Ilmuan Islam di Turki dan Indonesia

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Martin van Bruinessen,

‘Secularism, Islamism and Muslim intellectualism in Turkey and Indonesia:

some comparative observations’,

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Secularism, Islamism and Muslim intellectualism in Turkey and Indonesia:

some comparative observations

Martin van Bruinessen

Dedicated to Pak Amin Abdullah, who bridges the waters between Turkey and Indonesia

Does it make sense to compare two countries that do not have much of a shared history, such as Turkey and Indonesia? How can we make it more than just the juxtaposition of two unrelated cases? To what extent may our acquaintance with one of the two countries help us to understand the other better? Can similarities and differences between the two provide an insight into global social processes? It all depends, I suggest, on what exactly is being compared. The following observations, I hope, may hint at productive ways of making such comparisons.

There is a simple reason for my original interest in making comparisons between Turkey and Indonesia, and that is my own life history. Like Pak Amin, I have long been involved, and deeply so, in Turkey as well as in Indonesia. I had travelled extensively in Turkey and had carried out research there, long before my first visit to Indonesia. My research was primarily on the sociology and history of the Kurds of Turkey and neighbouring countries, but I was also interested in Sufism and the rise of political Islam in Turkey. When I began my research in Indonesia and was reading the classical books by Geertz, Benda, Deliar Noer, Boland and

Pijper,1 I was struck by the apparent division of Indonesia’s Muslims into ‘modernists’ and

‘traditionalists’, and by the great influence Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida were said to have had in Indonesia. It surprised me that I had never even heard the names of Abduh and Rida in Turkey, and I had never noticed a similar bifurcation of Turkish Islam into

‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ streams. This was in part because I had not paid sufficient attention to Turkish Muslim intellectual debates of the early twentieth century — I later discovered that Turkish (or rather Ottoman) intellectuals were in fact aware of the Egyptian Salafiyya. But the Ottoman reformist thinkers who were inclined to rational analysis, such as

1

Clifford Geertz, The religion of Java, New York: The Free Press, 1960; Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation 1942-1945, The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958; Deliar Noer, The modernist Muslim movement in Indonesia 1900-1940, Kuala Lumpur, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1973; B. J. Boland, The struggle of Islam in modern Indonesia, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; G. F. Pijper, Studiën over de geschiedenis van de islam in Indonesia 1900-1950, Leiden: Brill, 1977.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia 1

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Abdullah Cevdet and his disciple Ziya Gökalp, were more radical than Abduh and Rida in their rejection of tradition, and they became advocates of scientific positivism and strict

secularism.2 The Turkish revolution and the establishment of a secular republic led by

Mustafa Kemal cut short many religious-intellectual debates, which however resurfaced in

the late twentieth century, when the state relaxed its control of religious expression.3

Studying the relationship of state, civil society and religion in Indonesia, the emergence of Islamist movements and of liberal and progressive discourses, it became natural for me to ask whether I could find similar developments in Turkey, and how differences as well as parallels could be explained.

Not long after I had started my research in Indonesia, I had the privilege of having several

long conversations with the late Fazlur Rahman, whom I met at a conference in Jakarta.4 He

spoke of his pessimism about the state of intellectual debate in the Muslim-majority world, with two major exceptions. Indonesia and Turkey, he said, were the two main countries that held out hope for the future, because conditions there favoured the development of

sophisticated Muslim intellectual thought. His favourable opinion of these two countries no doubt was in part inspired by the fact that he had dedicated Turkish and Indonesian students,

who did much to spread his thought and influence among their compatriots.5 However,

perhaps there was a constellation of factors that these societies had in common and that made them more receptive to Fazlur’s neo-modernism.

More recently, both Indonesia and Turkey have been held up as examples to show that democracy and commitment to Islam are not incompatible, as is claimed by Muslim

fundamentalists as well as Western Islamophobes, but may very well go together. During the uprisings of the so-called Arab spring, several observers remarked that Indonesia’s recent and relatively successful transition from authoritarian rule to a more or less functioning

democracy provided an excellent example to be studied by North Africans in search of their

2_{M. Şükrü Hanioğlu,}_{Bir siyasi düşünür olarak Abdullah Cevdet ve dönemi}_{, Istanbul: Üçdal, 1981; M. Şükrü} Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in opposition, Oxford University Press, 1995; M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, ''Garbcilar': their attitudes toward religion and their impact on the official ideology of the Turkish republic', Studia Islamica 86, 1997, 133-158; Serif Mardin, Religion, society, and modernity in Turkey, Syracuse University Press, 2006.

3

Michael E. Meeker, 'The new Muslim intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey', in: R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in modern Turkey. Religion, politics and literature in a secular state, London: I.B. Tauris, 1991, pp. 189-219; Serif Mardin, 'Cultural change and the intellectual: a study of the effects of secularization in modern Turkey. Necip Fazil and the Naksibendi', in: S. Mardin (ed.), Cultural transitions in the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. 189-213.

4

This was at the conference ‘New trends in Islamic studies’ at LIPI, Jakarta, 15-17 August 1985. Fazlur Rahman had been invited to the conference by his student Nurcholish Madjid.

5

Fazlur Rahman’s most influential Indonesian disciples are Nurcholish Madjid and Syafi’i Maarif; in Turkey,

the chief representatives of his thought are his students Alparslan Açıkgenç and Bekir Demirkol. On Fazlur

Rahman’s influence in Indonesia more generally, see: Abd A'la, Dari neomodernisme ke Islam liberal: jejak Fazlur Rahman dalam wacana Islam di Indonesia, Jakarta: Paramadina, 2003; on his impact in Turkey, see: Yasin Aktay, 'The historicist dispute in Turkish-Islamic theology', in: S. Gunduz and C. S. Yaran (ed.), Change and essence: dialectical relations between change and continuity in the Turkish intellectual tradition,

Washington DC: The Council for Values and Philosophy, 2005, pp. 75-77 and 84-85.

