Muslim Intellectuals in Indonesia

Indonesia is increasingly identified as an upcoming global powerhouse ready to join the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), but too little importance is attached to the fact that it is also the most populous Muslim nation-state in the world—one in every five Muslims lives in maritime Southeast Asia. Generally international attention only focuses on the country’s economic potential in terms of natural and human resources, and this tropical island world between India and China is only seldom associated with Islam. However, in the wake of the seismic changes affecting the Middle East since the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, a latent awareness is beginning to develop that the country’s political experiences of the last fifteen years could offer an alternative between a hard secular state and an uncompromising Islamist polity. This means that if Indonesia’s achievements in accommodating religion in the public sphere and nourishing Islamic intellectual contributions were to receive the recognition they deserve, the potential impact on the rest of the Muslim world could be very substantial. Indonesia’s own growing assertiveness on the global stage is reflected in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s ambition to position the country as ‘bridge’, connecting Asia, the Muslim World, and the West.

To some extent this combination of neglect and ignorance is understandable. The general tendency to identify Islam with the Middle East and North Africa not only makes sense from a historical point of view; after all, Arabia is the cradle from where Islam first spread north and eastwards into the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and in a westerly direction into Egypt, Libya and the Maghreb. Also at the present day, it cannot be denied that many complicated political-religious issues that grip global media attention are concentrated in the Middle East. Also for the reasons of geographical proximity, Turkey under the AKP is always mentioned as an example of a ‘third way’ between secularism and Islamism, while Indonesia is generally ignored.

Aside from a lack of awareness of the Muslim archipelago’s demographic preponderance, there is also the persistent misconception that, because they find themselves on the geographical periphery of the Islamic world, Indonesia’s majority population must be considered as ‘marginal Muslims’. While it is true that Indonesia is located in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment, itself home to a plurality of religions, it is nevertheless wrong to think that its historical experiences with the Indic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism somehow reduce Islam to a ‘thin veneer’ over these earlier and supposedly more venerable South Asian religious deposits. 

There are at least two reasons why it is hard to root out these erroneous views. The first is the idea that Southeast Asians only turned to Islam when it presented itself in the allegedly syncretic form of Sufism, as suggested by early scholarship on the arrival of Islam in the region. The second, more contemporary, factor does not come from historiography but the social sciences. In 1960, the influential American anthropologist Clifford Geertz published The Religion of Java, in which he recorded the findings of his field work in a Central Javanese town. Geertz used an indigenous system of religious classification, at the time when he was insufficiently alert to how local opinions and preconceptions impact on the ways in which people were categorized as  santri (pious and usually urban Muslims), priyayi (aristocrats privy to court culture), and abangan (‘nominal Muslims’ belonging to the peasantry). Most of Geertz’s informants self-identified as santri, regarding themselves as practicing Muslims who observed the ibadat or acts of worship in the unadulterated form imported from the Middle East as Islamic reformism and modernism made their way to Indonesia.  Others were either dismissed as lapsed Muslims or as syncretists. Its inaccuracy was exacerbated when others, including Indonesian Muslims themselves, extrapolated Geertz’s taxonomy and began applying Javanese religious categories to Southeast Asian Islam in general. 

Ethnographic work conducted since the 1980s by subsequent generations of anthropologists provides an important corrective to these misapprehensions. They have demonstrated that Islam is firmly rooted in cultural settings as diverse as those of East Java, the Central-Javanese court of Yogyakarta, or the Gayo Highlands on the island of Sumatra. In a similar fashion, research conducted by historians re-examining the Islamization process evinces that centuries of interaction with the areas on the Western side of the Indian Ocean have thoroughly integrated Southeast Asia into the wider Muslim world. These advances have also established that the active and sustained participation of Southeast Asian Muslims in these intellectual networks has given them intimate familiarity with the shared body of Islamic learning in the Dar al-Islam. These findings have driven home the realization that Indonesians and Malays were not passive recipients of religious knowledge, but exercised agency in the formation of a distinct regional Islamic culture. To better appreciate the current achievements of contemporary Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, and the possible contributions or lessons they have to offer to other parts of the present-day Muslim world, it will be helpful to make a more detailed historical excursion into the region’s Islamization.

Historical excursion

To make sense of this process, three questions need addressing: when did Islam come to Southeast Asia? Where did it come from? And who were involved in its introduction and further development?

In spite of a paucity of data on the exact time of Islam’s arrival, there is a scholarly consensus that while Southeast Asian contacts with the Middle East go back to pre-Islamic times, the earliest indications of the religion’s incursions among the native population only become discernible in the fourteenth century. Historians also agree that Islam was brought in and spread by peaceful means rather than conquest. Moreover, the acceptance of Islam by Southeast Asians was not the result of a single act of conversion, but the outcome of a lengthy process, moving from symbolic adhesion alongside other religious practices to a gradually more exclusive embrace of Islam. It has also become clear that it is not a uniform process. Contacts of an area as large and culturally diverse as the Malay-Indonesian archipelago with other parts of the Muslim world were extensive and therefore it is not possible to formulate what one specialist of Southeast Asian Islam, Anthony Johns, called a ‘single big-bang theory’. Instead it is more fruitful to explain the process as having ‘a variety of starting points’ and ‘numerous modalities for its diffusion’. 

