Islam and Covenantal Pluralism in Indonesia: A Critical Juncture Analysis

Abstract

The ideal of covenantal pluralism is at once timely and challenging. It is timely because, after decades of policy briefs suggesting that free elections and civil society are sufficient to secure democracy, the struggle for pluralist co-existence around the globe remains as unfinished today as ever. The concept is challenging because it leaves unclear how its ideals are to achieve real-world realization—particularly where a portion of the population places an inclusive pluralism low on its list of public-ethical priorities. This article examines this latter tension in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy. Democracy here has heightened debates over whether citizenship is to be universal or religiously differentiated.

Keywords:

• pluralism
• Indonesia
• Islam
• differentiated citizenship
• majoritarianism

The ideal of covenantal pluralism is at once timely and challenging. It is timely because, after decades of policy briefs suggesting that some mix of free elections and civic participation is sufficient to bring about democracy and citizen equality, the struggle for recognition and co-existence in religiously plural societies remains as daunting today as ever. The failure of all but one of the Arab uprisings, the ascendance of hardline variants of Hindutva nationalism in democratic India (Hansen 2019), and the growth of racializing nativism in many Western countries (Beaman 2016), among other examples, have all underscored that received recipes for citizenship and democracy in circumstances of deep plurality are wonting. The time seems right, then, for a new formula for living together in ethnoreligious difference, and that is what the idea of covenantal pluralism seeks to offer.

Its timeliness acknowledged, the concept of covenantal pluralism is also challenging, in the sense that it requires additional specification if it is to have any realistic prospect for acceptance and implementation in societies around the world. In his pioneering formulation of the concept, Chris Seiple has made clear that the concept of covenantal pluralism is more socially robust than the more familiar concept of tolerance. He writes, “Covenantal pluralism moves beyond mere diversity—living side-by-side without engaging one another—to a mutual pledge to engage, respect and protect each other, without necessarily lending moral equivalency to the other’s beliefs or behavior” (Seiple 2018a; cf. Seiple 2018b). He then importantly adds, “Covenantal pluralism includes exclusive truth claims,” in the sense that the charter does not seek to tamper with or relativize the theological truth claims of any given religious community. The concept also “does not seek to assimilate minority beliefs and behaviors—to make their adherents look and act like the majority—but to integrate them as key contributing ingredients to the common good, as fellow citizens. The result is more stability because minority faiths and/or ethnic groups see themselves as a part of the country’s common story, and thus feel like equal and contributing citizens to their country’s common good” (Seiple 2018a).

Although its emphasis on mutual pledges and public-ethical socialization represents a welcome effort to think beyond the abstract intellectualism of other policy recommendations, the concept of covenantal pluralism raises two additional questions. First, what is to be done with those individuals and groups in society who have no interest in covenantal pluralism’s promise of mutual respect and egalitarian inclusivity across religious communities? And second, just what social programs might be needed to bring a particular religious community around to accepting covenantal pluralism as a charter consonant with rather than contradicting their religious convictions and rights? In other words, how is covenantal pluralism to be, not just a worthy ideal, but a lived and widely practiced cultural reality?

Behind these questions lies an equally foundational concern. If it is to become an important public reality rather than simply remain a normative ideal, the willingness to “engage, respect, and protect each other” across religious communities has somehow to come to be seen by most citizens as consistent with their most deeply held ethical convictions. It goes without saying that some sincerely religious people do not regard this ethical premise as consistent with their faith. Even in the secular liberal democracies of the late modern West, some people make clear that they prefer a citizenship differentiated by race, ethnicity, or religion to a covenantally inclusive variety (Beaman 2016).

As one moves to explore the conditions of the possibility of covenantal pluralism’s real-world implementation, then, the question remains as to what kind of social, political, and educational processes might work to deepen public support for this principle of civic equality across religious difference. The question acquires particular urgency where a portion of the population subscribes to a tradition that places citizen equality low on its list of ethical priorities, or sees the concept as so antithetical to its core convictions as to amount to a violation of its religious freedoms.

One way to explore these questions might be by way of a philosophical exercise comparing the concept of covenantal pluralism with some of its normative alternatives, including for example liberal tolerance, civic nationalism, multicultural citizenship, or democratic civility. Such a theoretical exercise offers few insights, however, into just what kinds of changes in society might facilitate a covenantal charter’s reception within communities for whom the concept at first seems unfamiliar or objectionable. A more useful approach, then, might be to explore the concept of covenantal pluralism through empirical case studies of instances where local actors attempt to implement social charters that bear a family resemblance to the ideals of convenantal pluralism, so as to understand just what sort of policies and social circumstances allow the ideal to take hold, and those that do not.

It is this latter approach that I attempt in this essay. In particular, and in keeping with the stated focus of the Review of Faith & International Affairs’ series on covenantal pluralism in Asia, in this essay I examine the achievements and challenges of public charters in the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia that bear a family resemblance to the normative ideal of covenantal pluralism. I pay particular attention to public ethical proposals that attempt to integrate all citizens, including minorities, into the national fabric in a way that extends equal rights and recognition to citizens without requiring them to accept the equivalence of other religions’ truth claims. What makes the Indonesian case especially interesting in this regard is that, although it is a Muslim-majority country, its history is replete with examples of actors and movements promoting public ethics that conform to key portions of the covenantal pluralism ideal. Most of these proposals have been linked to Indonesia’s distinctive legacy of multiconfessional nationalism and, with it, a religiously undifferentiated citizenship. Since the early years of Indonesian independence, this legacy has in turn been linked to the national philosophy known as the “Five Principles” or Pancasila. At the heart of this doctrine is the affirmation that, although Indonesia is based on a “godly” rather than secular nationalism (Menchik 2016), it extends equal citizen rights to members of all recognized religions (see below).

