This paper brings democratic politics back into our discussion about Islamism. Drawn upon Indonesian experience, our argument is that politics of identity, as illustrated by diverse articulation of Islamism, takes place within actual discourses that have shaped different projects or ways in coping with nationalized issues. Indonesian Islamism has reflected how the nature of ‘Islam’, as political signifier, enables groups or individuals to actively engage with reinvention of Indonesian nation-state and citizenship. Instead of taking Islamism as excess of either ideologies or structural changes, we need to look at its multiple projects as reinventing the nation and effacing their identity as Indonesian citizenship. However, political Islam in Post New Order are facing hegemonic crisis as the Islamists become the prisoners of the past legacy and present electorate politics. This helps explain the relation between political Islam and the violent version of Islamic articulations in Post New Order Indonesia
(Abdurrahman Wahid, Gus Dur, the fourth President, labelled as Bapak Pluralisme, Father of Indonesian Multiculturalism)
Introduction
Islamism in Indonesia has become one of the recurrent topics in the aftermath of long rule of Suharto’s regime. Its profile is as diverse as their advocates take up differing projects and arena. Political liberalization has opened unprecedented space of Islamic encounters with national, regional and international issues. Rather than reflecting an alliance, Islamic politics take multiple agenda, often in conflict to each other, when dealing with similar issues.
Terms, such as ‘radical’, ‘moderate’, or ‘liberal’ Islam, become increasingly popular as simple ways to categorizing their rather complex emergence and distinction. It is this labeling, or simple profiling, that contributes to the make-up of Islamism as the most popular topics that brings together pundits and security experts in their discoursing of Post New Order’s Indonesian Islamism.
Current understanding of Indonesian Islamism is situated in the two major events: the fall of Suharto in 1998 and tragic event of WTC Bombing in September 2001. The first event offers context of the emergence of Islamism as political forces that include broad-based groups of Islamism whose insertion into national politics traced back to Suharto’s strategies of containing rapid appeal for democratization in early 1990s.
The comeback of Islam politics in full force found momentum with the fall of Suharto and its articulation through Islamic parties has given legitimate entrance into the centers of state power at local and national level. Habibie’s transition government in 1998-1999 indicates the joint Islamic projects stroke a balance between populist appeal of anti-authoritarianism and authoritarian legacy of Islamic politics itself. While the Gus Dur administration in 2001 reveals more dynamic contention among Islamic parties that ended their short termed alliance with the dismissal of Gus Dur presidency by MPR (People Assembly).
This contention lingers to the present as the parties have to face with democracy challenges for the current nation-state formation and, particularly, their respective interests instead of ‘authoritarianism’ as common enemy that once hold them together. The point is that Islam politics has exerted major role in shifting the balance of power-relation between state and society and together with it, shows its agency as democratic forces for the fate of the nation-state reformation.
The tragic event 9/11 elicits different responses among Indonesian Muslims. Repercussion of US led war on terror within which Islamic terrorism is widely conceived of as having connection with ‘radical’ version of Islamic ideology divides the country into contrasting camps of supporters. Bali Bombing in 2002, together with the use of terrorism as strategy in communal violence in Ambon and Poso conflict, enforces the government to issue the Bill on The Eradication of Terrorism in 2003.
Public debate increases as the hostility marks who are the ‘liberal’ and the ‘radical’ Muslims. The debate not only revealing how Muslims should better respond to the question of ‘Ummah’ which is transnational and contingent on various contending interpretations but, more importantly, how Indonesian Muslims cope with post-Cold War issues with Islam in its baggage.
Discourse on terrorism at home reveals many faces of Indonesian Islamism as they are situated in-between national citizenship and adherents of pan-Islamism. This ambivalence has nothing to do with the battle between the good and the bad Muslim as the GWOT practices imply, but reflects contentious dynamics of Muslim agency toward international issues when the state fails to accommodate different aspirations in counter-terrorism policy.
It is with the backdrop of the two major events that we come to understand that Islamism in Indonesia is integral to national questions. We need to discuss their emergence and trends within the course of the nation-state reformation and how through their articulations their sense of identity and agency are cultivated and transformed. Its trajectory lies in the active interplay between domestic and global issue, and the extent to which democratic arena is in place to facilitate dissent and multiple versions of justice among conflicting Muslims.
