Tensions within the Islamic Community

As is to be expected those Indonesian Muslims who take their religious obligations very seriously and who would strive to lead an exemplary life, devoted entirely to Islam as taught and practised in the Islamic heartlands, and even more those who are engaged in scholarship, have always formed a minority among their neighbours.

In Java today, santri is the general term used to describe the practising, ‘orthodox’ Muslims, but the term still carries the connotation of men and women who remove themselves from this world in order to spend their lives in devotion in the pesantren, literally the place of the santri.

The importance of the Javanese pesantren and similar institutions elsewhere for the religious life of Indonesian Muslims in past centuries cannot be overestimated. Although partially reduced in significance by the progressive madrasah (see below) in this century, the ruralpesantren has been regaining some of its popularity of late. Relying heavily on donations and the active and material assistance of its members, the pesantren is usually led and owned by a kiai, as he is known in Java, or ulema as he is known elsewhere in the archipelago. A kiai has to be a man of learning and a gifted spiritual leader. In fact the reputation and fortunes of apesantren depend very much on the recognition enjoyed by its leader, the kiai. It is interesting to observe that whereas the institution of the pesantren has survived for cen­turies, individualpesuntrew rarely seem to have been able to keep up momen­tum and to maintain a high standard of excellence beyond the life of their outstanding founder.

In the past, the Javanese kiai, who are closely linked through an intricate network of marriages and teacher/pupil relationships, have, by their positive example and spiritual leadership, been a major rallying point for the surrounding community beyond the limited confines of the pesantren as such, and although reluctant to be involved in matters of this world, they could become leaders in times of social and economic distress.

The single-minded concentration of the santri on reaching paradise, however, has not always met with general understanding. A Sundanese folk-story (as retold by Ajip Rosidi), for example, tells of the hadji who spends all his life in devotion; even the rock on which he always performs his prayers is worn down. He expects paradise as if it were his by right, and so turns away from Allah and becomes an evil-doer and an apostate when he learns that instead of him a notorious criminal, who accepts that he has to redeem his sins in hell, has been chosen by Allah to go to paradise.

Then there are the abangan, people whose philoso­phy and religious beliefs owe very little indeed to Islam and a considerable amount to traditional Javanese mysticism and traditional Javanese religious conventions and practices, also described as Javanism, and now officially recognised as a creed called kebatinan.

The distinction between santri and abangan has been discussed in a contemporary setting by Geertz in his influential book, The Religion of Java (Geertz, 1960) which besides the rawin' and abangan types also identifies a third type which Geertz callspriyayi. This is how Geertz character­ises the three types:

Abangan, representing a stress on the animistic aspects of the over-all Javanese syncretism and broadly related to the peasant element in the population; santri, representing a stress on the Islamic aspects of the syncretism and generally related to the trading element (and to certain elements in the peasantry as well); andprijaji, stressing the Hinduistic aspects and related to the bureaucratic element (Geertz, 1960:6).

Geertz’s division has not remained unchallenged, and it has been pointed out in particular that the third priyayi type is not cultural but one of sociological relevance only, and that the term is not indicative at all of the religious attitudes of the members of this particular social class, ‘the traditional, legitimate elite’ (Bachtiar, 1973:88). A. priyayi just as any member of any other social class may be santri in his religious attitude or he may be abangan or, as would be even more typical:

A prijaji, as Paterfamilias, may on certain occasions enact the prescribed ritual of the ancestor cult associated with the pusaka, the family heirlooms, to venerate the ancestors; as a prominent member of the community he may, when occasion demands, arrange to hold aslametan, a communal dinner, at his house; on Fridays, as a good Moslem, he may go to the mosque to pray together with the other members of the Islamic religious community, or, at least, does not fail to appear for the public prayer on Idul Fitri to celebrate the end of the Ramadhan, the fasting month; as a member of a theosophy group he regularly attends the monthly meetings of the local lodge to discuss theosophical problems; as a member of a political party he takes every opportunity to propagate his party’s political ideol­ogy, and as a dutiful Indonesian citizen he is always present at mass meetings where the national ideology holds sway; then, also, as a Western educated man he may participate in discussions which are very much dominated by Christian values or European logic with, perhaps, a dash of Aristotelian philosophy or modern French existentialism; but when in the dark of the night he walks home from a meeting he may be a little frightened of the evil spirits that are believed to be on the lurk for their prey. (Bachtiar, 1973:95)

Ricklefs (1979) argues that the conflict between those Javanese who are fully committed to Islam in a stricter form (thesantri) and those to whom Mecca and all it stands for are at times peripheral (and to whom, for example, several pilgrimages to the grave of one of the nine wait would make the hadj superfluous), is more significant in present-day Java than the frequently invoked opposition of santri and abangan, if we take abangan to mean those Indonesians to whom, ultimately, Islam is irrelevant to the conduct of their spiritual life.

