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

The Indonesian state actively involves itself in Islamic society through a number of institutional formations, some of which may be found in similar forms in other majority-Muslim countries. For example, Indonesia has a quasi-state body made up of qualified Islamic scholars whose role is to encourage public morality and protect Islamic interests from the harmful tendencies of modern society. This organization, funded by the state but claiming independence from it, is known as the ‘Indonesian 'Ulama Council' (MUI)’. Established in 1975, this organization produces legal opinions on questions it regards as important for Muslims, and also manages regulation of halal industry (Ichwan 2005).

Another form of involvement is the Ministry of Religion. Established in 1946, it receives public funding that dwarves that of the MUI. The Ministry is called the ‘Ministry of Religion’, but due to the fact that around 88% of Indonesians self-identify as Islamic, the Ministry is mostly concerned with Islamic affairs. It provides services of a practical nature connected with Islam, and implements policy designed to shape Islamic society in accordance with state priorities. Its main concern is the reform and management of Indonesia’s state and private Islamic educational institutions. Using a budget roughly the same size as the country’s education budget, it implements policy to transform Islamic educational programmes so as to enable Muslim graduates better access to opportunities in the country’s diversified economy and governmental sector. It is this second site of state support, the Islamic bureaucracy and its educational institutions, that is the focus of this article.

I am interested here in the ways in which the Ministry’s policies have distributed Islamic authority in Indonesia, and the relations thereby created between the state-supported Islamic authorities and other segments of Islamic society. The Ministry’s bureaucracy has a number of administrative functions, but one of its prominent roles has been to provide technical expertise on Islam, a role implying a very different scholarly competency to that of the traditional scholarly class. Much of this technical expertise is located within the Ministry’s educational institutions, which now include no less than 23 fully-fledged universities. This expertise is concerned not with mediating revelation, but with the modernization of Islamic society in ways that support the discourses and goals of government (Ichwan 2006). To adopt a distinction elaborated by Charles Hirschkind (2006), its concern is not so much the inculcation of religious virtues as the shaping of Islam and Islamic society in forms that support state policy. Like any other top-down development-oriented undertaking, this shaping has required the creation of a class of technical experts with oversight over an objectified population (Li 2007; Mitchell 2002). In what follows, I pay attention to the separation that is invariably created between populations and expert regimes in modernizing contexts, focusing on Indonesia’s Islamic expertise.

I focus specifically on a policy announcement of 1975. The 1970s was a decade in which the pro-development government of Indonesia intervened heavily in the lives of its citizens. This intervention materialized in part through the establishment of new sites for learning, by which I mean loci of exchange where Islamic traditions of Indonesia could be evaluated and reshaped against discourses of development (Bloemberger and Kloos, this special issue). The Ministry of Religion was intent upon developing religious expertise that could give technical advice about Indonesian Islamic society, and this new class of experts was authorized, then, to turn a detached and critical gaze upon the environment from which they themselves had emerged. This gaze established a critical distance between expert and object, which I approach here through a concept that is prominent in the Ministry’s policy, namely ‘graduate attributes’.¹ I look back at a policy announcement by the Minister of Religious Affairs made in 1975. In this announcement, graduate attributes were explicitly connected with geographies of Muslim study. Before this decision, the Ministry had sent its talented students to a number of Islamic institutions in the Middle East, especially the famed Al-Azhar mosque university in Egypt. In 1975, the Minister of Religion, Mukti Ali (1923–2004) announced that graduates would be sent to social sciences and religious studies programmes in Western countries (in addition to centres of learning in the Middle East). This decision was legitimized upon an emergent notion of graduate attributes: according to the Minister, Indonesian Muslim students were to become more ‘open and critical’ (Munhanif 1998, 317).

