. Indeed, in the case of Indonesia, legal restrictions on religious choice and social pressures towards confessional conformity have increased rather than decreased since the early days of Indonesian independence. Since 1965, all Indonesians have been required by law to profess one of a limited number of named religions (once five, now six) and a recent Constitutional Court decision has affirmed that non-normative interpretations of those religions are liable to be deemed blasphemous and their promulgators jailed (Bagir et al., 2010). ¹¹ This ‘delimited religious pluralism’ (Howell, 2005) legally restricts spiritual seeking to within the fold of one’s officially declared religion, a restraint not imposed in European-heritage societies today. In any case, the idea of orthopraxy that undergirds Muslim community is probably now more popular than ever, even though there is broad acknowledgement of the diverse ways in which the Qur’an and Hadith can be interpreted to derive religious law. So although Indonesian urbanites and increasing numbers of rural Indonesians now grow up with life experiences that exert pressures towards individualization and are exposed to many, diverse forms of Islamic religiosity, the principle of personal autonomy in religious matters is not accepted in an unqualified way. In this part of the Muslim world, then, individualization has not emptied out into a wash of popularly endorsed individualism, whether (in Bellah and colleagues’ terms ¹² ) ‘utilitarian’ or ‘expressive’.