The real-world difficulties these and other inclusive initiatives have encountered in Indonesia point to some of the challenges facing efforts to realize the values of covenantal pluralism in any setting, whether Indonesian or elsewhere. The challenges can be usefully understood, I will suggest, against the backdrop of a critical-juncture approach to citizenship and democracy, details of which I discuss below. But this essay’s core claim is that for any proposal for covenantal pluralism to become culturally ascendant and sustainable, its proponents have to ensure that the concept’s prioritization of citizen equality and inclusivity comes to be embraced by most of the population because seen as consistent with their own core values. This is no easy matter. In Western Europe and the United States today, large portions of the national public subscribe to a notion of “cultural citizenship” (Beaman 2016) that restricts full rights of civic recognition to those citizens sharing certain traits of race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage. In Muslim-majority settings like Indonesia, however, a similar tension often centers on the question of whether covenantal pluralism’s emphasis on citizen equality is compatible with Islamic ethical traditions, not least those associated with unreformed understandings of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Many among these latter ethico-religious traditions regard equality-across-religions, and therefore covenantal pluralism, as deeply antithetical to an authentic profession of Islam (Abou El Fadl 2002; Emon 2012; Kuru 2019).

Covenantalizing Pluralism in Democratic Indonesia

Once regarded as a hopeful model of a Muslim-majority democracy, in recent years Indonesia’s luster in global policy discussions has dimmed somewhat. Just why this has occurred and what it implies for any discussion of covenantal pluralism requires a brief background discussion. With its population of 265 million people, Indonesia is the third most populous electoral democracy in the world. It is also one of the most ethnically diverse, with over four hundred ethnic groups living on 4000 islands stretching across some 3400 miles along the equator. Indonesia is also the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, with 87.2% of citizens officially professing Islam. The remaining population is divided among Protestants and Catholics (9.90%), Hindus (1.69%), Buddhists (0.72.%) and Confucians (0.05%). Although the Indonesian state extends formal recognition to just these six religions, there are several hundred thousand Indonesians who adhere to one among dozens of “indigenous religions” (agama leluhur) or “spirituality traditions” (aliran kepercayaan) in the country. As will be discussed below, in recent years the status of these long-unrecognized religious traditions has become the focus of public debate and judicial review (Maarif 2017; Butt 2019).

Proclaimed a multi-religious republic at the time of its declaration of independence in August 1945, Indonesia enjoyed a brief period of robust parliamentary democracy in the early 1950s (Feith 2006). From the late 1950s onward, however, the country’s democratic institutions were steadily compromised, not least as a result of a four-sided struggle involving the armed forces, Muslim political parties, the Indonesian Communist Party, and then President Sukarno. The struggle culminated in an attempted leftist coup the night of September 30, 1965, which was followed by a counter-coup that brought to power a heretofore little-known army general by the name of Suharto (Cribb 1990; Roosa 2006). For the next 32 years, Suharto ruled Indonesia with an iron fist. But his conservative developmentalist policies also facilitated sustained economic growth, which in turn brought about improvements in the country’s educational system and a steady growth in the country’s middle class (Hefner 2000).

Indonesia undertook a return to electoral democracy in 1998–1999, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis and the mobilization of a large if heterogeneous alliance against Suharto (Aspinall 2005; Bunte and Ufen 2009; Aspinall and Mietzner 2010). Although the coalition that ousted Suharto was ideologically varied (and included significant non-democratic groupings), it enjoyed the support of the Muslim wing of the country’s democracy movement, which was one of the largest and intellectually sophisticated in the Muslim-majority world (Hefner 2000). One of the factors that contributed to the successful reception of democratic and pluralist ideals in the Muslim community was that many of the country’s most influential Muslim leaders—including Abdurrahman Wahid, Nurcholish Madjid, and Syafii Maarif, among others (Hefner 2000; Kersten 2015)—struggled to demonstrate that democracy is compatible with Islam, and democratic citizenship in the Indonesia context is best realized through the ideals of Pancasila nationalism with its promise of religiously undifferentiated citizenship.

In the years following Suharto’s ouster, Indonesia underwent a series of ambitious legal, political, and societal reforms, the outcome of which is central for understanding the state of covenantal pluralism in Indonesia today. The first waves of these reforms suggested that an Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism had indeed set down roots in society. Between 1999 and 2002, the legislature crafted constitutional and legislative reforms, many of them designed to clarify and consolidate both democracy and civic pluralism. In its first two years, the reformasi (“reform”) government passed legislation expanding press freedoms, legalizing independent political parties, and authorizing a referendum on independence in East Timor, which had been forcefully integrated into Indonesia in 1976 (Aspinall 2005). In mid-1999, the national assembly passed laws that launched one of the most far-reaching programs of administrative decentralization the modern world has ever seen, devolving myriad powers and funding from the nation’s capital to provinces, districts, and municipalities (Aspinall and Fealy 2003, 3–4; Schulte Nordholt and van Klinken 2007). The reform-era government also put in place policies designed to move the still-powerful armed forces out of politics, separating the police from the military, removing military commanders from civilian government posts, and severing ties between the military and the once-ruling Golkar party (Honna 2003; Mietzner 2009).