It is our contention that once we conceive the dynamics of Islamism in Indonesia as competing articulation and identification to the post New Order citizenship, democratic politics becomes the most available project capable of building up more productive alliance for domestic prosperity and liberty, and consequently, implicates on the eradication of extremism and ‘radicalism’.
In the case of ‘Islamic radicalism’ in Indonesia, security solution proves to have exacerbated the dissents and escalated the tension between the radical and liberal camps. Growing primacy of surveillance on extra parliamentary Islamic groups in fact essentializes the imposed nature of their identities. This seems to be contradictory with democratic appeal that characterizes the entrance of Islamism into parliamentary arena. What is interesting to note is the fact that their political genealogy and aspirations are made unintelligible while their ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ behavior are perceived as threatening national integrity and liberal order of post New Order polity.
Looking more closely, ‘Islamic radicalism’ today is treated more like communism in post 1965. If the latter seen as radically secularizing the state in Guided Democracy period (1958-1965), the former Islamization of the state in post New Order. But, the hardcore issue of the two trends remains, that is, how the political forces relate to the nation-state formation either through class (labor) articulation or religious communitarian projects.
In next section, Contested Genealogy, we discuss trends in current understanding of Islamism within politics-security nexus in post New Order. Drawing upon diverse studies under the central theme of political Islam, we summarizes the trends into two camps; the first, which is dominant, is ideology-network approach and the second, minor one if not late coming, is political economy approach. We take these two academic trends seriously for their implication in policy making and also their context of origins and impacts as they are produced within discursive regime of power-knowledge in post New Order in particular and post-Cold War international regime in general.
In section Democracy without Democratic Antagonism, we reflect upon the existing condition of democratic practices to suggest that more attention should be paid on the dynamics of political Islam in its mutually effacing encounter with nation-state reformation and identity construction as Indonesian citizenship. Reworking upon existing studies on political Islam, we understand that Islamization of the state or nationalization of Islam are symptomatic of actual struggles among Islamists of diverse articulations of how the state power and Indonesian citizenship should be contentiously effaced.
Rather than following the binary understanding of religion and politics that obscures our vision, we need to understand violent version of political Islam as democratic problems that then helps shape our security intervention.
Contested Genealogy: A Critique
What is Islamism? Many scholars have their own conceptualization of Islamism. Greg Barton (2005:28), for instance, argues that Islamism comprises broad spectrum of Islamic convictions ranging from one extreme that Islam should be properly recognized in national life ‘in terms of national symbols’ into other extreme whose project is for ‘radical transformation of society and politics, by whatever means, into an absolute theocracy’.
Another scholar, Mohammed Ayoob (2008:2), proposes instrumental notion of Islamism that Islamists are individual or groups who employ Islam for their preoccupation with the present and future of their society and state. Their travel to the past is part of reinventing Islamic tradition for their present political projects.
But for our argument to proceed, conceptualization of Islamism offered by Sayyid (1997:46) seems more convincing. Let us quote at length the relation between Islam and Islamism in his proposition: “the relation between Islam and Islamism is not as direct as orientalists maintain, nor is it, as anti-orientalists would contend, merely opportunistic. Rather, it is constitutive—that is, both Islam and the identity of Islamism are transformed as Islamist attempt to articulate Islam to their project”. Sayyid’s notion of Islamism offers discursive understanding of the relation of Islamism and politics in Indonesia.
As will be described, dominant understanding of Indonesian political Islam has overemphasized the primacy of ideology over groups with their differing ideological orientations. Democratization is taken more as context of its emergence rather than discursive space into which various Islamic articulations have been made possible. As consequence, Indonesian Islamism is seen as either living legacy of Islam politics in Indonesian political history or imported from Middle East and Central Asia in the aftermath of Cold War world and post 9/11.
Primacy of Ideology: ‘Islamization of Politics’
Studies and literature that celebrates the primacy of ideology are abundant even to the extent that we, Indonesians and Indonesianists alike, discuss and write down this topics with a sense of ‘field research’ objectivity and hostile attitude altogether. Darul Islam of DI/NII and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), for instance, are bracketed into one theme of inquiry despite of their difference in the discursive space of emergence and objectives.
