The October 2002 terrorist bombings of a beachfront pub in south Bali pushed concerns about Indonesia’s Islamic schools to a new high as students from an Islamic boarding school in Lamongan, East Java were eventually convicted of the crime. For some Indonesian observers, facts like these confirm that at least some of Indonesia’s Islamic schools had been turned into training camps for terrorist militants.
However, Islamic education in Indonesia is nothing if not varied, and its central streams look little like the radical fringe. With some 11,000 Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and 36,000 Islamic day schools (madrasas), Indonesia has one of the largest Islamic educational sectors in the world. A full 13 percent of the country’s elementary school population receives their primary education in Muslim day schools. More than twice that number take evening or weekend religious classes at Islamic schools. About one percent of Indonesia’s Islamic schools might be described as socially radical, and the number that seems inclined to support militant violence is no more than a few dozen.
Far more representative of the educational mainstream, then, is Indonesia’s system of State Islamic Universities (UIN, IAIN). Today, every student admitted to the state Islamic university system fulfils divisional studies requirements that begin with courses in Islamic history and contextualizing methodologies for the study of Islam. With their undogmatic emphasis on alternative interpretations of key historical events, these courses use methods similar to those in comparative religion programs in the West, but are rarely used in higher education in other Muslim countries.
Since the year 2000, seven of the state Islamic universities have begun far-reaching restructuring that includes establishing new faculties in non-religious fields like medicine, psychology, general education and business. No less surprising, since 2004 all students entering the state Islamic system have been required to take a civics course which introduces students to the ideals of democracy, civil society and human rights. Nowhere else in the Muslim world do Muslim colleges provide comparable instruction on democratic values.
In an effort to examine Muslim educators’ views on Islam and democracy, in early 2006 I worked with staff at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta to carry out a survey of 940 Muslim educators in 100 madrasas and Islamic boarding schools in eight provinces in Indonesia. A summary overview of the educators’ views is revealing.
Indonesian Muslim educators’ ideas on democracy are neither formalistic nor crudely majoritarian; they also extend to subtle civil rights.
These rights include support for the idea of equality before the law (94.2 percent of educators agree); freedom to join political organizations (82.5 percent); protections for the media from arbitrary government action (92.8 percent); and the notion that party competition improves government performance (80 percent). These figures are as high as comparable data collected by the World Values Survey for Western Europe and the United States.
If this was all there was to educators’ attitudes on Islam and democracy, the results would be brightly optimistic indeed. However, educators’ views on democracy are not stand-alone. They co-exist with an almost equally strong commitment to sharia. For example, notwithstanding the strength of their commitment to democracy, 72.2 percent of educators believe the state should be based on the Quran and sunnah (traditions of the Prophet Mohamed) and guided by religious experts.
On matters of women and non-Muslim religious minorities, we see a tension between educators’ enthusiasm for democracy and their commitment to sharia. Some 93.5 percent of the educators believe that a non-Muslim should not be allowed to serve as president. A full 55.8 percent feel that women should not be allowed to run for the office. About 20 percent would bar non-Muslims from teaching in public schools. In short, on three matters – gender, non-Muslims, and the place of Islamic law in government itself – educators do not appear to be particularly tolerant.
We see in the survey data, then, that Muslim educators’ stated commitments to democracy, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press are about as strong as anywhere in the democratic world. However, on religious matters, Indonesian Muslims are not secularist liberals. Where a democratic principle runs up against an issue on which sharia is seen as having something to say, most educators feel that they must defer to sharia. At times this deference results in judgments that many observers, including most Muslim theorists who write on democracy, would regard as undemocratic.
Inasmuch as attitudes like those of the educators are widespread in Indonesian society (and other surveys indicate that they are), these findings suggest that Muslim Indonesians are likely to continue to grapple for some time to come with the question of how to balance the ideals of sharia with those of democracy. What is certain is that the results of this ongoing debate will have serious implications for the culture and practice of Indonesian democracy.
Robert W. Hefner([email protected]) is professor of Anthropology and associate director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org. The full text appeared in edition 90 of Inside Indonesia (www.insideindonesia.org).
