Vol 5 (No.1, 2017):1-22 (c) Korean Association for the Sociology of Religion Religious competition and conflict over the longue durée: Christianity and Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago R. Michael Feener * 1) Abstract This paper examines dynamics of competition between Muslim and Christian communities in the Indonesian Archipelago over the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. This period covers the initial intrusion of Christian missionary and European imperial interests into a maritime world that had become increasingly dominated by Muslim networks over the later medieval period. Looking at these changing cross-confessional interactions over a distended period of time facilitates some deeper perspective on the social, cultural, and political effects of inter-communal religious competition. This, I argue, can in turn help us to move beyond some of the potential analytic pitfalls that are increasingly recognized as compromising the utility of the kind of religious market and choice theories that have largely shaped studies of competition and innovation in the sociology of religion. Keywords: Indonesia, Islam, Christianity, History, Religious Competition The particular examples that I will explore here all come from the history of Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago and the interactions of * He is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. Address correspondence to Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies), Marston Road, Oxford OX3 0EE, United Kingdom. E-mail: michael.feener@history.ox.ac.uk - 1 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) Muslim communities there with diverse forms of Christianity. Today, the Republic of Indonesia is home to the world s largest national population of Muslims, with approximately 87% of its 238 million people professing Islam. Adherents of Catholicism and Protestant Christianity combine to account for another ten percent of the population (Badan Pusat Statistik 2010). The national ideology of Pancasila in the Indonesian constitution informs a model of state-managed religious pluralism, wherein no single official religion is defined but adherence to one or another from a list of officially recognized religious traditions is mandatory. Contemporary issues of religious identity and competition in the field of proselytization are both framed within, and enabled by, the contours of particular governmental and administrative regulations on religion. In the case of Indonesia, the Pancasila model of state-managed religious pluralism thus makes proselytization possible in the first place. At the same time, however, when heightened religious competition comes to be perceived as a threat to social order, then the state has tended to respond by taking new action to ensure the continuation of established (and/or desired) models of religion in society, restricting both choice and change in religious identities. 1) Within this framework, relations between religious groups have shifted along multiple vectors over the 70 years since independence. During the past decade, however, inter-communal tensions have generally been on the rise, as a recent Pew Research Center (2016) study ranks Indonesia as one of the highest in terms of both government restrictions on religion, as well as in terms of social hostilities. These developments challenge many contemporary observers. Consideration of some longer historical trajectories of relations between Muslims and Christians can, however, contribute useful perspectives for the understanding and interpretation of current dynamics of religious competition in the country. In the early centuries following the rise of Islam in Arabia, Muslim merchant seafarers were sailing eastward in search of the rare and lucrative commodities of Asia, across the Indian Ocean and thence to the profitable ports of the South China Sea. Some of them even made it thence as far north as the Korean peninsula as the ninth century Muslim author Ibn Kurdadhbih described Silla as a country of great wealth and such congenial conditions that the few Muslims who found - 2 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree their way there tended to settle down abandon any thoughts of ever leaving (Chung and Hourani 1938: 658-661). While the impact of such medieval Muslim sojourners ultimately had very little historical impact over the longue durée in Korea, things turned out very differently in the Asian islands of the southern seas. By the tenth century, Chinese court chronicles record the arrival of delegations of individuals with markedly Muslim names arriving from the Southeast Asian ports of Sumatra, Champa, Brunei and Java, as well as southern India and the Arab lands (Wade 2010). Muslim merchant communities in coastal entrepot scattered across Southeast Asia not only helped to transform the structures of local states, but also served as nodes of networks that expanded to eventually facilitate the conversion of indigenous populations from the interiors to Islam. The first Muslim sultanate in the archipelago was established at Pasai (on the northern coast of Sumatra), by end of the thirteenth century (Feener 2011). In its wake a number of other ports along the same trade routes redefined themselves as Muslim polities. The most prominent of these was Malacca, just opposite the Straits on the Malay peninsula. Malacca