Constitutional and legislative initiatives dealing with religion and religious freedom showed what at first seemed to be a similar, pluralism-affirming profile. Between 2000 and 2002 the Muslim-dominated National Assembly rebuffed efforts by Islamist legislators to change the constitution so as to require the state to implement an Islamist version of “Islamic law” (shariah) for all Muslim citizens (Hosen 2007; Salim 2008; Elson 2013). The effort foundered in part because of stiff opposition from the leadership of the country’s two huge mass-based Muslim organizations, the Muhammadiyah (25–30 million members) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (50–70 million loosely organized social adherents). Although some among their rank-and-file membership saw matters differently, the leadership of both organizations made clear that they preferred Pancasila citizenship to any religiously-differentiated charter. Between 1999 and 2002, Indonesian legislators seemed to crown this list of pluralist accomplishments by crafting constitutional amendments designed to uphold religious freedoms, in a manner that international observers welcomed as broadly consistent with tolerance-enhancing democratic norms (Lindsey and Butt 2016, 20).

One reason reform legislation like this was possible had to do with basic changes that had taken place in Muslim society from the early 1990s onward. First and foremost was the shift noted above: the ascent of a new generation of pro-democracy and pro-Pancasila leaders in the country’s two huge Muslim mass organizations, the “modernist” Muhammadiyah and the reformed “traditionalist” Nahdlatul Ulama. The leadership’s efforts were in turn related to changes in society, including momentous shifts in the character of Islamic higher education. Over the course of Suharto’s “New Order” regime (1966–1998), the government-supported, State Islamic University system (UIN/IAIN) and the private, Muhammadiyah-owned network of (today) more than 160 colleges and universities experienced a massive expansion in both size and influence. Today these and other Islamic educational institutions educate about 20% of Muslim youth; the institutions’ influence on matters of citizenship and plurality is vastly greater (Hefner 2009). Specialists of Islamic education and politics around the world have long recognized the importance of teacher training and educational curricula in efforts to disseminate the ideals and practice of pluralist citizenship (Herrera and Torres 2006; Doumato and Starett 2007). Here in Indonesia in the 1990s, as the country’s movement for democratic reform was gaining momentum, scholars in the State Islamic University system played a major role in crafting Islamic discourses in support of democracy, constitutionalism, and human rights (Abdillah 1997; Saleh 2001; Jabali and Jamhari 2002). In the years since the return to democracy in 1998–1999, Muslim educators have taken these initiatives further, leading the way in the development of civic education programs in Islamic and general higher education (Abdullah 2006; Jackson 2007). Most of these same educational initiatives remain operative and influential still today, and no where more forcefully than in the country’s great network of state-supported Islamic schools. In these and other regards, Muslim intellectuals and educators provided and continue to provide legitimation in Islamic terms for the ideals of democracy and a variety of covenantal citizenship premised on equality across religions.

Survey data in the early reform period confirmed that most of the Muslim public were in broad agreement with the principles of democracy and equal citizenship. However, on matters like inter-religious marriage or whether to allow non-Muslims to erect places of worship in Muslim-majority neighborhoods, they appeared much less tolerant. Moreover, rather than diminishing, tensions of this sort actually increased in the more open environment of the Reformasi period (Ali-Fauzi 2011). No less important, at the grassroots, a startlingly large number of Muslim school teachers, both in state-supported religious schools and public schools, began to convey messages on Muslim supremacism at odds with the national civic educational curriculum and the commitments of Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama leaders to Pancasila pluralism (Syafruddin et al. 2018).

In fact, the broader situation with regard to plurality and inclusivity in society evolved quickly and became considerably more agonistic as Indonesia moved further into the reform era. On one hand, certain trends in civil and political society seemed still consistent with the pluralist spirit of the early post-Suharto period. Most strikingly, the outcome of the national and regional elections held every five years since 1999 indicate that only 15–20% of the electorate favors parties advocating the establishment of a so-called Islamic state (Fealy 2016). The majority of citizens continue to cast their vote for parties broadly supportive of the country’s national political philosophy, the Pancasila (“Five Principles”). During the authoritarian New Order period (1966–1999) the Pancasila was often presented in school programs and state policies in an authoritarian manner, policies that only reinforced conservative Muslim opposition to the charter and to ideals of citizen equality in general. Nonetheless, and all the more remarkably in light of this coercive New Order legacy, most of the Muslim public in the Reform era continued to cast their vote for parties officially committed to Pancasila pluralism and citizen equality. In contrast to these reform-era electoral trends, in 1955 (the last of the country’s free elections prior to today’s reform period), parties advocating the establishment of a so-called Islamic state had won more than 40% of the vote (Lev 1966; Feith 2006).

The recent electoral outcomes are noteworthy for another reason. Even as the majority of voters have opted to steer clear of Islamic-state proposals, Indonesia since the late 1980s has undergone a pronounced resurgence in Islamic religious observance, but one that has not translated into electoral rejection of Pancasila pluralism (Hefner 2018). The resurgence has greatly complicated, however, interfaith relations, and presented new challenges to the proponents of the Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism.

Constructing an Indonesian Covenantal Pluralism

Inasmuch as Indonesian actors or organizations behaved as they did at least in part because of values bearing a family resemblance to covenantal pluralism, the Pancasila would seem to be at their core, and for this reason the meaning of the Pancasila merits additional comment here. The Pancasila is enshrined in the preamble to the Indonesian constitution, and the first of its five principles is arguably the most important. That principle stipulates that, “The state is based on belief in Almighty God [Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa]” (Lindsey and Butt 2016, 21). This principle has been interpreted in diverse ways, but since the Suharto era most Indonesians agree that it implies a rejection of a “secular liberal” or (in Ahmet Kuru’s 2009 terminology) an “assertively secular” sequestering of religion from public life. In the language of modern ethical philosophy, religion in the Indonesian scheme of covenantal things is not just private but a vital public good; it is on the basis of this conviction that the state is enjoined to dedicate resources and staff to its flourishing. This injunction is, one might say, the first principle of an Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism, and one that, it should be noted, is usually interpreted to restrict religious freedom by excluding atheistic non-belief as a legitimate option for public life (Hasani 2016).