Pioneering the history of Islam in their East Indies colony, nineteenth-century Dutch scholars suggested different parts of the Muslim world as the provenance of Southeast Asian Islam, including Arabia, Egypt, and South Asia. While the Dutch had a preference for West Indian points of origin such as Gujarat and the Malabar Coast, British historians opted for Bengal and the Coromandel, probably because of their geographical proximity. Common sense would suggest this too, but later research supports the plausibility of direct contacts between Southeast Asia and centres of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The arguments for this relatively new conjecture hinges on calling into question what seems to be manifestly obvious: that Islam travelled along the trade routes connecting the Middle East to Southeast Asia via the Subcontinent. However, this leaves unexplained the five-hundred year delay between the conversion of South Asia and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. Besides this temporal puzzle, as part of his efforts to develop a multifarious understanding of Southeast Asia’s Islamization process, Johns was also right to point out that ‘it is not usual to think of sailors and merchants as bearers of religion’. After all, if that were the case, why did Southeast Asians not accept Chinese religions, as Farid Alatas another sceptic of the mercantile thesis, observed.

An alternative, more sophisticated and therefore probably more accurate, understanding of this process can now be fleshed out thanks on the basis of meticulous textual studies by scholars who combine a rather rare solid grounding in Arabic, Malay, and other Southeast Asian languages. The resultant mapping of scholarly networks provides the architecture for a model that illustrates the exchange of ideas between different parts of the Muslim world, with the Indian Ocean functioning as a contact zone. Through this work, it has become evident that knowledge of things Islamic was not limited to Sufism alone, but extended to the wider body of religious learning circulating in the classical world of Islam. From the seventeenth century onwards there is concrete evidence of a distinct Southeast Asian Islamic culture which employs Malay written in Arabic script (known as Jawi) as its chief medium  and relied on a unique system of local Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren  to function as the primarily vehicle for the transmission and preservation of that knowledge. 

The first names of Indonesian literary figures also emerged during this period. It is an era of  mystical poets, religious scholars conversant with Qur’an commentaries, jurisprudence, theology, the highly sophisticated ideas associated with the theosophy of Muhyiddin ibn al-Arabi, and even ‘western’ rationalist thinking in the form of Greek philosophy preserved by earlier Arab-Islamic thinkers. Individuals such as the Poet-mystic Hamza Fansuri (d. ca. 1590), or jurists like Shamsuddin of Pasai (d. 1630) and Nuruddin al-Raniri (d. 1658), and Qur’an commentators such as Abd al-Rauf al-Singkili (d. 1690) can be considered the first Southeast Asian Muslim intellectuals.

It is this rapprochement between shariah-oriented ulama - in particular the jurists - and Sufis, resulting in the rise of neo-Sufism, which is the most salient feature of these scholarly exchanges. That is the view of Azyumardi Azra, the Indonesian historian whose mapping of these networks has done more than anything else for making a convincing argument that Southeast Asians were active participants in these intellectual exchanges, both locally and as expatriates in the Middle Eastern centres of Islamic learning. Ideas travelled, and were sustained throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as scholarly networks continued to provide the conduits for Islamic renewal, reformism, and modernity, and eventually also for the innovative ideas of the present day, to reach Southeast Asia and find particularly fertile soil in Indonesia.

According to the Princeton-based Australian Arabist and Indonesianist, Michael Laffan, these more recent historical links are even more poorly understood than the earlier ones, betraying a weakness in the field of area studies as scholars seem disinclined to consider work done in geographic areas outside their own purview. Laffan’s Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia maintains not only that Muslim Southeast Asia forms an integral part of the wider Muslim world, but it is also important because it challenges the widespread acceptance of Geertz’s typology, which Laffan sees as a cause for the ‘gap in informed knowledge of Islam in Southeast Asia as it relates to West Asia’.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the West’s relationship with the archipelago was drastically redefined, resulting in the complete subjugation of maritime Southeast Asia to Dutch and British rule. But there was also a parallel increase in the communications with the ‘heartland of Islam’. Alongside these external developments, locally there was a changing of the guard in the opposition to European encroachment on the region. The Java War (1825-30) constituted the last rebellion led by a scion of the priyayi ruling class, but in the protracted Sumatran Padri wars (1803-41), which had started out as a reformist challenge of internal political structures in the West Sumatran Minangkabau region by returning Hajjis inspired by successes of the Wahhabis in Arabia, ‘shari‛ah-minded’ ulama found themselves pitched against the Dutch colonial authorities and local collaborating chieftains.

Contacts with other Muslim communities - both abroad and at home - also fostered seemingly contradictory ideas of both local and Islamic identities, a simultaneous sense of what Laffan termed ‘both Islamic communitas and Jawi ecumenism’. As an early form of globalization these trans-oceanic contacts, rapidly expanding thanks to the introduction of the steamship, drove home the realization that globalization has as its antithesis a renewed interest in cultural origins and in exploring questions of identity. Even far away from their homelands, while coming face to face with Muslims from all over the world during their visits to Mecca and Medina, the Jawi pilgrims had also the opportunity to ‘merge with the kernel of the Jawi ecumene abroad’. 

Another technological innovation that also contributed greatly to the dissemination of reformist thought in the Muslim world was the introduction of the printing press. Publishing houses in Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca produced not only Arabic-language texts, they were also involved in printing materials in Jawi. With these emerging printing houses, modern journalism made its first appearance in the Muslim world and would soon become the key medium through which Islamic reformist and modernist ideas were spread throughout the Muslim world. In insular Southeast Asia itself, Palembang, Padang, Patani, Penang, but especially Singapore, established themselves as the major centres for the publication of books, journals, and other periodicals in Malay – printed both in Jawi, but increasingly also in Rumi, or Latin, script.