Greg Fealy (2004:105; cf. Bruinessen, 2002), one among other proponent of this approach, for instance, argues that ‘radicalness’ of Islamic groups connotes to their theocratic appeal in both state and public affairs. Though acknowledging the contingent boundaries between radical and moderate Islamists such as NU and Muhamadiyah, too much focus on ideological traits and their intersections, activity of the groups and their leaderships, escapes Islamists’ experience and how their struggles affect other political forces as all these forces articulate within nation-state setting and boundaries.
The use of radicalism as explanatory concept for understanding Islamism and politics becomes more pronounced with the insertion of jihadism as practical ideology of violence. Situated in the intermingling episodes of communal violence (1999-2003) and Bali Bombing 2002, political radicalism and terrorism has dramatically lost their political distinction and turned to be two discursive elements that until now sustain the hegemonic notion of Indonesian Islamism.
Political radicalness of FPI and Laskar Jihad, two prominent Muslim paramilitary, for instance, is perceived as homicidal perverts and alien to ‘tolerant’ Indonesia Islam (see, Hasan, 2002:169; 2006; see also). Not only failing to grasp the pressure of local and national antagonism opened up by democratization, this perception of violent jihadism dehistorizes violent Islamic articulations to the nation-state reformation in dramatic anti-communism discourse of 1965-1966 led by the most affected elements of NU and Muhamadiyah during Guided Democracy period (kroef, 1972; Samson, 1968).
The conflation of Islamic radicalism and jihadism also takes place within broader setting of global counterterrorism propaganda in post 9/11 (Asad, 2007:17). Counterterrorism, either military targeting or deradicalization, is perceived as legal and legitimate activity while ‘Islamic terrorism’ is not. Insofar as jihadist activity has been excluded from political arena, this act is confined into the domain of war. This internationalizing stance has its strong echoes in both Indonesia academic and public debate.
Indonesian Islamism, particularly its violent extra-parliamentary versions, draws greater attention to the issue of bad Muslim versus good Muslim with stronger moral-ideological inspection (Cf. Mamdani, 2002:765). As taking place in many countries in Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, Islamism with faces of terror in Indonesia has become increasingly an epistemological object of knowledge production in one hand and political object of surveillance and securitization.
Depoliticizing, widely misperceived as deradicalisng, the violent version of political Islam comes from two interconnected directions.
First direction of depolitization stems from rapid globalization of ‘Islamic terrorism’ as provoked by the US response to 9/11 event. As already discussed, the event has stepped beyond mere symbols of greatest atrocity committed by non-state actors, but as reconfiguration of global empire whose impacts affects Indonesian democratic transition. Hadiz (2006: 124-5), for instance, argues that in regard to transition to democracy in Indonesia, American empire of post-Cold War employs GWOT through active bilateral partnership and introduction of ‘governance’ discourse.
The objective is to (1) prevent the break-up of Indonesian nation state, (2) to contain radical Islamic forces deemed hostile to Western interests and (3) to guarantee the security and predictability necessary for the operation of international, especially US, capital in Indonesia and Southeast Asia region. Post-Cold War US foreign policy to contain political Islam reminds us of its foreign policy during Guided Democracy that sought collaboration with Indonesian Army in containing class-based articulation of PKI and supporting the party’s crackdown after the aborted 1965 coup (Kroef, 1972).
Second direction of depoliticizing revolves within turbulent dynamics of democratization at home. National experience with communal violence with religious background in Poso and Ambon together with unprecedented Bali Bombing has provided ground for mainstreaming the dangerous enterprise of ‘Islamization of the state’. Normalization of politics, that politics belongs to the public while religious channeled aspiration to the private sphere, gains support, even to the extent masterminding by the Muslim elites. The elites seek to renegotiate their political stakes with the remaining ultranationalist-military forces at home and attract greater sympathy from international/global coalition of development and security institutions.
In order to convince the global public that that democratization is on the right track, increased securitizing of radical and jihadist groups goes together with culturalization of Islamic articulation in public matters. However, this maneuver has proved highly contingent upon issues to which their response elicits public trusts or distrust.
