Indonesia, Islam, and the New U.S. Administration

There are many reasons to recommend that Indonesia should figure prominently in the next administration’s foreign policy deliberations, not least with regards to questions of Islam, democracy, and religious freedom. With its 255 million people, 87.2 percent of whom officially profess Islam, this Southeast Asian country is the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world. Indonesia is also the world’s largest Muslim democracy, having made a transition to electoral democracy in 1998–1999 after 32 years of authoritarian rule. Although it still has serious shortcomings with regards to the rule of law and the protection of religious freedoms (Crouch 2014; see below), Indonesia’s achievements with regards to press freedoms, labor rights, literacy rates, and women’s education and employment have by all measures been far-reaching and impressive (Robinson 2009). Even in such specialized fields as Islamic education—Islamic schools educate about 15 percent of the school-age population—Indonesia stands out. With its mix of Islamic sciences, general studies, and courses on women’s rights and civic education, the country’s network of State Islamic Universities and Colleges (UIN/IAIN) is arguably the most dynamic and pluralist-minded in the world (Azra, Afrianty, and Hefner 2007; Jackson 2007). Topping all this off, 45 years of growth have turned this country into Southeast Asia’s largest economy and one of the global south’s economic powerhouses. No less significant, the country’s growth has been relatively well distributed, driving down poverty rates and fueling the growth of a huge middle class.

Notwithstanding its strategic importance and record of achievement, Indonesia has long remained something of a second-tier concern in US policy circles. The country loomed largest in US foreign policy vision during the Cold War years of the late 1950s and 1960s. At that time, Indonesia had the largest Communist Party in the non-communist world (Mortimer 1974), and was widely regarded as the domino most likely to fall if Vietnam “went communist.” A failed left-wing officers coup on the night of September 30, 1965 put an end to that anxiety, and also to the Indonesian Communist Party, which was outlawed and its ranks decimated during six months of military-coordinated killing in 1965–1966 (Cribb 1990). With the transition to the authoritarian “New Order” government (1966–May 1998; Hefner 2000), Indonesia came to be regarded as an independent-minded but quietly consistent US ally. However, its relative political stability once again relegated Indonesia to the policy background, and its place in Asian affairs was progressively overshadowed by an ascendant China and India.

All this changed in the early 2000s, with rise of al-Qa’eda and other trans-national terrorists. The Bali bombings in October 2002 were the first al-Qa’eda-sponsored mass killing after 9/11. Over the next few years attacks by al-Qa’eda-inspired militants raised fears that Indonesia and Muslim Southeast Asia were about to become a “second front” in al-Qa’eda’s war on the West. The fact that the period between 1999 and 2003 saw outbreaks of “small town wars” (Klinken 2007) in six of Indonesia’s 32 provinces, and that the worst of these provincial conflicts pitted Muslims against Christians, added to the fear that Indonesia might be descending into sectarian dissolution. But the center held. Most of the provincial conflicts—typically stirred, not by al-Qa’eda terrorism, but by local elites’ competition for state resources after the launching of an ambitious program of political decentralization in 2001–2002 (Aspinall and Fealy 2003)—were well contained by 2003. More remarkable yet, from 2002 onward, Indonesia mounted one of the world’s most successful anti-terror campaigns. Several hundred militants were arrested, bomb factories dismantled, and hardline-Islamists wooed away from radical-Salafist models (Jones 2013). More tellingly, the results of Indonesian national and regional elections from 1999 to 2015 demonstrated that, even as the country has experienced a resurgence in Islamic piety (Ricklefs 2012), the great majority of Muslim voters clearly distinguish heightened religious observance from support for Islamist politics (Aspinall 2005). Blemishes notwithstanding, Indonesia today is a functioning democracy and an important actor on the world stage, and the next US administration would do well to recognize it as such.

More will be required to make any recognition of Indonesia diplomatically and strategically effective than this introductory overview implies. For one thing, the global rise of ISIS/Daesh, the failure of Arab-spring efforts at democratic renewal, and the specter of future terrorist attacks in the West have made sober public discussion of Islam and Muslims more difficult than ever in Western countries. Level-headed policy discussion has been made additionally problematic as a result of campaigns by populist Western politicians intent on winning political advantage by stoking citizen fears of Muslims and Islam. The fact that most victims of ISIS terror have been Muslims, and that our most steadfast allies in campaigns to destroy ISIS have also been Muslim makes this narrative bitterly ironic. In sum, in making recommendations to the next administration with regards to Indonesia, any and all proposals must keep in mind, not only what is required to engage Indonesia, but the lessons Indonesia offers for an American public uncertain and confused as to the place of Islam in our ever-changing global order.

