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Yes, Indonesia’s mass Islamic organisations are tolerant and democrats. But no, that doesn’t mean their culture can be exported to counter extremism.
Can the solution to Islamic extremism be found in the importation of a more tolerant and democratic culture to the Middle East? This is the question at the heart of recent discussions in the pages of The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Globe about Islam Nusantara (Islam of the archipelago).
Islam Nusantara is the name given to the theology of the world’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) of Indonesia. NU supports democracy, is largely tolerant of religious minorities, and does not seek state implementation of Islamic law. Promoters of Islam Nusantara argue that exporting this aspect of Indonesian Islamic culture can provide the antidote to the disease of Islamic extremism and militant jihadism plaguing the Muslim world.
It’s an instinctively appealing idea. It’s also wrong. The idea that Indonesian culture can be exported is a fiction born of a threefold misunderstanding about NU, the barriers to strengthening democratic values in the Middle East, and the origins of Islamic State (IS).
The term Islam Nusantara was coined in the early 2000s to refer to NU’s theological mix of Sunni Islam, Sufism, and local religious practices like the veneration of the nine saints of Java (the Walisongo). These practices are born out of the structure of NU.
NU is a coalition of Islamic preachers and prominent Javanese families that came together in 1926 to oppose the influence of Islamic modernism, the movement from Egypt launched by Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Muhammad Rasyid Ridha to strengthen Muslims through the promotion of science and a return to the foundational sources of Islam. Instead of reforming Islam, NU seeks to retain its mix of classical Islamic jurisprudence, Sufism, and local traditions rooted in the pilgrimage sites of Java.
Today NU’s opponent is still Islamic modernism as well as its distant cousin, Salafi jihadism. And despite what proponents of Islam Nusantara say, NU’s tolerance is selective.
Its tolerance of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians stands in stark contrast to its longstanding intolerance of Ahmadi Muslims and communists. The reason for this discrepancy is that Christians and the other accepted minorities have been important allies for NU in its struggle against Islamic modernism, while communists and Ahmadis are seen as a threat to NU and the Indonesian nation.
Certainly it is important to counter the idea that Islam and IS are the same. And it is true that NU’s tolerant culture has been crucial for the success of Indonesian democracy. But exporting a partial aspect of Javanese traditionalist Islam without the institutional, familiar, or local structure that supports it is unlikely to have much influence. This is indeed why NU has not spread beyond Indonesia in the 90 years since it was founded.
NU’s beliefs are compatible with democracy. But as survey researchers have long known (and reported repeatedly here, here and here), so are the views of most of the world’s Muslims. The barriers to democracy in the Muslim world are political and economic, not cultural.
IS was born in the same conditions in which the Taliban and Hamas were born, in places where there is no meaningful political representation or political order. The prolonged civil war in Syria and failed reconstruction of Iraq created a power vacuum that IS filled.
By contrast to the situation in Iraq and Syria, an environment of sustained political engagement provided the context in which the political aspects of Islam Nusantara were developed.
In the 1920s NU’s religious theology was accompanied by a political vision for an international Caliphate and Islamic state. But Indonesia provides strong evidence that if you allow Islamic organisations to participate in the political process they will moderate their demands and become part of the system rather than seek to overthrow it.
Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Indonesian Islamic organisations like NU that have participated in crafting the policies of the state have implicitly or explicitly moderated their views.
Their leaders have shifted from being pan-Islamists who seek a global Caliphate, to Indonesian Islamists who aim to create an Indonesian Islamic State, to Indonesian Muslim pluralists who actively work with other religious and ideological groups and promise to safeguard their rights, to post-Islamists who view Islam as complementary to other ways of organising politics and society. They have moderated through participation.
While there are exceptions to this trend, most notably the “new Islamists” who generate dramatic headlines but possess little electoral or social influence, the overall trend toward moderation is clear — include Islamists in the political process, and over time their ideologies and tactics will moderate toward support for democracy. This is the opposite of what has happened in Iraq and Syria, where despots with foreign backing have coopted Islamists or actively oppressed them.
The idea of exporting a more tolerant culture is a prime example of what the anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani calls “culture talk”; the predilection to define Islamic cultures according to their ‘essential’ characteristics in order to sort good Muslims from bad Muslims rather than discussing the specific conditions under which extremist movements emerge. It is a shallow and escapist way of thinking about the problem of Islamic extremism.
An example may help illustrate the problem of culture talk. What if we turned the logic of exporting culture around? Since Britain has almost zero gun violence, and the United States has an epidemic of gun violence, perhaps the problem could be solved by importing British culture to the United States?
Such a solution may be appealing at first glance, but it’s a fanciful way of thinking about a problem that would be better addressed through normal policies. In the case of IS, that means supporting more representative political institutions and equitable economies, and reducing support for militarism in the Middle East.
Jeremy Menchik is assistant professor in the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His book Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
I have a slight disagreement towards the article. When he said that “ …exporting a partial aspect of Javanese traditionalist Islam without the institutional, familiar, or local structure that supports it is unlikely to have much influence.” He overtly generalized the similarities of culture and local institutions within Indonesia such as the interplay of influence between the Javanese Islam with the outer region such as Sumatra, Kalimantan, or Sulawesi; where, in fact, are fundamentally different.
