Indonesia: A challenge to tradition

Aik TC SG

Indonesia: A challenge to tradition

Avantika Chilkoti August 26, 2015 Financial Times

Strict Islamic laws in several provinces have raised fears that the world’s largest Muslim-majority country is taking an extremist turn

With roofs swooping to the sky like the horns of a buffalo, the traditional homes of the Minangkabau people in West Sumatra are among the world’s most distinctive buildings. They have another distinctive feature, too: the houses are passed down from mother to daughter.

Despite being staunchly Muslim, the Minangkabau are one of the largest matrilineal communities in the world. In the 700-odd years since Islam arrived in this part of Indonesia, such contradictions have been worn lightly. But as a wave of piety has swept through the country in recent years, the Minangkabau homeland has become a hotspot for orthodoxy and intolerance.

In the regional capital of Padang, many schoolgirls who would have sported scruffy pigtails with their smart school uniforms a decade ago now parade through the dusty streets in starched cotton headscarves. It is one of several sharia bylaws enforced since 2005 by the former mayor, Fauzi Bahar, who also introduced Koran reading tests in schools and banned unmarried couples from frolicking in public.

“The principle of religion is good behaviour,” he explains, a smile on his face and a Rolex on his wrist. “With time those values were gradually eroded, then people started to leave religion, they got involved in free relationships and promiscuity — I’ll bring them back to the good that existed in the past.”

There are signs of rising religiosity throughout Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, where strict Islamic laws have been enforced in several provinces and a growing number of women wear the veil.

With President Joko Widodo, below, focused on flagging economic growth and political infighting, these outward signs of piety are feeding concerns that Indonesia’s tolerant brand of Islam is at risk. The anxiety has been compounded by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as Isis or Isil, which has drawn some Indonesians to its vision of a “caliphate”.

The worries about Indonesians waging war in Syria are particularly potent in this country. Returning fighters threaten to revive local extremist groups and undo years of counterterrorism efforts by Jakarta, just as veterans of the Afghan war in the 1980s formed the al-Qaeda-sponsored Jemaah Islamiyah network that has carried out savage attacks, including the bombing of a Bali nightclub in 2002.

“It appears that Isil and what’s happening in Syria is providing better training and a network that might bring some of those basically isolated and ineffectual groups together,” says Elizabeth Pisani, author of Indonesia Etc.“That poses a much bigger threat.”

In July, authorities began investigating two former pilots in Indonesia who pledged allegiance to Isis. And this month local police foiled Isis supporters who planned an attack during the country’s Independence Day celebrations.

Sweeping changes

Yet analysts say there is little to link violent extremism with the social and political changes sweeping through Indonesia. “What people need to realise is the importance of symbolism and theatre in Indonesian life and politics, so what we’re getting is a lot more outward display of piety,” Ms Pisani says. “I don’t think there’s been particular change in the intensity of the people’s religious devotion and belief.”

Michael Buehler, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, says the new sharia laws are often a tool for secular politicians seeking to win votes. Padang’s former mayor may talk about reviving faith but by enforcing Koran reading classes he also creates business for powerful Islamic teachers who influence a vast bank of voters. Anti-alcohol laws may drain sales from supermarket chains but they also win support from small traders.

“You just put a social camouflage on corruption,” Mr Buehler says, estimating that about 440 sharia bylaws have been issued across Indonesia, most in just six provinces.

When the Indonesian constitution was drafted 70 years ago politicians edited out the seven words ordering Muslims to follow sharia law, so many of these new religious rules are unconstitutional. Local leaders get around this by burying them in so-called “anti-sin” legislation, which bands together everything from child pornography to cafés playing music late into the evening.

Even among devout communities in rural Sumatra, not everyone supports religiously motivated policies. Ewasoska, head of the directorate for law and human rights in the small town of Padang Panjang, is among those concerned. The local government is asking a Christian church to secure consent from the surrounding community before it expands — a legal requirement which he says applies only to the construction of a new place of worship. His fear is that officials will hound minority communities to prove their credentials as good Muslims.

“Our Islamic leaders are afraid about what people will say, what the world will say,” he explains. “For me Islam is a very perfect religion but Muslims don’t understand Islam completely.”

Many Indonesians still revere the Middle East as the centre of the Islamic world, where the religion is practised in its purest form, but there are attempts to broadcast the virtues of Southeast Asia’s more open form of Islam. Where the US saw the region as the second front in the “war on terror” under the Bush administration, it is now being presented as a model for other Islamic societies — and a counterbalance to the Wahhabi fundamentalism exported from the Middle East.