In what follows, I outline current conditions and trends in Indonesia with regard to religion and public life. I highlight four points: the peculiar resilience of Indonesian nationalism; the role played by Islamic civic organizations in steadying Indonesian Islam and politics; the continuing challenge of inter-religious tolerance; and the nature of the threat posed by ISIS/Daesh. Together these four issues suggest that Indonesia does indeed offer positive lessons for how the US might engage Muslim-majority countries in an age when many prior US efforts have stumbled or fallen.

Lesson One: The Phoenix of Indonesian Nationalism

What at first sight might seem the most straightforward lesson for engaging Indonesia is actually quite complicated: Indonesia is a proudly nationalist country, and at the moment is in the early phases of expressing that nationalism with more vigor than it has at any time since the early 1960s. To understand this point, and to engage Indonesia more effectively, it is important to understand the place of religion in Indonesian nationhood.

As in so many countries, nationhood in Indonesia has been the subject of longstanding and bitter contention. For most of the years since Indonesians declared independence in August 1945, one of the most enduring political divides pitted Islamists intent on establishing some variety of Islamic state (defined as a state which administers Islamic law in its territory) against a historically variable alliance of social democrats, conservative nationalists, Christians (and other religious minorities: especially Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians), and Muslim pluralists committed to the sweet dream of an Indonesia both multi-ethnic and multi-religious. The latter ideal must not be confused with, to use Ahmet Kuru’s (2009) term, an assertive secularism that bars religion from public life or prohibits any state support for religious institutions. On the contrary, since 1946, Indonesia has had a Ministry of Religion, and over the years, but especially since the second half of Suharto’s “New Order” regime (1966–1998), that ministry has lavished resources on religious (and especially, because of their greater number, Muslim) schools, hospitals, and social welfare associations. The model of religious freedom at work here is closer in spirit, not to American or French “separationist” secularism, but to the pattern of “positive accommodation” (see Stepan 2011) associated with multi-religious, consociational democracies like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. As with these European countries, Indonesia not only tolerates multiple religions; it provides formal state recognition and funding to the largest, which here include Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. One of the more interesting but unfinished public policy debates taking place in Indonesia today concerns how to accommodate religious minorities not recognized among the six official religions.

During the New Order (1966–1998), coercive programs of indoctrination into the country’s national doctrine, the Pancasila (“five principles”), led many foreign observers to conclude that the ideals of Indonesian nationalism were little more than an “emperor’s-clothes” instrument of state domination. The first and most important of those five principles emphasizes that Indonesia is a state based on a single and all-powerful Godhead (Ind., Tuhan yang maha esa). While consistent with the Islamic principle of God’s unicity (Ar., tawhid), this first principle affirms that the state is based on religiosity but not on any one faith. However meager it might appear to some foreign analysts, this principle has been a pillar of Indonesian nationalism, and a rallying cry against those demanding the formation of an Islamic state.

In the free-wheeling and democratic atmosphere of the post-Suharto era, Islamists cited the coercive excesses of the New Order to reject the Five Principles and multi-confessional nationalism, calling instead for a state based on shariah. When it became clear that post-Suharto Indonesia was experiencing a resurgence of Islamic observance, many international observers worried that the multi-confessional variety of Indonesian nationalism had been so compromised by New Order abuses that it was just a matter of time before shariah appeals won the day. Once again, however, the nationalist center held. During 2000–2001, the National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to reject proposals by Islamist parties to require the state to implement a state-mandated variant of “Islamic law” for Muslim citizens (Hosen 2007; Salim 2008). The Islamist effort failed in large part because of opposition from the country’s two huge Muslim social welfare organizations, the Muhammadiyah (25 million members) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (35–40 million; see below).

