The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific: Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres 9819933536, 9789819933532

Citation preview

The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres Edited by Julian Millie

The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific

Julian Millie Editor

The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres

Editor Julian Millie Monash University Clayton, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-99-3353-2 ISBN 978-981-99-3354-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

The meetings out of which this book arose were supported by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship grant entitled ‘Deliberation and Publicness in Indonesia’s Regional Islamic Spheres’ (FT 140100818). Gratitude is expressed to the following institutions: Monash University Faculty of Arts, Australian National University (ANU), LeibnizZentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), and Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Gunung Djati. Julian Millie thanks the chapter authors for their enthusiasm and patience and acknowledges the kind support of the following individuals: Kai Kresse, Ulrike Freitag, Patrick Eisenlohr, Ken George, Kathy Robinson, Ken George, Penny Graham, Debra McDougall, Vishal Daryanomel, Dharmalingam Arunachalam, Andrea Whittaker, Sharon Pickering, Tommy Fung, Gary Bouma, Kevin Foster, Alice Davies, Kim Chen, Stewart King, Beatrice Trefalt, Yacinta Kurniasih, Sharyn Davies, Lewis Mayo, and Emma Baulch.

v

Contents

1

Introduction: The Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres Julian Millie

2

Conspicuous Pilgrimages and the Politics of Public/ Private: Social Media Representations of Indonesia’s Muslim Middle Class Martin Slama

3

4

5

6

1

27

Minority Islam in Indonesia’s Public Square: The Shia Emergence and Its Effects Dede Syarif

49

Public Faith in Action or Private Sect: The Salvation Army in the Present Jason Davies-Kildea

69

Habermas and Traditionalist Muslim Reflexivity in Indonesia Julian Millie and Asep Saeful Muhtadi

89

Public Islam and Preacher-Disruptors in Indonesia: A Case Study Moch Fakhruroji

111

vii

viii

7

8

9

CONTENTS

Patriarchal Territoriality: Women’s Worlds in the Sacred City of Banaras Shivani Gupta

129

Mediumship and Evidence in Australian Spiritualism: Conjunctions of Private and Public Matt Tomlinson

151

Epilogue: A Discussion with Ahmad Baso Ahmad Baso

Index

175

187

Notes on Contributors

Ahmad Baso commenced his education at an Islamic school in Sulawesi. He later studied at a Saudi-funded college in Jakarta. Baso did not complete this qualification and has not completed any of the courses of tertiary study in which he has enrolled. In his twenties, he became involved in the youth wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, NU) organisation. It was in the NU intellectual environment that he became interested in critical thinking in Western traditions, especially post-colonial theory. His profile in the world of NGOs led him to accept a role in Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights. Since leaving the Commission he has taught at a number of tertiary institutions and teaches courses in Indonesian textual traditions in online and face-to-face modes. Dr. Jason Davies-Kildea has worked in faith-based social services for more than two decades. His academic engagements have spanned multiple disciplines while remaining centred on the intersection between religion and the provision of social services to the community. In addition to post-graduate qualifications in theology and social science, Jason completed a Churchill Fellowship on ‘A study of holistic models of care, for highly disadvantaged people, which have been established in faithbased communities’. His Ph.D. topic was ‘The Salvation Army and the Social Gospel: Reconciling evangelical intent and social action’.

ix

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Moch Fakhruroji is an associate professor of Communication Studies in the Faculty of Da’wa and Communication Studies at the Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University (UIN), Bandung, Indonesia. His research interests include religious studies, Islamic studies, media sociology, mediatisation theory, new media and religion, and digital culture. Shivani Gupta is a lecturer at NUS College (honours college), National University of Singapore (NUS). She is part of the Impact Experience programme, where she supervises students undertaking projects on violence and gender, through interdisciplinary training, to engage in longterm impact work with non-profit and social organisations in Singapore and the region. Her focus at the college is on violence and gender studies. She also teaches sociology and anthropology courses. Previously, she completed her postdoctoral fellowship on the topic of sexual violence on university campuses in Singapore from the Department of Communications and New Media at NUS. She completed her Ph.D. in South Asian Studies from NUS. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Gupta worked with women’s not-for-profit organisations in India. Julian Millie is professor of Indonesian Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. After studying the Indonesian language as an undergraduate, Julian became interested in the Islamic traditions of that country. This led him to undertake doctoral research about an Islamic intercession ritual practised by Sundanese Muslims of West Java. After being awarded his doctorate in 2005 from Leiden University, Julian continued to research the political and social meanings of Islamic practice in Indonesia. These remain his primary research foci. He frequently researches and writes in collaboration with academics based at universities in West Java. In 2021, Julian was accepted into the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Asep Saeful Muhtadi (b. 1961) teaches in the faculties of Post-Graduate Studies and Communications at the Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University (UIN), in Bandung, West Java. His specialisation is communications. After completing his Masters’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1995), he undertook doctoral research about the communications practices of Indonesia’s traditionalist civil society organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (The Rising of the Scholars, or NU). He was awarded his Ph.D. title of his research at Bandung’s Padjadjaran University in 2003 and subsequently attained the rank of professor at the Sunan

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Gunung Djati State Islamic University. His major work, The Political Communication of Nahdlatul Ulama (LP3ES, 2004) is based on that research. He is involved in Islamic civil society organisations in West Java. Martin Slama graduated from the anthropology department of the University of Vienna with a Ph.D. thesis about the online practices of young internet users in Indonesia. Since then, his anthropological studies of Islam in Indonesia have included projects on diaspora communities of Hadhrami-Arab descent in Southeast Asia and, more recently, on new communication technologies and the varied Islamic uses of social media in Indonesia. His over-riding research focus is on forms of religiosity, the politics of space and socio-economic inequality. Martin Slama works as a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and collaborates with researchers at a number of universities in Indonesia. Dede Syarif is a sociologist who obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2018 from the Inter-Religious Studies programme at Gadjah Mada University, in Yogyakarta. His doctoral research analysed minority Islamic movements in Indonesia. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, at the Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University (UIN), in Bandung. He continues to research Islamic movements, inclusion, and diversity, focusing primarily upon his native West Java Province. Matt Tomlinson is an anthropologist who studies language, ritual, and politics in Oceania and Australia. He is an associate professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, and the author of God Is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific (2020), Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (2014), and In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (2009). He has co-edited seven volumes and special issues, including The Monologic Imagination (with Julian Millie, 2017) and New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (with Ty P. K¯awika Tengan, 2016).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres Julian Millie

This book is about the evaluations religious groups and individuals make about the public spheres in which they situate their religious activities and identities. It draws together relevant case studies from societies of the Asia–Pacific, adding to a growing body of literature about religion and public spheres in Asia.1 Our collection adds a novel perspective to this body of work: the authors of the following chapters observe evaluations and deliberations by religious individuals and groups about the religious qualities of public domains. By taking this perspective, we invert the inquiry that is commonly encountered in academic work on religion and public spheres, namely, the one that asks about the appropriateness

1 Our collection follows upon a number of discussions of public religion in the Asia– Pacific. Important contributions include Willford and George (2005), Bubandt and van Beek (2011), Parker and Hoon (2013), van der Veer (2013) and Künkler, Madeley and Shankar (2018).

J. Millie (B) Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_1

1

2

J. MILLIE

of religion for public domains. In contrast, by exploring the perspectives of religious actors as they evaluate public domains as sites for the work of religion, we hope to sidestep some of the problems that arise in theorising about public spheres, notably the anachronising and excluding effects it exerts upon aspects of religious life and practice. In this introduction, I explain why this inversion is a worthwhile exercise and engage with its inherent complexity. This inquiry involves untangling the realities of contemporary religious practice from a complex genealogy of public sphere theorising that has hidden evaluations of this kind from view. The introduction refers to the case studies to follow, all of which contextualise public religion in the contrasting religio-political legacies encountered in the region. When discussing the appropriateness of public domains for religion, it needs to be recognised that the articulation between public spheres and religion is rarely one of perfect alignment. We observe mutually beneficial concordances when, for example, civic ideals merge with religious programs. But the articulation can in other cases give rise to a striking inappropriateness, as if it risks an improper mixing of things that ought to remain separated. This inappropriateness finds expression in feelings of embarrassment (Bubandt & van Beek, 2011), shame (Latour, 2013) or a sense of excessive enthusiasm (Taylor, 2007). Bubandt and Van Beek (2011) give an illustration of an embarrassment.2 In 2006, in response to accidents occurring in the construction of Bangkok’s new airport, monks were asked to perform a purification ceremony. Bubandt and Van Beek observed the resultant ‘embarrassment’ on the part of observers and officials: “The spirits appear awkwardly in the Thai project of modernity aimed at developing the country as a leading Asian tourist destination…The spirits are at once embarrassing evidence of ‘popular superstition’ and uncannily real” (2011: 2). It is striking that such embarrassment could emerge amongst a population that holds religion and spirituality in such high importance. Perhaps it can be explained to some degree against the background of a public consensus that the airport was a public resource relying for its completion on the proper exercise of technical specialisation. In contrast, a purification ceremony is carried out in the hope that acts and utterances by ritual specialists will bring about

2 For an extended meditation on the embarrassment of religious speech, see Latour (2013).

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

3

divine intervention in worldly affairs. Its efficacy is dependent on the satisfaction of conditions established within a specific ritual and sacred order. This ritual order might be interpreted as an affront to the impersonal order of technical expertise that is characteristic of contemporary civic settings (Taylor, 2007). The focus of this introduction is the difficulty Bubandt and Van Beek encountered in integrating the ceremony into a conversation about public religion. They found that the scholarly conversation they were entering was so strongly shaped by the narrative of secular progress that it was difficult to integrate it as something other than an embarrassment. The terms of the existing conversation seemed to foreclose other possibilities. Was it possible, they asked, to contextualise the purification ceremony ‘without implicitly subscribing to a grand secularisation narrative?’ (2011: 11). Taking Bubandt and van Beek’s work as starting point, the problem could be sketched as follows: the conversation about public religion embraces forms and practices that synergise with processes of governance, but also has a folder labelled ‘embarrassments’. The contents of this folder, some would say, are anachronisms absent of public relevance, and the sizeable contemporary populations who continue to support them are sources of embarrassment. And the contents of this folder are difficult to retrieve because the scientific discourse makes it so. This is the problem addressed in this opening chapter, which is intended also as a framing for the chapters to follow, all of which describe and analyse religion and public domains in societies of the Asia–Pacific.

