Renegotiating Indonesian secularism through debates on Ahmadiyya and Shia

Abstract

Commentators have mainly viewed the Ahmadiyya debate in Indonesia either as a controversy over heterodoxy or as an episode raising questions about the human rights of ‘religious minorities’. Instead, I suggest viewing these debates as a field of normative questions of secularism in which the claims of religious are renegotiated in response to the fragmentation of religious and political authority brought on by a diversification of the use of media and a loss of trust in the Indonesian post-Suharto democracy, and between normative questions of secularism.

Keywords

Ahmadiyya heresy Indonesia Islam secularism

Southeast Asia, for hundreds of years situated at the centre of world trade routes between China, Arabia, India and the Middle East, has a long history of combining and accommodating permeable cultural and religious identities. Islam did not spread throughout the archipelago through military conquest by one particular force that was able to propagate its own version of the faith. Instead, it was spread across the region through traders from very different regions. This resulted in many nuances of practices, beliefs and systems of authority throughout Southeast Asia, and they remain an integrative characteristic of Islam in Indonesia (Ricklefs, 2001; Laffan, 2011). With this diversity of languages and beliefs, of socio-economic realities and of different political systems, the Indonesian context reflects broader features of normative global debates on secularism. This article raises the question as to what an analysis of the Indonesian case can contribute to these conceptualizations of secularism, the assumed ideal of separating political and religious institutions, and secularity, the empirical realities of the state–religion relationships.

In recent years, some of the most heated public debates on Islam in Indonesia have focused on issues framed as heresy or religious deviance. The best-known example for these controversies is that of the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic religious movement founded in British India in the late 19^th century. It originated with the life and teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad who claimed that he was the Mujaddid (divine reformer) of the 14th Islamic century, the promised Messiah and the Mahdi awaited by Muslims. The Ahmadi community soon split in two over arguments about the succession of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Since then, the movement is principally divided between the Lahore Ahmadis and the Ahmadis who kept the original name and are often derogatorily called Quadianis, after the birthplace of their founder. This later group has the theologically more problematic view towards Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and is thus the group of concern here (Friedmann, 2007). It is very international; a head office in London oversees its missionary activities and broadcasts its sermons online every Friday. Today, the Indonesian Ahmadiyya Congregation is most active in West Java. The organization claims 400,000 members, with the government’s figures much lower at 50,000 (International Crisis Group, 2008). The Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI) declared the Ahmadis outside Islam in 1980, after a similar fatwa issued by the Saudi-dominated Muslim World League, Rabita (Grundmann, 2005; Schulze, 1990). However, back in the early 1980 s, the MUI’s position on the Ahmadis garnered little attention. Neither the public nor the government endorsed the fatwa. In 2005, the MUI reissued it amid already heavily increased violence against Ahmadis in Lombok, in West Java, and in other parts of the country. This time, their fatwa was picked up and politicians often used it to legitimize or to excuse violence. The different impact of the two fatwas can be traced back to the different roles the MUI played in both systems. The MUI is a body that is comprised of representatives from the NU and Muhammadiyah as well as other organizations, but with its own means of funding and its own board and nation-wide structure, it forms its own entity. Once founded by Suharto as an umbrella organization and seen as a toothless governmental body, the MUI has emancipated itself from its old image and transformed itself into an independent authority (Gillespie, 2007; Ichwan, 2011; Hasyim, 2011; Lindsey, 2012). In other words, many Indonesians once saw the MUI as a rubber stamp but now admire it for having emancipated itself from the state after 1998. In 2008, when a group of human rights activists and leaders from various religious minorities came together to protest on Pancasila Day against unfair treatment of minorities, vigilante groups attacked them, referring to the MUI fatwa and arguments of heterodoxy. Shortly after, the government reacted by issuing a decree that was vague enough to be interpreted by some as protecting the Ahmadis, by others as banning them. Most accusations against the Ahmadis are a set of complaints based on Islamic law, security discourses and social exclusivity (Schäfer, 2013). Several religious leaders as well as outspoken extremist groups accuse the Ahmadiyya of apostasy because they venerate their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet. Although Ahmadis pray and recite the Koran like other Muslims do, their opponents accuse them of having invented a new shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, and of substituting for the Koran the books written by their founder. Other accusations regard their international network. During colonial times, many accused the Ahmadiyya of being British agents, determined to divide Islam and to hinder decolonization. Today, their opponents evoke similar accusations. Many also attack them for their tendency to congregate in their own community mosques rather than mingling with other Muslims.

