Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Indonesia is Neither an Islamic nor a Secular State

    I recently came across a discussion of alcohol regulations in Indonesia, housed on a site that apparently caters to Indonesia’s expat community. (Westerners have something of an infatuation with restrictions on alcohol as a measure of how religiously tolerant Muslim societies are. This is true even though it is still far easier to purchase beer in Jakarta than it is in my home town in central Pennsylvania.)

    What struck me was not the discussion of alcohol—old hat—but rather an instructive error in the very first sentence.

    Indonesia, being a Muslim majority country, is also a pluralist, democratic and secular nation.

    The error is in the word “secular.” Indonesia is not an Islamic state, but it is also not a secular state and it never has been. Misunderstand this, and you misunderstand Indonesian politics and religion.

    The Indonesian constitution (PDF) declared in Chapter XI that

    (1) The State shall be based upon the belief in the One and Only God.
    (2) The State guarantees all persons the freedom of worship, each according to his/her own religion or belief

    (1) is the key, establishing the founding principle that the state is religious, from which follows the conclusion that the state has legitimate role in regulating religious practice and religious affairs. Chapter X also stipulates that

    In exercising his/her rights and freedoms, every person shall have the duty to accept the restrictions established by law for the sole purposes of guaranteeing the recognition and respect of the rights and freedoms of others and of satisfying just demands based upon considerations of morality, religious values, security and public order in a democratic society.

    This provision clarifies that the protection of religious values may serve as the basis for lawmaking. Note that this is not a reasoned argument on legal grounds about where the rights of one infringe on the rights of others, this is a constitutional provision that asserts that such laws are permissible.

    From these and a few other provisions, many interesting things follow that have no place in a secular state. There are religious courts. There is a Ministry of Religions that regulates religions, not just Islam but others as well. The Indonesian state has the constitutional architecture necessary for state actors to take a position on what religious beliefs and practices are normatively acceptable, which ones are deviant, and which ones are a threat to social order. The argument that the sale and consumption of alcohol inflicts harm on Indonesian Muslims even if they do not consume it themselves is an entirely coherent position (even if I don’t agree with it at all).

    The politics in Indonesian Islam is not about defending the state from Islam. It is about positioning Islam within a state apparatus that can and does regulate it and other religions. Secular states solve these problems by preventing the state from taking a position on religion. For better or for worse, that is not the path that Indonesia’s elites chose at independence.

  • Political Islam and the Ahok Verdict

    In a forthcoming book, coauthored with Bill Liddle and Saiful Mujani and entitled Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam, I make the argument that individual piety does not explain much about Indonesian public opinion. Our book’s argument focuses on the beliefs and practices of individuals: what does it mean to be pious? And once we know that, do pious people think differently about democracy, or about Islamic banking, or about globalization? Although there are nuances, the topline result to all of these questions is not really.

    Today, Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama—universally known as Ahok—was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in prison. The case focuses on statements he made in a public forum in which he references a phrase from the Quran (al Maidah, verse 51). From a legal standpoint, the Ahok case is simply a mess, a travesty of justice. From a political standpoint, it is dangerous setback for Indonesian democracy. There is no mistaking it: Indonesian Islamists will learn from this case that an effective, legally permissible way to silence non-Muslim Indonesian voices is to threaten them with prison if they speak about Islam at all.

    How to square the argument in our book with this recent development? One may easily find statements by prominent Indonesian Muslim religious figures who criticize Ahok’s treatment (one example) and find the charge of blasphemy to be entirely specious. From an analytical standpoint, though, our argument is about individual beliefs. It is not about political process, or elite behavior. If one holds that there is no “autonomy of the political,” that individual preferences uniquely and exhaustively determine democratic political outcomes, then it would indeed be puzzling that Islam can be so mobilized for political purposes.

    But that is not what we argue. A society in which piety does not determine political action may also be one in which those who act to further their own interests use religion to do so. And accordingly, here is the last sentence of our book:

    To the extent that observers of Indonesia should worry about Islam as a threat to Indonesian democracy, it is not because of the beliefs of Indonesian Muslims. Rather, it is because of the choices of Indonesia’s political elites, or the strategies that Indonesia’s parties—Islamists and others—pursue to secure power. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Indonesia’s Islamists have made a choice to accept democratic elections as the procedure through which citizens allocate political authority. That is, they have accepted as legitimate that democracy is a procedure by which, in the words of Przeworski (1991: 10), “parties lose elections. There are parties: divisions of interest, values and opinions. There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers.” Islamists in Indonesia have organized political parties, they have lost elections, and they continue to participate in them. Any threat to Indonesian democracy now comes from the often corrupt, sometimes ugly, process of democratic politics itself.

    The question that our book raises, but does not completely answer, is why the invocation of Islam remains an effective elite political strategy.