Such policy innovations filled an important need: preventing Islamic programmes from falling behind the state’s ‘public’ (that is, non-religious) educational resources. This preventive project is a national imperative supported widely in Indonesia. Since independence, it has seemed beyond contest that Islamic education, traditionally structured around hierarchies of knowledge developed well before the national era, needed to be ‘modernised’ or ‘brought up to date’ with the non-religious sector (Ichwan 2006; Steenbrink 1986). Despite the wide support for this imperative, the Minister’s formulation of graduate attributes ought to be critiqued and relativized besides other concepts. The danger is that they might become measurements for identifying deficiencies in populations, and for establishing standards for their ‘betterment’. This danger relates to two aspects of graduate attributes. First, graduate attributes are generally idealized as having universal relevance, when in fact they correspond more closely to goals and discourses that are context-specific. As I explain below, the Muslim graduate attributes announced in the Minister’s policy were in fact idealisations derived from Indonesia’s national development programme, which sought to shape citizens as subjects capable of contributing to Indonesia’s urgent programme of social and economic development. Yet how valuable are such attributes for Muslim populations where the scope of religious aspiration does not go beyond the goal of continuing the religious practices that are authoritative within their communities? The Islamic bureaucracy and its tertiary institutions need their academics to have attributes of ‘openness and critical capability’, but these might be strange attributes for Islamic leaders outside that environment, where rival attributes such as connectedness, affirmation of tradition and doctrine, consistency, willingness to compromise and respect for hierarchy might be valued more highly.

Second, although this specification of graduate attributes might appear to be concerned with competencies of an abstract nature to be developed in individual learners, this decision was also about practices of Muslim worship, commemoration and learning. The inner attributes of humans cannot be reliably tested, but the things Muslims do with their bodies and voices in practical observances are concretely visible, and are held to be indices of human attributes (Asad 2003; Bowen 1993). In the bureaucratic context of the developmental state, certain practices are seen to point away from the cultivation of autonomous personhood that the Indonesian state had made a foundation of its educational programmes and development goals. The popular routines of preaching are one example. Minister Ali published copious reasons for his policy interventions, and preaching is mentioned frequently amongst them. He interprets the traditional patterns of Islamic preaching and listening as practices that impede the attainment of desirable graduate attributes. They seem to justify interventions by the state. In short, the Minister’s stipulations about graduate attributes were aimed at the populace generally, but they implied negative judgements about the styles and practices of particular segments within the nation’s diverse Muslim populations (Baso 2006).

In the latter part of this article I connect the policy announcement of 1975 with the present. Since 1975, the policy goal of equipping talented Muslim students with the skills required for an Islamic bureaucracy has yielded massive benefit for Indonesia (e.g. Saeed 1999). But something unexpected occurred during the same timeframe, something that appears ironic when considered against the policy announcement: Middle Eastern graduates have become highly popular as preachers. Amongst the ranks of the most popular contemporary preachers with national profiles, Middle Eastern graduates are prominent, perhaps even dominant.² This is remarkable because, as I show below, in the Minister’s reasoning that led to the policy change of 1975, preaching was interpreted as being out of step with contemporary needs of critical and independent Muslims. Not only that, Middle Eastern universities were deemed to be sites where students would not pick up attributes of openness and critical capability. This article is a reflection on the separation established in government policy between its own technical experts and other experts whose skills – although considered to be lacking in openness and critical capability – are much desired by populations seeking to employ them in routines of Islamic observance. In the present, the separation is encountered plainly in Indonesia’s contemporary public sphere, where the technical experts continue to play a role of oversight and correction towards experts who are valued by communities not for their openness and critical insight, but because they affirm relations of dependence and connectedness (for example, through preaching routines). I argue that the points of difference between the two classes are now symbolic issues around identity and belonging in contemporary Indonesia.

This special issue’s theme of ‘sites’ provides useful framing here: the Minister acted upon the connections he constructed between centres for Islamic study, Islamic practices and graduate attributes. At that political moment, these connections motivated a policy that would shift resources from one site to another. I have observed the effects of this shift in the present during my ongoing research into preaching and its public meanings in Indonesia’s West Java Province (Millie 2017). My knowledge of the policy climate of the 1970s is derived from my reading of policy literature from the period. In the part following this introduction, I turn to that literature, describing the origins of the policy announcement described above. I then follow the separation established in that policy into the present, drawing upon Indonesian reflections upon it. In the final part of the article, I provide a reading of a recent report about preachers published in a current affairs magazine popular with a large middle-class readership. This report illustrates how the opposition between Islamic technical expertise belonging within the Ministry and preachers has persisted as a feature of public exchange. In this report, the preachers are voiceless objects of the expert critique.