The Ahmadiyya debate, however, is one part of a larger constellation. In December 2011 and several times throughout 2012, there were clashes or attacks between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Madura, East Java (see also Formichi, 2014). The position of Shia Islam has even caused arguments within the MUI (Schäfer, 2013: 262). Public debates on the position of Shia Islam in Indonesia show that questions of orthodoxy, heterodoxy and deviance concern not only what might be considered very small and new splinter groups, but also Muslims whose belief has been an intrinsic part of the region since the 9^th century, and who number around 1 million. The category of deviance has also expanded to include Muslims who call themselves ‘liberal’, as well as those who deviate from gender norms. The issue at stake is nothing less than the defining power about what is Islamic and what is not.

Most of the scholarly literature on debates of deviance in Indonesia reproduces three approaches prevalent in the media and in policy reports. The first approach focuses on the relationship between the respective beliefs and certain notions of orthodoxy. Experts in Islamic theology and law analyse Ahmadi beliefs and the fatwas pronounced against their Muslimness (Burhani, 2014). The second approach is that of liberal human rights. It focuses on the state’s failure to protect specific rights (Crouch, 2011; Platzdasch, 2011). Both these approaches are important, but fall short of in-depth analysis and comprehensive understanding. A third, more rarely taken approach locates the debates within the complicated web of actors and structures and shows how public debates on deviance have been boosting the significance of precarious religious actors such as the MUI (Hicks, 2013; Schäfer, 2013). In this article, I will expand on the third approach and show how these debates may also be seen as a field in which the relationship between religion and the state is being renegotiated. I will explore what can be learned from the Indonesian case for scholarship on secularity, the empirically analysable relationship between state and religion, and secularism, the ideology of separation of religious and political institutions and authority.

Religion and the state in Indonesia

Indonesia is usually called a secular country. The term ‘secular’ is used to mark the state’s non-religious character or its relative neutrality, compared with other Muslim countries such as those in the Middle East. Most political and religious authorities are institutionally separated; holidays of 6 different religions are officially recognized, and religion is not prominently placed in the legal or institutional realm. But in recent years, this portrayal has increasingly become questioned. Several legal pockets seem to have become Islamized and attacks against non-Muslims and so-called deviant Muslims have become more widespread. After a decline in popularity of the Islamic state debate (Assyaukanie, 2009), the low results for Islamic parties in general elections in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014, and the declining popularity of shariah by-laws (Bush, 2008), the issue of Islamic minorities is now the central playing field for questions on the role of Islam. The question as to who is part of Islam and who is not is the main locus for pushing forward religious authority, and for more normative questions on the legitimate relationship and the desired relationship between religion and the state.

The rare academic literature concerned with or mentioning this case assesses the status of Indonesia’s secularity (Künkler and Stepan, 2013; Hashemi, 2009). The main question is: How does Indonesia’s current religio-political structure fit into existing concepts of secularism? But more useful than comparing Indonesia’s reality with that of western models is to ask how the concept of secularism is used in Indonesia itself. What is the actual experience of secularity and what shapes does the relationship between state and religion take? Indonesians have a complex relationship with the concept and the term ‘secularity’. Many uphold secularism as a central precondition for a functioning state.¹ The prominent Indonesian public intellectual Nurcholish Madjid coined the term ‘Islam, yes; Islamic parties, no’ in the 1970s. Big sections of the large Islamic civil society organizations frown upon any strong connection to party politics.² A key argument for such a separation is rooted not in liberalism, but in the struggle to protect Islam from the powers-that-be. The strict separation of religious and state institutions is also treasured as a positive way to counter what many perceive as intrusive foreign influence from the Middle East. On the other hand, such a separation in Indonesia has never been experienced as a force against oppression. Similar to the Arab Middle East and very much unlike early-modern Europe, a formal separation between religious institutions and the state was not institutionalized as a bulwark against inter-communal violence. Secular differentiation of authority has not acquired historical legitimacy as a strategy for the establishment of social peace (Krämer, 2013: 638). Instead, many Indonesians associate the word ‘sekularisme’ with atheism, immorality and anti-religious influences from Europe and North America. Similarly to other Muslim countries, the concept cannot be separated from colonialism, cultural alienation and oppressive authoritarianism (ibid.: 639). Against this background and against the background of restructuring society after the fall of Suharto, the Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars issued a fatwa against secularism, pluralism and liberalism in 2005. The three concepts, very often treated as one discursive package, are referred to by the acronym sepilis, which tellingly evokes the Indonesian word for the sexually transmitted disease syphilis. Secularism is by many perceived as being anti-religious, almost synonymous with atheism. This is similar in neighbouring Malaysia (Hoffstaedter, 2013) and many countries in the Middle East (Filali-Ansary, 1999; Krämer, 2013).