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own transition, and Turkey’s AKP government was praised (and admired by many North African revolutionaries) as a regime strongly committed to Islamic values but at the same time to political and economic liberalism.

Some commonalities (and some significant contrasts)

Rich non-Arabic cultural heritage

Turkey and Indonesia are located at opposite ends of the vast continent of Asia, North and East of the Arabic-speaking part of the Muslim world. Both are heirs to great civilizations, Islamic as well as pre-Islamic. Sriwijaya and Majapahit remain present in the mind of many contemporary Indonesians, as do the sultanates of Aceh, Mataram, Banten and the other Muslim states of the Archipelago. Similarly, Turks not only remember the Seljuq and

Ottoman empires but also Byzantium, the Hittite empire and Urartu. The Muslim civilizations that flourished in these two regions had non-Arabic languages as their major vehicles of expression (Malay and Javanese, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish, respectively). Arabic, it is true, was the language in which fiqh and `aqida, Qur’an and hadith were studied in madrasa and pesantren, but mystical poetry, metaphysical speculation, pious legends and sacred history were expressed in local languages. Both regions developed distinctly local styles of Muslim religiosity: the mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri and the Javanese court poets in Indonesia, and the Anatolian Sufism of Yunus Emre, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi and numerous later Sufi-poets in Turkey. In both regions, though officially Sunni, there long remained significant heterodox minorities, in whose beliefs and practices (abangan / kejawen

/ kebatinan and Alevi, respectively) traces of earlier religions could easily be discerned.6

These cultural complexities are not unique to Turkey and Indonesia. Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said of the Iranian and Indian cultural regions that lie between them, and to some extent even of Egypt. In all these regions, modernity brought movements of purification of religion, calls for a return to the Qur’an and hadith and more generally for conformity with beliefs and practices in the Arabic heartlands. Turkish Islam proved much more resilient to

those calls, proud of its own religious traditions, than Indonesia.7 This difference raises

interesting questions: could this Turkish resilience to Arabization (or to Salafism) be

explained by its history as a great empire that conquered and long dominated the Arab world and had the power to define Islamic orthodoxy? And could Indonesia’s relative openness to these influences be due to the role of Islam in the emergence of an Indonesian national

6

These heterodox minorities were the subject of my inaugural lecture at the University of Utrecht in 2000, ‘Muslims, Minorities and Modernity: The restructuring of heterodoxy in the Middle East and Southeast Asia’, available online at:

http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/m.vanbruinessen/publications/Oratie%20korte%20versie.htm.

7

On the dynamic relationship between ‘Arabization’ and indigenous Muslim traditions in Indonesia, see: Martin van Bruinessen, 'Ghazwul fikri or Arabisation? Indonesian Muslim responses to globalisation', in: K. Miichi and O. Farouk (ed.), Dynamics of Southeast Asian Muslims in the era of globalization, Tokyo: Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI), 2013, pp. 47-70.

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awareness and the struggle against Dutch colonialism, and the role of Mecca as a safe haven for anti-Dutch ulama?

Armed Independence struggle, politically engaged armed forces, secularism

One thing that distinguishes Turkey and Indonesia from most other Muslim-majority nation states is that both attained their independence as new states as the result of a prolonged armed struggle that was conceived as a jihad against alien occupying forces. In the case of Turkey, Islam became a core aspect of national identity; most non-Muslims were expelled and the few remaining Greek or Armenian Orthodox Christians and Jews were never accepted as fully equal citizens. But the new republican regime led by Mustafa Kemal adopted radically secularist policies and largely banned religion from the public sphere. Upon Indonesian Independence, most Dutch, many Eurasians (Indo) as well as indigenous Indonesians who had worked for the colonial administration left the country. There were, however,

considerable Christian minorities (as well as a high proportion of abangan), who would have strongly objected to Indonesia’s becoming an Islamic state, so that Indonesia, too, became a secular republic (although its secularism was very different from that of Turkey).

Indonesia’s founding fathers were aware of the Turkish revolution, which had taken place a quarter century before Indonesia attained its independence. They looked upon Mustafa Kemal and his comrades as anti-imperialist heroes to be emulated, and appear to have generally seen

Kemal as a reformer rather than an enemy of Islam.8

The armed forces of Turkey and Indonesia long retained a dominating role in politics that was legitimized by their role in the independence struggle. In Turkey, the army considered itself the custodian of society and guarantor of the Constitution (i.e., of the secular order); in Indonesia, under the infamous Dwifungsi doctrine, the armed forces until recently completed dominated political life. In both countries the armed forces have consistently acted as staunch defenders of the secular order and repeatedly intervened against perceived Islamist threats, as well as against civil society more generally. Only recently have they been forced to retreat from politics and restrict themselves to a more professional military role.

Both countries went through long periods of authoritarian rule, and Muslim associations arguably played crucial roles in the transition to a more liberal democratic system (as well as neo-liberal economic policies). The modalities were not the same, but the role of

Muhammadiyah and NU in providing stability in Indonesia during the years of post-Soeharto transition is undeniable, and in Turkey it was the AKP that as the ruling party since 2003 has carried out democratizing reforms and sent the army back to the barracks. Both countries are reasonably well-functioning democracies (especially when compared to other Muslim-majority countries), and the Muslim-majority of the population in both appear to be committed to

8

On Indonesian perceptions of the Turkish revolution, see: Chiara Formichi, 'Mustafa Kemal's Abrogation of the Ottoman Caliphate and its Impact on the Indonesian Nationalist Movement', in: M. Al-Rasheed, et al. (ed.), Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts, Oxford University Press, 2013.