On the other hand, and with the notable exception of the country’s Islamist minority, most Indonesian commentators have long agreed that the Pancasila’s first principle also implies that the state should steer clear of any proposal to establish an Islamic state, which is to say a state that enshrines some version of Islamic shariah as its legislative foundation (see Lindsey 2012, 35–65; Elson 2013). Article 29(2) of the Indonesian Constitution seems to buttress this same covenantal principle, stating, “The State guarantees all persons the freedom to embrace their religion and to worship in accordance with their religion (agama) and beliefs [kepercayaan]” (see Lindsey 2016, 21). Although at first blush this formula appears straightforward, its policy implications have remained contentious, in a way that offers lessons with regard to the challenge of consolidating an Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism.

Two issues lie at the heart of the covenantal pluralism problem in Indonesia. The first is legal-constitutional, and has to do with the fact that article 28J(2) in the constitution makes clear that religious freedom and pluralism are not absolute or non-derogable, but may be abridged by the state in the interest of other public goods. The most important of the latter are matters involving “moral considerations, religious values, security and public order in a democratic society” (see Lindsey 2016, 23). “Religious values” and “public order” are rather broad-sweep public interests, and the fact that in certain circumstances they may pre-empt the free exercise of religion suggests that the latter is a derogable freedom indeed. It should be noted, however, that the right to religious freedom is subject to similar restrictions in many countries, including Western liberal democracies (Fox 2012).

Established in 2003 at the height of Indonesia’s post-Suharto reformist euphoria, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has in recent years interpreted article 28J(2) in an even more specific and pluralism-restricting way, and one that appears in tension with conventional understandings of religious freedom. In particular, the court has issued rulings that make clear that an individual’s right to the free exercise of religion can be limited where that individual’s behavior infringes on the rights of the majority. More alarming yet from a covenantal pluralist perspective, the infringement of individual religious freedom is officially allowed where a minority group (including non-conforming sects in Islam, which here in Indonesia is thought by conservative Muslims to include Ahmadis, syncretic Muslims, and even progressive Muslims) promotes a practice of religion at variance with the majority’s understanding of a proper profession of that religion. In a much discussed ruling in 2009, the Constitutional Court upheld Indonesia’s notoriously expansive “Blasphemy Law” (Law 1/PNPS/1965) on just these grounds, affirming that the state had the right to restrict public expressions of religion, like that of Indonesia’s Ahmadis or various new religious movements, in the interest of public order (Bagir 2013; Lindsey 2016, 24). In this instance then, “public order” is defined on the basis of ethical majoritarianism, not a covenantal prioritization of equal rights and mutual recognition across religions. As another scholar of Indonesian constitutional law has recently observed, “this crude method of balancing rights will rarely, if ever, permit acceptable levels of constitutional protection for minorities when their interests do not correspond with those of larger groups” (Butt 2019, 72).

A second issue highlights this same vulnerability, and has to do with both legal and public understandings of the category of “religion” in Indonesia. Many contemporary Americans are used to accepting subjective criteria when defining what constitutes a religion; in other words, religion is any set of ultimate values and practices that an actor herself defines as religion. This broadly subjective definition of religion is, of course, not the accepted legal norm in most Western European democracies, where only some of the associations deemed “religious” by their adherents are legally recognized as such by the state (Fox 2012). Inasmuch as the American subjectivist approach to religion is so rarely the norm in other countries, and inasmuch as Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country, it should come as no surprise that a less subjectivist approach to religion has prevailed in this country. In particular, as noted above, the Indonesian state through its powerful Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA, est. 1946; see Ropi 2012) has extended official recognition and institutional support to only a select number of religions, which today includes the six religions mentioned above. In other words, the constitutional reference to freedom of “religion” (agama) in article 29(2) has been officially extended only to a subset of what an American using subjectivist criteria would regard as the full range of “religions” in Indonesia. Ironically too, the designation of six official religions was never the subject of parliamentary legislation. Its legal status today is instead based on explanatory instructions issued in the aftermath of the Blasphemy Law (Law 1/PNPS/1965) enacted in the final and decidedly authoritarian days of President Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy.”

Importantly, however, article 29(2) of the Indonesian Constitution also extends the right to freedom of religion to groups professing a second set of traditions known in Indonesia as “beliefs” (kepercayaan) or what can be more aptly translated as “spiritual traditions.” Since the founding of the Indonesian republic in 1945 and the establishment of a Ministry of Religious Affairs in January 1946, spiritual traditions have not been given recognition or bureau status within the country’s huge Ministry of Religion (MORA). From its first years to today, many officials in the Muslim-dominated Ministry have been convinced that kepercayaan did not refer to a second category of religiosity also deserving of state recognition, but simply to one among the many ways an adherent to a recognized religion might experience its reality at a personal level (Bagir 2020).