Recurrent exclusion of Ahmadiyah is paradigmatic exemplar in which FPI (Front of Defenders of Islam), the most active group in killing and terrorizing Ahmadiyah members, is not publicly condemned and banned as the case deemed to be ‘internal problem’ of Muslim community, while their public intervention to ‘purifying’ public life from ‘secularization’ is often celebrated as assisting the police tasks.
Looking at deeper level of ideological effacement, the conflation of political radicalism and jihadism in current studies on the genealogy of political Islam in post New Order seems to reflect the global revival of Weberian understanding of the modern state laden with Western experience in time of colonial encounter with the colonialized Rest in tandem with the recurrent insertion of ‘clash of civilization’ thesis in post-Cold War disorder.
As Lockman (2011:86-98; ) argues, in his detailed study on legacy of orientalism in US and Western countries’ foreign policy in Muslim countries, image of western modern state is taken up as ideal-type of impartial organizing of public interests that led the continent into full blown democracies. Embedded within this image is the capitalist spirit of ‘protestant ethics’ that Asiatic and African societies have had none except through reforming the oriental despotism and modernizing economic sphere.
While, repercussion of the apparently ‘realist’ vision of post-Cold War disorder, without communism, effaces the primacy of identity politics, through the insertion of ‘radical Islam’, that transverse state sovereignty and boundaries (Huntington,1993:22-49). It is within this global knowledge operation and framework that Islam politics must be contained in both domestic and international politics in order for societal modernization and liberal peace order to survive.
Strong orientalist vision of political Islam in Indonesia has in part inherited from colonial Dutch politics of containment (Samuel, 2002:9-24). Embedded in colonial Dutch enterprise of the late 1800s (ethics politics) onward, scholarship on Indonesian society, Indology, owes much to the Snouck Hurgronje’s understanding of Islam and Indonesian Muslims and Boeke’s expanded thesis on Indonesian Dual Economy toward Dual Society.
Combining their theses into policy making, Dutch colonial administration sought to westernize the Muslims for the colonial economic and administrative interests while their political resistance was forcefully banished as early as possible. Though this policy met growing resistance among Muslims intellectual and urban petty bourgeoisie in the late 1920s toward independence, legacy of this policy recurred in different discursive setting during the formative years of New Order authoritarianism (1968-1980s).
During New Order period, developmentalism discourse has dealt with political Islam as mere system of belief upon which Islam articulated and defended the appeal for modernization without communism, its long-entrenched adversary since 1950s. Circumscribed within SARA framework, Islamists of bygone era lived in fear of military repression, partly that of haunting memory of full blown crackdown against DI/TII and regional rebellions in 1957-1958 out of which Masyumi has been implicated. Against the backdrop of ‘waves of democratization’ in 1990s, Islamism reemerged as urban middle class and Muslim intellectuals and students, sought greater political freedom and voicing their past grievances and hope for better economic future.
Political-Economy: ‘Politicization of Islam’
Going beyond euphoric entrapment of ideology approach has been the major traits of the political economy understanding of political Islam and ‘radical’ Islamist in Post New Order Indonesia. Hadiz (2011:4), for instance, summarizes that political Islam must be understood as populist response to the crisis of capitalist development and its trajectory relates to following factors.
First factor is “the fluctuating relationship between the state and the highly varied representatives of political Islam, especially during the long rule of Suharto’s ‘New Order’ (1966-1998). Second factor is, “the de facto role played by political Islam as a major articulator of social justice issues in relation the social contradictions associated with rapid capitalist development in the late twentieth century, and in lieu of a coherent Leftist, social-democratic or liberal response.” The third factor, “which is closely related to the second, concerns the way the character of political Islam has been forged in relation to the outcomes and imperatives of Cold War politics”.
It suggests that we need to carefully address the relationship between Islam, capitalist development and the state. Islamic politics lies in the logic of capital that produces social antagonism and the ways the state manages the class-laden social conflict. Following arguments of this approach, New Order’s authoritarianism is perceived as political ways employed by capitalist bureaucratic state to suppress economic grievances and incorporate the demands into state-led associations (labor organizations, student’s movements, paramilitary).
This practice of authoritarianism has in fact produced growing resistance. Islamic radicalism’ in Indonesia is then seen as ‘essentially the product of the long phase of authoritarian capitalist development under New Order rule”.
