1Filled with compromises — more often than not practised but not formulated — Indonesian Islam with its different traditions was for a long time at odds with a purifying reformism that explained away contemporary problems through the liberties many inhabitants of the Archipelago took with Sunnite orthopraxy. During the first decades of the century, while the myth of a remaking of society that linked the perspective of a new nation-state with radical societal change was still alive, the condemnations were based above all on the necessity of adapting to the modern world. Often paternalistic, sometimes derisive, reformism emphasised the theme of sclerosis rather than that of betrayal. Propelled by a new urban elite composed mainly of intellectuals whose political engagement started from an early age, this Muslim nationalism was confident that its modernising project would preside over an overall renewal. This inexorable social and political, but also cultural and religious, aggiornamento would sweep away the vestiges of an Islam led astray by superstitions from another age or by too close a contact with a syncretic religious substrate. A few decades later, at the end of the 1960s, that the remaking had failed on the political level was patent. The banning of Masyumi as well as the political and economic marginalisation of a large section of modernising reformism’s proponents were grim reminders of their inability to carry any weight. The Indonesian army, strengthened by its alliance with the technocrats, had confiscated any perspective of modernity and henceforth employed a condescending tone towards reformist Islam — the very condescension that the Reformists had displayed towards representatives of traditionalist Islam two decades ago.

2Embittered, a section of the old Muslim elite then adopted a discourse of blame that associated the themes of martyrdom — of a Muslim community ceaselessly betrayed — with sinning. Falling back on dakwah, its networks saw to the spread of an intransigent Islam far removed from the openness and compromise it had demonstrated up till then, creating an unmistakable hotbed of a new intolerance. The tension over identity was not the only issue at hand. The old rebellions of Darul Islam (DI) had sustained here and there a tradition of religious violence whose resurgence was encouraged by the muddled politics of the New Order. The spectre of civil war (Darul Islam and the Sumatran PRRI) raised by General Soeharto in 1967 had allowed the authorities to prevent a renewal of political Islam, and they could not resist the temptation of repeating this operation in the following decade. At the risk of encouraging the growth of extremist Islam, the authorities played up its threat, hoping thereby to thwart the resurgence of a religion-based opposition and any new calls for the sharia. This short-sighted policy severely curbed the political space for Muslim militancy and contributed to its clandestine radicalisation. And when there was an opening up from the beginning of the 1990s, this was once again carried out on a mode of exploitation. The authorities did not hesitate to sacrifice at the altar of Islamic revival the Christian and Chinese minorities who had largely contributed to its prosperity for 30 years.

3In the meantime, the marginalisation of political Islam and the channelling of all its energies towards predication had the effect of exposing Indonesia to the international networks of a militant Islam wracked with deep hatred of the ‘impious West’. At times bitter rivals in their countries of origin, the Wahhabi-inspired networks and those of the Muslim Brotherhood had cumulative influences in Indonesia. The works of Sayyid Qutb were translated and spread within networks close to the Saudis, and the training of radicals was carried out almost as much in Cairo as it was in Medina. Indeed the promotion of these ideas played a key role in this new dimension of extremist Islam from the mid-1980s. With the conflict in Afghanistan and the vestiges of DI, all this converged in the training of more than a hundred militants who hoped to transform Indonesia into a new ground for jihad.

4At the end of our account, it thus appears that the radicalisation of Indonesian Islam has as its essential matrix its own political failure. In this respect the Reformasi period that emerged in 1998 after the fall of Soeharto indisputably marks the end of a cycle. Over and above the unexpected boost it gave to radical movements in the tumult accompanying its birth, the renewal of democracy in Indonesia reopened a political space that had been out of bounds to Islam for several decades. In so doing, it highlighted two clearly demarcated tendencies within radical Islam: the first, following in the footsteps of Darul Islam and its foundational rejection of the Republic of Indonesia, is to not budge regardless of the perspectives opened up by Reformasi. This is the case of some (very strict Salafists) who seek refuge outside of their own era by running modest fundamentalist phalansteries that imitate Islam of the early times. These endeavours are essentially devoid of any political project. Others (Salafists-Jihadists) hope to create through bombings the “salvation cataclysm”1 that would herald a new dawn. Unlike the first tendency, this movement aims to take advantage of the opening up of the political field. Some parties (PBB and PPP) questioned the religious status quo adopted at the time of Independence and clung to their call for the Jakarta Charter. Somewhat discredited by their collaboration with the authorities in the last years of the New Order, they failed to seize upon the moral exigency that the Islamic revival had brought about and did badly during the last elections. This is not the case for the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which on the contrary has managed to anchor itself in the political landscape of the country. Thanks to a moral rigour that has gained recognition, particularly in its fight against corruption, PKS embodies the political aspirations of those striving for conspicuous piety — a trend perceptible in Indonesia for some years now. Making no bones about the foreign sources of its inspiration (mainly the Muslim Brotherhood), it took up more or less openly the classic discourse of radical Islam on the ‘impious West’ and the dangers of atheist materialism, and worked assiduously towards the establishment of a new moral order. For some years now, however, its strict respect of democracy and its evolution towards a greater political pragmatism, following the lead of Masyumi in the 1950s, has confined it to the role of boosting the ruling coalition’s Islamic credentials.

5In the last years, militant Islamism’s position on the public scene has evolved in two directions. A conservative current, morally rigorist and often intolerant of religious minorities, has seen its influence grow within Muslim organisations and beyond. The manifestation of a religious revival at work for two decades now, but also the reflection of a consumerist conformism amongst the new middle classes, this current is partly a reassuring appropriation of globalisation. It allows for the affirmation of an identity distinct from that of the West, whose lifestyle has meanwhile largely been adopted, and has thrived because of its ability to label products of mass consumption, as well as cultural habits and social behaviours. Politically quietist, it has inaugurated an appeasement between Islam and nationalism that was very visible during the elections of 2009. In this way, this conservative Islam contributes to the second striking change witnessed in the past few years — the marked decline in the destabilizing capacity of radical Islamist groups. Confronted with the return of the state, these movements have seen their legitimacy challenged in the name of national unity and no longer benefit systematically, as they did in the past, from indulgence by the forces of law and order and from public sympathy.

6If Muslim conservatism has somewhat eclipsed radicalism since Indonesia emerged from the economic, social and political crisis in 1997, it also seems to stave off the audacious Islamic liberalism that is one of the particularities of Indonesia in the Muslim world. Still confined within a narrow ideological and religious margin, this liberalism has a hard time renewing the traditional open-mindedness of the Indonesian population in matters of religion. On its ability to reformulate — and promote — in modern Muslim terms a tolerance somewhat demonetised by the tightening of inter-faith boundaries and the decline of syncretic forms of religions, depends the future of Indonesian Islam.