This blow to Islamist aspirations was repeated in each of the electoral cycles in the years that followed. Although moderate Islamists continue to win about 15 percent of the electorate, to woo even that small base they have had to water down any demand for state-mandated shariah (Aspinall 2005; Mietzner 2008; Ufen 2008). The great majority of Indonesians support parties committed to Indonesia’s Pancasila and multi-religious nationalism. Even more remarkably, radical Islamist groups like the internationalist Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (Party of Liberation, Indonesia) and the Council of Indonesian Muhajidin (Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia), which at one point were capable of staging impressive mass mobilizations, have been weakened by internal splits and the younger generation’s greater interest in personal piety and middle-class careers than system-changing Islamism. The power of the Muslim center has not prevented the worrying growth of an underground fringe supportive of ISIS/Daesh (see below). Nonetheless, the great majority of Indonesian Muslims are today more confidently committed than ever to the multi-religious ideals of Indonesian nationalism. No less significant, since 2010 the government and the Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama have launched bold initiatives to celebrate and strengthen Indonesia’s multi-religious nationalism, and present Indonesia as an example to the world of the compatibility of Islam and democracy. This effort, too, merits the next administration’s recognition.

Lesson Two: The Steadying Influence of Muslim Civil Society

From a comparative Muslim-societies perspective, the single most striking feature of Muslim society in Indonesia is the presence and durability of Muslim social welfare associations. With followings of some 25 and 35–40 million people, respectively, the Muhammadiyah and the Nahdlatul Ulama are the largest Muslim social welfare organizations in the world (Alfian 1989; Nakamura 2012; Njoto-Feillard 2012). They are also among the most long-lasting, having been established in 1912 and 1926, respectively. Along with a host of smaller but similarly inclined organizations, these two Muslim associations have a depth of presence in Indonesian society without rival in other Muslim-majority countries.

Why is this important? In the 1990s, Western policy analysts and academics often averred that civil society organizations are the key to “making democracy work.” With the outbreak of ethno-religious conflicts in countries like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, however, it soon became apparent that some intermediary (“civil society”) associations are anything but “civil” or democracy-friendly in the habits of the heart that they nurture. Pluralist and democratic values do not automatically flow from the fact of participation in voluntary associations alone. If civic associations are to be democracy- and pluralism-enhancing, they require two additional ingredients: a political and intellectual leadership dedicated to, and capable of, engaging in “normative work” to create citizen values seen as consistent with the ethical tradition with which rank-and-file members identify; and, second, the “scaling up” of these very same citizen values in political and civil society as a whole, through collaborations with other civil society groupings and with state agencies committed to the dissemination and legal enforcement of those same citizen values (Hefner 2000).

It is in this regard that social welfare associations like the Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama have played such a positive role in Indonesia. When first established in the early twentieth century, both of these organizations were primarily dedicated to, not citizen values per se, but the twin objectives of religious education and heightened religious observance. However, both organizations quickly developed a network of hundreds of schools, polyclinics, hospitals, and orphanages. This pattern of associational activism created incentive structures whereby, rather than just politicians or ulama, believers with skills in teaching, medicine, or other professional skills acquired leadership and influence in the Muslim community. More generally, the multi-purpose nature of Muslim social welfare encouraged people to identify Islamic ethics, not just with individual piety or grand schemes for capturing the state, but with the practical goals of educating people, treating the sick, and, in a phrase, making social institutions more ethical and effective.

This is not to say that Indonesia has been lacking in movements with a politicized and étatist vision of Islamic “appeal” (da‘wa). The Darul Islam rebellion of the 1950s (Dijk 1981), the bitter political rivalries of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the Jemaah Islamiyah violence of the 2000s (Hefner 2012; ICG 2002; cf. Hasan 2006) remind us that that there have always been Indonesians preoccupied with totalizing dreams of capturing the state so as to impose a command religious economy. What is nonetheless distinctive about Indonesia is that, even when sectarian politics seems to threaten Indonesia’s nationalist heritage, many in Muslim associations rally to its defense, and regard participation in education, health care, and literacy campaigns as the most fitting expression of Islamic values. In this manner, Muslim civil society has helped to create an Islamic public ethics consistent with, rather than opposed to, the goals of a plural and nationalist Indonesia.

Lesson Three: The Enduring Challenge of Religious Tolerance

Notwithstanding Islamist setbacks in the electoral arena, the more rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the post-Suharto era has in some respects played to the advantage of anti-pluralist Islamists and to the detriment of Indonesia’s religious minorities. The latter include Muslims like the tiny Shi’a minority in this overwhelmingly Sunni country. This challenge too should figure in the US administration’s engagement with Indonesia.