It is worth noting that the inclusion of political economy approach offers valuable contribution in making sense of trajectories of political Islam in Indonesian history since colonial period. In latest stage of colonial period, particularly since 1920s, Sarekat Islam (SI), as paradigmatic exemplar, articulates petty bourgeoisie interests as this organization of strong socialist-communist elements confronts with colonial Dutch’s relation of economic production that favors Chinese merchants and traders (Hadiz & Robison, 2011:7-8).
Sarekat Islam is conceived as Muslim merchants-traders responding to capitalist development of the late Dutch colonialism. This movement then transformed its economic ‘indigenous Muslims’ interests into nationalist project together with the communists (later Red SI) and socialism of the PNI during 1930-early 1940s.
In contrast, political Islam in half phase of New Order’s state capitalism (1970-late 1980s), has been under state corporatization either through state-sanctioned party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP) and other extra parliamentary corporatization of growing but economically fragile urban Muslim middle class.
Violent resistance among Muslims urban proletariats emerged in the late 1970s and proliferated in 1080s. Tanjung Priok riots in 1984, as paradigmatic exemplar, took place in Jakarta that then marked the rapid phenomena of Islamic networks and associations in responding to the economic injustice and discrimination brought by growth model of developmentalism and structural adjustment.
However, political economy reading of political Islam has not convinced us about the extent to which violent articulation of Muslim organizations actually relates to the legacy of New Order authoritarianism. Lurking behind this approach is structuralist underpinning that sees political ideology of either the state apparatus or Islamists as expression, if not response, to the dynamics in nationalized global capitalism as results of multiple factors, global and domestic, that is beyond their reach.
The approach sees ‘violence’ committed by Islamists as no more than reaction among underprivileged to the pressures of superhuman forces. Equally worth criticizing is the approach’s less conceptualized notion of ‘radical’ and ‘radicalism’. It makes sense of Islamic radicalism through violence and other practices of exclusion (as indicated in value laden terms such as ‘intolerant’, ‘anti-pluralism’).
At this point, this approach shares the moral legacy of ideology-oriented approach that it claims to transverse. Its claim to go beyond security-minded scholarship on Islamism needs further elaboration as it remains entrapped in liberal fantasy of co-existential and world peace.
Genealogies of Indonesian Islamism, particularly ‘Islamic radicalism’, pursued by the dominant ideology-oriented approach, present us two faces of their inquiries. It offers detailed narratives of actors, organization, networks within ideological spectrums, while, simultaneously, the approach reflects its own function as articulator of post Cold War’s hegemonic understanding and practices of demonizing and depolitizing human subjects (Zizek, 2008; Negri 2000).
The deliberate negligence of taking seriously external factors that has affected the emergence and trajectories of Indonesian Islamism makes the approach vulnerable to be the state’s proxy in repressing political dissents articulating through Islam. This gap has been filled by the contribution of political economy approach that treats the state in domestic, regional and international contexts.
To summarize this section, the ideology oriented approach understands Indonesian Islamism as ideology(s) driving the Islamists to exploit Muslims’ grievances to capture the state and the public; while, the political economy approach sees Islamism as the excluded Islamists instrumentalize Islam, as ideological means, to articulate their grievances before the state and the public. Our preoccupation with these two approaches makes us accustomed to ‘Islamization of politics or state’ for the former and ‘politicization of Islam’ for the latter.
Islamism and Democratic Challenges
The role that political Islam has played for the fate of this nation has been so great that one who doubts this must be completely blind to the Indonesian history. Islamism, diverse and internally contentious, proves to have always been at the sequence of decisive turning points in the course of regime changes. It affects the ways the regime behaves but simultaneously, the nature and characteristics of its political performance has been equally influenced by its encounters with other political forces.
Adversarial relation with other national forces characterizes its historical performance, with the exception of life and death struggle with communism in early 1960s. Behind its emergence and encounters has been the cultural, social and economic undercurrent that varies from one period to another. All this has their bearings and legacy from which Indonesian Islamism today faces its contingency to renegotiation and transformation as the frontiers and contents of what the Islamists articulate are always reinvented in response to local, national and global condition.
