Indonesian Islam veers to right
Once moderate president takes hard-line stance in re-election campaign
JAKARTA, INDONESIA— Joko Wi- dodo, the Muslim president of Indonesia, is into heavy metal and saving Christians.
Earlier in his political career, he helped shelter ethnic Chinese Christians during deadly rioting. And upon winning the presidency in 2014, Joko filled his cabinet with women and banned a radical Islamic group that calls for Islamic law to replace Indonesia’s democracy. His election was seen as a victory for the moderate Islam that has long flourished in this country.
But this time around, as he runs for re-election on Wednesday against a pugnacious former general who has embraced the language of hardline, Middle Eastern Islam, Joko is veering rightward.
At a Saturday campaign rally, he pointedly gave thanks to Muslim preachers, and on Sunday he visited Mecca. For his vice-presidential running mate, Joko chose Ma’ruf Amin, the 76-year-old head of the Indonesian Ulema Council, which has issued fatwas against homosexuality and the wearing of Santa hats by Muslims. No hip-gyrating traditional dancing, no premarital sex and certainly no head-banging heavy metal allowed.
Nearly 5,000 miles from the birthplace of Islam, Indonesia, the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population, has been widely seen as proof that Islam and democracy can coexist and prosper.
“Indonesia is a country with more than 260 million people, with a geographical area of at least 17,000 islands,” Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Indonesia’s minister of religious affairs, said in an interview. “People still treasure and respect the diversity, the differences.”
Yet as the Muslim world has wrestled with Islam’s role in modern society, Indonesia, too, has engaged in a national spiritual reckoning. In recent years, the country’s Muslim majority has embraced more overt signs of religiosity and shifted toward Arab-style devotion: flowing clothes and veils, Arabic names and Middle Eastern devotional architecture.
Most of all, a puritanical Salafist interpretation of Islam, which draws inspiration from the age of the Prophet Muhammad, is attracting followers in Indonesia. Bureaucrats steeped in austere Wahhabism draw converts in government prayer halls. Hundreds of Indonesians joined Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands more cheer for the group also known as ISIS and ISIL on social media. Pushed aside are the syncretic traditions that were long the hallmark of Indonesian Islam, a blending with Indigenous beliefs that gave the faith its distinct local flavour.
“In Indonesia, Salafi ideology has penetrated urban and rural, civil servants and villagers,” said Din Wahid, a theologian at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “They see corruption all around them and say that it is only Shariah and restoring a caliphate that will be able to fix society.”
Joko’s opponent in the election on Wednesday, Prabowo Subianto — the European-educated son of a Christian and a connoisseur of fine wines — may seem an unlikely figurehead for hard-line Islam. But he is an astute politician who has shouted for jihad and vowed to welcome home from self-imposed exile Rizieq Shihab, the head of the Islamic Defenders Front, which gained notoriety for attacking nightclubs in Jakarta, the capital, and calling for Shariah law.
“Political Islam has strengthened tremendously over the last two decades in Indonesia,” said Andreas Harsono, an Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch and author of the new book Race, Islam and Power. “We should be very concerned, because both sides in the campaign have now made human rights and democracy decline.”
Faith politics exploded in late 2016 when millions of Indonesians marched in the streets of Jakarta to protest what they considered blasphemous language from Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian who was then the Jakarta governor. Ma’ruf, Joko’s surprising choice of running mate this year, was one of the drivers of those protests.