In the years since 2005, Muslims professing varieties of Islam seen as “deviationist” (Ind., sesat) have been the frequent target of violence by Islamist vigilantes. The communities that have suffered most have been Shi’as and Ahmadis, both of whom have about 300,000 members, or about ¼ of 1 percent of the national population. The Ahmadis (Ahmadiyyah) are a Muslim sect established in Pakistan in the early twentieth century, and regarded as deviant by Muslim organizations in many parts of the world. In 1980, Indonesia’s semi-governmental Council of Indonesian Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) issued a fatwa branding the Ahmadiyah heretical. However, quietly tolerant of religious minorities as it was, the authoritarian New Order government never took action against the group. In July 2005, seven years after Suharto’s overthrow, the MUI issued a blunter condemnation of the Ahmadiyah (ICG 2008). Islamist militias seized on the pronouncement to attack and destroy hundreds of Ahmadiyah properties in West Java, East Lombok, and other parts of Indonesia. Although a number of Muslim leaders rallied to defend the right of the Ahmadis to profess their faith, the attacks continued (Human Rights Watch 2013). On February 6, 2011, 1,500 militants stormed a small gathering of Ahmadiyah in the village of Cikeusik in western Java, torturing and killing three men. Although the incident was captured on a video and uploaded to the Internet, the perpetrators of the violence were eventually convicted of only minor charges.

In recent years, small but well-organized Islamist militias have launched similar assaults on Sufis, Shi’as, and, in a few regions, Protestant Christians. The situation of religious minorities and non-mainstream Muslims has been rendered more precarious by national legislation that lends itself to abuse at the hands of anti-pluralist officials and “uncivil” society organizations. The two clearest examples of such legislation are the 1965 blasphemy law (Article 156 and 156a of Indonesia’s criminal code, and Presidential Decree No 1/1965, both of which were upheld as constitutional by the Supreme court in April 2010) and the 1969 regulation (revised in 2006) placing restrictions on the ability of religious groups to build houses of worship. These regulations have been legally operative for many years, and for most of that period they did not contribute to wanton acts of sectarian violence. The law on blasphemy (more accurately described as an anti-defamation law) was introduced in 1965 by President Sukarno, but was rarely enforced (Lindsey 2012, 52–62). Since 2003, however, the regulation been applied more than 150 times – most consistently, it should be emphasized, in those few parts of the country where Islamist militias are tolerated by local government officials courting their support (cf. Buehler 2008).

In a small minority among Indonesia’s 32 provinces, local government officials have cited the laws on defamation and places of worship to justify inaction in the face of mob violence. Two well-known examples of such connivance involve harassment of Christians in West Java: The GKI Yasmin Church in Bogor, and HKBP Filadelfia Church in Bekasi (Crouch 2014). The Yasmin Church came to international attention in 2006 when the mayor and local religious officials provided the congregation with a permit for church construction purposes, only to revoke the license three months later in the face of protests by radical Islamists. In January 2011, the Supreme Court ruled against the city officers’ revocation of the permit. In defiance of the Court, the mayor refused to issue a new permit, and allowed shows-of-force by militia thugs in an effort to frighten the congregation away. Muslim civic organizations that have rallied to defend the Church have themselves been the targets of intimidation and reprisal. When asked about the mayor’s open defiance of the Supreme Court, then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said simply that it was not the president’s role to interfere in mayoral politics. Although a political moderate, Yudhoyono (r. 2004–2014) was criticized during his presidential terms for failing to take action in the face of repeated assaults on Christians as well as far bloodier attacks on Ahmadis and Shi’as. In 2007, the President shocked human rights proponents when he promised a meeting of the Council of Indonesian Ulama (which had just re-iterated its rulings on Ahmadis and “deviant” Muslim groups) that, “We must all take strict measures against deviant beliefs,” and he offered the tools of the state for that project.

The election in October 2014 of President Joko Widodo suggests that that the nationalist center has again asserted itself. A Javanese Muslim, President Widodo, popularly known as “Jokowi,” has long been regarded as a staunch proponent of multi-religious nationalism. His choice of ministers, not least of all the new Minister of Religious Affairs, has confirmed that reputation. However, at both the national and provincial levels, Indonesian politics is driven by complex and shifting coalitions, and the resulting alliances are anything but ideologically consistent. Although Indonesia has made great progress with regards to general freedoms, religious freedoms are likely to remain points of contention for some years to come.

