Why religion and politics were banned at the dinner-table

Those in predominantly secular societies sometimes struggle to understand nations where religion has a much stronger imprimatur. They may find it hard to understand, for example, “why the Antichrist matters in politics”, or that “around 20 percent of Americans see God’s hand at work in the economy – even if they also strongly support a market free of all non-divine influence”.

Leaps to comprehend are also often needed in analysing events in Indonesia – “neither a theocratic nor secular state”, where “religion is not fully separated from political and public life”, as Azyumardi Azra puts it.

Not only understanding, but using that understanding to form responsible ethical judgements, is even harder.

But it seems it doesn’t get that much easier even if you are within Indonesia. Andreas Harsono recently tackled the question of “Indonesia’s religious violence: the reluctance of reporters to tell the story”. He argues, “The question confronting journalists in Indonesia is how to explain what can only be seen as their selective self-censorship on stories involving religious freedom.”

I was particularly interested in his comment on one of the findings from a nationwide survey of journalists (see his piece for references), which indicated that 64 per cent of those questioned said they supported banning the Ahmadiyah sect: “When I saw that figure of 64 percent,” he says, “it reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a newspaper editor in Jakarta who was a Christian. She told me that she was shocked when her chief editor, a Muslim, told an editorial meeting, ‘Our policy is to eliminate the Ahmadiyah. We have to get rid of the Ahmadiyah.’”

I have previously noted my own surprise at conversations with moderate Indonesian Muslims who totally condemned the violence against Ahmadiyah, but also thought there should be some limitations on the group (in fact they thought the failure to uphold the 2008 restrictions was partly responsible for some groups taking the law into their own hands). It was something I couldn’t really fathom, and I came to the conclusion that their response was similar to the kind of response a group of professionals might have to a lone-ranger subgroup, whose unilateral reinterpretation of professional rules might bring the entire profession into disrepute. (There are other groups that differ from mainstream Islam, but because the differences do not concern the role of the Prophet – and therefore the essential identity of Islam – they have not proved nearly so controversial.) But I was aware, somehow, of a big gap in my comprehension.

In the current climate, there are always those who are ready to jump on an anti-Islamic bandwagon (there’s a particularly egregious example here, h/t The Interpreter – but in general I am regularly shocked by how acceptable it has become in many circles to malign and stereotype Islam). This makes it even more difficult to find a balance – to pay the right amount of attention to the minority that does totally inexcusable things, to the majority that is moderate but whose views on a number of issues may be very different from those prevalent in a liberal and/or secular environment, and to the various kinds of minorities that suffer from both the above, and also need protection simply because it is always hard to be a minority.

Given the lack of simple answers, material that shows the subtlety and paradox of the vastly complex world of Islam in Indonesia is always useful, and there have been several fascinating examples recently. Karen Bryner, for example, unpacks “one of the fastest growing trends in Islamic education in post-Suharto Indonesia” – integrated Islamic schools. Chiara Formichi has some hopeful thoughts about the trajectory of Indonesia’s Shi’i population. Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman looks at the contradictions of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia – the group is growing, despite the fact that it opposes concepts (eg capitalism) that surveys show Indonesians generally accept, and it attracts “large numbers of Muslim professionals who work in multinational companies and are part of Indonesian capitalism”. AP also reports on the rise in the use of Islamic medicine.

The complexity that emerges from pieces like these is difficult to turn into dinner-table platitudes, but all the more useful for that.