In this changing environment of increasingly intense contacts, a different kind of Muslim intellectual was on the rise; one more open to the ideas that were now percolating through from another centre of Islamic learning, and hub of a new wave of Islamic reform: Cairo. ‘Cairene reformism’ was inspired by the Panislamist campaigns of the late nineteenth century reformist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and  the writings of Muhammad ‛Abduh, the Mufti of Egypt, and his disciple, Rashid Rida. It is important to recognize the importance of the parallel exposure of upper-class Egyptian students and a select native elite in the Dutch East Indies to Western knowledge for the acceptance of ‛Abduh’s reform agenda, which envisaged that Muslims would emancipate themselves by taking advantage of all available knowledge, including Western learning.

Put together, these paradoxical trends were breeding the kind of fertile cultural hybridity that goes a long way in explaining the propensity of modern and contemporary Indonesian Muslim intellectuals to adopt and creatively adapt ideas of varying provenance. A tendency that gained momentum in the twentieth century, particularly after the colony of the Dutch East Indies became the independent Republic of Indonesia.

Late colonial and early independent intellectuals

The Dutch colonial authorities had been extremely concerned over the spread of Pan-Islamism and all the Islamic fermentation at the turn of the century. They would always clamp down without compromise on any manifestations of political Islamic activism. This repression left Muslim activists no option but to explore alternative avenues for the emancipation of their constituencies. Instead of steering a confrontational course, they shifted their focus to education, charity, and what would now be called grassroots social work. 

The first initiatives for this kind of activities emerged from modernist Islamic circles, leading to the establishment, in 1912, of both the Sarekat Islam (SI) and the Muhammadiyah. The former started out as a union representing the interests of small Muslim traders, but soon became a general advocacy group for modernist Islamic activists. Eventually its effectiveness was undermined due to internal power struggles, leading to the organization’s collapse. The Muhammadiyah was established by a religious scholar named Ahmad Dahlan (1868-1923) in the Central Javanese city Yogyakarta, seat of one of only two remaining Javanese sultanates. More traditionally inclined ulama in East Java felt threatened by this modernist challenge to their religious authority and responded in 1926 by establishing the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). In the ensuing decades the Muhammadiyah and NU would develop into huge mass organizations and continue to dominate Islamic activism until the present day, each commanding the loyalty of tens of millions of adherents. With its powerbase in the pesantren world of East Java, the NU has remained very much a Javanese movement, while the Muhammadiyah has been much more successful in branching out into the other islands of the Indonesian archipelago. It is worth remembering that these two movements, at the geographical fringe of the Islamic world, predate the much more renowned Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood by more than fifteen years and have support bases that dwarve those of its Middle Eastern counterpart.

From the 1920s onwards, the ideas of Cairene reformism, disseminated globally by Al-Manar, the periodical edited by Rashid Rida, were echoed in comparable Indonesian modernist Islamic organs like Seruan Azhar and Al-Munir. Numerous future Muslim leaders, such as Raden Fath al-Rahman Kafrawi, Abdul Kahar Muzakkir, and Mohammad Rasjidi spent time in Cairo during the pre-war years. Reformist ideas reached the Dutch East Indies not only through these returning students; it was also spread by expatriates who came to Indonesia, like the Sudanese Ahmad Surkati, who was brought in to help the Muhammadiyah in setting up an Islamic education system with Ottoman  and Hadhrami support. 

 Scholars receiving religious training in either traditionalist or modernist Islamic schools were not the only ones driving Islamic discourses in Indonesia, other figures such as Muhammad Natsir (1908-1993) also started coming to the fore during this period. In spite of being a product of the colonial secular education system and without any formal Islamic training, he became a prominent educator, publicist and activist, developing into Indonesia’s leading post-war Muslim politician and most high profile international Indonesian Muslim figure through his involvement in the Saudi-based Muslim World League. Natsir’s background reflects what the Dutch theologian and historian Karel Steenbrink has identified as the key feature of Indonesian Muslim intellectualism since the late nineteenth century. According to him, the crucial divide is no longer between Mecca-trained traditionalists and Cairene modernists, but between  recipients of a secular Western education and those who devoted their youth to religious studies, either in Indonesia or in Mecca, Cairo, or elsewhere. 

In the 1930s, Natsir began expounding the view that state and religion were indivisible. He deplored the Turkish secular state model introduced by Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, who was greatly admired by Indonesia’s leading nationalist and first president, Soekarno. This increasing assertiveness of Muslim activists can be partly explained by the growing competition from Christian missionaries, secular-nationalist intellectuals and proponents of Javanese mysticism. Consequently, during the Second World War, Muslim independence activists began courting the Japanese. Recognizing the strong ties of Muslim leaders to the populace, they showed none of the hesitation of the Dutch about allowing Muslims into the political domain. In 1943, the Japanese established a ‘Consultative Council of Muslim Indonesians’ (Madjelis Sjuro Muslimin Indonesia, abbreviated to Masjumi or Masyumi in the current spelling). Both the Muhammadiyah and NU joined the organization, so that, by the end of the war, Muslim activists and politicians had obtained positions of strength which they had never enjoyed during Dutch colonial times.  

