Improvisational Islam

Indonesian Youth in a Time of Possibility

Nur Amali Ibrahim

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501727887
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"In this landmark account, Nur Amali Ibrahim paints a nuanced, detailed portrait of students seeking to reconcile some of the major social forces that inflect everyday life across the Muslim world—Islam, liberalism, radicalism, and secularism—as they strive to both find and define their place in a fast-changing, democratizing nation. Ibrahim demonstrates the critical importance of scholarly attention in both anthropology and religious studies to this vibrant country—the world's largest Muslim nation."
?Daromir Rudnyckyj, Associate Professor, University of Victoria, and author of the award-winning Spiritual Economies

Improvisational Islam is about novel and unexpected ways of being Muslim, where religious dispositions are achieved through techniques that have little or no precedent in classical Islamic texts or concepts.

Nur Amali Ibrahim foregrounds two distinct autodidactic university student organizations, each trying to envision alternative ways of being Muslim independent from established religious and political authorities. One group draws from methods originating from the business world, like accounting, auditing, and self-help, to promote a puritanical understanding of the religion and spearhead Indonesia's spiritual rebirth. A second group reads Islamic scriptures alongside the western human sciences. Both groups, he argues, show a great degree of improvisation and creativity in their interpretations of Islam.

These experimental forms of religious improvisations and practices have developed in a specific Indonesian political context that has evolved after the deposal of President Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in 1998. At the same time, Improvisational Islam suggests that the Indonesian case study brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life everywhere. To be a practitioner of their religion, Muslims draw on and are inspired by not only their holy scriptures, but also the non-traditional ideas and practices that circulate in their society, which importantly include those originating in the West. In the contemporary political discourse where Muslims are often portrayed as uncompromising and adversarial to the West and where bans and walls are deemed necessary to keep them out, this story about flexible and creative Muslims is an important one to tell.

4

Playing with Scriptures

A small two-story house not far from the State Islamic University serves as the headquarters for students who meet regularly to discuss religion and politics. The young men and women in the collective, whose name is Formaci, form autodidactic study circles that consist at times of as few as five people to at other times as many as thirty or more. All the participants have extensive experience in the study of Islam, having enrolled in madrasas since an early age and majoring in subjects like Islamic philosophy, Islamic law, and Islamic theological sciences at the university. They have competence in authoritative religious scriptures and therefore do not include them in their reading list. Instead, they primarily study texts written by the great thinkers from the West, from ancient scholars like Plato and Aristotle to more modern ones like Locke, Hegel, Marx, and Derrida. Their reading habits allow them to formulate an interpretation of Islamic scriptures that upholds democracy, civil liberties, human rights, and gender equality as core values in the religion. They call themselves liberal Muslims, a label that is meant to reflect their progressive politics as well as their efforts to find commensurability between Islam and secular liberalism.

Instead of occupying the solemn learning environment often associated with libraries, madrasas, or university lecture halls, the group conducts its highly intellectual activities in what could be described as a rowdy fraternity house. The eight male participants who live on the second floor not only pay the rent but also set the tone for the entire house. Their lack of interest in housekeeping, for example, is palpable in the downstairs living room where the study circles meet—there are cigarette butts everywhere, as though the floor also serves as an ashtray. Study circles are often interspersed with impromptu card games, jokes, poetry contests, confessions about romantic happiness and sorrows, and the strumming of guitars and the singing of songs. Such activities, which can start in the day and extend till late nights, annoy the neighbors and often deter female participation in the group. Social conventions frown upon young women who keep company with raucous young men, even more so if the men are seemingly prone to antireligious behavior. Once, after a study circle had concluded, I asked Rizal to translate an Arabic word that had entered the discussion. “Arabic is such a rubbish language [bahasa sampah],” he replied dismissively and in contradistinction to the reverent Muslim attitude toward the language of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. “Poor Muslims are stuck with it.”

The activities and behavior of Formaci’s participants defy popular narratives about Islam and its scriptures. Discourses about “Islamic terrorism” that have become powerful since 9/11 locate the roots of violence in Islamic scriptures and assume that the Quran compels Muslims to be guided by such scriptures—that the text is agentive, while the reader is passive. In contrast, as Talal Asad has observed, there is an assumption that Christians and Jews are free to interpret the Bible as they please, which means that the reader is conceptualized as actively constructing the meaning of texts in relation to social contexts while the texts themselves are passive. Such double standards should not exist. Asad points out that in Islam, as in other religions, “the way people engage in such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and traditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the perceived demands of particular social situations” (2003, 10–11). Indeed, all texts exist in complex interpretive relationships with historically situated audiences, as Laura Bohannan (1966) has shown in her classic essay Shakespeare in the Bush. Attempting to tell the story of Hamlet to the Tiv of Western Africa, Bohannan struggles to explain European concepts of the supernatural, kinship, and justice to the Tiv, who, guided by their own cultural frameworks, emerge with a different understanding of the Shakespearean play. In a delightful reversal of roles, the Tiv even suggested that Bohannan misunderstood Hamlet’s story and advise her to consult her own elders at home.

There are multiple historical factors permitting Formaci’s participants to read scripture through the lens of Western humanities and social sciences and arrive at a liberal interpretation. On the one hand, the enterprise undertaken by the liberal Muslims in Formaci is not exactly new. Scholars have long described Indonesia as a deeply plural society with multiple modes of religious governance and political organization that have led to alternative ideas on how to be Muslim. Dealing with diversity is therefore a central condition of the lives of Indonesian Muslims, as John Bowen (2003) has shown in his study of how Muslims in Aceh Province work to reconcile Islamic laws, local customary laws, and secular state laws. The translations between these different legal regimes, Bowen suggests, show how people with deep differences in values can live together and create something that resembles the pluralism idealized by secular liberalism. In light of such observations, it is thus not surprising that many scholars have written about Indonesian Muslims practicing progressive politics, which, as I will elaborate in the following chapter, has contributed to Indonesia’s image as a “good” Muslim country in the contemporary geopolitical context.¹

At the same time, these long-standing conversations about coexistence amid diversity have become much more urgent in the post–New Order era. As previously discussed, democracy has enabled the emergence of multiple groups of Islamists. Radical Islamists use vigilantism and violence to implement sharia law (which they take to mean the suppression of vice, which includes the prohibition of the sale of alcohol, and the forced veiling of women), while moderate Islamists contest in the polls, secure seats in parliament, and enact legislative changes to widen Islam’s political reach. These developments have led to concerns regarding growing intolerance and exclusivity in Indonesian society, prompting a redoubling of efforts to promulgate progressive interpretations of Islam, such as those undertaken by the youths in Formaci. The ability of young Indonesians to participate in the reconfiguration of Islam has been made possible by the recent rise of what some scholars call “pop religion,” or forms of religiosity that have been mass mediated through the Internet, films, music, and other forms of popular culture that are targeted largely at young people (Weintraub 2011). An example, as discussed by Carla Jones (2007), is the proliferation of magazines and clothing stores that teach young Indonesian women how to be Muslim and fashionable at the same time. Importantly, pop religion allows young people to imagine themselves as important religious actors with the ability to create new forms of religious expressions.

The youthfulness of Formaci’s enterprise can be observed in the...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 4. Playing with Scriptures