An Irrevocable Transformation? Bubandt and van Beek’s work reminds us that the discourse around religion and public spheres is freighted with normativity (Asad, 2003; Bubandt & van Beek, 2011; Cannell, 2010; Douglas, 1996; Hirschkind, 2006; van der Veer, 2001; Pels, 2003). This discourse has shaped its object in such a way that some religious forms and practices seem to unproblematically belong in contemporary public realms, while others (such as the purification ceremony) seem to belong to superseded and primitive worlds. It might indeed be impossible to engage in this conversation without affirming the anachronising narrative. Widely cited versions of the grand narrative of secularisation speak of irrevocable processes: the transcendent God and associated practices have been ‘unmasked’ (Asad, 2003) or ‘disenchanted’ (Taylor, 2007 following

4

J. MILLIE

Weber). In Latour’s memorable phrase, the modern critical stance has caused the ‘crossing-out of God’, rendering God an absent deity who does not interfere in the social order or in nature, but who may be called upon by modern subjects when needed as a spiritual resource (Latour, 1993: 32–35). Without doubt, these judgements correspond to things that did indeed happen in real populations (reformations, bureaucratic rationalisations, enlightenments, counter-cultural moments, etc.), but what are their implications for the many individuals, groups and populations who continue to do the unmasked/disenchanted/crossedout things? They might appear now to be engaged in practices belonging to an earlier time. Their practices are thenceforth asterisked. However the crossing-out is conditional upon a narrative that gives precedence to a viewing point variously called the ‘modern critical stance’ (Latour), the ‘modern secular order’ (Asad) or the triumph of ‘exclusive humanism’ (Taylor).3 It was not the flow of historical events that enabled and led to the ‘crossing-out’: rather, that depends upon one specific but powerful narrative account of it. In other words, if the Thai monks told the story of Thai modernity, the resultant modernity would not be constructed above the crossing-out of the deities. As noted, Latour, Asad and Taylor are ambivalent about the modern critical stance, and as a result, individuals or groups not acceding to the crossing-out/unmasking, etc., are not revealed in their works as embarrassments. But much academic analysis is less reflexive about its privileging of the modern critical stance. In some versions of the secular public sphere, human dignity is conflated with rational control: human subjects lack autonomy and control when they give credence to rituals and practices with efficacies dependent upon the doctrine and cosmology of religious orders.4 So, the crossing-out marks the commencement of a new notion of dignity. For example, in a volume on the secular reenchantment of the world, Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (2009: 2) give favourable judgements of contemporary processes of re-enchantment 3 The accounts of Latour, Asad and Taylor all hedge the finality of their judgements because of this tension about whether the greater historical force was the flow of events or politically powerful characterisations of them. Latour’s hedging is the most explicit. After affirming the irrevocable crossing-out of God by modernity, the temporality he established is confounded by his claim that ‘No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun’ (1993: 47). 4 About the association between the disengaged, rational stance and secular modernity, see Asad (2003: 185–187) and Taylor (2007: Chapters 7–10).

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

5

about which, in their words, no one ‘need feel ashamed’. What distinguishes these contemporary processes of re-enchantment is that they are secular and rational rather than ‘resurgences of traditional ideas and practices’. In the re-enchanted world they envisage, subjects derive their dignity from their rational control. The world must be enchanted anew, they claim, and must ‘be enchanted with dignity, which is to say in accord with secular rationality’ (14). What does this stipulation imply about contemporary subjects accepting the authority of traditional orders? About the Thai monks discussed by Bubandt and van Beek? Landy and Saler assign contemporary groups, individuals and populations to a secondary subjectivity (undignified, irrational, shameful). In what follows below, I locate this problem in the temporalities that structure the academic conversation about religion and public domains and tentatively suggest how their effects might be mitigated. My suggestions are based to a large degree on discussions with the writers of the chapters held in Canberra and Berlin. One of the questions we asked was: could our conversation avoid being determined by the temporal straitjacket just outlined? Could ‘undignified and embarrassing’ public forms be integrated into a public conversation while avoiding the taken-forgranted settings of the modern critical stance? We ventured that one way to do this might be to focus analysis upon the deliberations and reasoning of religious individuals and groups about the religious efficacy of public domains. By reorienting the critical gaze in this way, our grounding assumptions change. We no longer proceed from the premise that public domains have evolved in such a way that they offer limited inclusion to religion. Rather, we start with the assumption that religious groups and individuals have developed diverse understandings about the distinctive affordances that public domains offer for religion. The groups featuring in the chapters to follow do not ask ‘Is our religion appropriate for public domains?’ but ‘Will this or that public domain be an efficacious one for our practice?’ They are not hampered by the crossings-out etc. put in place by the academic discourse but make judgements that bring religious understandings of efficacy in contact with their knowledge about private and public domains. As I explain in more detail below, this approach does not remove the modern critical stance from the discussion, or the privatisation of religion or secularisation. Rather, it searches for these things in the evaluations of public spaces made by religious actors. In this way, the border between private religion and public action does not appear as a monolithic divide

6

J. MILLIE

that is impenetrable because of the temporalities put in place by the grand narrative of secularism. Rather, it emerges within calculations made by public people about the efficacious potential of diverse domains—physical, metaphorical and mediated—in the contemporary world. By making these calculations, they reveal themselves to be engaging with public spheres, not struggling in delusion against them.

An Asia–Pacific Discussion The conversations leading to this book included eight social scientists, mostly anthropologists, with expertise in diverse religious communities of the Asia–Pacific region. This diversity of social and cultural settings was no hindrance to the conduct of our scientific conversation, for within all of these settings we can observe religious and spiritual currents existing alongside (and sometimes in conflict with) public domains that provide conditional access and approval. Public domains in these locations are shaped by transformative narratives variously referred to as the secularisation narrative, the privatisation of religion, the disenchantment of the cosmos and the homogenising effects of modern statehood. For religious groups and individuals, these narratives and their implications are objects of reflection. In his comparative study of the spiritual and secular in India and China, anthropologist Peter van der Veer sums up the transformation experienced by all the populations encountered in the chapters below: The gradual transformation of a transcendent hierarchical order into a modern immanence that is legitimated in popular sovereignty and is characterized by the market, the public sphere, and the nation-state has transformed the role of institutional religion and in some historical instances (but not in others) marginalized it. (2013: 7–8)

To a significant extent, this transformation was experienced first in Western societies and subsequently brought in varying shapes and forms to Asia through the contacts and exchanges of colonisation.5 For this reason, the conversation is to some degree a global one, and the scientific lexicon developed by scholars such as Casanova, Latour, Asad and Taylor can be put to work in a discussion about populations in the Asia–Pacific region. In other words, the notion of the ‘crossed-out God’ is significant 5 Künkler and Shankar (2018) provide a useful account of the sources on this point.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

7

in all the settings discussed in the following chapters, albeit in different ways. Of course, we need to be nuanced here: colonisation is only one of the relevant back stories, and there is no single master narrative behind the transformation of religious public spheres (Eisenstadt, 2000; Mahmood, 2010; Salvatore, 2005; Van der Veer, 2001). In none of the locations encountered in the chapters to follow has the ‘mediating character of the modern imaginary’ (Asad, 2003) been the same. Nevertheless, we found a common conceptual repertoire that made our diverse specialisations intelligible and comparable. There are good reasons for arguing that the ‘Asia–Pacific’ is not a useful frame for this discussion. I mention two here. The first concerns essentialism. As Peter van der Veer (2013: 23) points out, a label such as this becomes useful only because it essentialises civilisational units ‘so that they can be compared without exploring the highly fragmented and contradictory histories of these societies’. The concept of the ‘Asia– Pacific’ can be used as a point of comparison against other essences (the Middle East, Europe, etc.), and there is convenience in this. But the disadvantage of this is that we are forced to give an artificial sameness to the societies that we combine beneath these labels. The second reason is an inversion of the first: if we take an anti-essentialist stance and give respectful attention to the differences inherent in the societies under discussion, the label then becomes an arbitrary one (Bubandt & van Beek, 2011: 5). This objection can be summarised in this question: with such great contrasts between them, what makes this selection of examples into an object that merits discussion? Our discussion is an Asia–Pacific one because of the participation that produced it, not because the Asia–Pacific is a natural or stable object of analysis. The logic of our regional focus inheres in the relationships and networks that brought contributors together, and the possibilities for knowledge exchange they offered. All the participants in our meetings are members of an evolving, regional network that is shaped by emerging political realities.6 In turn, these networks reveal new combinations and possibilities for scholarly discussions. It has been many decades since Singapore, where Shivani Gupta teaches, became a hub for research on the Asia–Pacific. A more recent development is the emergence of regional 6 Slama might seem like an outsider, based as he is at the Vienna Academy of Sciences. In fact, his academic career has included lengthy periods working in Indonesia and Australia.