According to Ricklefs, historically three periods can be distinguished in the Islamisation of Java as opposed to its conversion to Islam: 1. the fourteenth to the eighteenth century; 2. the nineteenth century; 3. the twentieth century.

The first period is one of marked religious tolerance characterised by two development processes, the gradual Islamisation of the people of Java and the accompanying Javanisation of the non-Javanese Mus­lims who had brought Islam to and settled in Java. In that period pre-Islamic, Indic and authentically Javanese cultural and religious concepts generally continued to live side by side with Islamic concepts in mutual tolerance.

For a number of reasons the nineteenth century saw a change in that relationship. Direct colonial rule and exploitation, which imposed a considerable burden on Javanese society and its economy, coin­cided with the emergence of a new type of Muslim among the many who, to the displeasure of the colonial authorities with their fear of Pan-Islamic activism, made use of the improvements in overseas transport in order to go on the pilgrimage. These newly returned hadjis naturally would have become influenced not only by the conduct of other Muslims in Mecca, but also by Wahhabi revivalism and by the reformist ideas emerging from Egypt, thus reversing the trend brought about by the interference of the VOC which, particularly in the eighteenth century and through its trading and shipping monopoly, had broken up the international network of Muslims which had been so characteristic of the earlier period of Islam in the archi­pelago.Asaresultofthatnew experience in Mecca a rift was bound to develop between the returning hadjis and the traditional religious teachers, the kiai, who might have accommodated non-Islamic spiritual traditions in their teach­ing and religious practices. And, in consequence, theabangan, too, were faced perhaps for the first time, with a decision about which of the two, Islam or Javanism, to choose.

In the twentieth century those divisions began to harden and it appears that the distance between the three has now become so great as to split Javanese society to an unprecedented degree. Ricklefs even believes that while the commitment to orthodox Islamic faith and practice has been greatly strengthened within the santri community in the past cen­tury, the percentage of all Javanese who are Muslim (most of them abangan) has probably declined. This of course has been realised by Muslims who today consider the conversion of the Javanese as their primary task (Boland, 1982:191).

The changes in colonial policy and the increased impact of colonial rule, and equally important for Indonesian Islam, the changes occurring in the Middle East with the emergence of the Wahhabi movement and with the development of the reformist thought of Muham­mad Abduh, obviously not only had an impact onjava but affected the other regions of the archipelago as well. Looking at the spiritual development of Islam in the archipelago in general, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islamic revivalism and reformism were of singular importance throughout as everywhere they forced Muslims individually to rethink their own religious position. If Ricklefs observes that these issues, revivalism and reformism, more than any other issue split Javanese society, his observation also holds true for other regions and ethnic groups of the archipelago right to the present day. Once Muslims began to insist on the pervasiveness and all-embracing nature of their religion, this religion became a divisive issue which not only separated rulers and ruled, colonisers and colonised, but also continued (and continues) to disturb the traditional internal coherence of indigenous com­munities.

This became apparent first during the Padri War (1803—38) in which the Dutch became involved from 1821 onwards. The padri, so named after the Acehnese port of Pedir from which many Sumatran Muslims set off for the pilgrimage, as argued by some or, as argued by others, because the Malays had adopted the Portuguese lingua franca term for cleric, were pilgrims who had returned to Minangkabau in West Sumatra from Mecca, deeply impressed by the conquest of the city by the Wahhabi in 1803 and by their puritanism. Their immediate aim was to raise Islam in Minangkabau to a similar level of purity as they had seen in Mecca by turning against local adat and against what they perceived to be a general laxity in morals and customs of a non-Islamic nature. By emphasising the role o(fiqh it was also hoped to restore greater order and security in social and eco­nomic life. In their efforts thepadri soon resorted to fanatical and dogmatic violence and turned not only the traditional secular elite against them but also those Muslims who were closely associated with the traditionally strong Sufi orders of the region. Most prominent amongst those orders was the Syattariah which was said to have been brought to Minangkabau by Burhanuddin, a pupil of the Acehnese mystic Abdurrauf who was mentioned earlier.