quickly became a dominant hub of trade in the region, and shortly after establishing special tributary-trade relationship with China in 1414 the second king of Malacca officially converted to Islam (Wake 1983). This new sultanate at a strategic position between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea attracted traders from all across the expanding maritime Muslim world of the tame, making it one of the world s most prosperous port polities of the sixteenth century. A century after its founding, it s merchant community included: Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa..., Hormuz, Parsees... Turks, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of... the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from... Ceylon, Bengal, Siam, Malay, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, men of Brunei, Timor, Java, Palembang, [and] the Maldives (Cortesão 1944). The wealth that was commanded there, and across an expanding network of Southeast Asian sultanates attracted not only a diverse range - 3 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) of Asian and Muslim merchants but also a new kind of mariner in the sixteenth century. This description of the multi-ethnic, and predominantly Muslim, population was in fact recorded by one of them: Tomé Pires, a Portuguese traveler who composed an extensive account of the riches to be had, and the trading conditions in, Asia. The arrival of the Portuguese (and their Iberian rivals, the Spanish) into the waters of the Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth century introduced new dynamics of inter-religious competition. Portuguese ships had found their way to the shores of Southeast Asia, propelled not only by the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, but also by a complex combination of sentiments that included a desire to dominate the lucrative luxury trade of Asia, and to carry forward the Christian crusade for the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the expulsion of its Muslim (and Jewish) populations. Recognizing the key role of Malacca as the most prosperous entrepôt of the Straits, the Portuguese attacked and took the city in 1511, hoping thence to wrest control of the regional spice trade from its established Muslim networks and re-direct it toward Europe for great profit. Perhaps predictably, however, many Muslim merchants left the city after it was taken by the Portuguese, and redirected the commerce that they conducted to other ports across the archipelago. This impetus for a de-centralized Muslim merchant diaspora contributed to the rise of a number of new sultanates in the region including the new port polities of the north Java coast, which became beachheads for the gradual conversion to Islam of that island s large inland populations over the centuries that followed. An expanding number of new Muslim states came to take on a strong stance of opposition to further Portuguese Christian expansion in the archipelago. This has been read by some historians as one of a race between Islam and Christianity that fueled the expansion of both religions across the region in the early modern era (Schrieke 1957: 309). Anthony Reid has characterized the period between 1550-1650 as a remarkable period of conversion to both Christianity and Islam in Southeast Asia in which the arrival of the Iberians fueled competition by fostering the emergence of a new political character to religious identity (Reid 1993: 151-179). In this both commercial and crusading impulses combined and mutually reinforced each other in propelling new dynamics into the - 4 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree reconfigurations of trade routes and patterns of religious conversion across the region. In Schrieke s classic formulation, the Portuguese and Muslims in Southeast Asia looked upon each other as mortal enemies attempting to do as much damage to each other as possible, and for them it was quite definitely a question of maintaining a monopoly which would put them in a position to set the prices on the market (Schrieke 1966: 41) In the Indonesian archipelago (as opposed to the neighboring Philippines) the numbers of conversions to Christianity over the long sixteenth century were minor in terms of absolute numbers. The Iberian incursions, however, provoked a major response among local Muslim leaders, that had the effect of not only blocking the further spread of Christianity, but also of driving new waves of conversion to Islam and the establishment of new Muslim communities across the region. The West Javanese port polities of Cirebon and Banten, for example, had their origins in the counter-crusades led by an Islamic holy man (wali) who had fled from northern Sumatra after the Portuguese intrusion into the Straits of Malacca, and spent some years studying in Mecca before returning to the Archipelago (Reid 2010: 433). The impact of the Portuguese advances and Muslim responses thus marked a major shift in the dynamics of Islamization in the region. The most prominent of the new Muslim states to emerge in that context was the Sumatran sultanate of Aceh, which routed a Portuguese fleet in 1521. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Aceh rose to become a dominant Muslim power in the region and a rallying point for opposition to further Portuguese expansion. Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Muslim opposition to the infidel Iberians took the form of armed campaigns across the archipelago from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to Java and Maluku. In 1550, Johore organized an anti-portuguese coalition of Muslim port polities that included a number of smaller states of the Malay peninsula, and Jepara on the north coast of Java (Reid 1969: 403). Religious competition in the form of armed struggles was thus framed within contexts of broader geo-political and economic developments. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began a series of aggressive campaigns along the shores of East Africa and Southern Arabia and thence worked to establish and extend their power across the - 5 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) Indian by building forts at strategic points along the coasts of Africa and India (Serjeant 1963: 13ff). These incursions were met with resistance by the Ottoman navies, who grew (for a time) concerned about the possibility of the disruption of Islamic commerce across the Indian Ocean (Casale 2010). The Ottomans thus came to be seen by many Muslims in Southeast Asia as both a center of Islamic authority and a power who might potentially assist in their own campaigns against the expansion of Portuguese interests. In the 1560s, the Sumatran sultanate of Aceh s appeals to the Sublime Porte were answered with the sending of several gunsmiths to help develop a new arsenal for the defense of Islam (Göksoy 2011). A quarter century later, another group of twenty Ottoman gunners were dispatched to defend the fortress of Ternate against a Spanish attack (Andaya 1993: 137). In 1585, Sultan Babullah of Ternate had seized the Portuguese fortress there and expelled the them from that north Maluku island reversing the progress that Christianity had begun to make in the eastern reaches of the Archipelago (Andaya 2014). Sultan Buisan of Maguindinao later forged an alliance with the Babullah s successor and, in 1599 led a coalition of Muslim forces in raids on Spanish settlements in the Visayas (Reyes 2014). The strongly religious valences framing these military confrontations in competition for control over increasingly large parts of island Southeast Asia were, moreover, carried over even after the Portuguese were largely supplanted by the Dutch as the premiere European power in Indonesian waters in the seventeenth century. This was the case even though the Dutch did not generally emphasize a Christian dimension to their campaigns to establish commercial control over the lucrative trade of the Archipelago. By the 1630s, Kakiali, a Muslim leader from Hitu was coordinating opposition to the Dutch India Company (V.O.C.) in Ambon (Ricklefs 2008: 69-70). The 1670s-1680s witnessed the proliferation of armed movements of resistance toward Dutch expansion in the region, including the establishment of fortified Islamic strongholds in Java (Pigeaud 1976); Raja Ibrahim s anti-dutch movement on the Malay peninsula (Kathirithamby-Wells 1970: 50); Shaykh Yusuf Makassar s jihad against the V.O.C. at Banten (Feener 1998); and Ahmad Shah b. Iskandar broad ranging appeals from West Sumatra to co-religionists as far away - 6 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree as Makassar to join in his holy war (Kathirithamby-Wells 1970). Conceptions of opposition to European imperialism as a formative aspect of Islamic identity in the region maintained their resonance among many Muslim communities over the subsequent centuries, reinforced by the experience of increasingly consolidated European control as the V.O.C. was replaced by a new Dutch colonial government. After facing a long series of local insurrections across the Archipelago over the eighteenth century, the Dutch found one of their most serious challenges in the Java War of 1825-1830, in which they eventually defeated the challenge of Raden Diponegoro s millenarian movement to restore Islam and expel the unbelievers. In his monumental study of this history, Peter Carey (2008: 654) has characterized this spectacular campaign of anti-colonial resistance as the last stand of Java s old order, in which a significant source of support came from the religious grievances of Muslim santri who had come to feel marginalized under the emerging Dutch colonial system. By this time the nemesis with which Muslims felt themselves to be engaging was no longer (exclusively) against crusading forms of Christianity, something that was not in any case a significant element of Dutch agendas of expansion in Asia. Rather, Muslims were beginning to perceive that the real rivalry was now between believing Muslims and those that, to their eyes were devoid of religious feeling altogether. The development of this new sense of what it was that Islam was in competition with in the nineteenth century is captured evocatively in an anecdote of a retired Javanese Muslim religious official who was caught by surprise to hear the son of a Dutch Assistant-Resident saying grace before a meal remarking that up to that moment he had believed that all Europeans were thoroughly without religion (Carey 2008: 654). By the nineteenth century, struggles of anti-colonial resistance were firmly cast for many local Muslims in terms of a communal vision of strife between Islam and the forces of unbelief marking a transition to a new kind of religious competition. It would, however, be ill