Islam in Indonesia - Society

Society

To a significant degree, the striking variations in the practice and interpretation of Islam — in a much less austere form than that practiced in the Middle East — in various parts of Indonesia reflect its complex history. Introduced piecemeal by various traders and wandering mystics from India, Islam first gained a foothold between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in coastal regions of Sumatra, northern Java, and Kalimantan. Islam probably came to these regions in the form of mystical Sufi tradition. Sufism easily gained local acceptance and became synthesized with local customs. The introduction of Islam to the islands was not always peaceful, however. As Islamized port towns undermined the waning power of the east Javanese Hindu/Buddhist Majapahit kingdom in the sixteenth century, Javanese elites fled to Bali, where over 2.5 million people kept their own version of Hinduism alive. Unlike coastal Sumatra, where Islam was adopted by elites and masses alike, partly as a way to counter the economic and political power of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, in the interior of Java the elites only gradually accepted Islam, and then only as a formal legal and religious context for Javanese spiritual culture.

These historical processes gave rise to enduring tensions between orthodox Muslims and more syncretistic, locally based religion — tensions that were still visible in the early 1990s. On Java, for instance, this tension was expressed in a contrast between the traditionalist santri and abangan, an indigenous blend of native and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs with Islamic practices sometimes also called Javanism, kejawen, agama Jawa, or kebatinan. The terms and precise nature of this opposition were still in dispute in the early 1990s, but on Java santri not only referred to a person who was consciously and exclusively Muslim, it also described persons who had removed themselves from the secular world to concentrate on devotional activities in Islamic schools called pesantren—literally "the place of the santri".

In contrast to the Mecca-oriented philosophy of most santri, there was the current of kebatinan, which is an amalgam of animism, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic — especially Sufi — beliefs. This loosely organized current of thought and practice was legitimized in the 1945 constitution and, in 1973, when it was recognized as Kepercayaan kepada Tuhan Yang Maha Esa (Indonesian: Believer of One Supreme God) that somewhat gain the status as one of the agama, President Suharto counted himself as one of its adherents. The Kebatinan or Kepercayaan have no certain prophet, sacred book, nor distinct religious festivals and rituals; it has more to do with each adherents internalized transcendental vision and beliefs in their relations with the supreme being. As the result there is an inclusiveness that the kebatinan believer could identify themselves with one of six officially recognized religions, at least in their identity card, and still maintain their kebatinan belief and way of life.

Kebatinan is generally characterized as mystical, and some varieties were concerned with spiritual self-control. Although there were many varieties circulating in 1992, kebatinan often implies pantheistic worship because it encourages sacrifices and devotions to local and ancestral spirits. These spirits are believed to inhabit natural objects, human beings, artifacts, and grave sites of important wali (Muslim saints). Illness and other misfortunes are traced to such spirits, and if sacrifices or pilgrimages fail to placate angry deities, the advice of a dukun or healer is sought. Kebatinan, while it connotes a turning away from the militant universalism of orthodox Islam, moves toward a more internalized universalism. In this way, kebatinan moves toward eliminating the distinction between the universal and the local, the communal and the individual.

Another notable view is the division between traditionalist and modernist Islam. The nature of these differences was complex, confusing, and a matter of considerable debate in the early 1990s, but traditionalists generally rejected the modernists' interest in absorbing educational and organizational principles from the West. Specifically, traditionalists were suspicious of modernists' support of the urban madrasah, a reformist school that included the teaching of secular topics. Traditionalists also sought to add a clause to the first tenet of the Pancasila state ideology requiring that, in effect, all Muslims adhere to the sharia.

Despite these differences, the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama, the progressive Consultative Council of Indonesian Muslims (Masyumi), and two other parties were forcibly streamlined into a single Islamic political party in 1973—the United Development Party (PPP). Such cleavages may have weakened Islam as an organized political entity, as demonstrated by the withdrawal of the Nahdlatul Ulama from active political competition, but as a popular religious force Islam showed signs of good health and a capacity to frame national debates.

Women's higher employment rate is also an important difference between Indonesian and Middle East cultures.