Whatever Happened to Civil Islam? Islam and Democratisation in Indonesia, 20 Years On

ABSTRACT

As the hopeful dreams of the 2011 “Arab spring” have given way to anti-democratic repression in most Arab-majority nations, the question of Islam and democracy in Indonesia has been thrust to the centre of policy and research attention once more. With some 260 million people, 87 per cent of whom are Muslim, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority society in the world and the third-largest democracy. Analysts disagree as to whether Indonesia offers an example of a successful democratic transition in a Muslim-majority country. This debate serves as the background to this article’s revisiting of a book written almost 20 years ago, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. The article opens with a discussion of the personal and theoretical preoccupations that informed the approach adopted in Civil Islam. It then addresses the broader question of the degree to which the promise of the 1998 transition has been fulfilled. The article ends by examining Civil Islam’s core conclusions in light of recent developments in Indonesia. These include a “conservative turn” in Islamist circles committed to the creation of a religiously differentiated citizenship. The results of the April 2019 elections suggest, however, that the supporters of a religiously inclusive Islam have by no means been vanquished.

KEYWORDS:

• Indonesia
• Islam
• democratisation
• political ethics
• civil society
• agonistic plurality

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Gustav Brown and Amelia Fauzia for their hard work and generosity in organising the conference at which an earlier version of this article was presented, and for their kind feedback on subsequent drafts of the conference paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who commented on the article for the Asian Studies Review, and the editor, David Hundt, for his very helpful suggestions for editorial revision.