Indonesian Islamism today should be better understood in that way. Nation-state remains important, even increasingly unavoidable, for the engagement of Islamic parties and extra parliamentary organizations with multiple issues that concern their constituencies and broader Muslim community. Islamists very well know that the state is not a fixed boundary, or a closed system of regulating human conducts.
They challenge other ‘nationalist’ forces to enliven the spirits of asking and questioning nationalism that tempts to be in service of oligarchic power. None of them, even the most subversive like proponents of DI/TII, imagine different ways to radically change the nation or separate the country into dar-Islam and dar-khuffar. What they propose is how the state is better organized and public affairs are conducted for prosperity and liberty the majority of Muslims have not enjoyed over decades.
This very asking and proposing, however radical it may suggest, discloses political space that New Order authoritarianism sought to subscribe into anti-Pancasila and separatism discourses. Looking back, short-lived experiment with Pancasila as ‘Asas Tunggal’ (sole foundation) in 1980s up to late 1990s must be relegated to the persistent criticism among leading Islamists since the time this policy issued in 1982.
Just as reminder, Syafruddin Prawiranegara, one of progressive Masjumi leaders and prime minister of the Republic’s Emergency Government 1948, wrote a publicly declared letter to Suharto in 1983 that instead of upholding Pancasila, the regime’s enforcement of the state ideology as sole foundation of all citizens’ organizations betrays the nature of Pancasila itself as comprising all principles of life that evolve from Indonesian society (Prawiranegara, 1983:74-83).
The strong point of his argument is that if Pancasila becomes totalized, not only as state ideology, the ideology will lose its nationalizing characters that since the birth of the nation has sustained practices of ‘Gotong-Royong’ in political and social spheres. This, however, strongly reflects the Islamists’s criticism against the authoritarian tendency to symbolize Pancasila as ideology of power or state ideology rather than working principle of Indonesian political community.
To understand the contribution and problems of political Islam in post 1998 we take seriously what debating issue on ‘Asas Tunggal’ since 1980s contributes to the revitalizing of democratic struggle among Islamist of diverse articulations. Anti-authoritarianism evolved from this peak period of state-led capitalism.
Together with the broad based leftist student movements, brand new and old Islamic student groups and urban intelligentsia began their collaboration against military rule and model of economic development that has constituted the nature of the New Order regime. Anti-authoritarianism becomes the rallying point within which new and old demands are articulated. The more the suppression put in place by the regime, the more New Order lost its hegemonic character that has once been thought by Islamists and secular nationalist alike of as rescuing the nation from ‘brutal and atheistic’ proletarian politics of communism.
This discourse, anti-authoritarianism, creates discursive space for reinventing new political agency as they bring forth different, more often conflicting, identification to what Islam should play in national context. Islam is again dealt not as ‘solution ‘as we may be impressed by the fierce rhetoric of the ‘purist’ Islamists, but the fact that it is through Islam that different articulations of the Islamists take place in coping with perils of New Order’s authoritarianism.
In 1990s renegotiation with the regime took place following the establishment of ICMI in 1990. Instead of completely containing the Islamic movements, the regime’s maneuver opened up democratic space within which multi-face of Islamism became more threatening to the regime as proved in last years of Suharto. The inclusion of critical Muslim intellectuals of middle class background into the organization produced pros and cons among broad based Islamic movements back to the anti-authoritarianism of 1980s.
Instead of proliferating ‘associational pluralism’ to weaken the Islamic opposition, it re-politicizes another segments of Islamists whose understanding of democracy, as response to the increasing corporation, becomes more radicalized and leads them to non-cooperation (Porter, 2002: 234-5).
The establishment of Forum Demokrasi led by Gus Dur, as one of the two paradigmatic exemplar of this period, not too much shows the ‘anti-cooptation’ attitude but best understood as different strategy of negotiation with the regime’s effort to rehabilitate its relationship with Islamism. Beside the growing uneasiness, including deepening fracture, within military in coping with the unpredictable trends of political Islam (Ramage, 1996:158-9), ICMI and Forum Demokrasi reflects more the conflicting Islamic articulation to Democracy as new discourse of the period.
In the global backdrop of ‘democratization waves’ across the authoritarian communist countries, this different strategies bear both the legacy of past experiences of harsh repression against political Islam and dangerous travel to the future where ABRI would become the only adversary.