However, although Natsir succeeded in turning Masyumi into the leading Islamic party, he was outmaneuvered by Soekarno and his allies and thus failed to translate his party’s advantageous position into political capital. Initially it had seemed as if an agreement regarding the position of Islam in the Republic of Indonesia had been reached on the basis of an accord that has become known as the ‘Jakarta Charter’ (Piagam Jakarta). Apart from the recognition of a belief in one God as its founding principle, the Charter’s most crucial stipulation from the perspective of Masyumi was ‘the obligation for the adherents of Islam to practice Islamic Law’ (dengan kewajiban mendjalankan Sjari’at Islam bagi pemuluk-pemuluknja, henceforth referred to as ‘the seven words’). Because he was worried about potential divisiveness of such a phrase in the constitution of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation-state like Indonesia, Soekarno dropped it at the last minute from the preamble of the country’s constitution. 

Instead, the president of the freshly proclaimed republic introduced his Panca Sila or Doctrine of Five Principles - one of which re-iterated the belief in one God (Ke-Tuhanan Yang Maha Esa). But the implementation of the crucial ‘seven words’ remained a core objective for the Masyumi leadership. It was the increasing internal bickering among the various Islamic blocs within the party, throughout the first decade of independence that prevented the realization of this aim. Consequently, by 1955, observers were debating if Indonesia could even be considered a truly Muslim country – let alone an Islamic state. Islam’s position in Indonesia was deliberately left diffuse by the government, so that the country could not be considered as an Islamic state according to orthodox Islamic conceptions, but neither was it a secular state where religion was a strictly private matter or entirely banned from public life, as in the case of Turkey, for example. Instead, Indonesians ended up with a form of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylors calls ‘soft secularism’. The country’s political system did not ban religion from the public sphere; it only tried to control it. In both the Indonesian and Turkish instances this leads to the interesting, almost ironical, situation where two states which try, in different degrees, to keep religion out of politics, exercise that control through behemoth ministries of religious affairs.

 Between the mid-1950s and 1960s, Indonesia’s political situation grew increasingly instable, further aggravating Islam’s precarious position in the state structures. By then, certain frustrated Muslims had already turned against the central government, with armed rebellions breaking out in West Java, South Sulawesi, and the North Sumatran province of Aceh. While Masyumi withdrew from the cabinet, the leaders of the Muhammadiyah and NU, as well as Muslim intellectuals such as Hamka (1908-1981), the leading writer of Islamic books, continued to argue in vain for the re-instatement of the ‘seven words’. Then, in 1959, Soekarno broke the political impasse by re-instating the 1945 constitution and giving himself sweeping powers as part of the so-called ‘Guided Democracy’ system. This tense and repressive political climate meant that the chances for Muslims to get the Jakarta Charter accepted had become even slimmer. 

Despite these political tribulations, Indonesia also witnessed some positive developments, especially in regards to the internal consolidation of Indonesia’s Muslim community. The introduction of a state Islamic education system provided and supervised through the Ministry of Religion played a central role in this process. In particular, institutions for tertiary education would become very important for the further development of Muslim intellectualism in Indonesia.

As early as the summer of 1945, Vice President-designate Muhammad Hatta (1902-1980), Masyumi leader Natsir, and the NU’s Wahid Hasyim (1914-1053) - son of NU founder Hasyim Asy’ari and later minister of religious affair - had launched the initiative for a Sekolah Islam Tinggi (SIT) or Higher Islam School. Transferred to Yogyakarta in 1948, it was renamed Universitas Islam Indonesia (UII).  To appease the Islamist bloc, following the elevation of Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University to a state university level under the pressure of the secular nationalists in 1950, the government established a Perguruan Tinggi Agama Islam Negeri (PTAIN), or State Islamic Higher Learning Institute for the purpose of educating and training cadres and civil servants for the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Ten years later it merged with Jakarta’s Akademi Dinas Ilmu Agama (ADIA) or State Academy for Religious Officials - founded by the Ministry of Religious Affairs in 1957 – into the first two Institut Agama Islam Negeri (IAIN) or State Islamic Institutes. The internal organisation and curricula of these IAIN’s were modeled after al-Azhar University, to the extent that three of its five faculties matched those existing at the reformed al-Azhar. Eventually, IAIN campuses, which proliferating in other major Indonesian cities, become the battlegrounds for competing interpretations of Islamic thought.

Apart from the politician Natsir and the writer Hamka, another assertive modernist and Islamist intellectual during this period was the diplomat and scholar Mohammad Rasjidi (1915-2001). Born as Saridi in what he called an abangan family, he nevertheless attended Muhammadiyah-run schools, and then a Hadhrami-sponsored Irsyād school run by Surkati, who gave him the name Mohammad Rasjidi. Between 1931 and 1938, he studied philosophy at Cairo University under Mustafa ‛Abd al-Raziq, a former student of Abduh, allegedly at the advice of Muzakkir, who also introduced him to the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, with whom Rasjidi privately studied during his years in Egypt.  According to his biographer Azyumardi Azra, his exposure to Salafi reformism shaped Rasjidi’s abiding ‘revivalist or even fundamentalist spirit’, because the ‘education and intellectual milieu in Cairo completed his religio-intellectual journey’. This remains an intriguing observation because throughout his subsequent career Rasjidi came into contact with a vast array of very different ideas, all of which have apparently left little impression.