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secularism and to reject the idea of an Islamic state. This was shown clearly, in the case of Indonesia, by the rejection of the Jakarta charter in the 2001 and 2002 sessions of the MPR ad the decreasing electoral support for Islamic political parties. In the Turkish case, it was the AKP that broke with the Islamist ideals of its predecessors and redefined itself as a

conservative party, implicitly accepting the country’s de facto secularism. In the heyday of

the Arab spring, the AKP’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told North Africans that for pious Muslim politicians a secular polity might be preferable to all other alternatives.

The AKP has its origin in a succession of ‘pro-Islamic’ parties that were banned for

violations of Turkey’s secularist laws and then replaced by a new party appealing to the same constituency. The AKP however successfully broadened its electoral base by de-emphasizing Islamic issues, embracing liberal democracy and embarking on a combination of welfare policies and neo-liberal economic reforms that appealed to other segments of the population. In this, it represents a broader trend in Muslim societies that has been dubbed ‘post-Islamist’

by certain authors.9 It is the first political party with an Islamist background that not only

came to power through elections but succeeded in increasing its share of the vote in two succeeding elections. Understandably, Islamist parties elsewhere take a great interest in the AKP’s success and seek ways of emulating it. In Indonesia, the PKS has not only closely observed the rise of the AKP but made somewhat similar efforts to broaden its base by appealing to voters beyond the narrow group of ideologically motivated Islamists. (In this case, the transformation from a small, purist avant-garde party to a broader pragmatic mass party, with its fair share of corruption scandals, occurred so rapidly that it may well prove to be the party’s undoing.)

Secularism, secularisms, secularization

Not everyone may agree with my calling both Indonesia and Turkey secular republics. The term secularism has negative connotations in Indonesia, and many Indonesians would point out that the state ideology of Pancasila, which has the belief in God (keTuhanan Yang Maha Esa) as its first principle, is not secular but religious. However, religious and secular are not necessarily opposites.

Common definitions of secularism usually refer to the separation of religion and state or religion and politics. But in actual practice, there are many varieties of secular political systems, and in only very few are religion and state completely separated. In Germany, the state collects church taxes on behalf of the church, and in some German counties, state schools have crucifixes in the classrooms, the ultimate symbol of Catholic identity. Great Britain has an established state church, the Anglican Church. In the Netherlands, the state subsidizes Protestant and Catholic schools. Secularism, in these countries, does not mean that state and church are completely separate, but that the state is expected to be neutral and

9

Most notably by the political scientist Asef Bayat. See his Making Islam democratic: social movements and the post-Islamic turn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

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maintain an equal distance to all religions. Jewish or Muslim schools should be entitled to the same subsidies as Christian schools; non-Christian religious communities should have the same rights as Christian communities.

The various forms of secularism that emerged in the Western world are the results of different historical trajectories and may emphasize quite different aspects. A tentative classification should at least contain the following types:

• Separation of state and religion in order to protect religion from politics and to

guarantee religious freedom. The United States of America, which considers the Pilgrims, who fled religious persecution in Europe, as its founders, presents the most radical example of this type of secularism. Religion is highly present in the public sphere, and all religions have great freedom to play public roles. The state does not identify itself with any specific religion, although public ceremonies are pervaded with prayers and references to God – something Robert Bellah termed ‘civil

religion.’10

• Separation of state and religion in order to protect the state and the political process

from interference by religion. In its most radical form we find this type of secularism (laïcité, ‘laicism’) in France, where revolutionaries had to conquer political space from domination by the powerful Catholic Church. Religion is largely banned from the public sphere; conspicuous symbols of religious identity are not allowed in state schools and other public institutions.

• Neutrality of the state towards religions (in the sense of equal distance towards all

religions). This variety of secularism typically emerged in multi-religious societies with long histories of inter-religious conflict. India is the most prominent example (where secularism is under permanent threat from Hindu fundamentalists). The Netherlands, where Protestants and Catholics long fought each other, constitutes another case. Under the conditions of this type of secularism, rights and privileges available to (the adherents of) one religion, are also available to other religions.

Turkey and Indonesia provide variations on these basic types. Turkey consciously adopted the French style of secularism (and even its name: laiklik) but combined this with aspects of the Ottoman state tradition in which it was the state that controlled religion rather than the other way around. Turkish secularism broke the hold of autonomous religious institutions over society but consolidated the control of the state over the religious life of its subjects. Through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which is directly answerable to the Prime Minister, the state controls all major mosques, appoints and salaries mosque personnel (imam and khatib), and takes care of religious education at all levels. The state, not civil society, defines what acceptable Islam is. In the course of the Republic’s ninety-year history, there have of course been changes in what the state considered acceptable Islam. Under military

10

Robert N. Bellah, 'Civil religion in America', in: R. N. Bellah, Beyond belief, New York: Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 168-189.

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rule in the 1980s, the so-called ‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis’, a conservative doctrine

incorporating Turkish nationalism as a major component of proper religiosity, was adopted as

the official doctrine.11 Ten years of AKP rule have brought some changes, but surprisingly

several typically laicist measures, such as the headscarf ban in schools and universities, have not been lifted.

Indonesia’s secularism is a variety of the ‘neutrality of the state’ type. The original

formulation of Pancasila was such that all the major religions could recognize themselves in them (but later versions obliged Muslims and Hindus to redefine their religions as somewhat similar to Islam and Christianity, with a single great God, prophets, and holy books). The Ministry of Religious Affairs, although established as a friendly gesture towards pious Muslims and overwhelmingly concerned with the administration of Islam, has

sub-departments for the other officially recognized religions. A number of religious holidays of each of the officially recognized religions (Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and, since 1999, Confucianism) were adopted as public holidays. The intention to maintain equal distance to all religions in order to prevent inter-religious conflict also clearly constituted the background of the 1969 joint decree of the Ministers of the Interior and of Religion on proselytization and the construction of houses of worship. This degree is the basis for a policy of not allowing proselytization among the followers of another (recognized) religion or the construction of places of worship in districts dominated by

another religion and where the religion in question has hardly any followers.12 The neutrality

of the state has its limits, however, for only a handful of religions are officially recognized and the adherents of other religions or non-believers are deprived of essential civil rights.