Despite these Ministry misgivings, during Suharto’s New Order, spiritual traditions were given a measure of state recognition and a small institutional perch, not within the Ministry of Religion but within the far less powerful Ministry of Education and Culture. Citizens were not allowed to list spiritual traditions in the religion column featured on birth certificates, national identification cards, and other legal documents. With the rise of the New Order government after 1965–1966, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and other state agencies clamped down even further. These bureaus introduced laws and regulations designed to encourage practitioners of spiritual traditions to repudiate their convictions and adopt one of the country’s state-recognized religions. These policies resulted in the conversion of more than two million people to Islam or Christianity in the early years of the New Order period (Hefner 1993, 2011; Maarif 2017).

In November 2017, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court startled many Indonesian observers when it seemed to reverse years of state discrimination and ruled that government policies requiring all Indonesians to list one of the six recognized religions on their national identity cards and birth certificates were unconstitutional, because a violation of the constitution’s protection of freedom of religion and belief. Citizens adhering to any among the dozens of kepercayaan/spiritual traditions operating in Indonesia were for the first time allowed to list “belief in almighty God” (kepercayaan terhadap Tuhan yang Maha Esa) on their national identification documents. The court made clear that its ruling did not imply that spiritual traditions are the same as or have full legal parity with religions/agama, and the practitioners of these spiritual traditions remain vulnerable to discrimination in education, the workplace, and civil society (see Butt 2019; Bagir 2020). Having attended the first national conference on indigenous religions in Yogyakarta in July 2019, and having done interviews on the island of Sumba with practitioners of a well-known indigenous religion (Marapu) during that same month, however, I have been impressed that, however vulnerable the adherents of these traditions remain in some regards, the Court ruling is a significant step toward greater religious freedom and a more inclusive covenantal pluralism (cf. Maarif 2017; Bagir 2020).

There have been other, less state-based developments in Indonesian society that bear witness to the continuing influence of this Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism. Well before the Constitutional Court ruling, educational and social welfare groups in society had launched initiatives of their own to uphold and deepen Indonesian traditions of pluralist cooperation. First established in 1991 by an alliance of Christian and Muslim leaders, the Yogyakarta-based Interfidei organization greatly expanded its multifaith collaborations in the Reform period, both at the national and regional level (Prasetyo 2019). Working with local state and societal actors, the organization established programs of outreach in areas shaken by religious conflicts, bringing local religious leaders, teachers, students, and business people together for the purposes of multifaith dialogue and peacebuilding. In the early 2000s, the 25-million strong Muhammadiyah launched a series of educational programs designed to open the Muslim organization’s network of high-quality elementary and high schools to non-Muslim students, in an effort, not to convert those students, but to strengthen ties between local Muslim and non-Muslim communities (Mu’ti 2016). The initiative has even led to discussion as to whether the membership of this Muslim mass organization should be opened to non-Muslims. During the unsettled days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nahdlatul Ulama’s security wing (known as Banser) regularly sent in forces to guard Christian churches in areas threatened by hardline Islamist attacks. In 2010, NU launched an ambitious on-line campaign to counteract the dissemination of extremist Islamist views in mosques, schools, and on-line websites. On February 28, 2019, the National Conference of NU Ulama passed a resolution urging all of its members to refrain from using the term kafir (unbeliever) when referring to non-Muslim fellow Indonesians; it instructed the membership instead to refer to non-Muslim Indonesians as muwathinun (“citizens”). The administration of President Joko Widodo (e. 2014) took note of these and other initiatives. In 2017, and with the strong backing of Muslim mass organizations like Nahdlatul Ulama, Widodo established a taskforce which a year later became the Agency for Pancasila Ideology Education (BPIP). Although questions continue to be raised about the dangers of over-politicizing Pancasila education, programs have been relaunched in schools and colleges across Indonesia.

Of course, as the concept of covenantal pluralism makes clear, constitutions and legislation are but some of the ingredients required to create an enduring and proactive practice of citizen inclusion. In Indonesia as in India (Hansen 2019) as well as in many Western democracies, efforts to “covenantalize” pluralism have faced some of their greatest resistance, not just from political parties and segments of the state bureaucracy, but from actors in “civil” society unconvinced that equality-across-plurality should rank high among their menu of public ethical priorities.

A Majoritarian Turn?

By comparison with other Muslim-majority nations at the time of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s, then, Indonesia seemed to have put in place many of the ingredients required to create a civic pluralism of a broadly covenantal sort. In matters of legislation, Islamic education, and the all-important question of intellectual leadership and mass-organizational support for democracy and plural citizenship, Indonesia seemed well ahead of most of its Muslim-majority counterparts. Unfortunately, however, Indonesia’s return to democracy was nothing if not complex, and the complexity was particularly apparent in matters of inter-religious relations.

A number of developments in the early to middle reform period converged to undercut a deeper consolidation of covenantal pluralism. First, many of the impressive laws and constitutional reforms introduced in the early reform period and intended to strengthen religious freedom and the rights of minorities proved to be “flawed or incomplete” because “characterized by a lack of compliance measures and sanctions,” as well as foot-dragging or indifference on the part of the police and prosecutors (Lindsey 2019, 37). Second, and no less vexing, during the first three years of the post-Suharto era, eight of the country’s (today) 34 provinces witnessed outbreaks of fierce ethno-religious violence, the bulk of it in eastern Indonesian provinces where Christians and Muslims live alongside each other in roughly equal proportions (Bertrand 2004; Davidson 2008; Wilson 2008). In its early phases the conflict had as much to do with the political vacuum created by the sudden collapse of the authoritarian state and the launch of a hastily crafted program of political decentralization in 1999–2000 as it did ethnoreligious tensions (see Aspinall and Fealy 2003; Sidel 2006; Van Klinken 2007). However, the violence eventually consumed some 10,000 lives and displaced more than one million people.