advised at this point to begin reframing the conversations in terms of any teleological narrative of secularizing modernization. As will be discussed further below, new dynamics of religious competition between Islam and Christianity were to re-emerge in the late colonial and independence - 7 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) periods. More fundamentally, however, we have to recognize the ways in which the dynamics of competition are not always centered on matters of individual choice as is often assumed in modern sociological conceptions of religious competition. For the means deployed to defend and expand the scope of Islam in local societies whose members perceived themselves to be under threat were not always or even often - imagined as a means to convince individuals of the value of one distinct selection from among various market options. Notions of individual choice and its accompanying rationalities were simply not the only factors in play, even in the modern period where communal dynamics have been (and to a considerable extent remain) significant factors. A large body of scholarship has explored patterns of modernizing religious reform across multiple traditions over the long twentieth century characterized by increasing rationalization, systematization, and social activism. The universal utility of this sociological framework for understanding dynamics of religion in modernizing societies has, however, recently begun to be called into question by historians. For example, in his ground-breaking study of the diversity of Islamic religious movements in a modernizing India, Nile Green highlights the importance of simultaneously keeping in view the diverse range of developments in religious practice that may contradict familiar trajectories of socio-historical development (2011: 11). Green argues that while the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed social and cultural transformations that encouraged the creation of an ever-increasing diversity of religious producers and consumers, this multiplicity of religious competitors was not only between but also within religious traditions. Through all this, movements for rationalizing reform found themselves cheek to jowl with forms of mystical and intercessionary belief and practice that were empowered and expanded through these same social processes as Green demonstrates trough rich examples from diverse forms of Sufism and the market in amulet (2011: 241). Such forms of religiosity thrived through the late nineteenth century in contexts of continued Muslim struggles against the expansion of Dutch colonialism in the Indonesian archipelago. Following the Dutch invasion of Aceh in 1873, the Acehnese waged a long war of anti-colonial resistance cast in terms of a jihād in the defense of Islam against - 8 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree invading infidels. Calls for these campaigns of resistance drew on the traditions of activist Sufism that had taken root in the region over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries including that of the Sumatran scholar Abd al-ṣamad al-palimbānī (al-jāwī) s treatise on jihād. 1) Over the late nineteenth century, these visions of Islamic mysticism and militant mobilization came to be expressed through a new genre of holy war texts in Acehnese verse, generally referred to as Hikayat Prang Sabi, and physically manifest in a range of talismanic texts and objects. During the late colonial period, religious competition was thus further militarized to a degree that left a lasting imprint on both Muslims and Christians in the region. In some other parts of the Netherlands Indies where Muslims were not as historically dominant as they were in Aceh, individual colonial officials did at times promote Christian missionary work as a measure to prevent the creeping encroachment of Islam such as in Central Sulawesi in the early decades of the twentieth century (Aragon 2001: 113). Even here, though, major dynamics of Muslim-Christian interaction continued to be characterized by their communal, rather than individual, dimensions a particular kind of religious competition in which entire populations as much, if not more than individual souls were contested and converted. Such a scalar orientation above the level of individuals poses a significant challenge to the modern sociological models focusing on the individual as the locus of competition and the primary agents choosing from options in a market place. This is not to deny that socio-economic dynamics of individual choice are ever factors in shaping patterns of inter-religious competition. Indeed, in modern Indonesia we do have cases where better material incentives have been deliberately employed to attract individual religious converts (International Crisis Group 2010). My point is rather that while this may be part of the picture, it is not an independent explanation for the complex phenomenon of religious competition and innovation playing out in the region over the long term, and that ignoring the communal dimensions hampers our understanding of contemporary developments as well. One important factor within this framework for religious competition is that of cultural identity, and its functions at a both the levels of communities and individuals. This is not a static state, but rather - 9 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) something