8

J. MILLIE

academic discussions of scholars from the university system established under Indonesia’s Ministry of Religion, three of whom participated in this discussion (Dede Syarif, Moch Fakhruroji and Asep Saepul Muhtadi). This system of colleges and universities dates to around 1960, but it has only been since the 1990s that thinkers from this system, with support from the Australian and Indonesian governments, have become regular participants in regional academic forums in the Asia-Pacific region. It is an exciting development, for Indonesia’s Islamic universities are an innovative venture: the government is attempting to frame Islamic study in the ethics and protocols of the modern research university, something never attempted with the same level of commitment elsewhere in the Islamic world. As Australian academics have reached out to create collaborations with academics in that university system, the resultant conversation has aligned more closely to the vernacular realities of Indonesian Islam. This shift is a work in progress that is too new to be characterised with certainty, but these scholars have unquestionably shaped a more open and plural conversation ‘within the neighbourhood’. From this perspective, the participants in this discussion reflect emerging constellations of authority that are networked on top of concern for the neighbourhood and include ‘insider’ experts whose engagement with their discipline goes beyond academic interest. Does this evolving participation make a difference? For the subject area covered in this book, the impacts are significant. The Indonesian government is attempting something problematic within the conventional terms of the religion and society discussion: revelation cannot, in conventional thinking within the Western academy, provide an epistemological base for the specialised activity of modern research, but this is exactly what the Indonesian Ministry is attempting, and the academicians from that system accordingly help us relativise those conventions. The most telling sign of this in this volume is the contribution of Ahmad Baso. Over a period of decades, Baso has developed a concept of state-religion relations that does not presume the exclusion of religion from public domains. Although this concept is based on his experience as an insider within a large Islamic subculture, he has contributed to the creation of an Indonesian discussion about public religion in which Indonesian realities are blended with the conceptual repertoire established by key Western thinkers in the field. In summary, our Asia–Pacific discussion is not one in which we frame the object of analysis as ‘Asia–Pacific’. Rather, this label reflects our aspiration for a conversation enriched by the diversity of thinking in the region.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

9

After the ‘Crossing-Out’ In this section and the next, my goal is to focus more closely upon the anachronising effects signalled by the ‘crossing-out’ and tracing their life in the academic literature. A useful starting point is provided by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007). She was frustrated at the public understandings of rituals that were emerging in Great Britain in the 1960s. In her view, the conceptual lexicon for talking about public religion was itself biased against rituals of religious traditions (Douglas, 1996 [1970]). She wanted to start a conversation about the practices of worship and devotion that were popular amongst Irish immigrants in London but found the discussion had been ‘handicapped by terminology’ (1996 [1970]: 8). All around her she noticed that people were interpreting terms such as ritualism and ritual symbolism as if they could only refer to things people did in the past. According to prevailing use in sociology as well as popular discourse, she complained, these terms had come to refer to ‘external gestures without inner commitment to the ideas and values being expressed’ (1996 [1970]: 2). The contemporary zeitgeist privileged strict conformity between inner disposition and outer expressive form.7 It followed from this, Douglas noted, that in everyday discourse ritualism had come to signify ‘empty conformity’, and further, contemporary reformers within the Catholic church were being guided by the very same understanding. As Douglas saw it, ritualism had come to index a ‘despised form of communication’ (2). Douglas was concerned that this semantic marginalisation had left analysts bereft of tools for attributing value to ritual symbolism in contemporary England, even though large populations, such as London’s Irish community, routinely embodied it in worship and devotional practices. To initiate the discussion, she first had to ‘break through the spiky, verbal hedges that arbitrarily insulate one set of human experiences (ours) from another set (theirs)’ (1996: 8).8

7 The genealogy of this privileging has been discussed by amongst others Saba Mahmood (2001) and Webb Keane (2007). 8 Douglas was considered by some to be too heavily invested in the specific notions of efficacy she had encountered amongst London’s Irish Catholics. Her critics interpreted this as a preference for ritual stasis, and a lack of openness to dynamic processes through which rituals retain their relevance and appeal (Fardon, 1999: 122–124).

10

J. MILLIE

Similar to Mary Douglas, Talal Asad has argued that modern liberalism accommodates a specific notion of religion in the form of belief, meaning interiorised knowledge. In his view, this was the paradigmatically liberal concept of religion, one that marginalised the notion of religion as activity in the world (bodily discipline, ritual practice, etc.) (Asad, 1993). An abstracted religion had come to acquire greater ethical valency than an embodied one. In addition to that, he observed that modernity valorised an essential, sovereign self above one constrained by religious obligations and discourses. Like Douglas, he observed that the embodied forms of religion would be marginalised by these processes: “practices constituting particular forms of life are displaced, outlawed and penalised, and […] conditions are created for the cultivation of different kinds of human […] People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed […] they are not possible without political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming ‘humanity’ from ‘traditional cultures’” (2003: 154). In the process, practices are subjected to an ‘unmasking of their pretended power’ (35–36). Charles Taylor identified something similar to this unmasking not in the colonial encounter, but in the long history of Western modernity. In the story told by Taylor, ceremonies intending to invoke Divine causality, such as purifications, attracted negative meanings due to the emergence of civic orders that corresponded with a distinctive, deistic religious calling. The starting point for this process was the immediate pre-Reformation period, but its flourishing occurred after the Enlightenment (Taylor, 2007: Chapters 2–7). This calling asked individuals and groups to apply their autonomous agency for the betterment of impersonal social and political orders that were not dependent upon Divine intervention. This calling and the impersonal order to which it aspired were challenged by practices that sought to engage with divine causality. As a result, these practices risk being labelled as ‘enthusiasm, fanaticism or radicalism’, and were received by elites as assaults upon the disengaged stance that came to reflect their ethical superiority. In subtly differing analyses, all these authors expressed a similar position: the public religion conversation was conceptually geared to validate only those parts of religion that coincided with the logic of the secular public sphere. It had become a vehicle for projects of what Asad called pushing, seducing and coercing. Bubandt and Van Beek expressed this in a question: must it always be that “Mahdis, shamanistic rituals, Ashura

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

11

procession and spirit shrines are embarrassing because they are have become associated with the ‘backward’, the ‘traditional’, the internally ‘exotic’”? (2011: 16). In other words, after their practices have been unmasked as ‘pretended power’, it might appear that contemporary practitioners have irretrievably become the embarrassing servants of that ‘pretended power’.

The Birth of the Anti-civic All the populations discussed in the chapters below show a similarity in their ordering of civic and religious affairs: at some point in their political histories, homogenous civic orders to varying degrees pushed aside the traditional socio-religious orders, with varying effects in their respective polities. As this happened, those religious efficacies that supported and overlapped with the ordering principles of the civic entity became public and political values. For example, the expectation of national regimes that citizens would pay attention to individual self-improvement overlapped with a similar principle inculcated in modernist religious contexts. Yet religious efficacies that appear to not support the dual orders, civil as well as religious, were becoming understood as threats to civic order. Their powers were unmasked, and the ground was established for the emergence of the ‘anti-ritualism’ deplored by Mary Douglas above. The articulation of the civic order with supportive religious forms became an orthodoxy in theorising about the public sphere. A high point of this thinking is José Casanova’s (1994) widely cited book in which he made a case on behalf of the ‘deprivatisation’ of religion. He made the public religion discussion into an aspirational one about the ideal public sphere. Casanova’s book was a response to the emerging profile of religion in political spheres in parts of the world during the 1980s. He responded to this emergence by arguing that civil society is not invariably threatened by the ‘entry’ of religion into the public sphere. In fact, it benefits from three specific kinds of religious interventions (1994: 40–66): entries that protect modern freedoms and rights against an absolutist, authoritarian state; ones that provide moral and ethical arguments in opposition to the unchecked operation of functionally differentiated spheres and those that defend the traditional life-world from the state furthering its own interests in ways that encroach upon it. These stipulations reflect how strongly the analytical concept of the public sphere has supported the processes described by Douglas: so much of religion is excluded from the possibility

12

J. MILLIE

of public validation. As Asad pointed out (2003: 183–186), the shape and texture of religion proposed here is one that replicates the aspirations of liberal citizenship. The three interventions could just as well serve as a humanist-atheist action program. In the conversation led by Casanova there is no place for commonplace religious practices such as embodied disciplines, ritual commemoration, purification, initiation rites and commensality. They are not absent from his analysis because he sees these things as embarrassing or lacking in dignity. It is simply that his tethering of religion to an idealisation of the public sphere accommodates such a very narrow understanding of religion. Around the time Casanova’s book was published (1994), this narrow understanding was drawing reactions from scholars who considered that a conversation about the public good ought to pay attention to such things, considering their importance to processes by which individual and group subjectivities were formed, and considering its exclusionary effects. As noted above, Talal Asad (1993) challenged the belief-centred definition of religion that he associated with modern liberalism and highlighted its political power. He drew attention to populations for whom religion obligates the sharing of commitments to bodily discipline, study and commemoration, and to the political imbalance that excluded these from conversations about the common good. In the wake of this, scholars began to interpret such activities as ethical projects for cultivating pious selves.9 Importantly for this discussion, a number of these studies gain theoretical clarity by applying the label of non- or anti-civic (or a synonym of these) to the individuals and groups they focus upon. This label reflects the mirror image of the normative model preferred by Casanova. If publicly acceptable religious forms are those that support the idealisations on which the liberal civic order is based, then that begs for a counter-category of religion that is intelligible because its member groups appear to be so clearly unsupportive of it. As a result, we observe labels such as ‘world-denying’, ‘renunciative’, ‘non-liberal’ or ‘counterpublic’ co-occurring with the framing of practices as ethical projects. This pairing leads to the question whether the religious actors concerned are being positioned in a dichotomised category shaped not by their own preferences but by the ebb and flow of an evolving scholarly discussion. 9 A critical literature has emerged in response to this turn, see Mittermaier (2012) and Mattingly and Throop (2018).