On his return to Indonesia, Rasjidi worked for a number of Muslim organizations. This prepared him well for important functions in the religious establishment. After serving twice as Minister of State for Religious Affairs, until the post was claimed by the NU, he embarked on a diplomatic career in the Middle East until he was recalled from Iran in 1953.  Dissatisfied with his job at the department of foreign affairs in Jakarta, Rasjidi left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne under the guidance of Louis Massignon and became the first Indonesian to obtain a doctorate for his study of Javanese religion. After a brief stint as ambassador in Pakistan, he resigned his post in 1958 to avoid being caught up in the power struggle between Soekarno and Natsir, and joined the faculty of McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies.

There Rasjidi’s disagreement with Joseph Schacht’s views on the origins of Islamic law created a furor. After leaving Montreal for the directorship of the Islamic Centre in Washington, he continued his polemics against what he considered ‘bad orientalism’, challenging, for example, Madjid Khadduri’s views on Islamic international law. Returning to Indonesia to take up a professorship in Islamic Law at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Rasjidi became a staunch defender of what he regarded as pure Islamic doctrine against the calls for reform issuing from two figures who were not just on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but differed also from Rasjidi in regards to their outlook on Islamic education. 

Abdul Mukti Ali (1923-2004) and Harun Nasution (1919-1998) foreshadow the successive generations of postcolonial Muslim intellectuals who have arisen in Indonesia in the latter part of the twentieth century. They were not only capable of transcending the traditionalist-modernist schism, but making Islamic thought also palatable to secularly inclined thinkers.

Born as Boedjono, Mukti Ali received both a secular Dutch-language and Islamic education at East-Java’s Pesantren Termas, where he was also given his Muslim name and advised to give up his Sufi allegiances. Actively involved in the independence struggle, he became a politician while simultaneously continuing his studies at Yogyakarta’s Sekolah Tinggi Islam. After performing Hajj in 1950, Mukti Ali left for Pakistan to study Islamic history at the Faculty of Arabic Literature in Karachi and then moved on to McGill in Canada. There he became excited by the ‘holistic fashion’ in which Islamic studies were presented and the fact that the programme was not associated with Middle Eastern Studies. It was designed to enable Muslim students to become appreciative of modern discourses on such issues as intellectual freedom, the concept of the state, women’s rights and dialogue among religions. The last subject caught Mukti Ali’s imagination: his decision to major in comparative religion and his close friendship with Wilfred Cantwell Smith made him the first Muslim scholar from Indonesia to become an expert in the field.

Back home, Mukti Ali was put in charge of the first comparative religion programmes introduced at the recently established IAINs.  From this position he was able to influence successive generations of young Muslim intellectuals: students were not merely introduced to the comparative study of religions to give them a better understanding of religious traditions as such, but to instill a greater tolerance towards the beliefs and practices of others. At the same time, Mukti Ali was also perceptive enough to recognize the downside of exposure to Western learning. The dualism caused by Dutch educational policies had resulted in some Indonesians adopting everything, while others rejected anything Western. Mukti Ali thus made a case for developing a field of ‘Western studies’ or ‘Occidentalism’, as a counterpart of Western Orientalism, to prepare Indonesian Muslims for a dialogue with the Western world.

Harun Nasution, who was born in Sumatra, came from a family of local religious officials or penghulus. After finishing a secular primary school, he continued at a Dutch-run Modern Islamic Teachers’ College, where the staff consisted mainly of graduates from Middle Eastern universities. His Mecca-trained father objected to Nasution’s intention to enrol in a Muhammadiyah school in Central Java, first sending off him to Saudi Arabia, but eventually relenting and allowing him to transfer to Cairo where he remained throughout the Second World War.

Upon the declaration of Indonesian independence in 1945, Nasution joined Indonesia’s embryonic diplomatic service and started working under Rasjidi at the embassy in Cairo. When, in 1960, Soekarno turned on politicians such as Natsir, Nasution thought it wise to retreat from government service. At Rasjidi’s recommendation he was admitted to McGill University, where he obtained an MA degree and then, in 1968, completed a PhD on the basis of a dissertation on ‘The Place of Reason in Abduh’s Theology: Its Impact on his Theological System and Views’, in which he associated the Egyptian reformist with the classical rationalist school of Mu‘tazili philosophy. By this time, Nasution’s view and understanding of the Islamic tradition had moved away from those of his former mentor, whose exposure to Western scholarship of Islam appears to have only made him more reactionary

A military coup against President Soekarno in 1965 resulted in the replacement of ‘Guided Democracy’ by the so-called Orde Baru, or New Order Regime, under the command of General Suharto. It introduced a pragmatic economic development policy courting the West instead of the ideologically rigid left-leaning Old Order. The leadership of the Masyumi party, outlawed and disbanded in 1960, anticipated a window of opportunity for a renewed pursuit of its Islamist agenda. These hopes were quickly dashed when it became apparent that no restoration of the pre-1959 multiparty system was forthcoming. Instead the relation between religion and state, and the place of Islam in Indonesian public life, was taken into a very different direction. 

New Order’s policy towards Islam was an intricate game of divide and rule. In 1966, it had pronounced an emphatic ‘no’ against the re-establishment of Masyumi, and a year later it prevented the return of its former leadership to active politics. Suharto also refused to consider the incorporation of the Jakarta Charter into the constitution. As a result Natsir and Rasjidi shifted their activities towards dakwah (religious propagation) activities, using the Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII) as their main platform. In later years, conservative Muslims felt further rebuked by parliamentary proposals to elevate mystical belief (kepercayaan) to the same status as ‘religion’ (agama) and the introduction of a civil marriage law that was regarded as an affront to Muslim practices. In such instances, the government stepped in to tone down the proposals in order to avoid further alienating the Muslim constituency.