“We are trying in some ways — and actually the US pushes us — to be more bold in our efforts in showing to the world that Islam has different faces,” says Ibnu Hadi, who heads the north and Central America unit at the foreign affairs ministry. “In the Middle East the connotation is always violent and it’s harsh and rigid but in Asia [we’re] more tolerant and we can adapt.”

Among the Pancasila, or five principles, forming Indonesia’s founding philosophy is belief in one God. Some 87 per cent of the 250m population is Muslim, almost exclusively Sunni, 10 per cent is Christian and 2 per cent Hindu and Buddhist. Only atheism is an alien concept.

Academics say the moderate nature of Indonesian Islam comes down to history: the religion was introduced by travelling sufis and merchants rather than imposed by Turkish or Arab conquerors. With the population dispersed across about 17,000 islands, no single Islamic identity has emerged. Instead, local traditions, animism and mysticism have been combined with faith. Azyumardi Azra, a moderate thinker, takes the example of the custom of visiting the tombs of loved ones or holy saints, a practice that is frowned on by more traditional Muslims. “Indonesian Muslims love to practise what I call flowery Islam, colourful Islam,” he says.

Commercial opportunities

In bustling, cosmopolitan Jakarta the trappings of Islam may not reflect a deeper piety but they are big business. A growing army of “hijabers” flood the shopping malls, matching carefully draped headscarves with the skinniest of skinny jeans and vertiginous stilettos.

Muslim consumer spending on clothing and shoes in Indonesia reached $18.8bn in 2013, according to Thomson Reuters estimates. And “hijaber communities” have developed around specific designers, organising events where young Muslim women receive religious teaching alongside lessons on the newest headscarf fashion.

Dwita Yuniata, who works at Zalora, a local online fashion retailer, says headscarves have become popular not thanks to any rise in orthodoxy but because an array of new Islamic designers have made them more accessible. “It’s more a fashionable thing and everybody has their own style,” she explains. “All these hijabers, they need to have lots of selection, lots of colours.”

There is a similar story of rapid growth in the halal hotel industry, where Indonesia’s Muslim travellers spent some $7.5bn on outbound tourism excluding the hajj pilgrimage in 2013, according to Thomson Reuters.

In the lobby of the Sofyan Hotel Betawi in central Jakarta, green tinsel decorates the reception desk and industry certificates line the walls, but there are no obvious clues that the establishment is sharia-compliant. Meeting Islamic law simply means serving halal food, providing prayer mats and making sure unmarried couples do not share a room. Non-Muslims are welcome.

The Sofyan family, originally from West Sumatra, began working towards compliance with sharia law at the hotel because it offered better returns. “If we are sharia compliant we broaden our market reach rather than narrowing it,” says Riyanto Sofyan, its chairman.

Extremism fears

Signs of rising piety in Indonesia may have little to do with religiosity but they feed concerns about extremism, which has a long history across the archipelago. The violent Darul Islam group has been trying to create an Islamic state since it first emerged in the final years of Indonesia’s fight for independence from the Dutch some 70 years ago. And Jemaah Islamiyah fighters have carried out savage attacks.

Yet, given the size of the population, the number of serious terrorist incidents remains small. Indonesia ranks 31st out of 124 countries in the Global Terrorism Index published by the Institute of Economics and Peace last year, just below the US.

Powerful mainstream Muslim organisations such as the Muhammadiyah are a stabilising force, providing education and healthcare while emphasising to their 30m followers that Islam does not condone violence. Meanwhile, civil society groups conduct anti-radicalisation workshops and the Detachment 88 police force gathers intelligence.

Yet in recent years a new threat has emerged as Isis gains traction in the Middle East and attracts followers from across the globe. Jakarta officially banned the militant group a year ago but Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, says the police have little power to control radical preachers. Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, Indonesia’s best-known Islamist cleric, pledged allegiance to Isis from within a maximum-security prison.

More than 300 Indonesians are now fighting with Isis in the Middle East, Ms Jones estimates. The figure is low compared with the UK, where thousands have joined the militant group, but it is high for a distant country with a powerful Muslim majority and no fear of marginalisation or Islamophobia.

“It’s a worrying trend because we have always been a laid-back society, we have always been tolerant and we are proud of our tolerant religion,” says Yenny Wahid, an Islamic activist and daughter of the late president, Abdurrahman Wahid. “But it is now under attack — there are people out there who try to spread the gospel of intolerance.”