Looking More than just ‘pragmatism’ of ICMI member and ‘idealism’ of Forum Demokrasi, this experience reflects ‘communist dilemma’ in the last years of Sukarno when the possible contender after ‘the death’ of Sukarno would be the military (Kroef, 1962). Both radicalizing and moderating characters of the Islamic struggle are two faces of Islamism within democracy discourse in this period.
Between 1995 and 1998, issues like anti-Dwi Fungsi ABRI and anti-neo-liberal capitalism, as well crafted in both Islamic articulations, became the nodal points that bind all new nationalist forces together to end the regime. But this democracy discourse focused on the overthrowing of Suharto that obscure their modest attention to the regional conditions across the country.
Ethnic conflicts broke in West Kalimantan 1996-1997 and Aceh dispute grew tenser while the Chinese community steadily occupied the mind of masses as to be the scapegoat in time of political crisis. National politics became increasingly an arena of open confrontation among power seekers and opportunists as more and more Islamists, be they labeled as purist or secular-inclusive, saw themselves as possible contenders in post Suharto era.
Efforts at constructing common ground among Islamists for future democracy were suspended as replaced by efforts to revive the past legacy and present constituencies. The fall of Suharto in 1998 came as glad tidings as to make possible their running for power holding.
Post New Order Indonesia witnesses the failure of political Islam in democratic sense of the term. Its dynamics and trajectories since Habibie Presidency 1998 reflect more the internal disputes and pragmatist aspect of their articulations as cultural and social cleavages of their past legacy becomes resilient rather than crosscutting that creates the political void in their political representation under the banner of Islam.
The ‘impeachment’ of Gus Dur in 2001 is one of the best pictures of how fragile democratic legacy of political Islam in the last two decades has become to imagine its possible greater contribution for substantial democracy and security. Bringing forth the agenda of Syariah into annual session of the People Consultative Assembly in 2002 divided them more deeply in ideological orientations. Polarizations increases as their ideological rift makes them later easily prey to the popular and academic labeling such as ‘Islamist’, ‘Islamist inclusive’ and ‘secular-inclusive’ (Baswedan, 2004:679).
Five major Islamic parties (PKB, PAN, PPP, PBB, PKS) began to crumble as the leaders of the parties becomes more fond of talking lip service about what true Islam is rather than what Islam can best offer to tackle grinding poverty of the New Order’s Developmentalism legacy. ‘Abanganisasi of Islam’ and ‘santrinisasi of Islam’ are their language of war. This in fact reinvests their cultural origins and masks their electorate behaviors. It is within this national circumstance various academic and popular labeling such as ‘neo-traditionalist’, ‘revivalist’ or ‘neo-‘modernist’, emerges only to add to the political obscurantism underway.
Absence of hegemonic link, in form of joint agenda, capable of uniting and furthering democracy project explains the zero sum game of their political encountering with issues that otherwise exert great impacts on the constituencies. In early years of Post New Order, there has taken place conflicts of decisions and opinions among Islamists in parliament, Islamic public intellectuals, and scholars including MUI (see, Ichawan, 2005). Religious conflicts in Maluku, North Maluku and Central Sulawesi (1999 until 2003) seem to reflect, among other factors, the bad performance of political Islam in the first years of post-New Order.
The rise of violent Muslim paramilitaries and ‘jihadism’ into the conflicts is another symptom in the long list of its failure. Worth noting is the war with GAM, the Acehnese secessionist movement, that then requires the international intervention to end the fratricide by bringing both parties to negotiation and resolution in 2006.
All these show how Islamic parties have been unable, if not reluctant, to cope with real problems and how prone the populist Islamism are to be elitist and power preserving. The place of power that once achieved through democratic struggle has been but the market of political transactions and calculations as the actual patterns of Islamic parties personalize into traditional leadership and patronage (see, Priyono, 2007).
‘War on Terrorism’ is another notorious nationalized discourse that reveals the multi-face of Islamic articulations in coping with the relation between global politics and violence (see Heffner, 2002). In the name of ‘national security’, Bill on the Eradication of Terrorism issued in 2003 that since then has incited growing criticism and widespread doubts among the significant segments of Muslim community.