In this new political environment, Natsir and Rasjidi were increasingly sidelined, while Mukti Ali and Nasution’s stars rose quickly. New Order’s first priority was to improve Indonesia’s economic situation by replacing Soekarno’s ideologically heavy Guided Democracy with a pragmatic development policy. The new regime showed itself willing to consider a constructive role for educated Muslims in this process. This required a new type of intellectual who could participate in government-directed development efforts. Consequently, technocrats and professionals from pious Islamic backgrounds, as well as a number of progressive-minded Muslim intellectuals, including Mukti Ali and Harun Nasution, were inclined towards a degree of cooperation with the New Order regime. 

Between 1967 and 1971, Mukti Ali hosted a special study circle at his home in Yogyakarta, called Lingkaran Diskusi, usually translated as ‘The Limited Group’. Its core members - Ahmad Wahib (1942-1973), Dawam Rahardjo (b. 1942), and Djohan Effendy (b. 1939) - were all destined to become prominent Muslim intellectuals. Their deliberations became an important stepping stone for the ‘Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thought’ (Gerakan Pembaharuan Pemikiran Islam). It suggests that the cross-pollination between successive generations of liberal-minded and cosmopolitan intellectuals resulted in a new Muslim ‘ideoscape’, envisaged to imbue the government’s development policies with Islamic values. When he was appointed Minister of Religion in 1971, Mukti Ali began defining a ‘Weberian’ religious policy in which all religions would become involved in socioeconomic development. It was against this background that Mukti Ali and Nasution were able to facilitate the educational reforms that would provide the necessary preconditions for the formation of new progressive Muslim intellectuals capable of conceptualizing an alternative form of public Islam. 

A key part of this new policy was the overhaul of the existing Islamic education system. According to the Australian political scientist Greg Barton, Mukti Ali ‘envisaged rejuvenation of the pesantren value system and for the pesantrens to act as change agents in Indonesian society in order to facilitate community development’. The initiative found an enthusiastic supporter in the grandson of NU founder and future NU leader and president, Abdurrahman Wahid, who was quick to understand that revamped NU pesantrens would provide the seedbed for a new ‘hybrid’ Muslim intelligentsia as an alternative powerbase for the NU.

The task of revamping Indonesia’s institutions for higher Islamic education fell to Harun Nasution. He managed to introduce a new national curriculum, providing a revised programme that was designed to equip students with a concept of Islam as an integral system of doctrines, culture and civilization. It encompassed the study of the various legal and theological schools, alongside philosophy and Sufism, including the allegedly ‘deviant’ Mu‘tazila and the writing of Ibn al-‘Arabi. This was intended to instill in students an awareness of the division between absolute and relative Islam, whereby the former refers to the Qur’an and Sunna, whereas the latter is embodied in the interpretations developed in the course of history. In addition to the influence of indigenous and Middle Eastern modes of Islamic education, aspects of a Western-style of education were now introduced as well, which impacted both on the contents and the modes of teaching. These included the reading of Western philosophers, Orientalists and Muslim scholars of Islam who draw on Western scholarship themselves, like Fazlur Rahman, Mohammed Arkoun, Hasan Hanafi, and Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri. Mukti Ali and Nasution’s alternative approach, along with their decision to single out the elite as a strategic target for these programmatic innovations, must be regarded as the accommodation to the reality of New Order politics.

These reforms did not go unchallenged. Not surprisingly, Mohammad Rasjidi was very critical of the 1973 curriculum, objecting in particular to Nasution’s allegedly unquestioned embrace of Western ‘Orientalist’ scholarship on Islam and his emphasis on the historicity of the Islamic legacy. Although both had obtained advanced degrees from the West, Rasjidi remained doctrinally more conservative and reluctant to address historical and critical aspects in his teachings. Nasution, on the other hand, advocated a multiplicity of views and emphasized the use of new scholarly methodologies and critical reflection.

Postcolonial Muslim intellectuals

Mukti Ali and Harun Nasution themselves belonged to a generation that lived through the transition from colonial rule to independence, and they were the trailblazers for the first postcolonial generation of intellectuals who would take over the torch in the 1970s and 1980s. The subsequent trajectory of late twentieth-century Indonesian Muslim intellectualism is marked by four milestones or ‘key moments’ that have shaped the course of intellectual thought in Indonesia. 

The first one dates back to the period 1970-1972, when student leader Nurcholish Madjid (1939-2005) gave two seminal speeches that defined the innovative Islamic intellectualism in Indonesia and became central for the country’s intra-Muslim debates on secularism. In these addresses, Madjid insisted on making a clear distinction between secularization and secularism, arguing that while Muslims can reject the latter on ideological grounds, the former must be accepted as a ‘social fact’, because there is no denying that Muslim societies are and always have been subjected to the process of secularization. To make his case, Madjid drew on the writings of Harvey Cox, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah.

