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1 Functionalization of Islamic education in Indonesia and Malaysia
Introduction
There I was sitting among the ustadzs (male religious teachers) in the teachers’ lounge of a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan province, drenched in sweat from the sweltering mid-morning Borneo heat while being plied with an endless supply of piping hot sweet tea and lumpia (fried spring rolls), when the moment of research epiphany struck. The television was showing an ever-popular infotainment program when suddenly a story came on about an inter-religious celebrity couple and their recent controversial marriage. The news caught the ustadzs’ attention and they started to discuss and debate it from wide-ranging theological points of views. As a Malaysian it was quite a scene to behold. In my personal experience, such an “unorthodox” marriage would provoke near universal condemnation from the general Malay-Muslim community, let alone in the deeply conservative environment of an Islamic school. The spirited debates in the teachers’ lounge naturally brought questions to my mind: What kind of Islamic education system has allowed for such a discourse to arise? Why are Indonesia and Malaysia so different?
These questions eventually led me to investigate how and why Muslim-majority states use or functionalize Islamic education to further enhance their legitimacy. Through the analyses of the Islamic education systems in Indonesia and Malaysia, I illustrate the varied ways through which states in the two countries have tried to use those systems to promote hegemony. I show that the combined influence of ideological hegemony of state Islamic orthodoxy and a strong centralizing tendency on the part of the state explain the severely restricted discursive space of Islamic education in Malaysia. On the other hand, the broad autonomy enjoyed by Islamic schools and the strong presence of heterogenous values in the state Islamic orthodoxy explain the relatively open discursive nature of Islamic education in Indonesia.
Differences between Islamic education in Indonesia and Malaysia
There are three key differences between Islamic education in Indonesia and Malaysia that can shed light on the aforementioned puzzle. First, Islamic schools in Indonesia greatly outnumber those in Malaysia, even after taking into account the size of the Muslim population. At the latest count, there are 47,221 formal Islamic primary and secondary schools in Indonesia spread out over the vast archipelago (roughly one school for every 4,387 Muslims).1 In comparison, there are 1,804 Islamic schools within the national education system in Malaysia (roughly one school for every 9,616 Muslims) and they are overwhelmingly concentrated in peninsular Malaysia.2 In Indonesia, the sheer number of Islamic schools, the country’s disparate geography, with its attendant cultural diversity, and inadequate budgets pose logistical and financial challenges to the relevant ministries in Jakarta when trying to implement a coherent Islamic education curriculum and enforce compliance from local educational offices and schools.3 In contrast, the smaller number of schools coupled with the larger budget of ministries in charge of Islamic education allow the state to strengthen its hold over even supposedly autonomous Islamic schools in Malaysia.4
Second, most Islamic schools in Indonesia are privately owned and managed, while in Malaysia, the majority of Islamic schools are either under the management of the Ministry of Education or the State Islamic Councils (Majlis Agama Islam Negeri).5 Private status provides Islamic schools in Indonesia room to operate autonomously, since they are not completely dependent on the Ministry of Religious Affairs for funding. But as we will soon see in subsequent chapters, this operational autonomy comes with the stiff price of not having enough resources to properly manage the schools. The public status of Islamic schools in Malaysia, on the other hand, means that they can be effectively managed by a central authority, be it the Ministry of Education or the State Islamic Councils, especially when it comes to curriculum content, teachers’ certification and appointment, choice of textbooks, examinations, and the like. In short, a streamlined standard can be established for Islamic education, either under the aegis of the ministry or the state religious authorities, with the trend leaning toward increasing centralization by the ministry. We will explore these differences in Chapters 3 and 4.
Third, there is a higher degree of institutional coherency in Malaysia than Indonesia when it comes to educational operations and objectives. Despite the constitution guaranteeing the sultans and by extension, the Majlis Agama Islam Negeri, wide latitude in managing Islamic affairs, including Islamic schools, within their jurisdiction, the reality is that Islamic education in Malaysia is overwhelmingly dominated by the federal government in Putrajaya. Despite occasional political differences, state institutions along the horizontal (Ministry of Education and JAKIM) and vertical (Majlis Agama Islam Negeri) axes of governance typically work in concert with each other especially in regard to curriculum content, school supervision, teachers’ training and placement, and a host of other operational issues. In contrast, in Indonesia, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture have been historically at odds with each other when it comes to the overall nature and future direction of Islamic education in Indonesia, especially with regard to the issue of “single-roof education” (pendidikan satu atap). The 1999 decentralization laws further exacerbated the rift between these two institutions. The role played by the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) and their local offices, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, further complicates the picture. Suffice it to say that lack of institutional coherency within and between the state institutions that oversee Islamic schools in Indonesia means that it is much harder for the state to imprint its ideological stamp on the Islamic education system as a whole. In Malaysia, by contrast, the state has been relatively unified and effective in shaping Islamic education.
Why functionalization and centralization of Islamic education in Indonesia and Malaysia?
