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Indonesia Islam
Organized political party structures promoting Islam
were
disciplined to the requirements of Pancasila democracy in
the
PPP, and Islamic organizations, including the Muhammadiyah
movement and Nahdatul Ulama, were subjected to government
regulations flowing from the Mass Organizations Law.
Muslim
critics of the regime in the early 1990s claimed that the
government policy toward Islam was "colonial" in that it
was
putting in place in modern Indonesia the advice of the
Dutch
scholar and adviser to the Netherlands Indies government,
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. As an adviser between 1891
and 1904,
Snouck Hurgronje advocated tolerating the spiritual
aspects of
Islam but containing rigorously Islam's political
expression. The
goal was the same in the colonial period and during the
presidencies of both Sukarno and Suharto: to see to it
that the
business of government and administration remained a
secular one.
However, Islam could not be fully "depoliticized." The
traditional structures for Islamic communication and
mobilization, pesantren and mosque, were resistant
to
external control. Religious teachers, through the
dakwah
(the vigorous promotion of Islam), still proselytized and
propagated guidance and values in the early 1990s that
influenced
all aspects of human affairs. The "floating masses" were
touched
by a social and political message couched in terms of
Quranic
injunctions and the hadith.
The so-called "hard" dakwah, departing from
sermons
and texts tightly confined to matters of faith and sharia,
was
uncompromisingly antigovernment. The illegal texts of
Abdul Qadir
Djaelani, for example, contrasted Islam, which was the
revelation
of God, with the Pancasila, which was man-made of Javanese
mysticism. The Islamists (often referred to as Islamic
fundamentalists) called for the people to die as martyrs
in a
"struggle until Islam rules." This call, for the
government, was
incitement to "extremism of the right," subversion, and
terrorism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, security
officials
warned against the revival of Darul Islam in the guise of
a
Komando Jihad (Holy War Command). Isolated acts of
violence,
including, in early 1981, the hijacking of a Garuda
Indonesian
Airways DC-9, gave credence to these alerts. This unrest
also was
the context in which the government viewed the Tanjung
Priok
affair. The government reaction to radical Islamic
provocations
was unyielding: arrest and jail.
The followers of the "hard" dakwah were a
minority
within a minority in 1992. Although Islamists might be
disaffected with the state, the goal of urban,
middle-class
Muslims, who shared in the benefits of government economic
policies and who were relatively untouched by the
preaching of
rural Muslim teachers, was not to overthrow the regime.
They
wanted to transform the regime from within to make its
acts
conform more with Islamic values--a focus then that was
not on
the state itself but on policies and practices that were
offensive. The issues that spurred middle-class Muslims on
included not just the persistent Muslim complaints about
secularization, Christianization, and moral decline, but
also
contemporary political grievances about the inequitable
distribution of income, concentration of wealth and power
in the
hands of Chinese Indonesians to the detriment of
indigenous
(pribumi--see Glossary)
entrepreneurship,
corruption, and
the role of the president's immediate family. These kinds
of
issues cut across religious boundaries and united moderate
middle-class Muslims with more secular middle-class
critics, both
civilian and military.
The president had indirectly addressed complaints about
a
skewing of economic rewards to Chinese Indonesian
enterprises by
backing deregulation, warning against flaunting wealth,
and
appealing for companies to allow worker cooperatives to
purchase
up to 25 percent of equity shares. This last proposal,
made in
1990, despite questions about its economic soundness, had
a firm
basis in the 1945 constitution, Indonesian economic
history, and
populist rhetoric.
A more complicated problem was the political access the
president's six children had to state contracting
agencies. Their
monopoly enterprises, influence brokering, and linkages to
Chinese Indonesian entrepreneurs made the children major
players
in the Indonesian economy. Leaving aside the question of
whether
their activities facilitated development or hindered it,
their
highly visible role with the underlying suspicion of
favoritism,
political extortion, and corruption, had a corrosive
impact on
Suharto's own image. The father defended the children.
Domestic
criticism was banned in the media, and foreign discussions
resulted in periodic censorship of certain editions of the
Sydney Morning Herald, the International Herald
Tribune, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
It was
even suggested by some local observers that the
president's
desire to protect his children from a future government's
reprisals energized his succession agenda.
Through reward and cooptation, the government won the
allegiance of a broad sector of the Muslim elite, the most
general indicator of which was election results showing no
increase in the appeal of Muslim political parties. At the
same
time, thoughtful Islamic strategists, such as Nahdatul
Ulama's
Abdurrahman Wahid, felt that Islamization would come from
inside
the New Order rather than from external confrontation. The
Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) was formed in
December
1990, uniting a broad spectrum of leading Muslim academics
and
government figures (but with the noticeable absence of
Abdurrahman Wahid). ICMI's founding had the overt support
of
Suharto and suggested that the president wished to deepen
his
political links to the Muslim constituency independently
of the
PPP and Nahdatul Ulama. This organizational development
also
raised the question of where ABRI stood in a constellation
of
forces that saw the president apparently seeking balance
among
Golkar, Islam, and ABRI.
Data as of November 1992
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