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

13

Two examples are Ayala Fader’s (2009) ethnography of Hasidic communities in New York state and Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) study of the listening practices of Cairo’s Muslim ‘counter-public’. These studies frame their subjects with a clear identity—anti-civic/liberal—because their practices indicate that they appear to reject the concordance between civically oriented religion and civic ideals. Symmetries with Casanova abound. Hirschkind constructs a counter-public sphere on the model of the bourgeois public sphere that differs from its parent because its constituting medium is the sermon, a medium that can be constructed as the affectoriented rival of the newspaper. In Fader’s account, the mirror image of the public sphere emerges in the boundary-maintaining effects of Hasidic constraints affecting styles of hair, clothing, manner of speech, demeanour, sociability, choice of marriage-partner and so on. Fader put it thus: ‘Studies of nonliberal religious groups cast into relief the historical lineages to which anthropology of religion has long been tethered’ (Fader, 2009: 4). This is no doubt true, but at the same time, these groups are made intelligible by being represented in the terms of those lineages. None of the authors just mentioned would support the suggestion that the practitioners and groups encountered in their writings were undignified or embarrassing. Yet when their practices and beliefs are interpreted as anti-public, these groups gain definition as the negative image of Casanova’s model for public religion.

Religious Efficacy of Public Spheres In our discussions leading to the production of this volume, we proposed an inversion of Casanova’s approach. He stipulated the public good that religion could bring to public spheres. We want to explore what public spheres can offer for religion. Doing this, of course, involves close attention to religious actors’ understanding of public spheres and their religious potentials. In the chapters to follow, we observe religious groups and individuals asking not ‘Does our religion synergise with civic priorities?’ but ‘Will this or that public domain be an efficacious one for our practice?’ The research task we implement here is to observe the reasoning and calculations involved in answering these questions, and the religious forms that are produced in the process. For three reasons, this approach is useful for understanding public religion in the present. First, by removing the determining effects of

14

J. MILLIE

the ‘crossing-out’, we can avoid the a priori settings that fix practitioners as embarrassments, insults to dignity, opponents of the civic order or deluded citizens recreating traditional pasts out of public view. The anachronising effects of the diachronic perspective can be avoided in analysis focussed less upon the grand narrative and more closely upon the deliberations and practices that underpin public religious forms and practices. Second, this approach does not ignore the reality that public realms are subject to conditions affecting religious practice and performance. The point here is not to deny the importance of such conditions, but to search for these things in the understandings and deliberations of religious groups and individuals. In this way, groups and individuals are revealed as public actors who are not struggling in ignorance against the conditions of publicity, but are bringing together knowledges of politics, religion and publicity in their calculations about the efficacy of public domains. And thirdly, public realms are not treated as fragile ecosystems that accommodate a narrow range of religious forms and practices and need to be protected from others that might harm them. Rather, they are alive with the potentials for a wide range of religious forms. These forms are mediated through the deliberations and evaluations of actors who do not belong to a category opposed to the civil order, but who are themselves discriminating subjects of that order. To give some texture to this shift in perspective, I turn briefly to two themes that are repeatedly encountered in the deliberations of religious actors about the religious efficacy of public domains.

Transcendence in Public Domains? Efficacious religious practice frequently depends upon conditions prevailing in the setting in which performance takes place. For example, where transcendence is a goal attention must be paid to the question of whether and how this might be possible in this or that setting. Interfaith practices stimulate such deliberations. In recent times, practitioners and leaders of faith groups have been more frequently called upon to publicly embody their religion and faith in interfaith or multi-faith initiatives. These are becoming more frequently staged in many communities as responses to moments of shared trauma (natural disasters, mass killings, threats to public cohesion) (Weller, 2009). These initiatives are frequently staged in public, or in religious settings belonging to other religions or denominations. They are intended to be acceptable not only to discrete

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

15

confessional groups, but also to the broader, heterogeneous collective. When looked at in this way, these initiatives make far-reaching demands upon religious groups: they ask them to be innovative, encouraging them to reflexively appropriate and adapt tradition to produce religious performances not structured purely by their respective canons, but also by the emergent conditions of heterogeneous publics. But they also pose challenges such as: Can the transcendence guaranteed by this or that practice be achieved in this or that public domain? What religious efficacy does the space enable or prevent? Are our practices mobile, or are they spatially and contextually limited? Does the heterogeneity of this or that setting pose risks or opportunities? In Australia, an emerging body of published guidelines for interfaith practice reveals the efforts of Christian organisations to answer such questions.10 The guidelines are positive about the benefits of interfaith practice for inclusion and mutual understanding, yet they reveal concern about a shared problem: transcendence is dependent upon specific practices, symbols and utterances that are legitimised in the sources from which Christian religious distinctiveness is constructed. These sources are held to contain singular truths. What then are the implications for efficacy if practices are performed alongside other faith groups for whom efficacy is guaranteed by contrasting truth claims? When evaluated in this way, public domains open the possibility of certain efficacies, but foreclose others. Multi-faith prayer brings these issues to a head. In the Australian Christian literature just mentioned, a specific understanding of multi-faith prayer is recommended: praying alongside followers of other faiths at multi-faith events is strongly supported, but readers are advised against understanding this as ‘praying together’. This would risk the distinctiveness of Christian worship. Furthermore, this literature acknowledges the unsuitability of public spheres for certain practices. Ecumenical guidelines for multi-faith liturgy state that ‘the central Christian sacramental actions which recall the saving events of the Gospel are inappropriate for multi-faith worship’ (Australian Consultation on Liturgy, 1995). In

10 Australian Consultation on Liturgy (1995), Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission (2009), Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission (n.d.), Victorian Council of Churches (2004).

16

J. MILLIE

other words, from this perspective, the multi-faith setting offers efficacies relating to inclusion and mutual understanding, but is disabling of authentic transcendence. These deliberations are encountered in Indonesia also. Although interfaith practice per se is relatively new in the Republic of Indonesia, multi-faith prayer is not a new thing. In Indonesian public life, a civic gathering is considered an appropriate opportunity for group supplication (Indonesian: doa bersama). A large majority of Indonesians (the official figure is approximately 88%) self-identify as Muslim, but this majority includes a wide variety of Islamic segments and styles. The non-Muslim population is also very diverse. As a result of this plurality, the civic gatherings at which group supplications are verbalised will frequently be heterogeneous in their religious makeup. The Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI) considers this heterogeneity to be a problem. This quasi-state body was established in 1974 by the authoritarian government of Suharto at a time when the regime needed a representative body to give Islamic support to its policies. As the political context changed, the Council also changed. After the authoritarian period ended in 1998, the Council began publishing legal opinions (fatwa) that prioritised faithfulness to the literal texts of Islamic sources above inter-religious harmony (Ichwan, 2005; Sirry, 2013). Amongst the things to attract the attention of the Council was the legality of group supplications performed in gatherings with a heterogeneous religious character: What is the legal status of such prayers? Are they efficacious when considered against the specifications about prayer found in the Qur’an, prophetic traditions and previous legal opinion? The resultant fatwa, like the Christian statements discussed above, points out that the heterogeneous civic context is a flawed setting for the utterance of a prayer.11 The Council referred to principles in the Qur’an and Prophetic traditions that constrain with and for whom prayers can be made. It is not mentioned in these sources that one could pray alongside followers of other faiths. This led the Council to the conclusion that Muslims are forbidden from attending and giving their ‘amen’ to prayers of followers of other religions, as well as to prayers intended to be acceptable to multi-faith assemblies. As well, such prayers will not succeed and might even be dangerous: the relevant legal sources are clear that disaster 11 The Council’s fatwa may be read at the MUI’s website: http://mui.or.id/wp-con tent/uploads/files/fatwa/27.-Doa-Bersama.pdf.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

17

awaits non-Muslims in the afterlife, and these disasters can potentially afflict Muslims also. This danger is a basis for prohibiting participation in their prayers. This dispute about the multi-faith setting draws our attention to another dimension of this arena of public discourse: publicity. Publicity is an item for reflection in the evaluation of public domains for religion. The fatwa should be read not only as a statement of doctrine, but also as a salvo fired in an ongoing public dispute about religion and authority in Indonesia. Concepts such as religious equality and pluralism divide Islamic society, and the fatwa triggered a response from Islamic intellectuals concerned about interfaith relations (Sirry, 2013). Other scholars recommended contrasting interpretations of the same sources as those discussed by the Council (Kamal et al., 2006). It probably made little difference for the general public: without doubt some segments of the Islamic community would pay heed to the terms of the Council’s fatwa, but it seems more likely that Indonesians’ high enthusiasm for collective prayer in plural contexts outweighs their desire for such literal adherence to sources. Nevertheless, the fatwa is a striking example of an evaluation of the religious efficacy of public spheres: it delivered a doctrinal statement about the efficacies of public prayer, and at the same time, revealed the Council’s calculated understanding of publicity as a tool for asserting its position in polemic.