Secularism as an ideology or as a characteristic of the relationship between state and society should not be confounded with the process of secularization or with the secularization thesis, which was long a part of modernization theory. The thesis claimed that the modernization of a society was inevitably accompanied by secularization, in the sense of a decline of

religion.13 The striking resurgence of religion almost everywhere except in Western Europe

11

Gökhan Çetinsaya, 'Rethinking nationalism and Islam: some preliminary notes on the roots of "Turkish-Islamic synthesis" in modern Turkish political thought', The Muslim World 89, 1999, 350-376; Fusun Üstel, 'Synthèse turco-islamique entre traditionalisme et modernité', in: J. Thobie and S. Kançal (ed.),

Industrialisation, communication et rapports sociaux en Turquie et Méditerranée orientale, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, pp. 387-400.

12

For an insightful analysis of the decree and its background and consequences, see: Mujiburrahman, Feeling threatened: Muslim-Christian relations in Indonesia's New Order, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 57-62. In practice, the decree has mostly justified the bans of church construction in Muslim-majority regions, but there have been cases where it was used to stop mosque construction in the Christian-majority Eastern provinces of Indonesia.

13

Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, 2004; K. Dobbelaere, 'The Meaning and Scope of Secularization', in: P. B. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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since the last quarter of the twentieth century has called the secularization thesis into

question. The sociologist José Casanova has shown, in an influential study, that the thesis in

fact made three distinct, mutually independent claims.14 The first concerns the differentiation

of a secular sphere from religious norms and institutions (law, education, medicine, the sciences, politics, the market became separate spheres of activity, no longer under the control of religion; religion does not disappear but survives as a separate domain besides those others). The second concerns the overall decline of religious beliefs and practices, and the third claim concerns the marginalization of religion from public life and its restriction to a private sphere. The first and second claims are strongly supported by empirical data, but the third, Casanova argues, simply does not apply in most societies. Casanova even speaks of a ‘deprivatization’ of religion and an increasing presence of religion in public life. Many other philosophers and sociologists have made similar efforts to rethink the nexus of modernity,

secularity and secularization.15

Secular states are the result of secularization in the first of the three senses identified by Casanova, the emergence of a public sphere not controlled by religion (along with other differentiated spheres). This does not imply that their societies are secularized in the other meanings of the term. In fact, as we have seen, large proportions of the population in secular states may be deeply religious, and religious institutions and values may be prominently present in their public spheres – as is the case in Turkey as well as Indonesia.

Turkey’s secular order

In the first years following the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), the Kemalist regime abolished all religious institutions surviving from the Ottoman Empire and replaced them by secular ones. The highest religious office, that of the shaykh al-islam or supreme

mufti (the Mashikhat), was abolished, and only much later did a new government body, the

Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, or briefly Diyanet) take over

some of its functions. The shari`a and shari`a courts were abolished, and legislation and law courts borrowed from European examples. Religious schools (madrasa) were closed and replaced by state schools with a secular curriculum. Sufi orders (tarikat) were banned and Sufi shrines and other venerated graves were closed to the public. Traditional Muslim styles of dress, such as the turban, were banned and men were ordered to wear European-style hats instead. The Arabic script that had been used for writing Ottoman Turkish was replaced by the Latin alphabet. There was even an attempt to replace the Arabic language by Turkish in the call to prayer and recitation of Qur’anic verses during worship.

The most radical phase of laicism, when all that smacked of religion was abolished or suppressed, coincided with the years of single-party dictatorship under Mustafa Kemal

14

José Casanova, Public religions in the modern world, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

15

An excellent collection of thoughtful recent contributions to the debate is: Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (ed.), Rethinking secularism, Oxford University Press, 2011.

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Atatürk and his successor Ismet Inönü. After the Second World War, Turkey exchanged its single-party authoritarian order for a multi-party electoral democracy, and as a result the state had to take at least some account of the conservative religious sentiments of the majority of its population. The effort to suppress conservative religiosity gave way to efforts to educate the masses in ‘enlightened’ versions of the faith.

As a first, highly symbolic gesture, the Arabic call to prayer was restored and broadcast on radio. While madrasa and tarikat remained banned because they were considered to teach backward ideas and superstitious practices, the state felt a need for ‘enlightened’ clerics to teach an understanding of Islam compatible with the needs of modern society. A new type of school, with a curriculum combining modern subjects with Arabic and Islamic disciplines, was established to train prayer leaders and preachers (Imam-Hatip school), and faculties of

theology were opened to educate enlightened scholars of Islam.16 The Directorate of

Religious Affairs (Diyanet) became a vast bureaucratic institution through which the state

strove to control the religious life of its citizens.17 Diyanet controls all the major mosques in

the country and appoints their imams and khatibs; it writes the weekly Friday sermons – for a long time, the same khutba was readout in mosques throughout the country – and all

textbooks on religion as well as a whole range of other publications. Different departments supervise hajj and `umra services and answer questions about religious matters that are posed by individual believers – the latter is essentially the official fatwa body, though it does not carry that name.

It is interesting to note that the institutions established by the Kemalist state to control its conservative religious subjects have often been used effectively by the latter to preserve their own interests and to gain influence in the state apparatus. The Sufi orders and other pious

congregations such as the Nurcu and Süleymancı remained banned, but some of their

followers succeeded in gaining influential positions in the Diyanet apparatus, as did

numerous persons of a more Islamist persuasion. There have been repeated waves of purges of Diyanet in order to get rid of these undesirable elements. The most remarkable

phenomenon is that of the Imam-Hatip schools, which became very popular among pious sections of the population because they were the only schools that offered at least some form of Islamic education. Although meant to train simple religious functionaries only, most of its graduates had other ambitions than just becoming a prayer leader or continuing their studies in the faculties of theology. Governments were under pressure from their electorate to allow these graduates access to other streams of higher education, including not only the law and political science faculties that trained much of the country’s political elite but also police and

16

Howard A. Reed, 'Turkey's new Imam-hatip schools', Die Welt des Islams 4(2-3), 1955, 150-163; Gotthard Jäschke, 'Vom Islam in der heutigen Türkei', Die Welt des Islams 18, 1977, 1-18; Howard A. Reed, 'The faculty of divinity at Ankara', The Muslim World 46, 1956, 295-312 and 47, 1957, 22-35; Günter Seufert, 'The Faculties of Divinity in the current tug-of-war', Les annales de l'autre islam 6, 1999, 353-370.