Optimally whole humans

In 1975 the Minister of Religious Affairs, Mukti Ali made the policy announcement described above. The Ministry would commence to send students to postgraduate schools in Western countries, varying its previous policy of sending students to Middle Eastern centres of scholarship. As noted, before then, Egypt’s famous mosque university, Al-Azhar had been amongst the favoured destinations. The Minister made it clear that a concern with graduate attributes underpinned the policy change:

By sending students overseas for ongoing education, the desired achievement is that we nurture in them a satisfactorily scientific approach. A person’s thought process, which is the most important qualitative element of higher education, has to display a modern, open and critical attitude. In the West, they will encounter this. It is not the study per se that is important, but the social environment, the experience of learning and the understanding of life in a modern society. Those are the important things. (quoted in Munhanif 1998, 317)

The announcement bears the imprint of its time. As a minister in a government determined to achieving development goals, Minister Ali took up the challenge of introducing policy supportive of those goals in the field of religion (Beck 2002, 340–342). He drew heavily upon policy goals developed outside of the religion portfolio. In the late 1960s, the Indonesian government stipulated desirable subjectivities that would support its development planning, such as ‘the development-oriented human’ (manusia pembangunan). Another idealization that is frequently encountered is ‘optimally whole person’ (Ind: manusia seutuhnya). This person was mentioned in the legislative provisions of 1969 that launched the government’s first five year national development project, where it is stated: ‘National development is to be carried out within the framework of the development of the Optimally Whole Indonesian Person’ (Abdulgani 1984, 14–16). This subject was one that would fully benefit from development, while at the same time, would develop its capabilities fully in order to contribute to it (Heraty Noerhadi 1984).

It was not a strain to make this concept a priority of the religious portfolio, for ‘a modern, open and critical attitude’ was conceptually in line with a prominent current of Islamic thinking. Since the early twentieth century, Islamic modernism had thrived in Indonesia. According to this religious programme, when an individual acquired capabilities necessary for flourishing in non-religious domains such as commerce and technology, that person was fulfilling a religious obligation (Peacock 1978). Against this background, the modernizing state’s conception of desirable subjectivity could be unproblematically adopted as a religious ideal also. During Minister Ali’s term, the ‘optimally whole person’ was adapted from the state development programme to become also a policy model for Islamic personhood (Ali 1973, 118).

There was more to this policy change than sending students to western universities. At a broader level, it involved transformational reforms of Indonesia’s Islamic educational system. The basic idea was to make graduates of Islamic education competitive for employment opportunities beside graduates of the non-religious sector. To do this, the Ministry aimed to bring Islamic educational institutions into the orbit of the national education system. This involved: greater and more focussed resourcing of Islamic education; increasing the number of Islamic educational institutions teaching the national curriculum; monitoring quality and achievement of learning goals; decreeing that qualifications from Islamic schools were equivalent with those of the civil system; and developing research environments in the Ministry’s tertiary institutes along the lines of the modern research university (Azra 2015; Makruf 2014).

The Ministry’s success in establishing these research schools within Indonesia has not made study abroad any less important. The enabling of Indonesian students to study overseas remains a core element of the Ministry’s plans. In a 1988 programme that referred specifically back to Minister Ali’s policy change, new resources were made available to train Islamic scholars at MA and doctoral levels in the West (Effendy, Prasetyo, and Subhan 1998, 404). In 2014, the President of the Republic initiated its ‘5000 Overseas Doctorates’ programme, which provides scholarships and works with overseas partners to facilitate graduate study for Indonesians in all fields in sites around the world, including Europe, the Middle-East, Asia and Africa.

