Graduate attributes, state policy, and Islamic preaching in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

The development of state institutions for the management and administration of Islam has enriched the range of Islamic authorities in Indonesia, with distinctive effects for public Islam. The article examines the effects of an Indonesian policy decision of 1975 that was intended to develop specific graduate attributes – ‘modernity, openness and critical thought’ – in graduates of Islamic post-graduate study. It was decreed that Islamic graduates would be sent to post-graduate programmes at universities in the West, altering a policy setting that had previously favoured venerable sites of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The Ministry of Religion associated sites of post-graduate learning in the West with graduate attributes of openness and critical thought, and perceived that these attributes were necessary for the development of a cohort of technical experts with competency to observe and analyse Islam in Indonesian populations. Article problematizes this notion of graduate attributes in the religious sphere, noting their novelty in comparison with competencies required of Islamic leaders in Indonesian communities (connectedness, affirmation of tradition, ritual expertise, etc). Attributes of ‘openness and critical thought’ position technical experts as critical observers of other segments in Indonesian Islamic society, such as Indonesia’s popular preachers, many of whom are trained in sites of Islamic learning in the Middle East. In Indonesia’s contemporary Islamic public sphere, such technical experts, many of whom were trained in Western social science departments, maintain a critical distance from Indonesia’s popular preachers, the majority of whom (ironically) received religious training in sites of learning in the Middle East.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic education
• Islamic preaching
• Islamic bureaucracy
• Islam and development
• Mukti Ali
• public sphere

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council through its Future Fellowship programme, which funded this research. Gratitude is expressed to the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), which hosted the workshop from which this special issue arose. Further gratitude is expressed to Linda Hindasah, who assisted with parts of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The appendices of Djaelani (1982) contain a chronological selection of governmental resolutions and laws in which graduate attributes are expressed.

2 We cannot quantitatively verify this statement, but it is frequently attested to in Indonesia. For example, in 2018 TEMPO magazine produced a twelve page feature on the latest cohort of popular preachers (I discuss this in more detail below). The article identified four preachers to represent the most successful of the cohort, all of whom were Middle East graduates: the Sumatran Abdul Somad Batubara (b. 1977), who graduated from Al-Azhar (Egypt) and Dar ul-Hadith (Morrocco); Khalid Basamalah (b. 1975), who graduated from Medina Islamic University; Hanan Attaki (b. 1981), a graduate of Al-Azhar; and Adi Hidayat (b. 1984), who graduated from Libya’s Kuliyat ul-Da’wah al-Islamiyyah (Tempo 18–24 June 2018, 26–37).

3 In his account of the gradual rise of exclusive humanism in Europe, Charles Taylor (2007, Chapter 4) termed this religious outlook ‘providential idealism’.

4 The precedent for such analysis is Susan Harding’s (2000) analysis of coverage by the national press of the USA of that country’s fundamentalist and evangelical communities during the twentieth century. National media coverage reflected the nation’s modern secular hegemony for most of the twentieth century. The religio-political nexus in Indonesia has not much resemblance to that of the USA, although the framing of preachers as outsiders to modernity is similar to the exclusion of fundamentalist and evangelical communities described by Harding (2000, 61–82).

5 Hidayat’s academic history is interesting in the context of this article. He had strongly desired to complete postgraduate study ‘in Canada or America’ (Hidayat 2016b, 51). The scholarship opportunity that came his way took him to doctoral programme in Western Philosophy in Turkey at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council's 'Future Fellowship' grant entitled Deliberation and publicness in Indonesia's regional Islamic spheres (FT140100818).