In these traumatic circumstances, some Indonesians, especially those in conflict zones, began to see the violence in religious terms. Others concluded that the ideals of Pancasila citizenship were ineffectual in the face of post-New Order conflict. The disappointment of many people with Pancasila principles also reflected the fact that, during his 32 years of rule, Suharto often used the Pancasila as an instrument of political control rather than social inclusion. This caused some popular disillusionment with the philosophy. It also led the parliament to scrap the ambitious program of Pancasila civic education (P4) carried out in schools and offices during the Soeharto regime. However, as noted above, this decision has since been reversed.

A third and even more consequential influence on what has been described as the “conservative turn” in Indonesia Islam (van Bruinessen 2013) has been the growing prominence of another player on the public Islamic scene, the semi-governmental Council of Indonesian Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI). The MUI was created in 1975 to provide a bridge between the government and Islamic scholars (Nur Ichwan 2013; Hasyim 2014). At its founding, the MUI had deliberately excluded Islamists advocating the replacement of the Indonesian nation-state with an Islamic state. Regarded during the New Order period as acquiescent toward the Suharto government (see Hooker 2008), in the first months of the Reformasi era the MUI found itself criticized both by Islamists and progressive Muslims as a tool of regime interests. In the face of these challenges, the post-New Order MUI resolved to show a new spirit by declaring its independence from the state and rebranding itself as a “civil society” organization—albeit one that sought to shape government policy on key religious policies.

A key tactic in the MUI’s expansion strategy was to repudiate its earlier membership rules and recruit to its ranks radical Islamists from groups like the Hizbut Tahrir and the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia. Both of these organizations are hardline Islamist, rejecting democracy as un-Islamic and promoting a Muslim-first differentiated citizenship (cf. Chaplin 2018). Notably absent from the MUI’s campaign of representational outreach were the liberal and progressive Muslims who a few years earlier had figured so prominently in the vanguard of the democracy movement. In keeping with its campaign of conservative outreach, the MUI also rebranded itself as the national guardian of Islamic morality, a morality that it defined in conservative and exclusive rather than pluralist terms. There was no more striking illustration of these trends than a fatwa issued by the MUI in July 2005. The fatwa condemned “secularism, liberalism, and pluralism” as contrary to Islam (Gillespie 2007). The MUI leadership took care to signal that its fatwa was not intended as a repudiation of Pancasila pluralism; indeed MUI officials made clear that the pluralisms to which they objected were those varieties that implied that the truth claims of all religious traditions were equally valid. In Chris Seiple’s formulation of the concept of covenantal pluralism, of course, the relativization of religious truth claims is explicitly rejected; Pancasila pluralism in Indonesia has long been interpreted in a similarly relativism-rejecting manner. Unfortunately, however, hardline Islamist activists in Indonesia were little interested in such normative subtleties, and they understood the MUI rejection of pluralism as a call for state and societal repression of groups deemed religiously deviant (Ind., sesat).

There has been a fourth and final element to the anti-pluralist currents of the reform period. Cities and towns during the early 2000s witnessed a startling proliferation of Islamist militias of varying sizes and disposition. Most claimed to be combating “vice” (maksiat) and justified their actions with reference to the Qur’anic principle of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (al-amr bi 'l-marʿrūf wa 'l-nahy ʿan al-munkar; see Cook 2002; Wilson 2015). The morality militias also invoked MUI pronouncements to justify attacks on Muslim minorities, including the Ahmadiyah and Shi’a, minority sects which comprise about 1–2 percent of the country’s total Muslim population. Islamist militias also targeted other religious minorities. In particular, they escalated attacks on the practitioners of syncretic varieties of Islam (ICG 2010; Human Rights Watch 2013; Telle 2013), and harassed Christians operating in Muslim-majority neighborhoods and towns (Howell 2005; Crouch 2014). Some among the Islamist militias call for the replacement of Indonesia’s democratic system with a state based on these militants’ understanding of shariah law (Osman 2018). But more among the Islamist militias display what Ian Wilson has aptly described as a “populist pragmatic Islamic militancy” (Wilson 2015, 249)—steering clear of full-blown challenges to the state, while also engaging in an “aggressive politics of space localism” (Wilson 2015, 254). Whatever their precise rationale, these actions have had a significant impact on Muslim public opinion, not least with regards to any effort to deepen Indonesian traditions of covenantal pluralism.

These majoritarian currents came to a crescendo in 2016–2017, in the course of the gubernatorial campaign in the nation’s capital district of Jakarta. At a campaign rally on September 27, 2016, the then Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (popularly known as Ahok), made a somewhat offhanded reference to the al-Ma’ida 51 verse in the Qur’an, which counsels Muslim believers not to take Jews and Christians as protectors, allies, or friends. Governor Ahok is an ethnic Chinese Christian who in 2012 had been elected deputy governor of Jakarta for a five-year term, on the ballot with the popular mayor of Surakarta and future president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi). When Jokowi ran for and won Indonesia’s presidential election in 2014, Deputy Governor Ahok automatically moved up into the gubernatorial post. Islamists associated with hardline militias like the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) quickly organized protests objecting to the Christian Chinese-Indonesian’s leadership role, but the campaign failed to gain traction. In fact, in mid-2016, Ahok’s approval ratings in this overwhelmingly Muslim metropolitan region stood at 70%. However, at the late September campaign rally, Ahok told the audience that voters should not be fooled by any among his electoral opponents who invoke the Al-Ma’ida verse to argue that Muslim voters should not vote for a non-Muslim candidate. When Ahok’s political opponents learned of his comments, they posted a redacted video of his remarks on the web. This version of Ahok’s speech made it appear that the Governor was claiming that the Qur’anic verse itself was deliberately misleading, rather than leaders who cite it to justify opposition to his candidacy (IPAC 2018).

