Civic Islam: Muhammadiyah, NU and the Organisational Logic of Consensus-making in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Civil Islam notes a tendency or orientation within Indonesian political Islam that is broadly compatible with electoral democracy and religious pluralism. Scholarly and popular discourses on Islam in Indonesia frequently situate the Muslim civic organisations Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) within this tradition. Muhammadiyah and NU do play important roles in both reproducing democratic norms and upholding the state’s formal commitment to religious pluralism. However, this is not because of an ideological commitment to civil Islam, but rather an organisational logic of risk management – which shapes both the timing of their interventions in politics and the compromise-oriented solutions they propose. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary contention over pornography and the legal status of the Ahmadiyah sect, I argue that these “big tent” organisations seek compromise solutions designed to preserve their own levels of influence and overcome their own internal ideological cleavages. This article thus suggests a new category of analysis – civic Islam – to describe organisations whose policy interventions are driven more by internal factors than by an ideological commitment to the civil Islamic project.

ABSTRACT IN INDONESIAN

Civil Islam memperlihatkan sebuah kecenderungan atau orientasi Islam politik Indonesia yang secara umum kompatibel dengan demokrasi elektoral dan pluralisme agama. Diskursus ilmiah dan populer tentang Islam di Indonesia sering menempatkan organisasi sipil Muslim Muhammadiyah dan Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) dalam kecenderungan atau tradisi ini. Muhammadiyah dan NU memainkan peran penting dalam mereproduksi norma-norma demokrasi serta menegakkan komitmen resmi negara terhadap pluralisme agama. Namun, hal ini bukanlah karena komitmen ideologis mereka terhadap civil Islam, tetapi lebih pada mengikuti logika manajemen risiko dari organisasi – yang menentukan kapan mereka melakukan intervensi politik maupun mengusulkan solusi kompromis. Dengan melakukan analisis atas perdebatan yang terjadi di parlemen terkait pornografi dan status hukum kelompok Ahmadiyah, saya berpendapat bahwa organisasi-organisasi "tenda besar" ini mencari solusi kompromis yang dirancang untuk mempertahankan kekuatan pengaruh mereka sendiri serta mengatasi perpecahan ideologis internal mereka. Artikel ini mengajukan kategori analisis baru – civic Islam – untuk menggambarkan organisasi yang intervensi kebijakannya lebih didorong oleh faktor internal daripada komitmen ideologis terkait dengan gagasan civil Islam.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• Indonesia
• democracy
• civil society

Notes

1. The concept of “civil Islam” is rooted in theories of public religion, a concept that describes situations in which religious organisations retract broad-based claims on the state and instead accept positions of influence within “the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society” (Casanova, 2001; Stepan, 2000).

2. Muhammadiyah and NU are the largest Muslim civic organisations in the world. Muhammadiyah today has about 30 million followers. NU also claims 30 million members, but is thought to have some 100 million followers (Bush, 2014).Since independence, Muhammadiyah and NU have exerted a disproportionate influence on public policy across a broad spectrum of issue types – from the formalisation and regulation of religion to education and healthcare. It is worth noting that, in this article, I generally discuss Muhammadiyah and NU – and their influence on policy – together. However, the two organisations are significantly different from one another in key ways – differences I do not intend to flatten. In fact, Muhammadiyah and NU were both founded during the 1920s as rival religious and educational networks – Muhammadiyah representing Islamic modernism and NU representing traditionalism. Islamic modernism is, in essence, a response to and refutation of traditionalism. More specifically, it is a reform movement that seeks to reconcile economic and political modernisation with a rationalising theology that stresses ijtihad (individual exegesis of the Quran and Sunnah) over traditional Islamic jurisprudence. Traditionalism, by contrast, describes orthodox Muslims who follow the syafi’i mazhab (one of four medieval traditions in Islamic jurisprudence). Despite a competitive dynamic between the two organisations, their leaderships make common cause on public policy far more often than not. Muhammadiyah and NU are also distinct from one another in terms of organisational structure. Muhammadiyah is more or less a modern civic organisation, albeit one with an extremely large membership. NU is, essentially, a modern civic organisation (Pusat Besar Nahdlatul Ulama) that sits atop a decentralised network of autonomous kyai, i.e. ulama who run pesantren (Islamic seminaries). NU-affiliated kyai take religious direction from the organisation, but do not necessarily follow it in policy matters.

3. Kopecky and Mudde (2003) argue that the comparative literature on civil society is overly normative, defining civil society only by whether a group may be coded as “pro-democracy” (and then lumping all others together as “uncivil”). They suggest that these normative biases reduce the analytical effectiveness of empirical work and render “civil society” useless as an analytical category. Instead, they suggest redefining civil society in terms of whether an organisation (a) fills the mediating space between household and state, (b) engages in policy advocacy and activism outside state structures, (c) is autonomous from the state, and (d) has the ability to act as a check on the state. Notably, none of these defining characteristics requires any strong ideological commitment to democracy or liberal values.

4. They are also much more than that. Muhammadiyah was founded as a religious educational foundation promoting Islamic modernism, while NU was (and still is) a network of traditionalist ulama and their seminaries (called pesantren).

5. Indonesia officially recognises Islam, Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese Confucianism. Although individual citizens may practise other faiths, these recognised faiths are granted various forms of institutional privilege. Menchik (2016) describes a pact or understanding among embedded elites within these religious groups that the state is or should be religious but not particularistic among them.

6. Hefner himself does not, in either Civil Islam or subsequent writings, argue that Muhammadiyah or NU is per se civil Islamic. Rather, he observes that civil Islam emerged from these organisations and is represented within them.

7. The notion of “big tent” organisations emerged from the study of US political parties, which are internally heterogeneous coalitions of interest groups.

8. As a consequence of this interpretation of Surah 58, Muhammadiyah instructs its followers to be tolerant of non-Muslims, and to only deviate from that baseline when individuals, organisations or states actively oppress or seek conflict with Islam.

9. Künkler (2013) argues that support for pluralism from within NU and Muhammadiyah is part of an “emergent liberal discourse” in Indonesian Islam.

10. NU, like Muhammadiyah, portrays itself as occupying a middle ground between liberalism and radicalism, and frames that position as distinctly and “authentically” Indonesian.

11. The draft bill was co-sponsored by the much smaller PBB.

12. As part of a broader project on Islam and democratisation (2010–14), I interviewed a number of parliamentarians, parliamentary staffers and personnel from Muhammadiyah and NU with intimate knowledge of this issue and how it unfolded. Two high-ranking members of Muhammadiyah (interviewed in 2011 and 2013), a member of PAN (interviewed in 2011) and a member of PD (interviewed in 2011) all recalled Muhammadiyah’s backdoor intervention but requested anonymity.

13. The term ahlus sunnah wal jama’ah literally means “people of the Sunnah and the Islamic community”. But it is generally used to denote orthodox Sunni Islam. In Indonesia, it is also sometimes used by traditionalists, such as those from NU, to delineate traditionalists (i.e. followers of the four medieval mazhab) from other approaches to Islam.