Graduate attributes and Islamic practice

On the surface, the Minister’s announcement was about the inner attributes of human subjects; about things which resist reliable empirical testing and quantification. But critically, the policy change was also about the practices humans engage in. Attributes are invisible, but religious practices – rituals, forms of worship and study, genres of communication, performances – are concretely visible. They are frequently made objects of public reflexivity, and Minister Ali was a close observer of them. We know this because many of his speeches and writings convey his ethnographic perspectives of Indonesian Islamic society. As noted, in the 1970s, he was advocating for the policy of creating ‘wholly optimal people’. One particular practice – preaching and listening to preaching – is identified as an impediment to that goal. This is striking because the Islamic preaching routines of Indonesia attract massive participation, especially (but not only) from the large audiences at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Listening to preachers is a highlight of many Muslims’ participation in cycles of ritual, worship and commemoration.

In Minister Ali’s publications, preaching and listening are interpreted as activities that point to the wrong kind of Islamic subjectivity. In taking this position, he was in harmony with the broad thrust of modernist and reformist critique (Millie 2017). Their objections are of a number of kinds. One focusses on the sensuous character of listening, and problematizes the styles of preaching that are popular for the masses. According to this view, those styles point to Muslims enjoying the verbal artifice of clever speakers, and to passive subjects lacking the capacity for deliberation and independent thought (Millie 2017). In one publication, Minister Ali referred to the festive preaching enjoyed at celebrations of Islamic feast days. He affirms that these activities are enjoyable but adds that ‘three or four weeks later people have forgotten that the celebration was even held there. Or perhaps they consider the celebration to be merely a routine event’ (Ali 1973, 82). This is practice that appears to not offer much for the development of the ‘optimally whole person’.

A second view of preaching expressed by Ali (and other reformists) associates preaching with excessive attention to formal correctness in worship and ritual practice. The preacher is held to be responsible for reproducing a religious mindset oriented to formal practice. In Minister Ali’s view, Indonesia’s preachers encouraged the masses to remain preoccupied with correctness in the forms of ritual practice while they ignored substantive challenges impeding their social, economic and political progress: ‘Proselytising (dakwah) and sermons (tabligh) are provided in a very formal way with lots of emphasis on legal requirements (fiqh). This method is wrong’ (Ali 1987, 95). The religious outlook that underpins this critique is characteristically modernist: religious practices ought to work towards mutual benefit, and those do not work for mutual benefit, such as those oriented to ensuring the individual’s place in the afterlife, are misplaced and potentially harmful.³ In Mukti Ali’s view, preachers are responsible for the continuing grip of this view on populations.

The policy statement implicitly conveys an impression about Egyptian academic programmes of the time. I have not found any direct reflections upon those programmes in Minister Ali’s writings, yet it is clear from his announcement that he considered Egyptian programmes of the time to be inferior to western ones for the inculcation of the attributes mentioned in his announcement. Other Indonesian bureaucrats and public intellectuals of Minister Ali’s time were not so reticent in expressing their judgements. A commonly-expressed opinion was that Indonesia’s Muslim students should develop Islamic expertise that would be more responsive to Indonesian realities than the expertise cultivated in the better-established programmes of the Middle-Eastern centres of learning, which progressive intellectuals associated with a stagnation of Islamic knowledge (e.g. Azra 2002; Madjid 1987).

The Minister’s announcement flagged a tension between different classes of Islamic authority. The educational programmes of Minister Ali’s times, in his view, could not overcome the challenges of dealing with rapid social change. Creating Islamic research capacity was the goal of the moment (Ali 1987, 137–146). Minister Ali did not pretend that the ‘open and critical graduates’ would develop knowledge that would replace the established Islamic sciences, for the social science graduates would be doing something new. They would not be experts in religious knowledge as it was widely understood in Indonesia, but in the social science of religion. Nevertheless, it was clear that he intended to create a class of Muslim intellectuals that would train a scientific lens on Indonesian Islamic lifeways. They would have a policy oversight over other classes of Islamic authority. They would be technical experts. It is important that the separation put in place by this policy not be overstated. There are many tensions between currents of Islamic authority in contemporary Indonesia. The separation discussed here is only one of them. Furthermore, Minister Ali was minister at a time when policy innovations were at their most interventionist (Li 2007). Since then, the technical expertise in religion has not been so fulsomely advocated in policy. Nevertheless, as I show below, there are some effects have not diminished as time passes.