When the Dutch returned to West Sumatra in 1821 they sided with the adat party, i.e. all those opposed to the fanaticism of the padri, and in 1837 the power of thepadri was broken after their most promi­nent leader, Tuanku Imam of Bonjol, had been forced to surrender. Apart from smaller local uprisings in the nineteenth (and the twentieth) century two other, and for the Indonesians equally unsuccessful, major wars of the nineteenth century, the Java War (1825-30) and even more so the Aceh War (1873-c. 1912) also had a religious aspect, at least as far as the indigenous combatants were concerned. Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, the rebel leader of the Java War had a strong religious (mystical) background and to many of his followers he seemed to combine the qualities of the Mahdi of Islam and the promised just king (ratu adil) of Javanese mythology.

Aceh, always fiercely independent and politically orientated towards the Middle East, strongly resisted Dutch attempts to subjugate it and after a vain effort to gain the support of Turkey among others, it settled down to fight the jihad on its own. As the Aceh War dragged on at great expense to the Dutch, the religious element in the Acehnese resistance was analysed and astutely exploited by the colonial authorities on the advice of C. Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) who, before accepting a Chair in Leiden, resided from 1889 until 1906 in the Dutch East Indies, as an advisor to the colonial government first on Eastern languages and Islamic law and then from 1898 onwards on ‘native matters’, with a special brief for Aceh. Snouck Hurgronje more than anybody else formulated a view of and policy towards Indonesian Islam, the impact of which was to last far into the twentieth century. As Boland has pointed out, for example, the office to which Snouck Hurgronje had been attached, the Department for Native Affairs, known to Indonesians as the Bureau of Religious Affairs, was the direct predecessor of the independent Republic’s Department of Religious Affairs (Boland and Farjon, 1983:17).

Basically, Snouck Hurgronje advocated a policy of discrimination by which a distinction was to be made between Islam as a religious, personal and private affair, and Islam as a political force. To that aim government should grant absolute freedom to and not interfere with the purely religious expressions of Islam. The hadj, contrary to previous policy, should not be discouraged (nor, for that matter, should it be encouraged). Government should interfere as little as possible with the application of Muhammadan law, as long as this law did not itself interfere with or con­tradict the regionally quite diverseadat, i.e. local traditions and customs with legal consequences, in the definition of Snouck Hurgronje. Ultimately, however, both adat and syaria had to be subject to (European) civil law.

Outside the purely religious sphere Islamic activities were to be curbed and severely restricted and, finally, efforts were to be made to help Islam and Indonesian Muslims to leave the era of narrow dogmatism in order to catch up with Western civilisation and modern liberal thought (Benda, 1983:20-31).

During the Aceh War, Snouck Hurgronje’s approach succeeded in gradually splitting religious and adat leaders, as the adat leaders were more easily accommodated and the war ended with the defeat of the ulema, the religious leaders. However, about 40 years later, in 1946, the ulema were to have their revenge when in the course of the so-called Social Revolution many of the adat leaders were killed indiscriminately. Similar events occurred in Java in reverse order where Communists turned on the santri in 1948 only to be persecuted and massacred in return in the wake of another political upheaval, the Gestapu affair of September 1965 which led to the formation of the New Order regime.

A further event of considerable impact and with clear political dimensions also had a prominent Islamic aspect to it, namely the regional Darul Islam rebellions which beset West and East Java, South Sulawesi, South Kalimantan and Aceh between the late 1940s and 1965 through periods of intermittent guerrilla warfare directed against the central government. As van Dijk has pointed out, Islam was a major rallying point for the rebels but, ‘less a criterion whereby to distinguish friend from foe’ (van Dijk, 1981:394). The regional rebellions had a number of causes, many of which were unrelated to religion as such. Yet, support for the rebellions reflected the belief of many of the rebels that it would be possible to overcome the various shortcomings blamed on central government if Indonesia were to become an Islamic state.

Of the rebellious regions whose activities were rarely co-ordinated and who strove for the establishment of an Islamic state, Aceh probably gained most. Unlike the other areas it was granted the status of a Special Region in 1959. This privilege had so far been bestowed only upon the capital city of Jakarta and the one-time capital city of Yogyakarta. Within the limits of existing law Aceh was also to have considerable auton­omy especially with regard to religious education and the application of adat and syaria.