The academic and analytical dimension of the concept of ‘sekularisme’ cannot, in the Indonesian case, be separated from the sphere of political and religious activism in which the term carries several meanings, none of them neutral. Even during Indonesia’s reformasi period, the enthusiasm for democracy was never a simultaneous enthusiasm for a form of popular representative rule that necessarily excludes religion from political decision-making processes. On the contrary, such a separation was always viewed as characteristic of the Suharto regime and did not, in the view of many Indonesians, connote democratic rule at all. Many Indonesians were expecting Islam to play a more central role in the newly-to-be-formed democracy. The scepticism towards the compatibility of Islam and democracy that has been prevalent in the West is shared by only a handful of people. The general public sees democracy and Islam as re-enforcing one another. But the same is not true for secularity and secularism which are viewed much more sceptically.

The fall of the development-oriented military rule of Suharto in 1998 has brought about heated debates and opened large old questions on the relationship between Islam and the state. The position of Islam vis-à-vis the state was discussed publicly three times in Indonesia’s history. First, the negotiations were important during the time of independence and nation-state formation in the 1940s, then in the mid-1950s when the assembly came together to redraft the constitution, and finally again since the late 1990s. In August 1945, when Sukarno and Hatta declared Indonesia’s independence, Indonesia was occupied by the Japanese, while the Dutch, supported by the British, were planning to return and reclaim their colony. There still was a war to fight and the situation was extremely unstable. Willing to compromise temporarily, the Islamists did not insist on what came to be known as the ‘Jakarta Charter’, a sentence in the constitution that would have made shariah law compulsory for Muslims. Also, they agreed when Sukarno’s state philosophy ‘Pancasila’ referred to a concept of God that was only vaguely monotheistic but neither Islamic nor even strictly Abrahamic. The state philosophy ‘Pancasila’ represents the major forces at the time, as they were also brought together in Sukarno’s other concept of ‘NASAKOM’ – Nationalism, Islam, and Communism: (1) belief in the one and only God [Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa]; (2) just and civilized humanity; (3) the unity of Indonesia; (4) democracy; and (5) social justice. The first principle, demanding belief in the one and only God, is most relevant for the present context. The word ‘tuhan’, roughly translatable as ‘Lord’, is used, rather than a term that could be seen as exclusively Islamic. During the constitutional debates in 1945, the sentence was briefly incorporated into the constitution. It would have given Islam a much more prominent role in the legal-political system. It was an add-on to the first principle and read: ‘Belief in the one supreme God with the obligation to live according to Islamic law for Muslims’ [Ketuhanan dengan kewajiban menjalankan syariah Islam bagi pemeluk-pemeluknya]. However, it was quickly removed from the draft. This sentence later became known as the Jakarta Charter and remained a sore issue for some Muslims who felt that they had wanted only a temporary compromise.³ The main challenge and aim at the time was to keep the archipelago together to build a nation-state. In order not to provoke doubts and potential secession among some mainly Hindu and Christian areas, this temporary compromise was reached with the understanding that there would be future discussions.

The 1945 constitution enshrines religious freedom and at the same time stipulates that ‘the state is based on the belief in the one supreme God’. It does not dictate which religion’s version of God should be worshipped, but later laws and bills regulate religion and belief in various ways, including the above-mentioned categorization into various recognized religions. For much of the modern nation-state’s history, these issues were not publicly discussed. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, ruling military pro-development communists and Islamists were silenced. As elsewhere in the world, Islam began to gain political currency throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The reformasi period after 1998 boosted Islam’s status as an important field of reference in political debates and negotiations. Against this background and amid Indonesia’s rapid socio-economic changes, political and religious authorities are now renegotiating their own individual positions as well as the relationship between the state and belief.

