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1 Introduction
Islam, state, and society
‘Without a pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) a Madurese kiai (religious leaders/teachers) is like a captain without a ship’.
(Interview with Kiai Mashduqie Fadly (d. 2010) on 1 December 2009)
This former local parliament member as well as a leading kiai in Bangkalan’s comment clearly signifies the importance of the pesantren as the main traditional Islamic education institution and also kiai’s vehicle in Madura’s socio-political life. For many urban middle-class Muslims this precisely contradicts today’s growing perception of an ideal and appropriate preacher who is often closely associated with Islamism, Salafism, ultra-right, or pop-style approach, and aptly counters the widespread increasing perception of an ideal and desirable Islamic education institution in urban areas that is commonly described as modern, expensive, and exclusive.
Contrary to most recent scholarship on Islam that tends to focus on modern, urban, and middle-class Muslims’ thoughts, practices, rituals, and traditions, this book shows that traditional understanding and practices of Islam and politics in democratizing and decentralizing Indonesia in the midst of the rise of more modern understanding and urban-style practices of Islam is still persistent. Madura is clearly a place where its residents share the communal concerns and interests and that many local authorities and Islamic institutions are not simply traditional elements of pre-colonial and colonial legacies that are to be subordinated by modernity.
This book is about the history of the relationships between Islam, state, and society in Indonesia with its focus on local politics in Madura.1 It covers two periods; the first is the last years of the New Order (1990–1998) and the second is the first years of a period that is known in Indonesia as Era Reformasi or Reformasi (the Reformation Era or Reformation) or, more neutrally, the post-New Order period (1998–2010). The materials in this book are based on library research and two sets of fieldwork from July 2009 until January 2010, and from October 2010 until July 2011. The periods were selected because the last years of the New Order in Madura exhibit a number of polemics and conflicts between the governments and some segments of society, that include two notorious cases of the Nipah Dam incident and the strong opposition of Bassra (Badan Silaturahmi Ulama Pesantren Madura – The Association of Friendship of Madurese Pesantren Ulama) towards industrialisasi (industrialization)2 and a riot in the 1997 elections in Sampang, and because the first years of the post-New Order show the fascinating dynamics of the ongoing processes of democratization and decentralization in the area, that include a number of local elections. In short, this book shows continuities and changes of the development of Islam and politics in the two periods. While most studies on Islam and local politics in Indonesia focus on one period only, either the New Order or the post-New Order, this book, by analyzing the two periods, offers insights into the relationships between Islam, democracy, authoritarianism, centralization, and decentralization. This book addresses some of the concerns of political science, rural sociology, political anthropology, development economics, Islamic studies, and history. The main actors discussed are local leaders: the kiai (religious leaders), the blater (local strongmen), and the klebun (village heads), the people who successfully claim a domination over the use of religious authority, physical force, and formal leadership, respectively, within a given territory. The events underlined include the 1993 Nipah Dam incident, the strong opposition of Bassra towards industrialisasi, elections at all levels, local-Islamic traditions, and cultural festivities.
This book has two main focuses. They are, firstly, to identify and explain factors that have shaped and characterized the development of contemporary Islam and politics in Madura; and secondly to recognize and elucidate forms and aspects of the relationships between Islam and politics; between state3 and society; between conflicts and accommodations; between piety, tradition and violence in that area, and the forms and characters of democratization and decentralization processes in local politics. The broader idea of this book is to identify and explain how and why Islamic powers in secular countries have presented a challenge for states around the world, including Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population as well as the third largest democracy in the world. This book is expected to show how the area’s experience in dealing with Islam and politics may illuminate the socio-political trajectory of other developing Muslim countries at present living through comparable democratic transformations. Madura was chosen because it has one of the most complex relationships between Islam and politics during the last years of the New Order and the first years of the post-New Order in Indonesia, and because it is a Muslim area with a history of a very strong religious as well as cultural tradition than is commonly understood and is largely ignored in literature on Islam and politics.