I am also not very sure whether the benign element of the Islam Nusantara is embedded within the cultural aspect, especially the Javanese culture; hence it is not transferable. I think, to some extent, outer-island Moslems, who are not very familiar and very well expose with Javanese culture, are also benign and tolerant, even more in comparison to some part of Java such as West Java or East Java. I think majority of Moslems in Indonesia (especially outside Java) are used to live in complex and multicultural environment that are continuously changing.
Maybe it is worth exploring whether the credit of success is stemming on the Indonesian government policies or can also because of the shared history that bound the population together.
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The argument of Islam Nusantara is not that Indonesian culture can be exported, but that Islam is justifiably influence by culture wherever it exists.
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I agree with Keith’s comment. Jeremy’s article missed the core elements of Islam Nusantara –a local Islam; not a global Islam. What we need to export to Middle East or to Australia is not the form of “Javanese Islam” as the article told us, but its idea that Islam accommodates local culture and values; be it in Middle East, America or Australia. So we dont need to transplant Islam Nusantara to other countries –just what US has attempted with its democracy. Instead, what we should do is to develop a local Islam so we will have Islam Nusantara in Indonesia, Australian Islam, American Islam etc. Indeed, Islam has many different faces.
The message is clear: Arab Islam is not the only version of Islam. In this sense, a global Islam as IS tries to spread is not only wrong but does not represent Islam –that’s what the supporters of Islam Nusantara try to claim.
Jeremy’s article not only missed the main issues of Islam Nusantara, but he also mispotrayed NU and its history and development. Too bad 🙁
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Pak Nadir, I think Jeremy’s analysis uses the lens similar to that developed in the social theory movement, i.e. the “political opportunity structure”. The main point of his analysis–this is my take–is that the kind of Islam Nusantara can only be developed in the political and cultural context relatively unique to Nusantara, which is not there in Arab countries. It is the “political structure” of Nusantara that has made the development of Islam Nusantara possible. And because of the differing political structure, Islam Nusantara cannot be copied to other contexts.
I also argue that merely looking at the theological and fiqh dimension (e.g. accomodation of local cultures) while overlooking the cultural and political context of respective countries may fall into essentialist fallacy. On this, you can compare NU with, for example, Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt and then pose a question: What makes MB gain more international influence (having sort of ‘franchises’ in other Arab and non-Arab countries, including Indonesia) than NU yet MB fails to reach a success in the democratization process like that of NU? Most likely it is because the political structure and cultural context of both Egypt and Indonesia is different.
No less important, what you mean by Arab Islam, as compared to Indonesian Islam, should be clearly defined: You didn’t mean IS represents a kind of Arab Islam, did you?
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The far important question, which will help define Islam in Indonesia, is what is WRONG with Islam in Indonesia. Specifically, who and why allows so many to be brainwashed into believing that Shi’a, Ahmadi, Ismaili Muslims and Bahai’s should be persecuted in Indonesia. Like Malaysia, perhaps some Sunni Muslims (the normal branch of Islam in Indonesia) are unwilling that they are insecure and, like fellow Malays, have to bash Islamic sects, to prove both zealotry and manhood. One thing that typifies Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia, is the inability to Sunni (all schools) and 12ther Shi’a (in Iran and Lebanon) to tolerate each other, and neither sect can tolerate, smaller non-violent Islamic sects. Instead of bashing Ahmadiyya people, Indonesians would do well to learn WHY Ahmadiyyah and Ismaili Muslims, Bahai’s, Hindus, Christians (mostly) are NON-VIOLENT in Indonesia and self-examine (look in the mirror) why you ARE violent. ISIS is not recruiting Ahmadiyya Muslims or Bahai’s or Hindus, and there is a fairly obvious reason for that, that lies in the Quran, Hadith, Sunnah, Sira and Fiqh. Indonesians and Malays are simply not (for the most part) courageous enough to admit they are insecure, afraid of other Muslims, and waste time imitating Arabs, which makes both Indonesian and Malay Muslims look immature, insecure and self-mockeries of what Islam was originally in the Archipelago, a far more tolerant variant of Sufi Islam
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Peter Cohen, your question is important. Yet it is also important not to oversimplify, by saying “so many to be brainwashed” and that Indonesians imitate Arabs and are insecure. (Btw, have you ever lived in or done research on Indonesia like Jeremy Menchik did?). It is many in numbers, yet not many in ratio: As a whole, Indonesian Islam is still better, if not much better, than Islam in Arab countries–though of course it doesn’t mean Indonesia is already ideal and perfect. One thing for you to look in the mirror too: Compare sectarianism in Indonesia with Islamophobia in the West. I hope you will find similarities in the way how it is politically instrumentalized.
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Azis, I don’t think there is all that much Islamophobia in the West (or India or China, whose populations overwhelmingly detest Islam) but rather there are a large number of Islamocontemnos. A Latin root so different from -phobe but much more accurate. Please look it up.
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Indonesian needs to be reminded of how things gets to this mess. From a bunch of sumatran visited mecca century ago and wanting to turn the indies into a desert caliphate upon return. Thus the Paderi war which basically tried to eliminate indigenous cultures.
Indonesia is too frightened to question the very concept imposed by their Arab overlord. Too scared to realize that just like communism, it is basically a failed but violent ideology. Which will render their whole life as a lie.
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