17

Istar Gözaydin, Diyanet: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nde dinin tanzimi, Istanbul: Iletisim, 2009; Ismail Kara, 'Eine Behörde im Spannungsfeld von Religion und Staat: das "Präsidium für relgiöse Angelegenheiten"', in: G. Seufert and J. Waardenburg (ed.), Turkish Islam and Europe / Türkischer Islam und Europa, Istanbul-Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999, pp. 209-240.

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military academies. These schools have remained a site of contestation between secular republican and religious-conservative forces in society until the present day. For several

generations, including Erdoğan himself and many other leading members of the AKP, the

imam-hatip schools were an effective vehicle of vertical social mobility and the creation of a

counter-elite.18

Some Indonesian parallels

It is not hard to notice a number of interesting parallels to the Turkish developments sketched above in the administration of Islam in Indonesia. Indonesia never closed its pesantrens and madrasas, nor did it ban Sufi orders (except some minor ones that were considered ‘deviant’). As a heritage from the colonial period, Indonesia’s legal system is also largely based on Western (Dutch, in this case) law, but the shari`a has retained a place in family law and the religious courts that administer it. Attempts to further secularize family law in the 1970s failed. However, the state has shown a similar intent to supervise and control the religious life of its subjects.

The Ministry of Religious Affairs was, especially during the New Order period, not unlike Turkey’s Diyanet. The Ministry was the vehicle through which the regime attempted to stimulate depoliticized, ‘enlightened’ and development-friendly interpretations of Islam. The Madrasah Aliyah Negeri (and other madrasa that followed the same curriculum of 70 percent general plus 30 percent religious subjects) are not unlike Turkey’s imam-hatip schools, and came to play a similar role in upward social mobility. Because most pesantren combined the traditional study of classical fiqh books (kitab kuning) with a modern madrasa-type

education, large numbers of youth of religiously conservative rural background gained access to higher education. The major institutions catering to these madrasa graduates were of course the IAINs, but like Turkey’s Imam-Hatip graduates, many Indonesian madrasa graduates intended to continue their education in non-religious subjects.

The Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), established in 1975 with the primary aim of providing religious legitimation for the government’s development policies and more generally of constituting an interface between the government and the Muslim umma, does not have an exact counterpart in Turkey – the various Turkish governments never felt a strong need for religious legitimation. Diyanet does provide answers to religious questions – there is in fact a hierarchy of mufti offices from the provincial to the district level – but it responds to

questions from ordinary believers rather than the government, and is in this respect more like the NU’s bahth al-masa’il councils and Muhammadiyah’s Majelis Tarjih.

I mentioned above that in Turkey, the institutions established to control and discipline conservative Muslims also offered opportunities to the latter to infiltrate them and gain a

18

See the interesting observations in: Ismail Çağlar, From symbolic exile to physical exile: Turkey's Imam Hatip schools, the emergence of a conservative counter-elite, and its knowledge migration to Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

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degree of influence in the state apparatus itself. A remarkable Indonesian example of a

similar process is the dramatic change that took place in the MUI in the post-Soeharto period, when it redefined its role from being the khadim hukuma to serving as the khadim

al-umma and became a mouthpiece for radical groups that had been marginalized during the

New Order.19

Turkey’s Faculties of Theology and especially Indonesia’s IAINs, which were both meant to produce a class of enlightened religious scholars are highly successful examples of what may be called ‘religious engineering.’ They produced a critical mass of well-educated scholars with a deep interest in hermeneutics, who have had a significant impact on public discourse on religious matters. Such thinkers as Fazlur Rahman and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who have had to leave their own countries because their hermeneutic approaches angered conservatives, found eager readers and students in these institutions. They are also, to my knowledge, the only institutions of academic theology in the Muslim world where they very idea of a

feminist reading of scripture can be discussed.20

Islam and politics

The elites that founded and governed Turkey and Indonesia in their early decades were largely secular-minded, even though some of them were privately practising Muslims. In Turkey, resistance to the first secularizing measures was violently repressed. Muslim political parties were never officially permitted (the same was true of parties based on class or

ethnicity). In post-1945 multi-party politics, the choice was between radical and conservative varieties of Kemalism, and pious Muslims would always vote conservative. In 1970, a

German-trained engineer, Necmettin Erbakan, established the first of a series of ‘pro-Islamic’ political parties, which was soon banned for violating the secular order. Erbakan then

established another party, with a similar program, that took part in several coalition

governments in the 1970s but was banned after the military coup in 1980. This party too was succeeded by a similar one, and so on. The parties are called ‘pro-Islamic’ because by law they could not make any reference to Islam as the basis of their ideology or identity but clearly did appeal to Islamist sentiments. Erbakan named his political ideology ‘the National

Outlook’ (Milli Görüş); it reflected the interests of small Muslim businessmen and farmers of

Turkey’s interior, was anti-Western and anti-capitalist and favoured a political and economic reorientation of Turkey from the West to its Muslim neighbours. There was a certain

19

This transition is studied and analysed in detail in: Moch. Nur Ichwan, 'Towards a Puritanical Moderate Islam: The Majelis Ulama Indonesia and the Politics of Religious Orthodoxy', in: M. van Bruinessen (ed.),

Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the 'Conservative Turn’, Singapore: Institute of South East Asian Studies, 2013, pp. 60-104.