This book is not necessarily a description of one specific culture or one certain people and their life. Instead, it is a socio-political and socio-cultural history of the development of the relationships between Islam and politics that looks at Madurese society through the analysis of state–society relations, authoritarianism, democracy, and regionalism, in which religion and culture are highly significant in the development and dynamics of Indonesia’s fledgling democracy.
As the theme of this book suggests, I concentrate on identifying and analyzing particular categories of individuals and groups of local leaders. Concise biographical information of particular individuals and a thorough description of types of local leaders is one of the main points. Madura as an island, Bangkalan and Sampang as regencies, two villages in Bangkalan, Tapal Kuda (the East Java Eastern Salient) areas as the main migration destination of Madurese, and the East Java province, which Madura is part of, make up the geographical context of the book. Before that, however, the structures and configurations that form and influence Madurese society and groups of local leaders are elucidated in order to provide a foundation for this book; or, more specifically, Islam in Madura is observed to build the foundation. Finally, having sketched the foundation, the actors, and the setting of the book, the other main discussion concerns major socio-political events of the past and present at the regional (provincial level), regency, and village levels.
By focusing on the sub-national level, I also show how Islamic symbols and cultural elements are employed and promoted to reinforce the influence and position of local elites in local politics, and that they can also be found in other places in Indonesia. Actors such as the kiai, the blater, and the klebun who concern themselves with conflicts and accommodations within society can be found, for instance, in Banten where kiai traditionally have a strong influence in society, where the jawara (local strongmen) act as private security forces and political actors, and where the jaro (village heads) are responsible for guiding and guarding the village. Moreover, the complex relationships between Islam and politics that involves, among other things, on-going processes of democratization, identity politics, the creation of civil society, and Islamism can also be found in other Muslim-majority states, such as Malaysia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Senegal. Therefore, it might be argued that despite the narrow geographical focus, this book offers a broader analysis of how Islam and politics coexist, flourish, interlace, and strive in complex, pragmatic, and mutually beneficial relationships in a rather neglected and peripheral area that in fact might be useful in examining the relationships between Islam and politics in other places in Indonesia and other Muslim-majority states.
Islam and politics in the changing world
Contemporary Muslim politics is not monolithic; it is very diverse and evolving, although its dynamics vary in many countries. Religion is a determinant of political identity, a focus of loyalty, and a source of authority in the Muslim world (Vatikiotis, 1991, p. 36). One of the most continuously discussed aspects of Islam and politics in recent international debates has been Islam’s compatibility with democracy. In fact, there has been an effort in many countries to give ‘Muslim politics a civic, pluralist, and even democratic face’ (Hefner, 2005, p. 4). The notion arose in the West in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent U.S. and its allies’ ‘War on Terror’ (WoT) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and other countries. Islam, as a religion, interacts with social, political, economic, and cultural determinants and is shaped by them. Hence, there does not exist a homogenous and unchanged Islam that overrides politics and society. If we take politics to be about relations of power, then we should be concerned with how Islamic discourses and traditions are mobilized in contestation activities and in power struggles, whether involving formal political institutions or wider societal forces and processes (Ismail, 2004, p. 163).
A number of developments in Muslim-majority states since the Second World War demonstrate that all major political currents that include Islamism, authoritarianism, fascism, secularism, liberalism, populism, and many others exist, thrive, and form political environments. These environments are dominated by movements attempting to transform the state and question the legitimacy of existing governments, public participation, and access to governments. The first obvious example of state transformation was the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution, when a Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, rallied a mass movement and began a revolution to overthrow the Pahlavi dynasty under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was supported by the United States and replaced it with an Islamic government. An example of questioning the legitimacy of existing governments was the assassination of Muslim state leaders, such as Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Ziaur Rahman in Bangladesh, Rashid Karami in Lebanon, and Mohammad Najibullah in Afghanistan following turbulent political disputes, confrontations, and upheavals. The last and the most recent example of state transformation was when Islamism really came to the fore when the Taliban emerged in 1994 as a prominent faction in the Afghan Civil War, held power from 1996 to 2001 in Afghanistan, and enforced a strict interpretation of sharia (Islamic laws); and the involvement of Al-Qaeda, a multi-national organization founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and other Arab volunteers who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, in numerous attacks on civilian and military targets in various countries, including the September 11 attack in the United States and the 2002 Bali bombings in Indonesia.
