Asian Studies Review | 2019
Civil Islam Revisited
Abstract
The 1989 collapse of state socialism in Europe ushered in a wave of political democratisation and economic liberalisation that quickly spread from Eastern and Central Europe to the Soviet Union. Observers began to question whether this wave would reach Southeast Asia, whose authoritarian regimes were themselves products of the Cold War. Indeed, there was some precedent for believing it would. Thailand had actually begun its transition to democracy a year earlier, in 1988, while Philippine protesters had overthrown Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Suharto’s “New Order” regime, however, appeared especially resistant to calls for reform. Buffeted by gaudy growth figures, the regime had already faced down an internal challenge from within the military and an international human rights crisis in East Timor. Moreover, it had begun cultivating support among Indonesia’s emergent Muslim middle class, largely to isolate military and civilian rivals within the ruling class. Equally, though, Suharto hoped this new-found piety would inoculate the regime against the popular convulsions experienced elsewhere. Despite the regime’s efforts to co-opt Islam, orthodox Muslim voices were increasingly prominent among those calling for political reform. Prior to the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, these voices were less of a movement andmore a loose association of the likeminded, linking reform-minded cadres within Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah to a diffuse network of Muslim youth groups, labour organisations and NGOs promoting human rights. Crucially, these Muslim reformists were not just Muslims seeking reform, but Muslims articulating explicitly religious arguments for reform. Islamic arguments for democracy and human rights drew heavily from the philosophy of modernist scholar Fazlur Rahman, his Indonesian protégé, Nurcholish Madjid, and likeminded traditionalists such as Abdurrahman Wahid (who, as NU’s Chairman, directed the organisation to disavow its quest for an Islamic state). As anthropologist Robert Hefner noted, these arguments were demonstrably similar to those made by Catholic reformists in southern Europe and Latin America two decades prior – arguments that preceded the “Catholic wave” of democratisation and inspired Jose Casanova’s (1994) articulation of “public religion” as a sociological concept. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia tells the story of these Muslim reformists: their ideas, their efforts to turn autocratic Indonesia into a democratic and civil pluralist state, and the challenges they faced along the way – not least of which came from other Muslims. It argues that a paradigm shift in Muslim political consciousness, which Hefner calls “civil Islam”, undergirded these efforts.