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Indonesia Islam
Islam was the dominant religion by far in Indonesia,
with the
greatest number of religious adherents: around 143 million
people
or 86.9 percent of the population in 1985, which when
adjusted for
1992 estimates represents between 160 million and 170
million
adherents (see
table 5, Appendix). This high percentage of
Muslims
made Indonesia the largest Islamic country in the world in
the
early 1990s. Within the nation, most provinces and islands
had
majority populations of Islamic adherents (ranging from
just above
50 percent in Kalimantan Barat and Maluku provinces to as
much as
97.8 percent in the Special Region of Aceh) (see
table 6,
Appendix).
According to orthodox practice, Islam is a strictly
monotheistic religion in which God (Allah or Tuhan) is a
pervasive,
if somewhat distant, figure. The Prophet Muhammad is not
deified,
but is regarded as a human who was selected by God to
spread the
word to others through the Quran, Islam's holiest book,
the
revealed word of God. Islam is a religion based on high
moral
principles, and an important part of being a Muslim is
commitment
to these principles. Islamic law
(sharia; in Indonesian,
syariah--see Glossary)
is based on the Quran; the
sunna, Islamic tradition, which includes the
hadith
(hadis in Indonesian), the actions and sayings of
Muhammad;
ijma, the consensus of a local group of Islamic
jurisprudents and, sometimes, the whole Muslim community;
and
qiyas or reasoning through analogy. Islam is
universalist,
and, in theory, there are no national, racial, or ethnic
criteria
for conversion. The major branches of Islam are those
adhered to by
the Sunni (see Glossary) and
Shia (see Glossary) Muslims.
To a significant degree, the striking variations in the
practice and interpretation of Islam--in a much less
austere form
than that practiced in the Middle East--in various parts
of
Indonesia reflect its complex history. Introduced
piecemeal by
various traders and wandering mystics from India, Islam
first
gained a foothold between the twelfth and fifteenth
centuries in
coastal regions of Sumatra, northern Java, and Kalimantan.
Islam
probably came to these regions in the form of mystical
Sufi (see Glossary)
tradition. Sufism easily gained local acceptance
and
became synthesized with local customs. The introduction of
Islam to
the islands was not always peaceful, however. As Islamized
port
towns undermined the waning power of the East Javanese
HinduBuddhist Majapahit kingdom in the sixteenth century,
Javanese
elites fled to Bali, where over 2.5 million people kept
their own
version of Hinduism alive
(see The Coming of Islam
, ch.
1). Unlike
coastal Sumatra, where Islam was adopted by elites and
masses
alike, partly as a way to counter the economic and
political power
of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, in the interior of Java
the elites
only gradually accepted Islam, and then only as a formal
legal and
religious context for Javanese spiritual culture.
These historical processes gave rise to enduring
tensions
between orthodox Muslims and more syncretistic, locally
based
religion--tensions that were still visible in the early
1990s. On
Java, for instance, this tension was expressed in a
contrast
between
santri and
abangan (see Glossary),
an
indigenous blend of native and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs with
Islamic
practices sometimes also called Javanism, kejawen,
agama
Jawa, or
kebatinan (see Glossary).
The terms
and precise
nature of this opposition were still in dispute in the
early 1990s,
but on Java santri not only referred to a person
who was
consciously and exclusively Muslim, santri also
described
persons who had removed themselves from the secular world
to
concentrate on devotional activities in Islamic schools
called
pesantren--literally the place of the santri
(see Islamic Schools
, this ch.).
In contrast to the Mecca-oriented philosophy of most
santri, there was the current of kebatinan,
which is
an amalgam of animism, Hindu-Buddhist, and
Islamic--especially
Sufi--beliefs. This loosely organized current of thought
and
practice, was legitimized in the 1945 constitution and, in
1973,
when it was recognized as one of the agama,
President
Suharto counted himself as one of its adherents.
Kebatinan
is generally characterized as mystical, and some varieties
were
concerned with spiritual self-control. Although there were
many
varieties circulating in 1992, kebatinan often
implies
pantheistic worship because it encourages sacrifices and
devotions
to local and ancestral spirits. These spirits are believed
to
inhabit natural objects, human beings, artifacts, and
grave sites
of important wali (Muslim saints). Illness and
other
misfortunes are traced to such spirits, and if sacrifices
or
pilgrimages fail to placate angry deities, the advice of a
dukun or healer is sought. Kebatinan, while
it
connotes a turning away from the militant universalism of
orthodox
Islam, moves toward a more internalized universalism. In
this way,
kebatinan moves toward eliminating the distinction
between
the universal and the local, the communal and the
individual.
Another important tension dividing Indonesian Muslims
was the
conflict between traditionalism and modernism. The nature
of these
differences was complex, confusing, and a matter of
considerable
debate in the early 1990s, but traditionalists generally
rejected
the modernists' interest in absorbing educational and
organizational principles from the West. Specifically,
traditionalists were suspicious of modernists' support of
the urban
madrasa, a reformist school that included the
teaching of
secular topics. The modernists' goal of taking Islam out
of the
pesantren and carrying it to the people was opposed
by the
traditionalists because it threatened to undermine the
authority of
the kyai (religious leaders). Traditionalists also
sought,
unsuccessfully, to add a clause to the first tenet of the
Pancasila
state ideology requiring that, in effect, all Muslims
adhere to the
sharia. On the other hand, modernists accused
traditionalists of
escapist unrealism in the face of change; some even hinted
that
santri harbored greater loyalty towards the
ummah
(congregation of believers) of Islam than to the secular
Indonesian
state.
Despite these differences, the traditionalist Nahdlatul
Ulama
(literally, Revival of the Religious Scholars, also known
as the
Muslim Scholars' League), the progressive Consultative
Council of
Indonesian Muslims (Masyumi), and two other parties were
forcibly
streamlined into a single Islamic political party in
1973--the
Unity Development Party (PPP)
(see Political Parties
, ch.
4). Such
cleavages may have weakened Islam as an organized
political entity,
as demonstrated by the withdrawal of the Nahdlatul Ulama
from
active political competition, but as a popular religious
force
Islam showed signs of good health and a capacity to frame
national
debates in the 1990s.
Data as of November 1992
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