If the Governor had actually uttered what his accusers claimed, he had indeed ran afoul of Indonesia’s notorious Law on Religious Blasphemy (see below). However, even a generous interpretation of the Governor’s statement suggested that he had sailed into stormy religious waters. In the months that followed, Islamists joined forces with mainline Muslim conservatives to mount three huge public protests against the Governor. The largest, in December 2016, brought 500–800,000 demonstrators into central Jakarta, making it the biggest Islamist show of force in the nation’s history. Islamists and hardline conservatives also took advantage of the Ahok controversy to appeal for Muslims never to vote for non-Muslim executives, insisting that such behavior is contrary to Qur’anic principles. The unexpected scale of the campaign forced the government of President Joko Widodo to distance itself from the now desperate governor, who soon became the target of prosecution under Indonesia’s blasphemy law. The trial began in the thick of the second round of the gubernatorial campaign, crippling Ahok’s electoral efforts. The embattled governor went on to lose the second round of the elections on April 19, 2017. On May 9, 2017, a North Jakarta District Court found him guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to two years in prison.

The Ahok crisis sent shockwaves through Indonesia’s minority communities. However, my research visits in the months that followed suggested that the shock was even greater in Muslim circles long associated with the promotion of the Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism. The sense of alarm was compounded by the realization that hardline Islamists regarded the anti-Ahok mobilization as a first step in a broader campaign to challenge the presidency of Joko Widodo in the national elections in April 2019. The Islamists hoped to bring the president’s archrival, Prabowo Subianto, to power, along with a slate of Muslim-first advocates in regional elections to be held on the same election day. The former son-in-law of President Suharto, Prabowo had first cultivated ties with hardline Islamists in 1997–1998, when he directed a secret campaign of outreach to Islamists in the hope of dividing and defeating the movement seeking to oust Suharto (Hefner 2000; Purdey 2006). Although his efforts to save the Suharto presidency failed, from that point on the perception in Islamist circles was that Prabowo was a man with whom they could deal. And the issue on which they most hoped to press their case centered on efforts to shift Indonesia away from a religiously inclusive Pancasila pluralism to a Muslim-first differentiated citizenship.

It is not at all clear that Prabowo agreed with this campaign to promote an anti-pluralist variety of citizenship. Prabowo’s 2019 presidential campaign was marked more by appeals to an authoritarian nationalism than it was to Islamism as such. Perhaps most telling in this regard was that Prabowo’s choice for his vice-presidential running mate, Sandiago Uno, was a charming and articulate young business man who, though religiously observant, was not in the least Islamist. By contrast, and illustrating the vulnerabilities of principled pluralism to retail politics, the president, Joko Widodo, responded to the Ahok crisis by picking the controversial chairman of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), Maaruf Amin, as his vice-presidential running mate. The move had multiple motives, but was in part understood as an effort to pre-empt further Islamist challenge by recruiting a conservative Muslim luminary to the president’s camp. The bittersweet irony of Widodo’s choice was that Amin had been the lead signatory of the MUI’s 2005 fatwa against pluralism, secularism, and liberalism; he was also one of the scholars responsible for the 2016 ruling that found Governor Ahok guilty of blasphemy. Whatever his ideological colors, Amin was also from Indonesia’s largest Muslim mass organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama, and his selection succeeded in consolidating Jokowi’s support among rank-and-file members in the huge organization. Jokowi went on to win the April 2019 presidential elections with a solid margin of victory.

Whatever its electoral implications, the legacy of the Ahok crisis has worrying implications for efforts to strengthen covenantal pluralism in Indonesia. In a series of national surveys conducted prior to and after the anti-Ahok campaigns, the political scientists Marcus Mietzner and Burhanuddin Muhtadi (2019) have measured public opinion among Muslim Indonesians on matters of inter-religious relations and pluralist citizenship. Their findings are sobering. Mietzner and Muhtadi find that today a full 1/3 of Indonesian Muslims hold views that are “very intolerant” and an additional 17% “intolerant” on such matters as non-Muslims hosting religious events or building places of worship in Muslim-majority neighborhoods. A full 52% of Muslims object to non-Muslims serving as high-ranking executives in government, an issue at the heart of the Islamist mobilization against Governor Ahok (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2019, 159). As Mietzner and Muhtadi remind us, these levels of intolerance toward non-Muslims are not exceptional by comparison with other Muslim-majority countries; nor do they diverge all that greatly from reported levels of intolerance toward Muslims in Western countries. What is nonetheless striking is that the findings confirm that intolerance among Muslim Indonesians is growing—reversing the trend toward greater tolerance of non-Muslims seen a few years earlier (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2019, 162; cf. Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani 2018).

Mietzner and Muhtadi conclude their study with another research finding relevant for assessing the prospects for covenantal pluralism in Indonesia today. They argue that, “rather than being driven by broader social change,” the uptick in intolerance toward non-Muslims appears to be the result of “religio-political entrepreneurs” working to move the question of non-Muslims into a central position in public discussions of citizenship in Indonesia today (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2019, 173). No less remarkable, although the rank-and-file who flooded the capital’s streets during the anti-Ahok protests came largely from the ranks of the Muslim poor, Mietzner and Muhtadi’s (2019, 173) research discovered that the religio-political entrepreneurs who led the campaign did not: “rich and highly educated Muslims were the key drivers of intolerance.” The success of these well-heeled Islamists illustrates that “Islamist ideas of politics and society are becoming increasingly mainstream,” and thereby contributing to a “slow but perceptible process of democratic deconsolidation” (Mietzner and Muhtadi 2019, 173)—as well as, one could add, the deconsolidation of an Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism.