Proselytising in Public Domains? Projects of proselytising necessitate calculations about the religious qualities of public domains. Most religious groups give attention to the need to have an impact upon society outside the confines of the group. For some, the desired impact might be the conversion of others. For others it might be charitable acts, or merely to set a Godly example. Engelke (2017) provides an example of reflexivity in which a missionary group paid sensitive attention to the reception of their public interventions. Members of a British, non-denominational Christian charity were responsible for coordinating the decoration of a public shopping strip in preparation for the annual Christmas parade. They were given this responsibility by the municipal government. But what sort of decorations were appropriate for these public spaces? The Bible Society felt the Christmas decorations ought to include religious references. At the same time, they were wary of ‘shoving religion down people’s throats’ in a society where support for

18

J. MILLIE

formal religion was declining (2012: 157). They decided the decorations should remind members of the public about Christmas through images of angels framed within an ambient setting. Passers-by might identify specifically religious signs in the ambient angels, but they could just as easily overlook them. The ambient framing would enable the angels to be interpreted by the broader public in the register of ‘spirituality’, which the Bible Society felt was more acceptable to the heterogeneous public than ‘religion’. If the group described by Engelke paid sensitive attention to the preferences of the heterogeneous public, the North American street preachers described by Joshua Edelman (2013) pay similarly close attention but arrive at a different position in relation to that public. They understand public space as the stage for a performance of confrontational religious programs. They aim to reveal to the members of the public—in effect passers-by—that their corrupted morality will invariably bring suffering in the afterlife. For the preachers, the offence and awkwardness they create are signs of success. Edelman discusses a preacher who publishes online images in order to legitimise his claims as a successful preacher. These images ‘show his audience ignoring him, jeering at him, interrupting him, and even spitting on him’ (Edelman, 2013: 122). This is proof of his efficacious use of the public domain for religion’s sake, for in biblical thought, when the messenger is harmed by unheeding listeners, the messenger is living out the example of Prophets. When he draws contempt upon himself because of his confrontational preaching, he succeeds in achieving a pious outcome. The parks, streetscapes and open spaces of North American cities are domains that offer this specific efficacy.

Our Chapters The following chapters present case studies of assessments of the religious efficacy of public spheres. They may be classed into two overlapping thematic brackets: those concerning efficacies connecting to publicity (chapters by Slama, Fakhruroji and Syarif), and second, ambivalence over the potentials of public spheres for specific religious programs (Millie and Muhtadi, Gupta and Davis-Kildea). Martin Slama describes media technologies that structure new modes for the circulation of intimate images of domestic piety. Slama points out that when Indonesian women post images of their visibly pious, nuclear family travelling together to

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

19

the holiest places of Islam, they affirm desirable ideals of middle-class, Muslim prosperity. Such images speak so powerfully to the Indonesian public that the social media team of Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has circulated intimate depictions of his family at the holy sanctuary as a promotional strategy. Images of this kind are highly valued by women. For decades the Indonesian state has promoted a domestic role for the nation’s women, narrowing the range of self-representational media open to women. Social media provide a way to participate in an online public oriented to pious display. What does a public profile mean for a religious minority? Dede Syarif’s chapter addresses this question. Indonesia is a country in which the state regulates public religion, although Indonesian governments have generally avoided favouring a specific Islamic outlook at the expense of others. Rather, they have regulated religion as a field within which civil society actors advocate for contrasting religious programs. In recent times, governments have been under pressure from advocates of the Sunni majority to restrict the practices of minority ‘dissenting’ groups. It might seem that a dissenting Islamic minority—in this case the country’s tiny Shiite community–would prefer the security of privacy for its practices and activities. Not so. Syarif observes that the community decided that a public profile would benefit the movement and the Republic of Indonesia, and has striven to achieve this by advocating for legal recognition as a civil society organisation, and through ritual performance in public spaces. In an era during which Sunni/Shiite tensions are increasing globally, the strategy has had striking results: the Shiite movement’s public presence is now high, but it has also sparked a reaction from religious groups concerned about public religion in Indonesia. In findings that complicate Slama’s statement that in Indonesia religion is associated with the private realm ‘to a minor degree’, Syarif reveals the conditions of access to public status in the country. It also affirms the political value of public visibility for minorities. Jason Davies-Kildea asks the same question as Syarif: What does a public profile mean for a religious minority? Amongst contemporary religious movements, the Salvation Army surely has a unique position in the public imagination because of its success as a provider of charity and social support. Yet the church is caught in a dilemma about its public role and profile. Drawing attention to the religious arm of the organisation, Davies-Kildea describes the Army as an evangelical, denominational

20

J. MILLIE

church (or sect?) that asks its followers to discipline themselves in biblically inspired models. At the same time, its social services reach out to an expanding range of needy individuals and groups in Australia. The Army has become one of the most important providers of social services, many of which are provided in collaboration with Australian governments. But what are the implications of the expansion of the service wing for the religious program? How does the church’s evangelical program co-exist with a service mission that must be adaptive and flexible in order to fulfil its mission to the contemporary poor and underprivileged? These questions point to an unfolding process of ‘internal secularisation’ (the term is cited from Chaves). In the Netherlands East Indies of the early twentieth century, the Dutch project of ordering the populations it had subjugated corresponded with the civilising project of Islamic modernism. After independence in 1945, this synergy continued to link Islamic modernists with the Republican state. Millie and Muhtadi focus on the reactions of Indonesia’s traditionalist Muslim segment to that synergy. Intellectuals from traditionalist circles knew that modernist Islam harmonised with the state’s project of fostering autonomous citizen subjects. They were aware that traditionalist Islamic styles were widely considered to be lagging behind modernist styles on the ‘road to modernity’, and worried about the political fate of the less developed segments of the population if the state’s development project were to unite too closely with the Islamic reform project. Such a development would surely favour Muslims whose modernity matched the state’s aspiration for progress. In response, traditionalist Muslims added a fascinating chapter to the Habermas legacy. Habermas’s concepts of civil society and reflexivity gave theoretical scaffolding to their conviction that religious truth claims ought to be absent from formal politics. This chapter presents a striking evaluation of the religious efficacy of public spheres: a traditionalist Muslim bloc’s awareness of the narrative of modernity led it to rationalise its political position—and the position of religion in public life—in arguments sourced from one of the world’s most prominent political theorists of the left. The expansion of online religion has had many effects for religious public spheres. On one hand, it enables proselytising by individuals and groups of all sizes. On the other, in Indonesia’s fragmented religious public sphere, online media enable dominant groups to mobilise support against smaller ones. This can cause problems for members of a significant class of mediators in Indonesian Islam: celebrity preachers. As Moch

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

21

Fakhruroji points out, celebrity preachers who exploit online platforms form a relatively new class of experts in Indonesian Islam. Their success has created a dilemma for Indonesia’s well-established Muslim civil society organisations. These massive quasi-bureaucracies would like to attract the large audiences attracted to celebrity preachers, but cannot do so because their public mission does not easily incorporate the attractive and contemporary styles of celebrity preachers. Fakhruroji describes an episode in which followers of a massive civil society organisation mobilised its following via online publicity in ways that caused serious problems for an individual preacher. In the era of online Islam, preachers make efficacious use of publicity acquired via media technologies. But they must manage their public messages carefully in order to avoid reactions from the publics able to be provoked into action at the suggestion that a preacher may have slighted their religious program. Online media have exacerbated the fragmenting tendencies of Indonesia’s diverse public Islamic sphere. Most of our chapters deal with religion as a distinctive sphere of praxis. Shivani Gupta’s focus is broader, including attention to the social values of shame and honour. These values might not be strictly religious in nature, but dovetail so comprehensively with doctrinal patriarchy in India that they are difficult to disentangle from religion. They determine women’s access to public space in India’s holy city, Banaras, where men and women are equally obliged to preserve and protect men’s honour and respectability. Gupta’s analysis explores the rules of spatial socialisation that women in Banaras acquire through embodied and unconscious enculturations. ‘Patriarchal territoriality’ is Gupta’s word for the spatial element of a structural inequality that demands that the public presence of an unaccompanied female must be purposeful and fleeting. There is no space for women to linger. The rules of this territoriality cannot be understood in the shape of the conventional public/domestic divide, however, for the privileging of male honour and respectability makes demands upon women even in the so-called ‘private’ space of the home. Of all the papers, Tomlinson’s chapter attracted the most interested discussion within our group. Tomlinson observed the Spiritualist practice known as ‘demonstration’. In these rituals, mediums communicate back and forth between ‘people in Spirit’ (essences of physically deceased individuals) and living audience members, to whom they provide ‘evidence’ that the people in spirit were in fact deceased family members. Tomlinson’s descriptions make it clear that Spiritualists do things that

