Popular Religion in Southeast Asia by Winzeler Robert L.;

Author:Winzeler, Robert L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Popular Islam in Indonesia

We should perhaps begin the discussion here by noting that any competent treatment of popular Islam in Indonesia is a daunting task, one that is far more complicated than in the case of Malaysia. In Malaysia, Islam is almost entirely the religion of the Malays, a single ethnic community. As noted above, there are significant differences between Malays in different areas of Malaysia, but today these are very secondary in comparison to the commonalities. Indonesia is an entirely different situation. The Muslim population is ethnically and geographically diverse. Outsiders who write about Islam are fond of saying that Islam in Indonesia (or sometimes Malaysia as well) is “moderate.” It shows that the conflicts, intolerance, militancy, extremism, and suppression of women’s rights now widely associated in the West with Islam are disproved as inherent or general characteristics of Islam, because they are not characteristic of the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. This is certainly a valuable point to make and one that should be a more important part of Western and world opinion than it is. But while true in a general way, it can be misleading in that it overlooks the range of cultural and religious and ethnic variation, including variation in popular Indonesian Islam.

Even specialist scholars of Indonesian Islam would be hard pressed to fully document this diversity at the level of popular religion. Several groups stand out in this regard. One is the Acehnese, located at the northern tip of Sumatra, who became famous for their long anti-

colonial war with the Dutch and more recently for their rebellion against the Indonesian government, their fervent Islamism, and their desire to be ruled according to sharia law. A second are the Minangkabau (or Minangkabau Malays) of the west coast of Sumatra, who are known for combining patriarchal Islam with matrilineal (tracing descent and reckoning inheritance through the female line) adat kinship. A third and most famous of all are the Javanese of central and west Java who are famous for traditionally recognizing and practicing two versions of Islam, including an orthodox one and a non-standard or syncretic one. Beyond such well-known groups, most accounts of Indonesian Islam as popularly practiced paint a picture that is similar to that of the Malays of Kelantan and elsewhere provided earlier. This includes a strong identity with Islam and an adherence to basic Muslim practices (the “Five Pillars”), combined, however, with various syncretic traditions, though with these increasingly challenged by reformist political Islam.

Because of its great expanse and diversity, it is to be expected that popular Islam in Indonesia will vary from one place and ethnic community to another. This variation has long been a central interest to outsiders and to Indonesians themselves. In the scholarly literature it is generally discussed both in accounts of particular Muslim groups and in more comparative studies.

Students of Islam in Indonesia have long taken special interest in those religious traditions that depart in one way or another from orthodox beliefs and practices.

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