Abstract
This book makes a significant contribution to understandings of the complex and dynamic nature of religious practice and identity formation in contemporary Indonesia. Although making up a tiny fraction of the total population, ethnic Chinese Muslims are a significant sub-group of Indonesians that sits at the intersection of a religious majority with an ethnic minority that has long assumed the role of economic middleman and political scapegoat. This new work presents us with compelling case studies and analysis of the situation for this group in the post-New Order period. The author leads us through a range of theoretical fields, from cultural studies and anthropology to historiography and Islamic studies and empirical methods, to deftly tell this contemporary story of the Chinese Muslims in Indonesia.
The case studies and fieldwork are evidence of rare and deep observational research, which results in a new and exciting contribution to the field.
The strengths of this book are many and include its treatment and close study of the ‘Chinese euphoria’ and ‘Islamic resurgence’ in post-New Order Indonesia. The author’s approaches by way of cultural studies and historiography enrich our understandings of the ways in which ‘Chineseness’ within Islam has been commodified and in turn embraced as a cultural feature of the broader diverse Indonesian identity.
The book highlights the strengths embedded in Indonesian nationalism itself, which can be highly inclusive and tolerant of diversity. At the same time, it makes clear where these limits to the Indonesian, as ‘imagined’ by the majority and by the State, lie. Chinese Muslims challenge, and in many ways disturb, both their religious and ethnic identity groups. The author illustrates for us under what conditions and for what reasons the construction and negotiation of Chinese Muslim identities occur.
Any weakness of the book comes from its treatment of the situation of those periods within Indonesia’s modern history during which the ethnic Chinese have so often been targets of violence and persecution. Whilst these events inform the contemporary context with which the author is concerned, they are mentioned only briefly in the historical account. I would have liked an interrogation of the idea of ‘Chinese euphoria’ alongside the literature on the trauma following the May 1998 mass rioting that targeted ethnic Chinese in major cities in Indonesia. At that time and for many also long afterwards, these attacks on ethnic Chinese left deep wounds. Whilst freedoms brought since reformasi may have gone someway towards remedying them, the author might have probed more deeply into sentiments within the Chinese Muslim community at the time, and which drove people to conversion thereafter. The author refers to Chinese Muslim leader Junus Jahja, expressing surprise that ethnic Chinese Muslims were also attacked in May 1998, but this line of analysis does not go further than this. Did the need to heal the past inform the Chinese Muslim community’s own drive for political and social participation post-New Order?
Nonetheless, the author’s overall thesis, well borne out here with case studies, is that a plurality of identities can and does exist in Indonesia, of which the Chinese Muslim is an important example. The cosmopolitan, open and inclusive ways in which places of worship such as the Surabaya Cheng Hoo Mosque have become spaces with multiple uses for different communities and ‘boundary crossings’ demonstrates this very well. Whilst I am slightly nervous overall about the success of the term and indeed the phenomenon of ‘Chinese euphoria’, this study enhances our understandings of what life in Indonesia looks like at the points of intersection between this ethnic minority and religious majority in a way that provides for optimism.