Lesson Four: The ISIS/Daesh Effect

On January 14, 2016, five ISIS militants attacked a Starbuck’s and police post in downtown Jakarta, clearly intending to carry out a mass killing. I was in Jakarta that day, and saw firsthand that the police and anti-terrorist units responded quickly and professionally. The attackers seemed peculiarly inept, and they were quickly neutralized. Two civilians died. The following day, the leader of a special ISIS brigade made up of Southeast Asian militants and based in Raqqa, Syria, claimed responsibility for the attack. It was the first-ever ISIS attack on Indonesia, and a worrying reminder that some two or three hundred Southeast Asian militants are currently training in Syria, with the declared plan of bringing their war on “infidel” Muslim governments back to Indonesia.

Public opinion in Indonesia rallied quickly and massively against the ISIS killers. In fact, from the government’s point of view, the attack provided a sobering but useful public service reminder that, although Indonesia succeeded at containing earlier al-Qa’eda adventurism (Jones 2013), ISIS represent a new species of terrorist threat. ISIS’s end-of-time apocalypticism obviates against any need to build a mass-based movement in favor of an “anywhere-any-time” strategy, staging mass killings of civilians on a scale that even al-Qa’eda spokespersons find religiously reprehensible. Combined with, and reflecting the influence of internet- and social-media recruitment mechanisms, this mobilization strategy seems certain to alienate the great mass of Indonesian Muslims. But it may well prove sufficient to mobilize a few hundred militants, who, with proper training and arms, can do serious damage to Indonesian society.

Of course, none of this scenario is peculiar to Indonesia. Indeed, if anything, Indonesia is better positioned than many Muslim-majority lands because there is a substantial national consensus against ISIS and like-minded terrorists. But more attacks are likely, and they may well damage the social and investment climate on which Indonesia, like all modern societies, depends. In the face of this challenge, the new American administration would do well, not merely to support the Indonesian authorities, but to speak loudly and clearly to the American public about just what Indonesia represents: a Muslim-majority country, with a functioning democracy, an increasingly well-educated middle-class, and a hopeful, plural future.

In other words, Indonesia’s importance lies in the fact that it is, not only a pivotally strategic country, but a reminder of something populist politicians in the West have recently overlooked or chosen to deny: that the struggle against terrorism is not just a primary concern of the West, but of most of the world’s Muslims. Indeed, far from reluctantly following a Western leadership in a global anti-terrorist alliance, Muslims in countries like Indonesia remind us that our struggle is theirs—and in most regards they are in the front lines of this moral battle for human civilization. If the new administration can convey this simple lesson from Indonesia to the American public, it will have done a great service indeed.

For a new American administration, the bottom-line in policy terms should include the following four points:

• First, quietly support Indonesian efforts to project the country’s achievements internationally, not least with regard to Islam and democracy. The “Indonesian model” cannot be exported, but its experience and achievements are relevant for other Muslim-majority countries; they are equally relevant for Western publics unfamiliar with the diversity and promise of the Muslim world.

• Second, continue our government’s long history of cooperation with democratic-minded Muslim organizations, including the Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama, and the State Islamic University System (UIN/IAIN). USAID and other American aid agencies have worked closely with Indonesian Muslim social welfare organizations since the 1980s, and the collaboration has been one of the unheralded triumphs of US foreign policy in the Muslim world.

• Third, deepen US and multi-lateral assistance to strengthen the judiciary and the professionalization of the national police; all such programs need to dedicate special resources to the development of a legal culture committed to containing acts of violence against religious minorities.

• Fourth, urge the Indonesian government to deepen programs of economic reform aimed at curtailing corruption and the growth of special-interest cartels. An open economy and continued economic growth are keys, not only to Indonesia’s prosperity, but to political stability and the growth of a well-educated and tolerant middle class.With these and other policies in hand, the prospects for Indonesia and Indonesian–US relations in the coming years look bright indeed.

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Robert W. Hefner

Robert W. Hefner is Professor of anthropology and Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University. At CURA, he has directed the program on Islam and civil society since 1991; coordinated interdisciplinary research and public policy programs on religion, pluralism, and world affairs; and is currently involved in comparative research on citizenship and civic inculturation in Muslim-majority and Christian/post-Christian societies.