20A major example from Turkey is the study by Hidayet Sefkatlı Tuksal, _{Kadın karşıtı}_{söylemin İslam}

geleneğindeki izdüşümleri [The projections of misogynist discourse in Islamic tradition], Ankara: Kitâbiyât, 2000 (originally a dissertation at the faculty of theology in Ankara); an Indonesian example is Siti Musdah Mulia, Islam & inspirasi kesetaraan gender, Yogyakarta: Kibar Press, 2007.

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influence of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the religious authority to whom Erbakan and his colleagues deferred was a charismatic Naqshbandi shaykh.

Indonesia never banned all Muslim parties; Masyumi was not banned for being an Islamist party but for its leaders’ participation in the armed PRRI insurrection. The New Order regime continued the ban of Masyumi, streamlined and marginalized the other Muslim parties, and carried out a general policy of depoliticizing Islam while endorsing non-political expressions of the faith. It may have been the very ban of Masyumi that facilitated an increasing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood among Indonesia’s committed Muslims. The Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII), which was established by former Masyumi leaders, became the major institutional vehicle for the transmission of this influence, through translations of Brotherhood literature and scholarships enabling Indonesians to study in Saudi Arabia and make direct contacts. The two main Brotherhood-connected underground networks, known in retrospect as the Tarbiyah movement and Abdullah Sungkar’s Usrah movement, both had

prior connections with the DDII but made themselves independent of it.21

The Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party, PKS), which was established by Tarbiyah activists after the fall of the Soeharto regime, shows some similarities to the Adalet

ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP), established in Turkey after yet

another of Erbakan’s parties, the Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party, FP), was banned. Erdoğan, the

strongest leader of the party, had gained national popularity when he represented yet another of Erbakan’s parties, the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party, RP) as the mayor of Istanbul and showed himself to be an effective administrator who brought welfare services to the poorer districts and served the middle class as well. The AKP shed the last remnants of the anti-Western and anti-capitalist attitude of the National Outlook parties, embraced liberal democracy, and reached out to broader segments of the population. For the PKS, the AKP rather than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood became the model to be emulated – not only because it was the first ‘related’ party to rule a large Muslim country but also because of its

perceived modernity.22

In Indonesia, the PKS is only one of a broad range of Islamist and fundamentalist movements with roots in the Arab world. Others include the Hizbut Tahrir, various wings of the Salafi movement, and smaller radical groups that were influenced by radical offshoots of the Brotherhood such as Egypt’s Jama`at Islamiyya. These movements never gained much of a foothold in Turkey, because very few Turks are convinced of the superiority of Arab Islam. Turkey has experienced a strong Islamic resurgence since the late 1970s, like Indonesia has,

21

Martin van Bruinessen, 'Genealogies of Islamic radicalism in Indonesia', South East Asia Research 10 no.2, 2002, 117-154.

22_{The AKP, like the preceding Milli Görüş parties, was ‘related’ to the PKS through their relations with the}

Muslim Brotherhood. Erbakan and Erdoğan, as well as the supreme guide of the PKS, Hilmi Aminuddin, repeatedly attended the twice-yearly meetings of the Muslim Brotherhood, where the various national branches of the Brotherhood and friendly organizations came together (interview with Hilmi Aminuddin, 2 November 2008).

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but the organizations or jama`at (cemaat, in Turkish) that emerged were all rooted in the Anatolian Islamic tradition, not imported from the Arab world.

Muslim associations

One of the chief distinguishing characteristics of Indonesian Islam is the presence of large, hierarchically organized and bureaucratized associations, of which Muhammadiyah and NU are the most prominent examples. Nothing quite like Muhammadiyah, with its networks of schools, universities, hospitals and orphanages all over the country, exists anywhere else in the Muslim world. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was established 16 years after

Muhammadiyah and has arguably made a larger impact on political Islam elsewhere than any other organization, has neither achieved the same degree of institutionalization nor of

acceptance by the general public.

Turkey’s legislation does not allow parties or organizations on the basis of religious, ethnic or class affiliation. Sufi orders remain officially banned, although this ban was considerably relaxed in the 1980s, and some orders have come out into the open and gained a larger following than before. For legal purposes, they have to adopt the form of an accepted type of

organization, such as the foundation (vakıf) or cultural association (dernek), and their

meetings may take the form of semi-academic seminars.23 More influential yet than the Sufi

orders are a number of informal associations commonly referred to as cemaat (jama`a), most

prominent among them the Nur and Gülen movements and the Süleymancı congregation.

The Gülen congregation is now believed to be the most powerful force in Turkish society, although it appears to completely lack any kind of formal, centralized organization. It consists of a dense network of foundations that run schools, dormitories, hospitals, financial institutions, newspapers, television stations, dialogue associations and charitable services. The chains of authority connecting them remain informal and invisible to outsiders. Although the Gülen community engages in some of the same activities as Muhammadiyah –

establishing schools, charitable associations, hospitals, banks – it is an organization of a very different type; notably it does not have periodical congresses at which policies are discussed and leaders elected. Nor does it have transparent specialized bodies such as the Majelis Tabligh and the Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid. All activities are supervised by councils that meet

regularly (istişare), but the members of these councils are only known to real insiders; they

are not elected and may not even been known to ordinary followers.24

23

Brian Silverstein, 'Sufism and modernity in Turkey: from the authenticity of experience to the practice of discipline', in: M. van Bruinessen and J. D. Howell (ed.), Sufism and the 'modern' in Islam, London: I.B.Tauris, 2007, pp. 39-60.

24

There are numerous studies of the public activities of the Gulen movement, but even the best-informed of them remain silent on the internal organization of the cemaat. See Berna Turam, Between Islam and the state: the politics of engagement, Stanford University Press, 2007; M. Hakan Yavuz, Toward an Islamic

enlightenment: the Gülen movement, Oxford University Press, 2013.

