there is a growing chasm between Indonesia’s national refrain about its tolerant, pluralistic tradition and the conservative populism that has breached public life. People on both sides are now waiting to see if the governor’s trial will help revive Indonesia’s moderate Muslim establishment or mark the beginning of its end.
“The Ahok affair has been a huge wake-up call,” said Alissa Wahid, a social activist, NU official, and daughter of late Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid. “We have been suffering for 10 years, letting hard-liners take center stage on social issues and even commit violence,” she said. “The challenges for NU going forward are not small.”
NU was a political party until 1984 but now concentrates on social welfare and religious education, often in tandem with other faith groups, encapsulating Indonesia’s syncretic mix of animistic, Hindu, Christian, and Buddhist traditions alongside Islam. The archetypal NU public figure was Abdurrahman Wahid, who was chairman of the group for 15 years before he was elected president in 1999. Yet under Wahid, far more strident groups started to elbow NU offstage.
“The prominence of liberal Muslim intellectuals like Wahid made moderate Islam seem like a stable and dominant ideology,” said Luthfi Assyaukanie, a researcher and co-founder of the Liberal Islam Network. “But before 1998, when [the dictator] Suharto fell, the media was tightly controlled and privileged the discourse of liberal, tolerant groups like NU.”
In retrospect, Assyaukanie said, the center could not hold. Suharto’s authoritarianism prioritized religious tolerance — for the sake of stability, if nothing else. But when the democratic floodgates opened in 1998, conservatives could finally organize and evangelize. FPI was founded in late 1998, the sharia-promoting hard-line Indonesian Mujahideen Council in 2000, and the reactionary Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in 2002.
“I don’t think NU adapted fast enough to the new media environment,” said Savic Ali, a young NU member who runs its website and Nutizen, a new streaming video platform. “The people who really took advantage of it were the hard right — conservative voices like that of [the celebrity TV preacher] Abdullah Gymnastiar who amass huge followings on TV and social media.” Ali is spearheading an effort to raise the digital profile of NU preachers but admits they’re playing catch-up.
Indonesian Muslims, including NU’s member base, are becoming more intensely and visibly conservative. A recent survey found that four in five public school religion teachers support imposing sharia, or Islamic law. And “more women wear hijab, more families go to Mecca, more people pray in public spaces after 1998,” Assyaukanie said.
The conservative elements within NU itself make it difficult to robustly counter these trends. Many NU ulema (religious scholars) have always been conservative, said political scientist William Liddle, at Ohio State University. “During and since President Wahid, the impression that moderates dominate NU has never been accurate.”
Alissa Wahid said growing conservatism within NU has been accompanied by intolerance. “In the last 15 years, NU members have become not just conservative in ritual but also rude, enforcing a ‘majoritarian perspective’ that dismisses all other kinds of Islam, leave alone other religions,” she said. The decentralized nature of NU is another roadblock to reform: It has always been a loose alliance of religious leaders and lay members, so there is, Wahid said, a “constant discussion” within NU leadership about how, if at all, to enforce NU directives.
Beyond these internal issues, Saudi Arabia has also invested billions of dollars since 1980 to spread puritanical Salafi Islam in Indonesia. Despite its explicitly anti-Wahhabi origins, NU has largely neglected to address the effects of this program, Assyaunakie said. “Plus, Salafi ideas are entering the organization itself, which has become steadily more conservative since the day Wahid left.”
“NU is not a good soldier for this battle vis-à-vis Salafism,” said Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, the other co-founder of the Liberal Islam Network. “It still has conservative instincts. Many members share, for instance, the fundamentalist viewpoint that Shiites and Ahmadiyya are not real Muslims; the only difference is that they don’t condone violence.”
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Indonisia needs to seriuoly conster banning ISIS from its nation and refuse to take any so called refugees