Conclusion: Indonesia at a Critical Juncture

All modern societies are ever-evolving and variably cohesive assemblies of diverse social groupings, political projects, and social imaginaries (Hannerz 1992; Schielke 2015). Although some contemporary academic fashions suggest otherwise, no single discourse can ever determine more than a portion of a society’s varied fields and ethico-political orientations, not least with regards to matters of inter-religious relations and pluralist co-existence. At certain critical junctures in their development, however, national leaders and political entrepreneurs may attempt to put in place a more-or-less dominant “ideological and institutional legacy” (Kuru 2009) that attempts to establish new ground rules and sensibilities for public life and citizen recognition. As Ahmet Kuru has argued, if it is to endure, the normative work at the heart of such critical junctures must be scaled up and maintained over time by the “establishment of institutions that generate self-reinforcing path-dependent processes” (Kuru 2009, 278; cf. Stepan 2011, 2014). No less important, if it is to remain socially consequential, the charter’s ethical message must be carried beyond the hallways of the state out into society; there, if all goes well, the message can deepen the influence of pluralist values in everyday life.

By all measures, Indonesia today is in the throes of just such a critical juncture, and true to such moments’ dynamics, the terms of how a diverse people should live together and flourish figure prominently in public discussion. A great reassessment of self-identities and sociabilities is taking place in this country. In its most public forms, the process concerns state-related matters of constitutionalism, citizenship, party policies, and national education. However, a significant portion of this public-culture-making is taking place, not in the halls of state, but in what can be described as the public sphere—the “common space in which the members of society … meet through a variety of media … to discuss matters of common interest; and thus to be able to form a common mind about these” (Taylor 2004, 83). It is important to recognize, however, that rather than the public sphere being a space of open and equal recognition, as Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor have sometimes imagined (cf. Calhoun 1992), Islamists in Indonesia have sought to turn the public sphere into an arena to which only Muslims (and only certain varieties of Muslims at that) should have full and equal access. In so doing, the Islamists have sought to reverse the impressive pluralist reforms of the early post-Suharto period, and to delegitimate a robustly inclusive variety of Pancasila pluralism. As the anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen (2019), has observed, a similar manipulation of public sphere dialogue has facilitated a surge in support for the Hindu nationalist far right in Modi’s India in recent years. Something similar is being attempted here in Muslim-majority Indonesia, although its ascendance is far from guaranteed. A new generation of media-savvy Islamists are attempting to exploit the Muslim public’s aspiration to piety and a proper practice of Islam. They are doing so by arguing that an inclusive citizenship, including one that allows non-Muslim to serve in positions of executive leadership, is contrary to Islamic ethical principles. But these anti-pluralist initiatives have in turn given rise to powerful pushback from a loose alliance of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others determined to defend Indonesia’s tradition of covenantal pluralism.

With its unresolved question of what counts as true “religion” and thus qualifies for protection on religious-freedom grounds, Pancasila pluralism has always fallen short of the full covenantal pluralist ideal. But this is part of the lesson to be learned from the Indonesian example: few real-world struggles for covenantal pluralism ever begin on the basis of “grand scheme” (Schielke 2015) ideals alone. Like democracy itself, such initiatives must instead build on associations and vernaculars that give the high ideals of citizen equality and mutual respect local meaning and resonance. As the constitutional and legislative reforms of the early post-Suharto period made clear, Indonesian reformists had for several years made headway in their efforts to advance a locally resonant variety of covenantal pluralism. But the achievement was sectoral rather than uniform across society, in the sense that it was most influential in social circles already committed to the Indonesian variety of covenantal pluralism, and aware of the threat to its continued existence. One of the great ironies of Indonesia’s return to democracy has been that the opening of the public sphere to an agonistic plurality of actors has allowed anti-pluralist and majoritarian voices to be heard more loudly than ever. The constitutional freedoms that have made such speech possible are of course a vital feature of all democratic politics. However, here in Indonesia the development has also allowed Islamist entrepreneurs to take advantage of the Muslim public’s growing piety so as to claim that equality-across-religions is a pluralist priority contrary to Islam.

However disquieting such claims may be to the proponents of pluralist citizenship, the issue at the heart of this Indonesian debate is a serious and legitimate feature of democratic life. It is also one that has non-Islamic but otherwise direct counterparts today in the culture wars raging in the United States and Western Europe. In other words, the debate is an Indonesian illustration of a near-global struggle taking place over just what ethical ideals are to be prioritized in the public square of a democratic society. In this sense, the recent history of covenantal pluralism in contemporary Indonesia points to a sobering but general truth: that the culture of openness, equality, and inclusivity to which a covenantal pluralism aspires can itself offer opportunities for the ascendance of majoritarian movements that place pluralism and equality low on their list of public ethical priorities. But the Indonesian example also illustrates just why, despite the efforts of its detractors, local versions of the covenantal pluralism ideal remain powerfully resonant for large numbers of people around the world.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the journal’s Covenantal Pluralism Series, a project generously supported via a grant to the Institute for Global Engagement from the Templeton Religion Trust.

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Robert W. Hefner

Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology and the former director and associate director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University (1986–2016). He has published or edited some 21 books on religion and politics, Islam and citizenship, and Muslim history and civilization. He is currently producing six documentary films on the politics of religion and citizenship in Indonesia.