Fragmentation of authority

The differentiation between authority and authorities in Islam (Krämer and Schmidtke, 2006: 2) analytically helps in looking at the agency of individuals and organizations as well as at structural changes. On the level of personnel, Islam in Southeast Asia has always been extremely diverse due to the way Islam was spread in the region. The diversity of backgrounds of Islamic preachers is reflected in the great variety of Islamic titles; different systems of Islamic legitimization have always existed parallel and in competition. Keeping this multitude of organizations and structures in mind, we may simplify and say that Indonesian Muslims mainly organize themselves within the two large civil society organizations Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah. These organizations were founded in the 1920s and represent what is usually labelled ‘traditional Javanese Islam’ and ‘reformist-modernist Islam’. They comprise about 40 million and 30 million members respectively and their important scholars have been perceived as the leading authorities on questions regarding Islam throughout most of the 20^th century. Krämer and Schmidtke understand these authorities from a Weberian perspective as obedience without recourse to coercive power [Macht] (ibid.). The archipelago’s multiplicity of religious authorities has even further diversified in recent decades. Two structural factors contribute to this change. In the last decades, the use of new media, the increase of online fatwas and web-based religious advice and commentary have further diversified a field that has for hundreds of years already been diverse and competitive. Scholars have made this argument for other Muslim regions, and the point that new media are dissolving and reshaping particular forms of authority (Robinson, 2009) is certainly true for Indonesia. The emerging middle classes in Southeast Asia are very well connected online (Lim, 2013). Consumption of Islamically themed new media is rapidly rising (Fealy, 2008; Fischer, 2008), and religious preachers often combine online and offline strategies to reach broader publics (Nef Saluz, 2011).

The rapid rise of further diversification has resulted in stronger competition for members and for significance among Muslim groups. This is most visible in the crucial realm of akidah [creed]. Akidah denotes those matters over which Muslims hold conviction. It describes Islamic faith and belief, thus speaking to the heart of the religion. Regarding questions of akidah, the MUI now holds the authority to define the boundaries of what is theologically right and wrong (Hasyim, 2011). In the discussion on deviance, politicians, journalists, perpetrators of violence, as well as bystanders and onlookers all refer to the MUI as the deciding authority (Schäfer, 2013). In addition to the expanding realm of media and consumption, there have been significant political changes that have contributed to the rearranging of religious authority. Since the end of the Suharto regime, an array of groups and organizations has been struggling, each striving to ensure its survival through competing for authority. In a climate of post-reformasi enthusiasm and dissolving trust in politicians, the Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars, the MUI, has successfully used controversial debates to carve itself a niche of authority.

Another important player in the field of state–religion relationship is the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Especially during Suryadharma Ali’s tenure as Minister of Religious Affairs between 2009 and 2014, the state’s neutrality regarding questions of religion has become highly doubtable. In 2010, he demanded the Ahmadiyya be banned. He repeatedly encouraged Ahmadis to ‘return to the true path’ and worked closely together with the MUI in the efforts to stage public conversions of whole groups of Ahmadis (Schäfer, 2013).

Also involved in these efforts was the Bakor Pakem, the Coordinating Body Monitoring Mystical Beliefs in Society. The body consists of members from the Department of Religious Affairs, the police, the national army, the National Intelligence Agency (Badan Intelijen Nasional [BIN]), the Department of Education, the Department of Law and Human Rights and the Attorney General’s Office. It was intended to meet both periodically and whenever a concern came up that needed discussion. According to the 2004 Public Prosecution Service Law, the Bakor Pakem has the responsibility to provide ‘oversight in respect of religious beliefs that could endanger society and the state’. The Bakor Pakem usually sits under the Intelligence Division of the Public Prosecution Office. Human rights organizations consider it extremely influential when pressing the government to ban religious groups.⁴

A closer analysis of the individual case studies of accusations regarding religious deviance (Schäfer, 2013) shows that these political and religious authorities work in very close collaboration. The advice formulated by religious authorities, most importantly the MUI, seems to influence state laws and policies. The MUI’s recommendations regarding the Ahmadiyya and the Darul Arqam group were followed either by legal restrictions or by respective comments in which politicians explained why they did not react upon receiving the MUI’s suggestions (ibid.). Time and again, politicians refer to the MUI’s advice and authority in public statements, and often involve it in conversion ceremonies. In the competition and cooperation between state and religious authorities, the latter expect the former to support and maintain their authority while they in return support theirs.