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The contrast between the highly bureaucratized Muhammadiyah and the highly informal structure of the Gülen movement is fascinating and raises questions about the difference of state-Islam relations in Indonesia and Turkey. The Gülen movement is very modern in its use of communication media and its emphasis on the modern science and technology in

education, but it has retained – like the other cemaat in Turkey – a structure of organization that is informal and seems even pre-modern, informed by the charisma of its leader. That informal character is at least in part a response to the legal situation: Turkish law does not organizations based on religion, and in order to avoid confiscation of property, the movement has arranged for all its assets to be officially owned by individuals or foundations. The formal structure of Muhammadiyah, as well as Indonesia’s other Ormas, is similarly at least in part based on Indonesia’s laws of association (which go back to Dutch legislation), which proscribe a bureaucratized structure with periodical congresses, elections, and a regional structure (pusat—wilayah—cabang—ranting) paralleling that of the state.

Another striking difference between Muhammadiyah and the Gülen movement is in their international orientations. The Gülen movement is active in some 140 countries, and not just among Turks living there but among people of other ethnic and religious backgrounds (but the pride in Turkish identity, Turkish culture and Turkish history remains an important aspect of its activities). Muhammadiyah also has some activities abroad, but these are exclusively directed at fellow Indonesians. Muhammadiyah seems not to have the sense of mission, the belief it has something to offer to the world, that the Gülen movement displays. Prominent Muhammadiyah members may send their children to a Gülen school in Indonesia, because they are convinced of the quality of education offered. Young men and women of the Gülen movement are studying at various universities in Indonesia (as well as many other countries), not because they are convinced of the superiority of education at these institutions but – I believe – as a form of networking that will serve the movement’s further expansion.

These differences seem to reflect a more general difference in attitude that may have to do with the contrasting histories of Turkey and Indonesia before they became independent republics. Whereas Indonesia was part of a colonial empire, Turkey was itself the heartland of the last great Muslim empire, which comprised most of the Arab world and large parts of South-eastern Europe. Both the AKP and the Gülen movement consciously seek to reconnect with the Ottoman past and share an urge to project Turkish influence into the world around

them.25

Islamic thought

As said before, Turkey and Indonesia may be the only two major countries of the (Sunni) Muslim-majority world where modern hermeneutic approaches and other contributions to

25

I develop this argument further in an earlier publication, trying to explain why Indonesian Islam has made so little impact on other Muslim-majority societies. See: Martin van Bruinessen, 'Indonesian Muslims and their place in the larger world of Islam', in: A. Reid (ed.), Indonesia rising: the repositioning of Asia's third giant, Singapore: ISEAS, 2012, pp. 117-140.

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theological thought flourish.26 But it was neither Muhammadiyah nor the Gülen movement that provided the most stimulating environment for the development of Muslim

intellectualism. Both pride themselves in skills and professionalism but have little appreciation for critical thought. Several prominent Muslim intellectuals had in fact a Muhammadiyah background, but their contributions to public debate mostly took place outside the Muhammadiyah environment. Especially the Gülen movement has very few theologians and philosophers in its ranks, and what its followers have had to say on religious questions has rarely been more than a repetition of some of Gülen’s statements. The

interesting thinkers are to be found elsewhere, and surprisingly (at least to me) it proved to be the academic institutions established by the secular state for training ‘enlightened’ and

government-friendly religious personnel – i.e., Turkey’s Faculties of Theology and

Indonesia’s IAINs – that constituted a favourable environment for the flourishing of modern hermeneutic approaches and critical studies in theology.

With the emergence of a prosperous Muslim middle class, which became conspicuous in both countries in the 1980s, there was a growing audience for more sophisticated views on the relevance of Islam for contemporary social issues. Muslim intellectuals began playing a highly visible role in the public sphere; new publishers found an expanding market for books on religion and history, mysticism, philosophy, and the social and political teachings of religions; new foundations such as Paramadina and the Lembaga Studi Agama dan Filsafat

(LSAF) in Indonesia or Bilim ve Sanat Vakfı in Turkey catered to the intellectual curiosity of

the Muslim middle class.

Public intellectuals in both countries had until recently overwhelmingly been on the left of the political spectrum (although Turkey had an undercurrent of intellectual thought with roots in the Ottoman tradition). In Indonesia the left was physically destroyed in the wake of Soeharto’s takeover in 1965-66. The regime moreover considered political Islam – even of the moderate Masyumi variety – as a potential danger and suppressed it. The liberal Islamic thought of Nurcholish Madjid and his friends was welcomed and could become very

influential because it did not have to contend with left or right rivals. In Turkey, a similar situation prevailed in the 1980s. The previous decade had been marked by pervasive and violent struggles between left and right. A military coup in September 1980 eliminated the left and the Islamist right, leaving as the only acceptable intellectual discourses non-political and nationalist varieties of Islamic thought. This gave Muslim intellectuals the opportunity to

carve out a prominent space for themselves in the public sphere.27

26

I exclude the Shi`i world from consideration. The philosophical sophistication of Islamic thought in Iran is without parallel in the Sunni world.

27

Binnaz Toprak, 'İki Müslüman aydın: Ali Bulaç ve İsmet Özel', Toplum ve Bilim 29-30, 1985, 143-151; Binnaz Toprak, 'Islamist intellectuals: revolt against industry and technology', in: M. Heper, et al. (ed.), Turkey and the West: changing political and cultural identities, London: I.B. Tauris, 1993; Michael E. Meeker, 'The new Muslim intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey', in: R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in modern Turkey. Religion, politics and literature in a secular state, London: I.B.Tauris, 1991, pp. 189-219; Michael E. Meeker, 'The Muslim intellectual and his audience: a new configuration of writer and reader among believers in the Republic of Turkey', in: S. Mardin (ed.), Cultural transitions in the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. 153-188.

