Islam, State, and Civil Society: ICMI and the Struggle for the Indonesian Middle Class

Abstract

On December 6,1990, television viewers across Indonesia were treated to the image of President Muhammad Suharto,1 clad in distinctive mosque attire, striking a large mosque drum (bedug) to call to order the first-ever meeting of the Association of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals (ICMI, Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim Se-Indonesia).It was a poignant moment in the political and cultural history of New Order (post-1966) Indonesia.For many Muslim Indonesians, the president's act was merely the latest in a series of overtures the Suharto government has made over the past few years to the Muslim community.For other Indone sians, the president's blessing of ICMI seemed to represent a dangerous departure from the non-sectarian principles of the New Order.For Western observers unfamiliar with the gov ernment's openings to the Muslim community, finally, the scene appeared rich with irony.Here was a man regarded by many foreign scholars as an abangan2 mystic unsympathetic to 1 It is not unusual for Muslims who have completed the pilgrimage (haj) to the Holy Land to take a new or addi tional name, as a symbol of the significance of the event for their personal identity.President Suharto added the personal name "Muhammad" after his pilgrimage in 1990.2 From the Javanese word for "red," abangan refers to those Javanese less strict in their adherence to Muslim devotional forms than the so-called santri, practicing or "orthodox" Muslims; see Clifford Geertz, The Religion o f Java (New York: Free Press, 1960).It is important to note that many people referred to by outsiders as abangan studiously avoid the term for self-ascription, since, outside the Western-educated middle class, it is widely re garded as derogatory.Many prefer to refer to themselves as kejawen ("Javanist"), practitioners o f Islam Jaw a (Javanese Islam), or, simply "Muslim," with the understanding that they place more emphasis on the mystical than the legal or ritualistic dimensions of Islam.The larger relationship of Javanism to Islam is a complex matter.Geertz's characterization of abangan culture as deeply Hindu-Buddhist was criticized by, among others, the re nowned Islamist Marshall Hodgson.Hodgson wrote, "[IJnfluenced by the polemics of a certain school of mod ern Shari'ah-minded Muslims, Geertz identifies Islam' only with what that school of modernists happens to approve, and ascribes everything else to an aboriginal or a Hindu-Buddhist background, gratuitously labelling much of the Muslim religious life in Java 'Hindu.'He identifies a long series of phenomena, virtually universal to Islam and sometimes found even in the Qur'an itself, as un-Islamic; and hence his interpretation of the Islamic past as well as of some recent anti-Islamic reactions is highly misleading."See Marshall G.