22

J. MILLIE

religious people have done for millennia: Spiritualists rely upon the mediation of a qualified performer to communicate with unseen beings; their understanding of death involves a spirit world from which the deceased can communicate with the living; they consent to their private details being published before a sympathetic audience and they co-create reassuring messages that protect participants from a chaotic, cruel version of the cosmos in which humans suffering lacks meaning. All these make Spiritualism appear like religion. On the other hand, Spiritualism looks nothing like religion. It makes no demand for incorporation of the self into any entity or cosmology beyond the unfolding interaction. Its practices are not vouchsafed through creedal statements, but through the incontrovertible ‘evidence’ made public by its mediums. One can therefore see how it is understood as a modern movement established in opposition to religion (Van der Veer, 2013). Without a corporate presence that binds individuals in a bundle of conditions involving institutional loyalty, hierarchy, cosmology and doctrine, Spiritualism is difficult to locate in relation to grand narratives of secularisation. It appears to sit outside the irrevocable crossings-out and unmaskings, not because its practices have a distinctive nature that distinguishes the movement as non-religious, but because its lack of a corporate presence keeps it distant from the public geography of the modern. Our epilogue is written by an Indonesian public intellectual, Ahmad Baso (b. 1971), whose theorising is shaped by the realities of Indonesian history and social life. His contribution to this collection was sought not because his ideas represent something essential about the broader region, but because they approach the core themes of this project from a unique position. On the one hand, Baso might well be Indonesia’s foremost authority on the Western theoretical corpus about secularism and public spheres. This is clear in his growing corpus of writings (a list of key writings is provided at the end of the epilogue). On the other hand, his normative position on Indonesian religion and politics is determined by his location within a massive but nevertheless particular Islamic space: Java’s Islamic traditionalist communities. Baso looks back for models to the history of Islamic Java. In the resulting outlook, we do not find support for formal politics shaped by a religious framework, but we do not find support for a public sphere neutral towards religion, either. Rather, he advocates for a public religion that accommodates differences as it enables marginalised groups to challenge the dominance of political and

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

23

economic modernisation. The crossed-out God appears in this perspective as an entailment of strategies of political domination put in place by colonisers, strategies of domination that were then consolidated during Indonesia’s authoritarian period. -)(With this volume, we hope to stimulate and enhance reflection upon the determining effects of the conceptual repertoire employed in discussions about public religion in the communities of the Asia–Pacific. This introduction has tried to convey the far-reaching influence of concepts that set in place a temporality that, despite being much critiqued, continues to exclude and marginalise practices favoured by large populations. It suggests a point of view that enables us to continue the conversation without characterising practitioners as out of time, deluded and anti-civic.

References Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press. Australian Consultation on Liturgy. (1995). Guidelines for Multifaith Worship. http://www.cam.org.au/eic/images/stories/pdf/GuidelinesInterfai thWorship_ACOL.pdf Bubandt, N., & van Beek, M. (2011). Varieties of Secularism–in Asia and in Theory. In N. O. Bubandt & M. Van Beek (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual (pp. 1–27). Routledge. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.pro quest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=957719 Cannell, F. (2010). The Anthropology of Secularism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 85–100. Casanova, J. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago. Douglas, M. (1996). Natural Symbols (2nd ed.). Routledge. Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission. (n.d.). Guidelines for Reciprocal Visits. Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. Ecumenical and Interfaith Commission. (2009). Promoting Interfaith Relations. Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. Edelman, J. (2013). The Intolerable, Intimate Public of Contemporary American Street Preaching. In C. Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, & J. Edelman (eds.), Performing Religion in Public (pp. 117–133). Palgrave Macmillan.

24

J. MILLIE

Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000). Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, 129(1), 1–29. Engelke, M. (2017). Angels in Swindon: Public Religion and Ambient Faith in England. American Ethnologist, 39(1), 155–170. Fader, A. (2009). Mitzvah girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton University Press. Fardon, R. (1999). Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. Routledge. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia University Press. Ichwan, N. M. (2005). Ulam¯ a, State and Politics: Majelis Ulama Indonesia after Suharto. Islamic Law and Society, 12(1), 45–72. Kamal, Z. et al. (2006). Interfaith Theology: Responses of Progressive Indonesian Muslims. International Centre for Islam and Pluralism. Keane, W. (2007). Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. University of California. Künkler, M., & Shankar, S. (2018). Introduction. In M. Künkler, J. Madeley, & S. Shankar (Eds.), A Secular Age Beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (pp. 1–31). University Press. Landy, J., & Saler, M. (2009). The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age. Stanford University Press. Latour, B. (1993 [1991]). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2013 [2002]). Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. Polity. Mahmood, S. (2001). Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of “S.al¯at.” American Ethnologist, 28(4), 827–853. Mahmood, S. (2010). Can Secularism Be Other-wise? In M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen, & C. Calhoun (Eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (pp. 282–299). Harvard University Press. Mattingly, C., & Throop, J. (2018). The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47 , 475–492. Mittermaier, A. (2012). Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2), 247–265. Parker, L., & Hoon, C. Y. (2013). Secularity, Religion and the Possibilities for Religious Citizenship. Asian Journal of Social Science, 41(2), 150–174. Pels, P. (2003). Introduction: Magic and Modernity. In B. Meyer & P. Pels (Eds.), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (pp. 1–38). Stanford University Press. Salvatore, A. (2005). The Euro-Islamic Roots of Secularity: A Difficult Equation. Asian Journal of Social Sciences, 33(3), 412–437. Sirry, M. (2013). Fatwas and Their Controversy: The Case of the Council of Indonesian Ulama (MUI). Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 44(1), 100– 117.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE RELIGIOUS EFFICACY OF PUBLIC …

25

Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. van der Veer, P. (2001). Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton University Press. van der Veer, P. (2013). The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India. Princeton University Press. Victorian Council of Churches. (2004). Guidelines for Multifaith Gatherings. Victorian Council of Churches. Weller, P. (2009). How Participation Changes Things: ‘Inter-faith’, ‘Multi-faith’ and a New Public Imaginary. In A. Dinham, R. Furbey, & V. Lowndes (Eds.), Faith in the Public Realm: Controversies, Policies and Practices (pp. 63–81). Policy Press. Willford, A. C., & George, K. M. (Eds.). (2005). Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia. SEAP Publications.

CHAPTER 2

Conspicuous Pilgrimages and the Politics of Public/Private: Social Media Representations of Indonesia’s Muslim Middle Class Martin Slama

Introduction Thinking about the relationship between religious life and forms of being public and private in the Asia–Pacific region urges one to question basic assumptions about this relationship as they have been formulated mainly within Western contexts being reflected in Western social science theory that presupposes a relegation of religion to the private realm.1 Thus, it should be noted from the start that in Indonesia religion—and Islam in particular—has never experienced a thorough privatization and is thus 1 For a discussion of this tradition of scholarship on religion and its supposedly troubled relationship to the public sphere see Julian Millie’s introduction to this edited volume.

M. Slama (B) Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_2

27

28

M. SLAMA

only to a minor degree associated with the private realm. On various levels of society, from the state bureaucracy to personal pious initiatives, religion is usually not regarded as something that has to be confined to a separate domain secluded from the public. For many Muslims in Indonesia today, adhering to Islam means to show one’s religious identity in public at least on some occasions, such as when performing daily prayers at one’s workplace, wearing particular clothes on Islamic holidays, attending Islamic gatherings or posting Islamic content on the semi-public platforms of social media. This chapter is particularly concerned with the latter practice, and related religious media practices, given that new ways of being public are currently explored by Indonesian Muslims challenging clear-cut distinctions between public and private realms as they have been formulated in Western enlightenment tradition. In this regard, the rise of social media since the late 2000s reinforced a trend that has become increasingly salient since the 1980s, when a growing Muslim middle class engaged in new ways to practice their religion publicly. This trend has been seized by the Suharto regime in the 1990s legitimizing ever more public expressions of Islam. Against this backdrop of the multiple possibilities of being public and private in Indonesia, this chapter focuses on family pictures posted on social media by middle-class Muslims that are related to religious practices. They often feature the nuclear family, a social entity that embodies the private sphere in many parts of the world (Heiman et al., 2012), including Indonesian middle-class circles. This globalized bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family was particularly promoted by the Suharto regime, ignoring the complex and varied forms of family and kinship that reflect Indonesia’s internal plurality (Brenner, 1998: 240). The model of the father–mother–two children family living in their single-family home owning a car was presented as an example towards which everybody should aspire. Long after Suharto’s fall, albeit contested by Islamic and secular discourses and partly modulated by them, this image remained strong, particularly in the advertising industry and the production of popular culture such as soap operas and films. In light of these attempts to remodel the family into a private unit, the nuclear family has become a site that is crisscrossed by what Suzanne Brenner (2011: 478) has identified more generally as “the shifting boundaries and meanings of public and private in Indonesian society”. As I will show in this chapter, being exposed on social media platforms in particular ways comprises private and public features to different degrees that