subject to change over time. Until the early nineteenth century, Christian missionaries made very few converts among Muslim Javanese. The reasons for this were related to the strong sense of cohesion produced by commitments to Javanese cultural norms which were often cast as antithetical to Christianity. By the 1870s, however, acculturated Indo-Europeans and native Christianisers had attracted new followers to a faith previously seen as foreign by embedding it within Javanese cultural aesthetics. This resulted in the establishment and subsequent growth of local Christian communities within a predominantly Muslim society and fueled processes that Merle Ricklefs has characterized as polarization over the late colonial period (Ricklefs 2007). As Indonesia gained independence in 1945, these internal divisions took on even more intense valences, and new patterns of competition between Christianity and Islam within the framework of a new nation-state. In this context, religious leaders strove to position themselves within increasingly pitched ideological debates over the nature of the new nation, and the regulation of religious belief, practice, and affiliation within it. The constitution that was promulgated in 1945 established Pancasila as its ideological framework of Pancasila: Stipulating belief in God as a founding principle, but without establishing any single state religion. Rather, citizens were required to identify formally with one from among a list of officially recognized religions that included Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, and Islam. This framework for state-managed religious pluralism was designed with the aim of mitigating the potential for communitarian conflict. It also, however, had the effect of spurring considerable resentment among sectors of the Muslim majority community who had been demanding a special place for Islam in the new nation, thus setting into place new dynamics of religious competition between Islam and Christianity. One of the most prolific Indonesian exponents of a new vision of religious competition was Muhammad Natsir (d. 1993), who publicly promoted fears that Muslims were being compelled to convert to Christianity through a combination of enticements and monetary incentives. 2) Since the mid twentieth century there has been a marked rise in Indonesian Muslim complaints about the influence of international organizations in funding Christian missionary projects targeting the - 10 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree nation s Muslim community. In 1976 a missionary conference held at Geneva issued a resolution on the misuse of diakonia ( social services ) for purposes of evangelization (Natsir 1980: 33-34). 3) At times, the perceived pressures on Muslims to convert to Christianity were quite literally - cast in life or death terms. Natsir himself publicized an incident from 1978 in which three Adventist missionaries allegedly proselytized one Muslim villager in East Java to the point of dropping dead from shock (Natsir 1980: 77-78). Panic over Christian proselytization propelled Indonesian Islamists to campaign aggressively for government intervention to clamp down on missionary activity in predominantly Muslim areas of the country, including the promulgation of legislation restricting Christian proselytization and inter-religious marriage (Kim 1998; Mujiburrahman 2006). Despite such government concessions to Muslim communitarian demands, the rhetoric of fear in the face of impending Christianization did not abate. In fact, communal tensions around the issue escalated to considerable levels of violence at points, as some Muslims who remained unsatisfied with such measures took matters into their own hands in the form of militant actions including church burnings. Commenting on this disturbing situation, Natsir and other Islamists elaborated public arguments along lines that, while admitting that such acts of violence were illegal, also stressed that they would not have happened if only the Christians had not been so flagrantly violating existing government restrictions on their missionary activities (1980: 23). Given the antagonism of Indonesian Islamists toward Christian missionaries, it is striking the extent to which they themselves have adapted modern Christian models of missionary activity and organization for their own projects of Islamic religious propagation (da wa). 4) As one contemporary Indonesian observer has put it, the new vision of da wa pioneered by Natsir for the mass organization that he helped to establish for Islamic propagation (Dewan Da wa Inslamiyah Indonesia - DDII) was: inspired by Christian missionary social programs in many respects (Husin 1998 :90). 5) During DDII s formative period, the organization was led by Anwar Harjono, who continued to emphasize the idea that Islam in Indonesia faced a constant threat of Christianization (Kristenisasi) in his prolific published writings and public speeches. 