Graduate attributes in the bureaucratic era

The effects of the policy turn of which the Minister’s decision was a high point are striking in the present. When he made that announcement, the Islamic bureaucracy and educational system had only recently started to attract significant investment from the Indonesian government. Fifty years later, these have a remarkable institutional presence in Indonesia. Indonesia is a republic that could have developed politically in a way that excluded religion from the state structure, or that encouraged it to atrophy in forms at a distance from the contemporary life of the state, but it has not done so: through the Ministry, Islamic expertise has its place in the bureaucracy. That expertise – open and critical – corresponds to a notion of service to the Islamic community that is quite new. The staff of the bureaucracy and the Ministry’s universities ensure that Islam can be shaped for policy goals: they can frame research projects and develop methods; can understand the policy nuances of problems; can use bibliographic and data resources; write dissertations, reports and refereed articles. These were the competencies that Minister Ali found to be absent in the 1970s. In the present, the Ministry and its universities are internationally acknowledged as providing a solution to problems that, in other countries, have brought more serious tensions to state-society relations.

The class of Islamic experts under discussion here are also admired in the Indonesian public sphere for their achievements and capabilities. In the years after independence, there was great concern from Muslim intellectuals about the relative public status of graduates of Islamic educational programmes in comparison with those of the non-religious universities (Steenbrink 1986). There was great concern that Muslims would be onlookers to the flourishing of modern Indonesia. Minister Ali’s policy turn led to the creation of role models for the Muslim community, of public intellectuals who could contribute to the public sphere because their credentials were of the same level and quality as the graduates of the non-religious universities.

We can trace this public status in publications in which successful Indonesian graduates describe and reflect on their study trajectories in foreign universities. In these books, which invariably bear the label inspiratif (inspiring), we encounter self-narratives in which writers reveal their movement from sites of religious tradition into the domains of the modern research university. In the book From the pesantren to the world: inspiring stories of Islamic students (Hidayat 2016a), staff working in the Ministry’s universities students describe themselves moving through different educational contexts: they commence with initial Qur’anic instruction in the home or village, then progress to Islamic school (pesantren), to primary and secondary school, to an Indonesian university, to a foreign university, to emerge at the end as a successful, independent researcher. The target audience for this literature includes young people in traditional Islamic educational settings who might find inspiration in the stories of the graduates whose origins resemble their own. There is an empowered ambience to these essays, as if the writers are narrating their emancipation in terms anticipated by the Minister’s graduate attributes announcement.

Nevertheless, other Indonesian reflections suggest a lack of harmony between the technical experts and other categories of Islamic expertise. They point out that although the graduate attributes of ‘openness and critical capability’ are necessary for success in the settings of the bureaucracy and the Ministry’s universities, they have far less efficacy in the domains of Islamic practice outside of them. This is the problem of the context-specific nature of graduate attributes that I mentioned above. The problem emerges in Jabali and Jamhari’s (2002) research about the experiences of lecturers at Jakarta’s State Islamic University, the flagship university of the Ministry’s system. One of the lecturers highlighted the disconnectedness:

In my classes [at the Jakarta state university], I give students the freedom to say whatever they wish. They are taught rational concepts, even when interpreting the Qur’an. But after they go back to the community, they should carry out the religious practices the majority performs. (2002, 53)

In other words, the practices and styles cultivated in the ‘rational’ learning environment lack efficacy ‘back in the community’. Another observer, political and social theorist Ahmad Baso (b. 1971), observing the same environment (Jakarta State Islamic University), analysed these mutually exclusive environments in a way that draws attention to the modernizing trajectory implied within it. The dichotomy is not just spatial, but also refers to different points on a teleology of modernity:

They [younger Muslim activists] go to Jakarta to continue their education at a higher level, and to join with a youth organisation or political party […] But of course, independence in Jakarta is only possible as long as there is financial support. The thing is, independence is difficult to obtain if one does not have cash. When the money is finished, they return to their villages. And that, in their view, is a return to the time of ‘pre-history’. (Baso 2006, XIII)

These writers are drawing attention to a disequilibrium that is an effect of the Minister’s announcement. The graduate attributes he idealized point strongly to qualities inhering in individuals, whereas the attributes expected of Islamic experts in many communities correspond to giving service to others. These contrasting conceptions of graduate attributes correspond to different segments of Indonesian society.