Together with an article published in 1968 under the title ‘Rationalization not Westernization’, in which Madjid explained that the social and spiritual domains of human life are governed by two different epistemologies, these early writings form the intellectual backbone of the Renewal of Islamic Thinking Movement which Madjid and his allies had set in motion. The movement’s political position, that there is no need for an Islamic state, or Islamic political parties, is well captured in the controversial slogan: ‘Islam Yes! Islam Party No!’ Philosophically, Madjid argued that the horizontal dimension of human interaction should be governed by the human faculty of reason, while the vertical relationship of the individual believer with the transcendent was inaccessible to rational thought because of its ineffability. People are able to enter this spiritual domain thanks to another human disposition, known in the Islamic tradition as fitra, the innate capacity of faith, which manifests itself through a disposition called taqwa or ‘God-consciousness’. The  movement’s detractors on the reactionary Salafi side of the spectrum rejected this epistemological interpretation, dismissing it as ‘sophistry’ and holding on to their dichotomous understanding of Islamic versus un-Islamic, pitching a binary of belief versus unbelief.

The second key moment appeared in 1983 when the New Order Regime insisted that all political and social actors in the Indonesian public sphere reaffirm their adherence to the Pancasila doctrine. Muslim organisations duly obliged. But it also led the NU, now under the leadership of the founder’s grandson, Abdurrahman Wahid (1940-2009), to revert explicitly to its founding principles (the so-called Khittah 1926) and refocus its attention on Muslim emancipation through education and grassroots social activism.  In the ensuing decade, Indonesian Muslim society had become unmistakably more religious. This phenomenon, known as Penghijaun (‘Greening’ – after the symbolic colour of Islam) was supported by the government through its own Islamization policy under the name ‘reactualization agenda’, encouraging personal piety and expanding Islamic education, but steering clear of political agendas. Scores of talented Muslim academics were provided with scholarships to pursue postgraduate degrees in Islamic and religious studies overseas. They went not only to the Middle East but also to the universities in North America, Europe and Australia. For example, Nurcholish Madjid and two future Muhammadiyah chairmen, Amin Rais (b.1944) and Ahmad Syafii Maarif (b. 1935), all went to the University of Chicago for their PhDs, where they studied under the direction of the political scientist Leonard Binder (b. 1927) and the Pakistani scholars of Islam Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988).

In this new environment, Abdurrahman Wahid and Nurcholish Madjid became the stellar new Muslim intellectuals, developing what in Indonesia is alternately referred to as ‘civil, ‘cultural’, or ‘cosmopolitan Islam’. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they groomed a new generation of Muslim intellectuals to take over the torch in the early twenty-first century. Among them were Columbia-trained historian Azyumardi Azra (b. 1955), mentioned earlier, and the philosophers Komaruddin Hidayat (b. 1953) and M. Amin Abdullah (b.1953), who obtained their doctorates in Turkey and would all rise to the pinnacles of Islamic academia, eventually serving as rectors of the State Islamic Universities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta.

The third key moment almost coincided with the start of the new millennium. With the final disappearance of New Order and inauguration of the Reformasi Era in 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid and Amin Rais (b. 1944), the then chairman of the Muhammadiyah, ascended to the highest offices in the land: taking over the presidency and becoming speaker of the national consultative assembly respectively. This offered an interesting spectacle of the leaders of the two largest Islamic organizations in the world presiding over constitutional reforms that left the principles of Pancasila intact and kept political Islam at arm’s length of the institutional structures of the world’s largest Muslim country. With the unlocking of the political arena and return of freedom of organization, congregation and expression, Indonesia’s public sphere was thrown open to a wide and often chaotic array of contesting voices, including those from across the Muslim spectrum. A dozen or so Islamic political parties were able to contest three consecutive national elections, but saw its voters’ base erode continuously. 

More successful than the politicians were reform-minded upcoming intellectuals who appeared capable of simultaneously upholding the same value system developed by their mentors from the preceding generations while at the same time challenging their lack of critical rigour in engaging with the Islamic heritage or turath. Most of these young thinkers and writers are associated with NU or Muhammadiyah affiliated NGOs or employed by think tanks founded by leading public Muslim figures such as Nurcholish Madjid’s Paramadina Foundation, The Wahid Institute, and The Maarif Institute for Culture and Humanity (named after another former Muhammadiyah chairman, Ahmad Syafii Maarif). Others are more explicitly political and are active in advocacy groups promoting democratization and civic rights, such as the Liberal Islam Network (Jaringan Islam Liberal, JIL), the Freedom Institute, the Reform Institute and the Center for Islam and State Studies, or engaged in defending religious freedom and pluralism, like the Center for Islam and Pluralism (ICIP).

It is in these circles that one encounters a kind of intellectual adventurism seldom seen anywhere else in the Muslim world. Disciples of Nurcholish Madjid continue to work at Paramadina Foundation catering to the spiritual needs of well-educated middle class Muslim urbanites and defending the need for intellectual freedom. Two years ago, Ihsan Ali-Fauzi (b. 1964), who has been involved with the foundations for decades, introduced the Ahmad Wahib Prize for Tolerance, named after the Yogyakarta writer who passed away prematurely in 1973. It rewards the work of young intellectuals who promote Islamic values of pluralism and tolerance through essays, blogs, or video productions. In 2010, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Nurcholish Madjid’s Movement for the Renewal of Islamic Thinking, Budhy Munawar-Rachman (b. 1963), a former executive director of Paramadina, wrote a four-volume study on the need to preserve and protect secularism, liberalism and pluralism. Also Yudi Latif (b. 1964), a Melbourne-trained sociologist and former vice-rector at Paramadina University, continues to explore the relationship between state and religion through his sociological and historical research into the complex triad of Indonesian statehood, Islam, and the ideology of Pancasila.