Two main questions drive this book. The first question is comprised of three parts: to what extent and under what circumstances do the states in Indonesia and Malaysia functionalize Islamic education for their own political ends? How do they engage in such functionalization?6 To what extent have such efforts been successful? A state shapes and controls Islamic education, I will argue in this book, when Islam, in its socio-political iterations, constitutes a potential basis for or threat to state legitimacy. States are likely to functionalize Islamic education when Islam assumes a saliency as a potentially potent organizational and oppositional socio-political force, which the state also has the opportunity to exploit. If outright repression alone is not enough to quell Islamic-based opposition to the state’s legitimacy, winning hearts and minds through ideological co-optation can become an important state imperative. The state attempts to gain control of Islamic education through centralizing efforts such as insisting upon standardized curriculum and textbooks, centralized teachers’ training, certification and placement, national examinations, appointment of school principals, and so on. Typically, the state also colludes with the religious authorities to establish a set of orthodox values to be instilled through the Islamic education curriculum that, I will argue, buttresses its legitimacy while stamping out competing religious interpretations.
The second research question is: Why has the state in Malaysia been more successful in exerting centralized control over Islamic education than the state in Indonesia? This book argues that the ability of the state in Malaysia to consolidate its control over Islamic education has been due to the state’s ability to minimize the influence and centrifugal pull of the Muslim society at large. In particular, the state in Malaysia has been able to gain control over Islamic schools and Islamic education curriculum with minimal pushback from opposing Islamic groups. In contrast, the state in Indonesia has not been able to centralize control over Islamic education even during the highly centralizing period of the New Order regime (1966–1998). There are three factors that determine the state’s resiliency and adaptability in interacting with Muslim society in pursuit of its Islamic education prerogatives: (i) the ideological makeup of the state institutions; (ii) patterns of Islamization in the society that necessitate different reactions from the state; and (iii) the control of resources by the central government that influences the interaction between the centre and its periphery.
Let us briefly consider each of these issues in turn. First, less intra-institutional resistance such as disagreements among departments or intransigent staff allows a state institution possessing a clear ideology to be more coherent when organizing Islamic education. Similar dynamics are also applicable to inter-institutional relations between state institutions that are part of the Islamic education system. In Malaysia, there is a high degree of ideological conformity within and between state institutions that manage Islamic education, even at the local level where long-standing traditions and cultural particularities remain pervasive and influential. The case studies of Islamic education in Kelantan and Sarawak in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively best exemplify what I term a “federalized” institutional mindset: local educational agents of the state believe the only way to improve the overall condition of Islamic education locally is through the heavy involvement of the federal government in Putrajaya. In Indonesia, in contrast, the ideological makeup of the institutions that oversee Islamic education is more fragmented and they are regularly at odds with each other. This institutional and ideological incoherency in turn hampers the efforts of the state in Indonesia to assert more control over the Islamic education system in the country. Case studies of Aceh and Nusa Tenggara Timur in Chapters 3 and 4 best illustrate this shortcoming, as do the discussions of the single-roof education system and funding for Islamic education in Chapter 2.
The second factor is patterns of social Islamization. The wave of Islamic resurgence in the late 1970s hit Indonesia and Malaysia in markedly different ways. The heightened fervour of political Islam that reverberated across the Muslim world at this time did not take on a similar urgency in Indonesia. Suharto’s New Order regime did not have to contend with galvanized domestic Islamic socio-political forces that could pose a serious threat to its rule. On the contrary, a decade later the regime decided to exploit Islam as a counterweight against the rising challenge of a nationalist faction within the military.7 While the regime did embark on Islam-oriented projects such as building more mosques and Islamic schools, promoting the MUI and establishing the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals or ICMI, its legitimacy did not depend on being publicly perceived as Islamic, which therefore allowed it to engage less with political Islam without significant political repercussions.8 Meanwhile in Malaysia, the Islamic resurgence in the late 1970s sparked the growth of a stridently vocal Islamic civil society movement that challenged the legitimacy of the hitherto secular state from an Islamic perspective. Instead of crushing the Islamic opposition and remaining secular, Mahathir Mohamad’s regime decided to Islamize the state, co-opt Islamic civil society and actively engage in the religiously charged public sphere, so as to burnish the state’s Islamic credibility to rule.9 In contrast to MUI in Indonesia, which is semi-official and has a narrowly prescribed scope of authority, JAKIM in Malaysia was from the early 1980s until the present day officially entrusted as the main driver of the state’s Islamization efforts, replete with significant powers in matters pertaining to Islam. In short, Islamization dynamics in Malaysia posed a credible threat to the state’s legitimacy, thus eliciting a reaction from the state to shape the Islamic public discourse in its favour, including by tightening its reins on the hitherto decentralized Islamic education system. No such threat arose in Indonesia, so that the impetus to refashion Islamic discourse was commensurately less.
The capacity to disburse resources to financially struggling Islamic schools is the third factor that contributes to the state’s ability to limit the pressure and influence from the Muslim social actors and at the same time increase its control over the Islamic education system. As shown in the previous section, state institutions in charge of Islamic education in Malaysia such as the Ministry of Education and JAKIM have been well endowed with resources, in comparison to their counterparts in Indonesia. Resource superiority allows the central government in Malaysia to overcome the federal system that theoretically provides Islamic schools with some measure of autonomy (Article 3 of the constitution).10 In contrast, the 1999 decentralization laws in Indonesia further complicate the efforts of the central government in Jakarta to distribute more resources to the Islamic schools, and hence have weakened its position vis-à-vis the Islamic education system. The issue of resource distribution within the federal/decentralized dimension of Islamic education system in Indonesia and Malaysia will be discussed at length in Chapters 3 and 4. In short, the control and distribution of resources affect the dynamics of...