And there is also the emancipatory aspect: public representations of the open and critical graduates tend to construct a trajectory in which the learner progresses and flourishes as he or she acquires the attributes of openness and critical capability while moving out of the ‘traditional’ context of Islamic learning and practice. Unavoidably, there is created a hierarchy of attributes, in which certain notions of expertise appear as things to be worked towards, and others as things a person might wish to transcend. This emancipation comes through in some of the entries in From the Pesantren to the World, such as the one following below, which suggests an inevitably to this sense of emancipation:

These notes are a narration of my long experiences as a student (santri) undertaking higher education. I have set out here the intellectual ideals I held to while I was a student in the pesantren and madrasah [institutions where Islam is studied in long-established pedagogical styles]. These were locally shaped ideals that then came into contact with the new intellectualism I encountered at the Jakarta State Islamic University. My intellectual vision developed into a national vision. Finally, I had the chance to carry our research abroad, where my interactions with scholars in the international environment opened up a global awareness. I hope that all this intellectual experience will contribute something to an interdisciplinary model for studying Islam. (Subhan 2016, 319)

This quote highlights the dilemma. The scholar’s remarkable achievement enables him to move between two settings in which contrasting graduate attributes prevail. At the same time, for this class of experts, the journey is a process of personal growth through which the student transcends the limitation of the pesantren and its ‘locally shaped ideals’.

Preachers in the Islamic public sphere

In the preceding sections, I have set out an opposition of sorts between experts of the Islamic bureaucracy and those who do their work in popular preaching routines. In this final part, I wish to be more specific about the notion of marginalization that is relevant here. As I noted above, the separation focussed upon here is only one of a number of tensions within Indonesian Islamic society, so what is it that distinguishes this one from others? For one thing, preachers are not a marginalized class in Indonesia. It is true that during the Suharto era (1967–1998), preachers who challenged the government’s political monopoly were often marginalized by the state, but during the same period, public piety increased with the support of that government, which increased the volume of public preaching activity. Since the end of the Suharto regime, in comparison with other Muslim majority polities of Southeast Asia, the Indonesian state has placed very few constraints on preachers (Millie, Syarif, and Fakhruroji 2020). And modernism has not steered religious policy away from traditional practice in the way it has in, for example, Turkey. Furthermore, although it is undeniable that Middle-East graduates have less success in finding jobs within the Ministry than graduates of Western programmes (Abaza 1993), graduate destinations everywhere are subject to the flourishing of new areas of professional skill and the demise of others. So is there anything substantive to the diversity being discussed here?

I find my answer by looking at Indonesia’s national media, and the way it gives representation to the technical experts and the objects of their expertise. We observe an inequality in the representation of preachers. This inequality is evident in media spheres outside of Indonesia also. Religious styles are resources that feature heavily in the calculus of who is enabled to speak authoritatively as modern about others who are able to be framed as outsiders to modernity (Eisenlohr 2011).⁴ In the present, authoritative voices in the Indonesian media frame preachers as outsiders to modernity in ways that ought to be questioned. Just as the Minister’s advocacy gave universal authority to contextually specific attributes over other versions that prevailed within Indonesian communities, in the present, the technical expert maintains a critical distance from the practices and attributes of preachers. And the attributes have changed from Minister Ali’s time, when the policy was to create Muslims who were ‘optimally whole’. In the current discussion the separation is more about identity-related aspects of democracy (pluralism, liberalism, secularism). And ironically, the preachers who are the objects of oversight are in most cases graduates of Middle-East universities.