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The superficial similarities in the trajectories leading to the temporary prominence of Muslim intellectuals in both countries could easily obscure the significant differences between both situations and between the issues with which the intellectuals concerned themselves. Nurcholish was courted by the New Order regime and members of Indonesia’s cultural and political elite to the extent that he once believed himself to be a credible candidate for the presidency; Amien Rais and Syafi’i Maarif both rose to the leadership of Muhammadiyah; Abdurrahman Wahid was the NU general chairman for no less than three periods; and Jalaluddin Rakhmat not only found large audiences as a popular speaker but also came to lead his own association of converts to Shi’ism, IJABI. No Turkish Muslim intellectual ever

came to lead a major organization or find that sort of large personal following.28

In Turkey, the intellectual who most resembles Nurcholish is probably Ali Bulaç, who is also a theologian by training, who has thought and written much about the accommodation of Islamic ideals and the secular state, and who has engaged in dialogue with intellectuals of the moderate left. For both, the constitution of Medina was an important document on which they based their ideas of equal rights for citizens of all faiths.

In the new millennium, Muslim intellectuals appear to have lost some of the influence they had during the last decades of the twentieth century. In Indonesia, they lost the support that the New Order had provided them, and they have now to compete with other voices that had

long been suppressed and were liberated with the fall of Soeharto.29 In Turkey too, political

liberalization brought many other voices back into the public sphere. Moreover, some prominent Muslim intellectuals were recruited by the AKP and became deeply involved in politics, giving up their role as independent thinkers.

Conclusion

The comparisons and juxtapositions made in this article may, as I hope, have brought out more sharply some of the characteristics of Indonesian (as well as Turkish) Islam. It is now time to draw some tentative conclusions. My discussion of Indonesia as a secular republic of the type where the state seeks to maintain equal distance to all religions probably has brought out how fragile this ideal of equal distance is. In India, Nehru is known to have held the view that the state should be more careful to maintain distance from Hinduism than from other religions, precisely because Hinduism is the religion of the majority and the other religions

28_{With the exception, perhaps, of the eccentric conservative poet Necip Fazıl Kısakürek}

, who was much admired by right-wing nationalists and conservative Muslims, and on whom the term Muslim intellectual does not sit confortably. See Serif Mardin, 'Cultural change and the intellectual: a study of the effects of

secularization in modern Turkey. Necip Fazil and the Naksibendi', in: S. Mardin (ed.), Cultural transitions in the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. 189-213; B. Babür Turna, 'Paths to God within the poet: Necip Fazil Kisakürek (1904-83) and his mystical poetry', in: G. Abramson and H. Kilpatrick (ed.), Religious perspectives in modern Muslim and Jewish literatures, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 55-70.

29

Martin van Bruinessen, 'Postscript: The Survival of Liberal and Progressive Muslim Thought in Indonesia', in: M. van Bruinessen (ed.), Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the 'Conservative Turn', Singapore: Institute of South East Asian Studies, 2013, pp. 224-231.

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are in a weaker position. In Indonesia, however, the state has drawn ever closer to Islam in the past decade, while distancing itself further from other religions and giving up the ideal of equal rights for all citizens (as seen most clearly in its failure to protect the Ahmadiyah and other sects considered ‘deviant’).

This contrasts with the treatment of religious minorities under the AKP government in Turkey. Previous ‘secular’ governments had consistently treated non-Muslim minorities as undesired, second-class citizens, considering them not Turks proper because of their different religion. It was the AKP government that restored some rights to them (for instance restoring property of religious foundations that had been confiscated and re-opening places of worship that had long been closed) and treated them with more respect. Both the AKP and the Gülen movement initiated dialogues with Turkey’s Christians and Jews and even with the heterodox Alevis. This was considered, by some observers, as part of the broader trend of

‘post-Islamism’ and accommodation between (former) Islamists and democracy.

In post-Soeharto Indonesia, it was not primarily the government but the large associations Muhammadiyah and NU that maintained a dialogue with non-Muslim minorities and upheld ideals of equal civil rights (they had more problems with Muslim sects such as the

Ahmadiyah). Both had moved away from political Islam to a de facto acceptance of secular democracy; in 1957 they still had been in favour of the Jakarta charter but in 2002 they considered the charter unnecessary and spoke out against it. Surveys in the early 2000s suggested that a high proportion of Indonesian Muslims supported the ideas of the radical Islamic groups that seemed to be flourishing then, but their voting behaviour showed a different pattern. Support for parties with an Islamic platform declined, most notably in the 2009 elections.

The only Indonesian Muslim party to make a slight gain in 2009, the PKS, did so because it had emulated the AKP and de-emphasized Islamist issues in favour of those known to appeal to a broader electorate: professionalism, care for the poor and needy, and a commitment to avoid corrupt practices (the party had chosen ‘bersih, peduli, profesional’ as its election slogan). The party’s apparent shift to a ‘post-Islamist’ agenda, which had been initiated several years before, as well as the expansion of the numbers of its cadres, went too fast to be credible or sustainable and caused a major rift within the party. Its performance has been spotty since, and the party has been plagued by relapses into unsophisticated Islamism as well as embarrassing corruption scandals, causing it to lose much of the goodwill it had earned in the early 2000s.

In both countries, political Islam appears to have lost the attraction it once had. Its promise of an alternative and more just social order based on the shari`a has become less convincing – both because of the poor performance of Indonesia’s Islamist parties and because the only Muslim party that successfully ruled a major country, the AKP, had redefined itself as a conservative party carrying out a mix of social welfare and neo-liberal economic policies. The major contributions to the ever-continuing debate on how to make Islam relevant for contemporary society cannot be expected from politicians but from civil society and academia. Here lies a major task and challenge for the institutions to which people like Pak

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Amin Abdullah have devoted their lives, Muhammadiyah (and of course NU and its affiliated NGOs), and the UINs / IAINs. May they remain, or become again, flourishing centres of intellectual debate.