This is also a key preoccupation of The Freedom Institute, a research centre for issues related to democracy, nationalism and market economics. It was established in 2001 by a group of ambitious young politicians and intellectuals, and is also closely linked to the Liberal Islam Network, which was established in 1999. Two of its founders, Ulil Abshar-Abdalla (b. 1967) and Luthfi Assyaukanie (b. 1967), who have stirred up strong reactions, positively as well as negatively, are involved as researchers for the institute. The duo’s collaboration also reflects a meeting of the minds of young intellectuals from traditionalist NU backgrounds and those with modernist Islamic leanings, jointly campaigning to revitalize ijtihad to develop hermeneutical readings of the Islamic heritage.

Something similar can be gleaned from other discourses which began emerging at the start of the new millennium and show an increasingly more sophisticated capacity for both critical engagement with intellectual mentors and self-reflection. This includes the criticisms levelled against first generation postcolonial intellectuals such as Nurcholish Madjid by young NU cadres. They question his closeness to the political elites under New Order and the concomitant tendency to subscribe to hegemonic readings of the Islamic tradition at the expense of dissident discourses which have been marginalized in the course of history. Key contributors to these critiques are Ahmad Rumadi (b. 1970), a scholar working at The Wahid Institute, and Ahmad Baso (b. 1971), a former journalist and independent writer. Calling themselves Islamic Post-Traditionalists, they have pioneered the application of discourse critique and other forms of deconstructive reading, postmodern philosophy, and postcolonial theory to the re-examination of the Islamic tradition as it has been passed on internally and interpreted by Western scholars of Islam and other Orientalists. For this, Baso, Rumadi, and others draw their inspiration from innovative Arab-Islamic thinkers such as Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010), Muhammad Abid al-Jabiri (1936-2010), and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010) who, in contrast to the controversies surrounding them at home, are extremely popular amongst young Muslim intellectuals in Indonesia. This progressive trend is nurtured by a forward-looking senior NU leadership, including general chairmen such as the late Abdurrahman Wahid and the incumbent Said Aqil Siraj (b. 1954). It could be argued that NU intellectuals have surpassed the country’s modernist Muslims in terms of progressive thinking and intellectual innovation. 

Within Muhammadiyah circles a growing appreciation is also developing for these later-day Middle Eastern intellectuals. Building on the efforts by senior modernist intellectuals such as Dawam Rahardjo, Kuntowijoyo (1943-2005), Moeslim Abdurrahman (1948-2012), Munir Mulkhan (b. 1946), and Amin Abdullah to formulate a ‘transformative Islam’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the Network of Young Muhammadiyah Intellectuals (Jaringan Intelektual Muda Muhammadiyah, JIMM), established in 2003, is trying to emulate the critical work of their NU counterparts. However it appears that, in contrast to the NU, the higher echelons of the Muhammadiyah are less inclined to offer sustained support for this new thinking, especially after 2005, when Ahmad Syafii Maarif was replaced as chairman by Sirajuddin Syamsuddin (b. 1958). Despite his relative youth, Maarif restrained this progressive course and pulled the organization into a more conservative direction. Individuals such as Amin Abdullah and Munir Mulkhan lost their positions in the Muhammadiyah executive, leaving their protégés to fend for themselves.

These progressive ideas have not gone uncontested. It is important to point out that since the beginning of the Reformasi Era, Indonesian society has also had to witness the rise of Islamic vigilante organizations such as the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI) and a militia called Laskar Jihad. These organization resort to aggressive campaigning, intimidation and even violence to combat both non-Muslim communities and co-religionists whom they consider ‘deviants’, including the young intellectuals gravitating around the Liberal Islam Network, Ahmadis, and Shi’ites.

Intra-Muslim antagonism came to a head with the fourth key moment, when, in July 2005, the Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) issued a fatwa condemning the notions of secularism, liberalism and pluralism as counter to the teachings of Islam, particularly when it comes to doctrine and acts of worship (‘ibadat). In terms of social and political import, the fatwa was more ambiguous. It stated that in a society with a plurality of religions, the Muslim community may assume an inclusive attitude, but Muslims should only interact with non-Muslims to the extent of not inflicting mutual harm. Evidently this legal opinion was directed against initiatives such as JIL and JIMM and their mentors, who are all promoting genuine plurality and open intellectual exchange, not only among Muslims but also adherents of other faiths. In June 2006, a broad coalition of pro-democracy intellectuals and activists, including Muslims, countered with their own statement, presented under the name Maklumat Keindonesiaan, or ‘Declaration of Indonesianess’, in which they affirmed their adherence to the principles of secularism, liberalism and pluralism. 

The point could be made that this multiplicity of Muslim voices reflects a vibrant public sphere in which a broad spectrum of Islamic discourses are allowed to compete with each other. On one hand, this can be interpreted as providing the kind of intellectual creativity required for innovative engagement with Islamic tradition and the exploration of new possibilities for Muslim sociability. On the other hand, the growing polarization of the Muslim discursive field is also a ground for concern. The increasingly confrontational, even belligerent, tone of debates and encounters betrays a worrying tendency of intolerance towards dissenters. It raises important questions about the success of Indonesia’s ongoing democratization process, the status of human rights in the country, and ultimately what kind of state Indonesia wants to be. As we are dealing with the largest Muslim nation state, the whole Muslim world should be watching.