I illustrate this point here by referring to a recent special edition of Indonesia’s most widely read current affairs weekly, Tempo magazine. Tempo magazine is something of an institution in Indonesia. Its reputation as a magazine for Indonesia’s Middle-class is based on its high journalist ethics as well as its popularity amongst aspirational readers employed in management and professions (Steele 2005, 165–198). It has a glossy format reminiscent of the U.S.A.’s Time magazine, and carries detailed reportage on economics, Indonesian politics and global affairs, along with expert commentary on these matters. The magazine is popular amongst Muslim readers, but this popularity is not due to any specifically Islamic quality – the magazine purports to be neutral in its religious orientation. Its coverage of Islam tends to frame Islamic society as a national sub-culture.

In June of 2018, it carried a special feature, extending for twelve pages. The subject of the special report was the rising popularity of four preachers, all of them relatively new arrivals on the national scene. The four preachers are known for their face to face preaching as well as their successful adaptation of social media and online platforms. Ten of the special report’s twelve pages described the preachers, along with the social media platforms and optimizers that are so important for their work. As noted above, Middle-East graduates are successful as preachers to a degree out of proportion to their number, so it is not surprising that all of the four featured preachers are graduates of educational programmes in the Middle East: the Sumatran Abdul Somad Batubara (b. 1977), who graduated from Al-Azhar (Egypt) and Dar ul-Hadith (Morrocco); the Salafi-styled preacher 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, 34–35). Importantly, although the report describes their biographies, skills, web-based business model and popularity, it contains no contributions from the preachers themselves.

The remaining two pages of the special feature present something different. We read a commentary about contemporary preaching in Indonesia. The commentary does not mention the four preachers by name, but is clearly directed at them and the broader cohort to which they belong, and the online turn of which they are foremost representatives. The writer of the commentary is the former rector of the Jakarta State Islamic University, Professor Komaruddin Hidayat. He is a high achiever in the bureaucratic domain pioneered by Minister Ali in the 1970s. He served two terms as rector, during which the university continued to develop Islamic studies in the styles of the contemporary social sciences and religious studies programmes in which its staff studied.⁵ He has since been appointed as the rector of Indonesia’s exciting venture into Islamic diplomacy, the Indonesian International Islamic University. In contrast to the fact-filled description of the preceding ten pages, this is commentary by an expert individual: a small photograph of Hidayat appears at the top right, and his professorial role is mentioned in the byline.

In Minister Ali’s day the primary discursive focus of technical expertise was the developmental subjectivity of individual Muslims. In contrast, Hidayat’s commentary is about Indonesia’s Muslim diversity, and the vulnerability of that diversity. Hidayat observes a growing intolerance for diversity in Indonesia, which finds expression in Islamic media and online platforms. Hidayat is one of many commentators to make such observations in contemporary Indonesia, where there is rising concern that the country’s traditions of diversity in Islamic practice and styles might be under threat (Harsono 2019; Maarif 2019). Preachers are held to be the foremost agents of intolerance, and indeed, a number of preachers, including some of the four written about in the Tempo feature, have created public controversy through sermonic utterances that denigrate Indonesian religious identities lying outside Sunni orthodoxy (e.g. Simandjuntak 2021). In these controversies, spokespeople claiming authority to speak on behalf of diverse publics advocate their own positions and denigrate those of their opponents, falling into predictable lines of opposition.

Hidayat’s commentary locates the five Islamic voices (the four preachers and Hidayat) in the same dichotomized positions put in place by the Minister’s announcement and the policy discourse about the ‘wholly optimal person’. The four voices who speak in the communicative styles associated with the embodied routines of Islam are commented upon. The magazine saw no need to convey any of their individual voices or messages. The fifth voice, Hidayat’s, is enabled to speak evaluatively in the mode of expertise, and if we ask why this is the case, we are reminded of Minister Ali’s advocacy for the attributes of ‘open, critical capabilities’: Hidayat’s professorial status confirms him as ‘modern, open and critical’. Tempo presents the routines of Islamic life as the object of commentary by the ‘modern, open and critical’.