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

29

can entail ambiguity and create tensions. Similar to the “scalable sociality” that Daniel Miller and his co-researchers (Miller et al., 2016: 3) have observed in various social media contexts across the globe with regard to group size and privacy, religious family pictures bear witness to the scalable nature of public and private realms in Indonesian online and offline settings, as they indicate a dynamic variety of being public and private reflecting the societal and political developments of the more recent past. This particularly applies to pictures of pilgrimages to Islam’s holy sites in Mecca and Medina, that is to the visual representation of the hajj and umroh, with which this chapter will be particularly concerned.2 The shifting nature of being public/private, however, cannot solely be attributed to the popularity of social media, although the latter seem to provide a perfect platform for its exploration. In the pre-digital era, one can of course already discern different degrees of public/private religiosities as they have been attached to particular visualizations and mediatizations. Given that the public/private distinction is generally informed by power asymmetries, which does particularly apply to the Indonesian case, I argue in this chapter that it is worthwhile to approach family pilgrimages and their visual representations from an angle that is conscious of the politics and micropolitics of these practices without reducing them to the realm of the political per se. The degree to which pilgrimages reflect societal hierarchies and power asymmetries is a question that leads us directly to the ambiguities and tensions that the public/ private distinction can entail in Indonesia. This chapter thus focuses on pilgrimage as a specific setting where constructions of the family and religiosity can visually meet, and where the (micro)politics of the public and private become visible. It attempts to show the contested nature of notions of being public and private in Indonesia and the sometimes seemingly paradoxical relationships between them, e.g. when pictures of private piety are meant to authenticate one’s pious public image. In order to explore these dynamics, I will, in the following, turn to the pilgrimages of politicians, which serves as a necessary prelude to the discussion of the visual representation of Muslim middle-class families on social media.

2 Islamic pilgrimage, not only to Mecca and Medina but also to a variety of places inside and outside Indonesia, has become increasingly popular among Indonesian Muslims in the last decades as well as a site of debate and contestation (Alatas, 2016; Darmadi, 2013; Slama, 2014).

30

M. SLAMA

A Political Genealogy of Family Pilgrimages and Their Visual Representations: From Suharto to Jokowi Indonesia’s first widely reported family pilgrimage was the hajj of President Suharto in 1991. It was widely interpreted as a sign of his regime’s “Islamic turn” (Heryanto, 1999; Liddle, 1996; Tagliacozzo, 2013: 261), since it coincided with a range of policies that were designed to court Indonesia’s growing Muslim middle class. However, among the latter, some Muslims remained sceptical about Suharto’s intentions and, as Moeslim Abdurrahman (2000: 236) has observed, “were not so happy making the pilgrimage in the same year as he did since they believed his travelling to Mecca was for the purpose of washing his political Islamic manipulation with holy water”. Obviously being aware of such counterdiscourses Suharto was eager to portray his hajj as a rather private affair and let his government spread the news that he would pay for the pilgrimage of his family by himself. In fact, his wife and five of his six children and their spouses as well as the sister of his wife and her husband joined him. This aspect of his pilgrimage was particularly stressed in the official publication of Suharto’s hajj called “The Devotional Hajj Journey of Father Harto” (Perjalanan Ibadah Haji Pak Harto, Tim Penyusunan dan Penerbitan Buku Perjalanan Ibadah Haji Pak Harto, 1994), that was originally published by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and a year later by Toko Gunung Agung, one of Indonesia’s biggest publishing houses at that time.3 It entails a subchapter entitled “The President went on a private hajj ” (Presiden Berhaji secara pribadi), a proposition that is sought to be enforced throughout the book by repeatedly referring to the fact that Suharto went to Mecca with his “family” (keluarga). Despite the fact that this pilgrimage had occurred several decades ago, its reverberations were felt in more recent times. For example, commemorating the sixth anniversary of Suharto’s death, the Indonesian daily Merdeka published sympathetic reports of his pilgrimage in January 2014

3 Needless to say that the Ministry of Religious Affairs can hardly be regarded as a private institution. For the genre of hajj memoirs of Southeast Asian pilgrims, including politicians like Suharto, see Tagliacozzo (2013: 251–269).

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

31

that repeated this narrative of a private pilgrimage.4 However, a closer look at the group of people that accompanied Suharto reveals that highranking generals joined him, such as the military chief Try Sutrisno (who became Vice President in 1993) and his adjutant Wiranto (who became military chief in 1998 and played key roles in Indonesian politics in the post-Suharto era). Moreover, he was welcomed in Mecca by high representatives of the Saudi monarchy and met King Fahd before returning to Indonesia. This tension between the image of a private, spiritually motivated pilgrimage and the domestic and foreign politics in which a president does not cease to be involved during such a pilgrimage can also be discerned in the pictures that were released of Suharto’s hajj , a collection of which has been published by Suharto’s eldest daughter, Siti Hardijanti Rukmana, on her website and on her various social media accounts.5 Siti Hardijanti Rukmana as well as her younger sister Siti Hediati Hariyadi became increasingly active on the internet and social media in 2018, when the political party Partai Berkarya that had been founded by members of the Suharto family was registered to take part in the 2019 parliamentary elections. Most of these hajj pictures have already been published in the official hajj book (Tim Penyusunan dan Penerbitan Buku Perjalanan Ibadah Haji Pak Harto, 1994) and the pictures that appear in it are credited with “documentation of the secretariat of state” (Dokumentasi Sekretariat Negara) (ibid.: vi). Given the entanglements between family and state, however, they may have also been taken by the “personal photographer” ( fotografer pribadi) who is also listed as part of Suharto’s hajj group (ibid.: 49). The collection that Siti Hardijanti Rukmana (re)published online consists of pictures that show Suharto, wearing a suit and tie or formal Indonesian Islamic clothes including the black peci (rimless cap), being 4 See: https://www.merdeka.com/peristiwa/kisah-soeharto-dielu-elukan-muslim-sed unia-saat-naik-haji.html; see also https://www.merdeka.com/peristiwa/kisah-presiden-soe harto-tak-mau-naik-haji-dibiayai-negara.html (accessed 29 November 2018). 5 See: https://www.tututsoeharto.id/naik-haji-tahun-1991/ (accessed 25 September 2018). Siti Hardijanti Rukmana’s postings of hajj pictures elicited unintended reactions, such as by the online platform alif.id that is run by young journalists close to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). It published an article about the jokes that the former NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid (who later served as Indonesia’s president from 1999 to 2001) made about Suharto’s hajj in 1991: https://alif.id/read/hamzah-sahal/humor-gus-durtentang-soeharto-naik-haji-b210819p/ (accessed 18 September 2018).

32

M. SLAMA

accompanied by Saudi officials and received by Saudi authorities. In the official hajj book this is portrayed as a Saudi initiative that was forced upon Suharto who was worried that his pilgrimage would be seen from a political perspective (Tim Penyusunan dan Penerbitan Buku Perjalanan Ibadah Haji Pak Harto, 1994). Nevertheless, the pictures clearly emphasize Suharto’s status as the president of the Republic of Indonesia. They could have also easily been taken during an official visit of the Indonesian president to Saudi Arabia. In addition to this, the collection comprises pictures that depict Suharto in the typical dress (ihram) worn by all hajj pilgrims praying at the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. The latter pictures come closest to the officially conveyed statement that Suharto’s pilgrimage was a private affair. Yet, at the same time, they confirm also the opposite, since on most of these pictures not only Suharto, his wife and his children are seen, but also other members of his entourage; and no spatial division can be discerned between kin and nonkin. For example, on one of the pictures one can see Suharto praying with his wife sitting to his left and his adjutant Wiranto to his right, whereas some of his children can be seen in the rows behind him amidst state officials. In other words, on these pictures it is not clear where the realm of the family ends and the one of the military and other state institutions begins. Among this collection published by Suharto’s eldest daughter (as well as on the internet at large), I could not find a hajj picture of the nuclear family—Suharto, his wife and his children—which would make such a statement of familial privacy. With both family members and state officials being conspicuously present, Suharto’s pilgrimage is thus difficult to categorize as either a family or an official affair. Neither distinctly public nor exclusively private, it was something in-between these categories, as one could perceive the generals as having become family members or, vice versa, his family members having become state officials.6 Despite these ambivalences, there was not much public debate about Suharto’s hajj given that the media were tightly controlled under his regime. The purportedly private pilgrimage was, however, widely reported 6 In fact, in 1991, this has partly already become reality. In 1983, Siti Hediati Hariyadi married Prabowo Subianto, an army officer, who rose to high ranks in the 1990s, but was dismissed from the military after Suharto’s fall by the then military chief Wiranto. Like Wiranto, Prabowo Subianto joined Suharto’s pilgrimage, as did general Wismoyo Arismunandar, the husband of the sister of Suharto’s wife. In addition to that, at the very end of Suharto’s rule, Siti Hardijanti Rukmana became Minister of Social Affairs from 14 March till 21 May 1998, the day her father had to step down.