6) The idea that such - 11 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) an overwhelming majority might feel threatened by the expansion of a rather small and internally diverse minority may at first appear implausible, but becomes somewhat more comprehensible when one explores the kind of presentation of Christianity in Indonesia to which Islamist activists like Harjono were responding during the later decades of the twentieth century. One widely-circulated example of this came to the archipelago from an Evangelical press in southern California in the 1970s in which a Christian missionary author proclaimed his message in a tone of imminent triumphalism: Many of the events I have experienced in Indonesia can be explained only if one believes that they were shaped by God s hand. But God wears gloves. His hand is often hidden though his actions are evident in the events that affect us politics, culture, society, and of course, religion What has been billed as the Indonesian revival is in reality a Christward movement that has been gaining momentum since 1931. For decades God wove the threads of revolution, independence, and the building of a nation together with his redemptive acts to create a receptivity to the gospel (Avery 1977: xv). Continuing on in this same text, the missionary author even explicitly linked then recent Indonesian successes in Christian proselytization with the great suffering of the country that was still a painfully recent memory at the time his book was published. In his own words Traumatic events from 1965 to 1968 changed the face of Indonesia politically, socially, and religiously and produced instability that aided the growth of Christianity (Avery 1977: 82). Such insensitive statements as these published just shortly after that great national trauma continued to provide fodder for the proliferation of competitive defenses of Islam against outside threats and generally contributed more toward the exacerbation of communitarian tensions than to productive religious innovation. Some Christian missionaries of the time boasted of a spike in the conversion of Javanese nominal Muslims (abangan) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the wake of the violence that gave birth to the New Order regime in 1965, some places in Java experienced dramatic social - 12 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree transformations. The following year the government made it obligatory for each citizen to identify with one of the five officially recognized religions something which opened the way for the conversion of nominal Muslims observing local traditions of religious practice (kebatinan) to embrace Christianity, rather than more orthodox formulations of Islam (Ricklefs 2012: 141). Examining local population statistics, Ricklefs reveals that by 1975 the Central Javanese city of Surakarta had been transformed from a place with a wide variety of religious affiliations with a strong kebatinan presences to become a city largely divided between Muslims and Christians (2012: 134). By 1980 nearly a quarter of its population was Christian even as it became one of the most fertile centers for the development of puritanical Muslim groups who actively confronted such Christianization (Ricklefs 2012: 144). Confrontational discourses flourished in such contexts, even as their local dynamics served to reinforce that same rhetoric by providing specific cases that could be cited in support the idea of Islam, and the Muslim community as a whole, under threat. Perceptions of feeling threatened continue to inform the religious imaginaries of both communities to this day, and are exacerbated by multiple factors. While some Muslim groups clearly have inflated the rhetoric of aggressive Kristenisasi for purposes of mobilizing demonstrations and even inciting violence, there have indeed also been documented cases of aggressive evangelical proselytizing in majority Muslim areas of the country into the twenty-first century (International Crisis Group 2010). Over the past fifty years, dramatic localized dynamics of conversion such as those experienced in 1970s Surakarta (or perhaps more recently in West Java) do not appear to have been broadly characteristic of subsequent developments on a national scale. 7) There has nevertheless been a perception of Islam s demographic dominance of the Indonesian national population decreasing over the second half of the twentieth century, with the percentage of Muslims reportedly dropping from 95 per cent in 1955 to 87.1 per cent in 1980. 8) Based upon aggregate national-level statistics on religious affiliation in Indonesia however, Mujiburrahman concludes that Christianisation of those who already adhered to Islam did not widely happen as the Muslim population remained generally stable while the increase in Christian numbers appears - 13 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) to reflect conversions of non-muslims in the outer islands of the archipelago (2006: 302). Despite the marginal demographic shifts or, following Appadurai s insights on the fear of small numbers (2006) perhaps precisely because of them the fear of Christianization among Indonesia s Muslims (and, conversely, Christian anxieties over the increasingly prominent position of Islam in society) is palpable, as discourses of threat and defense are echoed and amplified by a proliferation of new, even more exclusive and communitarian religious organizations. At the same time, over the latter decades of the twentieth century new dynamics of religious competition were introduced by aggressive Indonesian state programs for economic and social development. Lorraine Aragon has argued that, the New Order government not only played Muslim and non-muslim ethnic groups against each other in the pursuit of state regulatory favors, but also