This framing resembles the one set in place during Minister Ali’s time, but in 2018 the polarization appears as culture war. Clearly Hidayat is deemed authoritative to objectify the preachers, but it could be queried whether Hidayat is more open-minded and critical than our four preachers. We will never know because of the ways in which contexts and their associated attributes are pitted against each other. Hidayat has the attributes to evaluate the preachers in critical terms, but almost certainly does not have the attributes required to speak to the audiences that embrace the four preachers. The preachers do not have the language, qualifications or profiles to play the role of technical expert, but when it comes to being open-minded and critical, they are surely not Hidayat’s polar opposite. The dichotomization seems to rob our preachers – fluent in styles alien to those prevailing in Tempo’s readership – of the possibility that they might also be considered as ‘modern, open and critical’.

Once again, I do not wish to overstate the separation emerging in the Tempo coverage. For one thing, the magazine is a flagship of the Indonesian media, but it is not the only flagship. Preachers’ voices are heard in other print media, in broadcast and online media. Other spaces in the mainstream of the national mediascape flourish by engaging with the broad popularity of preaching and its centrality to Islamic lifeways. In the early 2000s television producers began to test various formats to attract Muslim viewers. A popular favourite has been the programme entitled ‘Choose your favourite child preacher’, in which talented child preachers are quarantined for the duration of the series while they receive training in preaching, while viewers observe their personality traits and vote for their favourite (Rakhmani 2016, 48–49). Of course such programmes fall on the popular side of the range of public spectacles, but they indicate that Muslims for whom preaching is an important element of religious life find their preferences affirmed on national television. Also, despite Minister Ali’s disposition towards preaching discussed above, the Ministry of Religion has facilitated the study of preaching in its universities within the broader discipline of Communication and Media Studies (Millie 2017). So, the state and the national public sphere have not combined to make preachers the ‘excluded other’ in Indonesia’s contemporary national media (this is the term Harding (2000) uses to describe North American fundamentalist society during the twentieth century). Nevertheless, the separation between technical expert and object of expertise has developed into a tense polarization within Indonesian Islamic society.

Concluding words

The Indonesian government’s commitment to Islamic reforms such as those outlined above is not as strong in the present as it was in the 1970s. In fact, the Ministry of Religion has been backpedalling from that policy setting, which to some degree reflects the authoritarian era in which it was introduced. For example, it has recently introduced policy that recognizes the qualifications of traditional Islamic scholars as equivalent to university degrees, even where the scholar never attended formal education (Azzahra 2020). This is justified on the grounds of equity and inclusion. These grounds point to a significant softening of the developmental priorities that so strongly motivated Indonesian policy in the 1970s.

Although the political setting has changed, this retrospective examination is a valuable one. In two ways, this article adds to the literature about state and Islamic authority in Indonesia. The first is to draw attention to the effects upon the geography of Islamic authority of the government’s project of creating specialized Islamic knowledge about Islamic society. Observers are right to characterize that project as a successful one (e.g. Saeed 1999). The Ministry’s experts create new Islamic knowledge appropriate for contemporary Indonesian conditions. Nevertheless, relations of oversight have been established between classes of Islamic authority. I have highlighted the polarizing effects of the state’s interventions, and the needless distancing between different classes of authority that this engenders. A different take on distancing of this kind is observed by David Kloos and Nor Ismah in this special issue. The gathering of Muslim feminists they describe succeeded by bringing together rather than separating a sociologically variegated range of feminist positions.

I have also drawn attention in the above to the tendency, inherent in the developmental discourse of the 1970s and modernizing programmes more widely, to consider practices as indicators of subjectivities, and to the subsequent policy steps that seek to reform the subjectivity by reforming the practice. In the story told above, a particular version of Muslim graduate attributes was given meaning by being brought into contact with concrete practices, and notably preaching. The effect was to characterize practitioners as anachronistic or in need of reform. The harmful effect of this is to negatively characterize a population through making baseless connections between their internal states and external practices, a basic move of religious reformers in Islam and other religions (Keane 2007). The analysis above suggests we should ask how much religious reform is actually based upon specious connections of this kind, and to what extent idealisations about internal states motivate such connections.

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).

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).

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.