Renegotiating Indonesian secularity

Amid thriving competition among religious and political authorities, there is alliance-building and cooperation. There are three possible interpretations of this hand-in-hand cooperation of leaders. First, one could argue that much of this cooperation is more about concrete positions and individual power and not as much about belief. While there surely is some truth in the centrality of struggles for positions, this view is cynical and too short-sighted. It overlooks the moral and other-worldly ambitions and motivations of some of the actors and rests on a simplistic separation between power and belief. A second perspective would be that religious authority is rising and that the state is becoming more religious. This interpretation falsely rests on the assumption that the Indonesian state has per se been non-religious and that this non-religious character is now being challenged. Another interpretation – not wholly contradictory to the second, but with a different focus – is that the colonial and military decades were an exception in a society that sees religion and politics as inseparably intertwined. Viewed in this light, not only would religious leaders be claiming their rightful participation in the political decision-making, but religion would be claiming its original historical position in the political apparatus and outlook. This third view, one that sees the military rule and the non-religious aftermath as an exception to the rule of an intimate intertwinement of politics and religion, reveals how the debates on orthodoxy serve as a battlefield for different authorities and values.

Lessons to be learned from Indonesia

What can more general scholarly debates on secularism draw from the Indonesian case? First of all, the debates on orthodoxy and deviance show that the question of secularity in Indonesia is not as much about religion or not religion, but more about defining what kind of religion is acceptable, and who holds the defining power. In other words, the question is not whether Muslims can live in an environment whose public institutions are less religious, but what particular relationship between Islam, state and society they regard as legitimate and desirable. The Indonesian case adds some empirical flesh to the insight that modernity is not necessarily non-religious. In Indonesia, as in many other parts of the world, religion is very much seen as modern. This is mainly due to the very different historical trajectories of early-modern Europe and many parts of the Muslim world. Although scholarship on modernity and secularism has acknowledged this, many case-specific analyses still ignore this in their view towards the appeal of religious symbolism and regard religion as something that is ‘reviving’.

Furthermore, Indonesia reminds us that we may use actor-centric analysis and structure-centric analysis to dissect the struggle of the relationship between state and religion into ideological struggles within society, but also into institutional struggles among elites. The question remains though, under what circumstances elites can use issues of religion to advance their positions and access to power.

First, religion has actually to have political currency. This is the case in most parts of the world and social scientists must begin to acknowledge this without falling into culturalist traps or rhetoric of extremism. This might be especially true for Muslim societies. Islam is often seen as a progressive, modern and morally superior force. Much of the Muslim world has been colonized. After decolonization, many new nation-states were governed by non-religious, often military elites. Resistance against colonizers as well as their successors often took place in the name of Islam. Further, Muslim elites were distanced from powerful positions and were able to keep their hands clean of politics. This explains some of the enthusiasm for Muslim parties and elites as well as Islamic symbolism, and contributes to an environment in which references to Islam have currency in power-bargaining.

The second condition that the Indonesian case reveals is an atmosphere of renewed authority, or more precisely the loss of authority as it was formerly practised, and the emergence of new authorities. This applies to the religious as well as the political realm (to uphold the analytically helpful if empirically flawed distinction). In Indonesia, political authorities have been trying to establish or re-establish themselves during the reformasi period. However, widespread corruption and several public morality scandals have proved destructive for the image of politicians and have eroded trust in the system of democracy that originally was emphatically embraced. This left a huge gap for new authorities to step into. As the old religious authorities have tried to stay out of issues regarded as too political, the MUI has been able to move forward and to reposition itself, promising clear stances and marked borders in an almost populist way. This can either be interpreted as a dangerous development or as a long-postponed rightful claim.

In light of empirical evidence suggesting the failure of separation between political and religious authorities, or between the state and religion, how can we revise concepts of secularism and secularity to address more adequately recent developments in Southeast Asia? I want to suggest that an alternative to measuring non-western realities against the prevalent concepts of secularism is to look in more detail at the proliferation of religious authorities as a danger to supposedly ideal models of separation. A closer empirical analysis of these cooperations will help to shed fresh light on the relationship between state, society and religion.

Footnotes

A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues İstanbul Seminars 2014 (“The Sources of Pluralism – Metaphysics, Epistemology, Law and Politics”) that took place at İstanbul Bilgi University from May 15–20, 2014.

Notes

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