spurred them to compete as moral vehicles for modernization (2001: 316). While some of these forms of oppositional Islamic identity are new, the ways in which their visions of confrontation are constructed also reflect the longer historical legacies that can be traced over earlier centuries. As one insightful observer of the tenor of Indonesian public discourse in the twenty-first century writes: In the Muslim discourse, Christianisation could also mean a political conspiracy of the Christians with other enemies of Islam, particularly the secularists, inside and outside the country, to weaken the Islamic groups culturally, politically and economically. Christianisation was therefore described as a new style of crusade, religious expansionism, foreign intervention, arrogance of cultural superiority inherited from the West, and intolerant to Muslim feelings (Mujiburrahman 2006: 300). Here we see clear continuations of earlier dynamics of religious competition struggles not just for the souls of individual believers, but also for the identity of entire communities in ways that reflect the abiding resonance of formative conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the archipelago dating back to the sixteenth century. Since the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, new - 14 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree freedoms of the press and political participation have served to exacerbate communal tensions of religious competition between Muslims and Christians across Indonesia. At the same time, reflecting broader globalizing trends of consumer culture, there has also been increasing competition for individual converts on both sides conducted through a widening range of means including innovative use of digital social media. It is here, in these contemporary extensions of a culture of persuasion, 9) that one can most clearly trace the dynamics of competition overs stakes of individual conversion that have been the focus of much work in the sociology of religion to date. Nevertheless, as Kim Hyung-Jun reminds us through his village-level ethnography in Java: This emphasis on personal salvation, however, is not the only way religious life is perceived by them. In other social situations, they highlight the collective nature of religious life and the need to intervene in religious life. (2007: 233). This emphasis on communities as a locus of religious identity, Kim continues, carries with it the idea that the freedom to practice one s religion in a multi-religious community cannot be attained without due attention and regulation. The effects of this can be traced clearly through the attempts of religious groups in Indonesia to regulate the reality of religious diversity in the country through legislation and litigation both of which increased dramatically after the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime at the turn of the twenty-first century (Bush 2008). As Melissa Crouch has noted, Opposition to Christian proselytization has intensified since 1998 because of the increasing opportunities and freedom for all religious groups... (2014: 269). Over the past two decades this has resulted in greater recourse to the courts in relation to disputes between religious communities in striking contrast to the handful of cases brought to the courts under Soeharto (Crouch 2014: 172). Crouch goes on to note, moreover the complex ways in which diverse local disputes over religious issues in the sphere of law have been complicated by the central government s ambivalence toward more radical communitarian movements gaining prominence in the country. It was, after all, the same years of euphoric Reformasi openness toward - 15 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) democratization and decentralization that also witnessed an escalation of intercommunal tension and violence in Indonesia. The vectors of conflict cut across diverse lines of class and ethnicity, but increasingly religion and particular strife between Christians and Muslims came to define dominant divisions. We see this, for example, in the rise of religious militias such as the Laskar Jihad and their drama of holy war in the Muslim-Christian violence in the Moluccas at the turn of the twenty-first century (Hasan 2006). John Sidel has characterized the waves of intra-communal violence that swept over Poso (Central Sulawesi) as working to heighten suspicions across the religious divide, to strengthen the boundaries and lines of authority within each religious community, and to sharpen the organization and instruments of violence on both sides (2007: 162). The broader shifts in what he refers to as the structures of anxiety about religious identity (Sidel 2007: 220-221) are reflected in incidents of intra-communal violence, and at the same time inform the evolving contours of religious competition in contemporary Indonesia. Indeed, reminders of the fraught contestations between Christianity and Islam in Indonesia come with tragic regularity, as for example in last year s news from Tolikara (in the easternmost province of Papua). There competition for marking public space in the form of Christian attempts to ban Muslims from performing public prayers to clear the way for an international Christian revival meeting exploded into murder and arson (Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict 2016). Such incidents testify to the continuing resonance and tragic outcomes of communitarian as well as individual dynamics of religious competition between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia. Taking a longer historical view on cultural and political dynamics of religious competition, I argue, not only provides contextualized perspective on contemporary events, but can also open up new analytic vistas beyond the individualist approaches of religious market and choice theories that have heretofore largely shaped studies of competition in the sociology of religion. - 16 -
Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree NOTES 1 Proselytization is both enabled by, and simultaneously tests the limits of, religious pluralism. Proselytization assumes a situation of diversity in which individuals have the potential to change their religious identities and affiliations, while at the same time harboring ultimate goals of overcoming that diversity through the eventual conversion of the rest of society to one s own religion. It is here that we begin to discern the fault lines that emerge between claims to the right to proselytize and the simultaneous appeals for protection from proselytization by others that have defined points of friction and rupture within a number of plural societies in modern Asia. Both sides stake their claims on conceptions of what is variously (and problematically) referred to in terms of the related but not identical concepts of religious liberty, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience. Within these entangled discourses, some parties invoke these concepts to preserve their own rights to remain different and distinct, while others do so to claim their right to be able to share their truths with others. What for one side is about protecting individual rights is seen by the other as a threat to the very foundations of the community. (Feener 2014, 1-16) 2 One early exemplar of the Acehnese genre of Holy War texts Nya Ahmat s 1894 exhortation to jihad against the incursion of the Dutch entitled Nasihat ureuëng muprang draws on the work of Palimbānī s Na ī at al-muslimīn wa tadhkirat al-mu minīin fī fa ā il al-jihād fī sabīl Allāh (Snouck, 1906: II, 119). 3 Many of Natsir s occasional pieces containing his views of the strained relations between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia were collected into a volume first published in 1969. M. Natsir, Islam dan Kristen di Indonesia (Jakarta: Peladjar/ Bulan Sabit, 1969). For more on Natsir and his position within debates on the position of Islam within the legal and constitutional framework of the new Indonesian state: R. Michael Feener, Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81-106. 4 Many Muslim activists apparently came to understand this restriction as implying that certain strictures would be applied to Christian missionary activities, but rarely (if ever) to their own public da wa initiatives. See: M. Natsir, Mencari Modus Vivendi antar Ummat Beragama di Indonesia (Jakarta: Media Dawah, 1980), 7 8. 5 Natsir s own modern approach to Muslim missionary work is most extensively and systematically expounded in a book with the curious title of Fiqhud-Da wah a volume based upon the lecture notes that he used in training courses for Muslim preacher. Much the book is devoted to practical advice for modern preachers, with discussions of issues such as the relationship of proselytization to religious freedom (Natsir 1969: 97-152). - 17 -
Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) 6 Natsir began one of his 1938 essays with the exclamation: The best way to oppose an enemy is with his own weapon! See: Suara Adzan dan Lontjeng Geredja: Islam dalam Conferentie Zending, reprinted in, M. Natsir. Islam dan Kristen di Indonesia (Jakarta: Peladjar/ Bulan Sabit, 1969), 49. 7 For more on Harjono and da wa polemics on Christianization : (Feener 2007, 107-118). 8 While there has been a growth in numbers of evangelical Protestants in Indonesia, most of this increase appears to have been from other Christian denominations, rather than from Muslim converts. Ibid. 9 Aragon, Fields of the Lord, 314. One possible reason for this dramatic relative drop that Aragon does not mention is that the 1955 census data comes before the incorporation of Western Papua (Irian Jaya) into the Republic of Indonesia, which would have brought with it a significant number of new Christians to be counted among the national population in the 1960s. 10 I borrow this term of from Pettegree s (2005) insightful study of media of conversion in the period of the [Christian] Reformation. References Andaya, L. Y. 1993. The World of Maluku. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Andaya, L. Y. 2014. Babullah. In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, edited by Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Brill Online. Appadurai, A. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Aragon, L. 2001. Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Badan Pusat Statistik. 2010. Population by Region and Religion. Badan Pusat Statistik Data 2010 Indonesia Census Report. Available at http://sp2010.bps.go.id/index.php/site/tabel?tid=321 (accessed 22 July, 2016). Bush, R. 2008. Regional Sharia Regulations in Indonesia: Anomaly or Symptom? In Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in - 18 -
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