Tom Pepinsky

Category: Islam

  • Is Indonesia an Unusual Muslim Country?

    I’m currently finishing up the first draft of a book manuscript on Islam and political economy in Indonesia. One of the arguments that I aim to make is that an intense study of the Indonesian case is broadly relevant for the study of Islam and political economy everywhere. But like many who work on Indonesia, I often find that scholars of Islam are skeptical that the Indonesian case has much relevance for them. Indonesia is often viewed as simply too different: not just at the far southeastern corner of the Muslim world, but characterized by a fundamentally different politics, economy, society, and history.

    I aim to challenge that view. But while readers some may be convinced by my appeal to history, many will not be. Skeptics of the relevance of Indonesia will look at the rest of the Muslim world, and say “it’s the only democracy,” or “it’s so large,” or “it’s so diverse.” These things are true, at least right now. But there are probably hundreds of other dimensions along which one might compare Muslim countries. Is Indonesia extreme along all of them? Hard to say without cherry-picking examples. So I’ve developed a more formal statistical test of the uniqueness of Indonesia vis-a-vis the rest of the Muslim world.

    To do this, I’ve used the handy QoG dataset from the Quality of Government Institute at Gothenburg. This contains hundreds of variables capturing everything from GDP to ethnolinguistic fractionalization to civil liberties to violence. I’ve taken their time-series-cross-section dataset, dropped all countries that are not majority or plurality Muslim, and then created a country average for each variable. Then, for each country, I’ve calculated what decile it falls in for each variable in the dataset from among all 52 Muslim majority and Muslim plurality countries. So, for example, if country A scores on the 95% percentile of all Muslim countries for variable X, it gets a score of 10 because it’s in the 10th decile. Repeat that for every ordinal, continuous, or dummy variable in the dataset, and the result is a series of decile scores for each Muslim country for hundreds of variables.

    The intuition here is that if a country is “abnormal” or “unusual” it will tend to score on the extremes—1st or 2nd, 9th or 10th deciles—for lots of variables. “Usual” countries will tend to score in the middle. Examine the distribution of scores for each of the 52 Muslim countries, and you can start to see what Muslim countries are normal and which ones are not.

    Here is what this looks like. Each gray line represents a kernel density plot for one country’s decile scores. Indonesia’s is the thick black line.
    Islam-deciles
    As you can see, Indonesia’s right in the middle of the pile. Across most dimensions in the data, it is not an extreme case, it is a typical case, scoring close to the median of all Muslim countries. I’ve also highlighted two countries that emerge from this analysis as unusual countries, tending to score at the extremes much more often than they score near the middle: Afghanistan and Malaysia. These results make sense too, for QoG tends to present their variables such that “good things” have higher values than “bad things.” (Although things like trade/GDP ratio aren’t necessarily “good,” of course.)

    So there’s my answer: across most indicators that we can observe, Indonesia is a typical Muslim country. This does not entail that Indonesian Islam is typical as well. But it does suggest that even if Indonesian Islam is atypical, such differences haven’t translated into broad differences in economy, society, and politics.

  • All Islam is Vernacular Islam

    I happened to come across this announcement for a Mellon Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Vanderbilt, carrying the title “When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam beyond the Arab World.” It looks like a fantastic opportunity, but it highlights a continuing problem in both academic and popular discussions of Islam.

    That problem is the perceived asymmetry between “central” and “fringe” Islam. The Mellon program is to be commended for encouraging us to remember that about 80% of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs. But even in making this point, it commits the standard mistake of opposing the Great Tradition of Arab Islam with the Little Traditions found in Istanbul, Tashkent, Lahore, Bamako, Dakar, Mogadishu, Dhaka, and Jakarta (to say nothing of Manchester, Marseilles, or Minneapolis). The term “vernacular” probably stems from a linguistic perspective, referring to those who speak a “vernacular” language, i.e., something other than Arabic. But as written in the program description, it reflects more than just that, implying a kind of purity or refinement of one particular form of Islam. It also implies a position for that form of Islam: at the center or core, versus the edges or fringes or peripheries.

    One way to clarify my objection is to ask what is the opposite of vernacular Islam? What is it called? Who practices it? What does it entail? If you find yourself uncomfortable answering that question—and nearly everyone who has thought hard about Islam will—then you should also be uncomfortable with the very idea of a fringe.

    So, say it together with me: All Islam is vernacular Islam. All of it. Wahhabis and Salafis in the Arab Middle East are just as much products of particular historical moments and sociopolitical contexts as are other Sunni Muslims who don’t happen to speak a form of Arabic as their native language (to say nothing of Ibadis, Ismailis, Alevis, etc.). The same imperative to gaze outward from the Arab Middle East must be complemented with a hard gaze inward among scholars of Islam in the Arab Middle East. Perhaps that is what the program leaders mean when they write

    as most Muslims live in the “fringes,” we need to problematize the notions of center and periphery, the relationship of the symbolic core to its ever-expanding outlying majority, and the latter’s creative adaptations of Islam.

    But even this implies that it is the fringes where we look for the “creative adaptations of Islam,” not the center. So long as scholars continue to write as if the Islam of the Arab Middle East is somehow unproblematic, they will continue to perpetuate the myth of a non-vernacular Islam.