The events have signified the entanglement of Muslim-majority states in dealing with the challenges of adapting politics and governance to the requirements of Islam. The existence of Islamic governments, radical Islamist political groups, and terrorist attacks is now irrecusable (Brown, 2000, p. 2). All over the Muslim world, the advances of political Islam and the Islamists have been aided by the blunders of the secular modernizing post-colonial elites. The rise of Islamism was partly due to weak, corrupt, and essentially discredited elites who turned to Islam as a discourse of legitimation to perpetuate their own power and right to rule (Noor, 2004, pp. 750–751).
Islam continues to act as a key mobilizing ideology and social movement frame in Muslim-majority states. Islam, however, is not only a subject of political contention, but also its object (Bayat, 2010, p. 8). It is true that political trends in Muslim-majority states are often violent and contradictory, due in part to the authoritarian regimes. However, ‘public Islam’4 for the most part works against violence. Armando Salvatore and Dale Eickelman suggest that advancing levels of education, greater ease of travel, and the rise of new communications media throughout the Muslim-majority states have contributed to the emergence of a public sphere in which large numbers of people want a say in political and religious issues. The result has been challenges to authoritarianism, the fragmentation of religious and political authority, and increasingly open discussions of issues related to the ‘common good’ in Islam (Salvatore and Eickelman, 2004, p. xi). It is obvious, therefore, that Muslim politics comes in various backgrounds, purposes, forms, and sizes. Differences among Muslim politics can be noticeably perceived not only among regions or among countries but also within countries as well.
Southeast Asia has often been regarded as a region of ‘peripheral’ Islam compared to the ‘centre’ in the Middle East despite the fact that the region is home to Indonesia as the largest Muslim state in the world and the fact that it has had some of the more dynamic and also syncretic, mostly non-violent manifestations of Islamic social and political life for centuries (Saravanamuttu, 2010, p. 3). In fact, the four biggest Muslim states in terms of population with over 100 million Muslims are all located outside the Middle East: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Southeast Asia has more significant diversity in cultures, customs, and historical patterns that have traditionally militated against the emergence of a unified realm with Theravada Buddhism, Sunni Islam, Catholicism, animism, tribal religions, as well as Daoism, Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, Christian denominations, and all forms of New Age religions flourishing as people’s religions (Schottmann and Camilleri, 2013, p. 5).
Given the fact that the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority state in the world, and has a Muslim population of around 88 per cent or 202 million in 2011 (Pew Research Center, 2009, p. 5), it offers examples of a Muslim politics as plural and contested as its counterparts in recently-transforming Muslim-majority states, such as Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran. Indonesia shows the articulation of Muslim politics within the context of the authoritarian (the New Order) and democratic (the post-New Order) politics in recent years despite being frequently overlooked in discussions of Muslim societies. The country, along with others in Southeast Asia, such as South Korea and the Philippines, has been a ‘newcomer’ in the ‘Third Wave’ of democratization. In the final years of the New Order administration under the Suharto presidency (1966–1998), a powerful movement for a democratic Muslim politics took shape. The movement succeeded in May 1998 in toppling the long-ruling and formerly unassailable Suharto, signifying the movement’s alliance with secular Muslims and non-Muslims. Since the end of the long authoritarian regime, Indonesia has implemented a vast number of political reforms that one may arguably place it among healthy electoral democracies. What is also remarkable was Muslims’ participation in the democracy campaign dedicated themselves to formulating religious arguments in support of pluralism, democracy, women’s rights, and civil society (Hefner, 2005, p. 4; Bertrand, 2010, p. 45). Be that as it may, Indonesia has generally been on the periphery of discussions of comparative and international politics. More importantly, the interaction between Islam and politics in the country has received som...