Instead of pro-active and critical engagement with this globalizing discourse, the political Islam gets involved in unfruitful debate about the nature of Islam in relation to homicide and suicide. Labels such as ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’ come home and exerts emotive and performative power to re-efface the already existing typology of ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ at home.
In contrast with New Order foreign policy in matters of global Islamic community was more based on ‘national interests’ than Islamic solidarity (Suryadinata, 1995; Hadiz & Teik, 2011), Post New Order foreign policy combines both pragmatism and religious moral undercurrents that takes side with ‘liberals’ at home. Despite the resistance, sometimes made publicly less intelligible by the administration and mass media, counter-terrorism policy and institutions installed and operate together with the late-coming national project of de-radicalization.
Here our point is not to argue that terrorist acts is morally acceptable but to understand how the democratic debate on the discourse and practice of counter-terrorism becomes is relatively absent but worse to mediate the rifts between camps of supporters with the moral primacy of peace and tolerance. Terrorism discourse has now lost its political dimension as ‘liberal Islamists’ in parliament and in public fora join forces against ‘the radicals’ for the presumed sake of ‘state security’ and ‘true Islam’.
Failure to build up hegemonic link within political Islam is another explanation, as we are arguing, to make sense of the present condition. It seems that political Islam has so far lost its golden momentum in the early years of Post New Order Indonesia. Tension between past legacy of New Order model of corporatization and present pressure for electorate politics has not been resolved in ways that not to eliminate the tension, which is politically impossible, but to put in place a ‘chain of equivalence’ among their diverse articulations (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).
Post New Order has offered greatest opportunity for the open-minded Islamists. However, the temptation to be the prisoner of the past and present is so alluding that no political efforts are made to hold them together. In this period, ‘Islamization of the state’ is symptomatic rather than a political fact. Trends in mobilizing public under the banner of Islam remain within their internal contentious behaviors that weaken rather than empower their articulations in national spectrum.
It is within this circumstance political Islam without hegemonic link contributes to the ongoing practices of violence and exclusion committed by Muslim paramilitaries, small band of militant Muslims labeled as ‘terrorists’ and various practice of territorial and symbolic exclusions against Indonesian citizens of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. One must keep in mind that all these practices of violence are integral to national problems concerning public matters into which those labeled as ‘militants’ have sought to define by violent means.
The reluctance and conflicting attitudes among Muslims politicians, Ulama and Muslim intellectuals reflect their conflicting identification and contention over the militants. Crisis of hegemony goes together with unresolved experience of dislocation that re-effaces sense of hostility and prejudice among themselves. In time of massive practice of patronage politics as it now characterizes actual political patterns and representation in Indonesia, unstable relation between political representation to the state arena and violent versions of Islamic articulation in public sphere should be understood as democratic problems and challenges to political Islam.
Conclusion
There are many perspectives to explain the connection between Islam, Islamism and politics. In backdrop of existing conditions of Indonesian Islamism and a bulk of scholarship on Indonesian Islamism, we proposes to understand the unstable connection as democratic problems and challenge.
To make better sense of Islamism as articulation of Islamic identity, it must be first of all be understood as democratic articulation as the Islamists seek to articulate their demands and hope through Islam into state and public arena. As our paper makes clear, Indonesian Islamism are integral to the political history of the country. It is not alien to democratic experience, but the fact that Indonesian Islamism has been the major democratic proponent in regime change and democratic transformation of the state.
As democracy is not entity, instrument or mere institutions but first of all political articulation, democratic nature of Islamic articulation in Indonesia has been facing hegemonic crisis as the Islamists of diverse articulations have been the prisoners of past legacy and present patronage practices.
Asking the state and Ulama to solve the problems vis-a-vis the labeled ‘militants’ seems to be a wrong request today. The practices of violence may halt as results of law enforcement but the violence will recur for another reason and in another place. It is the state that contributes to these practices as political articulations of the Islamists are not united by joint agenda capable of addressing the problems to their roots. However, the hegemonic crisis of the political Islam turns to be urgent challenge for the Islamists to make democratic moment fruitful for the better of the nation and its security.
(Frans Djalong. Center for Peace and Security Studies-UGM. August, 2011)
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