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

33

and received a lot of attention in Indonesia. This was also the time when the hajj and umroh became part of an upper-class lifestyle that was emulated by middle-class Muslims as soon as they could afford it. Suharto’s hajj reinforced the trend of “the new rich boarding planes to the Holy Land”, as Moeslim Abdurrahman (2000: 21) has put it in his seminal study. These were “the years of living luxuriously”, to use Ariel Heryanto’s (1999) expression, that lasted until the so-called Asian Crisis hit Indonesia in 1997 and that led to the end of Suharto’s rule. The country had to wait 23 years until another pilgrimage made headlines to a similar extent. In July 2014, at the end of Indonesia’s presidential election campaign, Joko Widodo, one of the two candidates for the presidency, went to Saudi Arabia to perform umroh that, in contrast to the hajj , can be undertaken at any time of the year.7 The pilgrimage stirred considerable controversy when pictures of Joko Widodo or Jokowi, as he is popularly called, appeared on social media that depicted him wearing the pilgrimage clothing (ihram) in a wrong way. As it turned out, the pictures were manipulated and spread by his political opponents who wanted to undermine his Islamic credentials, which was one of the major goals of their negative campaigning (Hoesterey, 2017). Jokowi’s team was keen to spread the news that these were false allegations and explained that his pilgrimage was not part of his presidential campaign, but that his intentions were to “calm down” (menenangkan diri) and to “pray” (berdoa) to God.8 And, reminiscent of the Suharto pilgrimage, they also added that it was entirely paid by himself. Jokowi went on the pilgrimage together with his wife and two of his three children, and a number of aides and members of his campaign team, such as Hasyim Muzadi, the former chairman of Indonesia’s biggest Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama. However, during the controversy, the pictures that were released by his team and published by Indonesian media that were sympathetic to him did not show the latter group, but his family. These father–mother–son–daughter pictures show the pious,

7 The other candidate was Prabowo Subianto, Suharto’s son in law, who founded the political party Gerindra in 2008 when he started his political career in post-Suharto Indonesia. In 1998, Prabowo was dismissed from the military due to his central role in exacerbating the security situation in the last months and weeks of Suharto’s rule, including the abduction and killing of political activists (Hefner, 2000: 206). 8 See: https://www.merdeka.com/politik/timses-pastikan-umroh-jokowi-bukan-age nda-kampanye.html (accessed 25 September 2018).

34

M. SLAMA

happy nuclear family in Mecca looking into the camera with the Ka’ba as the background. Similar pictures were published depicting Jokowi and his wife as a happy couple in the same setting suggesting intimate togetherness and marital harmony. Given the prominence of such pictures for the visual representation of Muslim middle-class families in Indonesia today, it is necessary to analyse them in more detail. The “private” pictures of Jokowi’s umroh that were made public belong to a particular photographic genre that is intrinsically related to tourism. In his widely cited book The Tourist Gaze (2002), John Urry points to the centrality of photography for how tourism is organized and practised. Particular places, buildings or landscapes are made into spots that have to be visited and are photographed again and again “with travellers demonstrating that they really have been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen before they set off” (ibid.: 129). Urry argues that photography shapes travelling and people’s construction of their private life by remembering it by means of visual images: “Indeed much tourism becomes in effect a search for the photogenic; travel is a strategy for the accumulation of photographs and hence for the commodification and privatisation of personal and especially of family memories” (ibid.: 128). The Jokowi family pictures in Mecca are reminiscent of the tourist gaze and of what Salazar and Graburn (2014) have more recently called tourism imaginaries, directing our attention to the role of socially constructed images in tourism. They tell the observer that “we have been to Mecca” with the iconic Ka’ba on the pictures functioning as the ultimate proof for this claim. Moreover, alluding to the popular practice of taking selfies, the pictures not only show the Ka’ba but also Jokowi and his family, stressing their presence at the holy site even more.9 However, in the case of Jokowi, emphasizing presence as such was not what these pictures were meant to convey, since people knew that he was there anyway. These touristic pictures—Jokowi, his wife and his children could have stood, dressed differently of course, in front of another tourist magnet, such as the Eiffel Tower—evoke images of a family holiday suggesting that he had no politics in mind when visiting Islam’s most 9 The pictures are not selfies but have obviously been taken by others. What they share with selfies is the perspective from which they have been taken with the persons on the picture dominating the foreground. They thus belong to a category of pictures that are particularly widespread today due to the popularity of taking selfies in Indonesia.

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

35

holy sites. They do not, however, particularly substantiate the claim of his spiritual intentions. Rather they suggest that he likes to “calm down” by spending time with his wife and children, insinuating that his pilgrimage was a private affair. Following Urry as well as Salazar and Graburn, one can conclude that through these pictures of a particular tourism imaginary, one could witness how Jokowi was privatizing family memories and thus the whole pilgrimage. These pilgrimage pictures differ markedly from the ones of Suharto’s hajj , especially when it comes to the representation of their respective families. I could not encounter any pictures showing Suharto with his wife and children alone pointing to a complete lack of the visualization of the nuclear family. As I have suggested above, the pictures do not indicate clear boundaries between family members and other members of the group that accompanied him. There are, however, pictures just of Suharto and his wife. Yet they belong to a different genre than the Jokowi-and-his-wife pictures showing a pious Suharto and his wife ready for performing prayer and not posing before a particular photo motif such as the Ka’ba. On the pictures, Suharto and his wife are actually doing what Jokowi’s team claimed was one of the main aims of his pilgrimage trip, namely praying to God. Although his wife and children were present and despite the claim that Suharto went on the hajj not as president, the visual representation of his pilgrimage hardly suggests that this was a father–mother–children family holiday, nor were there overt signs of intimacy between husband and wife. Most importantly, the perspective taken by the photographer is the one of a detached observer who documented what other people were doing. The camera never engages with the persons on the pictures, while the latter are never overtly posing for the photographer. This perspective of standing in front of the holy site while looking at it and not into the camera seems to have been a frequent representation in the 1990s when travel agencies and banks that offer saving programs for the hajj also used it to advertise their special products tailored for pilgrims. Yet at the same time, as Moeslim Abdurrahman (2000) has revealed, portrait photos of hajj pilgrims also became popular, known at that time still under the term potret diri (self-portrait) and not “selfies”. They show the pilgrims in their special clothes looking into the camera with the Ka’ba (or another spiritually significant site of the pilgrimage trail) in the background (Abdurrahman, 2000: 43–44, 190– 191). However, the scene that serves as the background is the result of

36

M. SLAMA

a photo collage, as the pilgrims did not really stand in front of the Ka’ba when the picture was taken. This is due to the strong prohibition of taking cameras inside the al-Haram mosque that was still observed in the 1990s (Abdurrahman, 2000: 209). This ban of taking pictures is actually still in place. Yet, as Juan Campo (2016: 285) has more recently observed, “the ban is more honoured in the breach than the observance, as evidenced by the number of ‘selfies’ taken by pilgrims in front of the Ka’ba and elsewhere in the haram area”.10 We thus can discern a shift here from pictures with pilgrims facing the holy sites and not the camera to “self-portraits” of pilgrims that invite the beholder to look at their faces, i.e. to the predecessors of today’s selfies that in the meantime seem to have become inevitable when it comes to documenting one’s pilgrimage. Whereas the former perspective makes it impossible to discern the identity of the people on the picture directing one’s attention to the holy sites, the latter maintains a relationship between the beholder and the pilgrims that can be observed on the picture. Similarly, Jokowi’s middle-class selfies engage the observer, which is in stark contrast to Suharto’s hajj pictures that keep the beholder at bay. While Jokowi and his wife (and children) smile into the camera and thus directly invite other Indonesians to join in their happiness, Suharto and his family are occupied with formal meetings and ritual obligations that rather remind one of the burdens of an official state visit than of the joy of a family pilgrimage. Nevertheless, Suharto’s hajj and Jokowi’s umroh are two special cases that were both—in not so different ways—public affairs, despite they were not officially meant as such. Here, the public was virtually the whole nation, since in 1991 as well as 2014 only those Indonesians completely cut off from any media would have not been aware of these pilgrimages. In fact, the publics of pilgrimages can differ widely depending on the positioning of the pilgrim in Indonesia’s complex socio-political landscape as well as on the media and communication technologies that pilgrims have at their disposal to make their journey (semi-)public. Concerning the latter aspect, Suharto’s pilgrimage was truly from another age, when

10 Similarly, Bunt (2016: 233) states: “Officially, there are still restrictions as to the use of cell phones within the precincts of Mecca. This does not seem to dissuade pilgrims from posting status updates and tweeting during the pilgrimage”. For the history of photography in Mecca and the visualization of its sacred landscapes, see especially Campo (2016).

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

37

his regime was in tight control of print and electronic media, especially with regard to reports about him and his family. Jokowi, on the contrary, epitomizes the smartphone using middle-class Indonesian, a role that he evidently enjoyed to assume even more after he had become president, when he started to have a whole media team at his hand supporting his posting activities. Keeping Jokowi’s pilgrimage pictures in mind, my analysis will further explore this particular segment of Indonesian society, i.e. middle-class Indonesians and their posting practices of pilgrimage pictures.

Pictures of the Pious Muslim Middle-Class Family on Social Media Disregarding the special circumstances of Jokowi’s umroh in 2014, i.e. that he was a presidential candidate and that he went on this pilgrimage at the end of his campaign, the very fact that he visited Mecca together with his wife and children including the particular visual representation of it was not at all extraordinary. Today, on the social media accounts of middle-class Indonesians one can find very similar touristgaze-pictures of pilgrimages along with other pictures that depict the pious Muslim middle-class family in a variety of settings. There, one can see photo motifs and arrangements of pictures that were very similar to the ones published by the media about Jokowi’s umroh, i.e. the nuclear family father–mother–children picture and the intimate husbandand-wife picture depicting the family and the married couple in front of the holy sites, respectively. However, in contrast to the Jokowi case in which the display of privacy occurred in a particular political and hence public context, it is less clear which public is evoked or is intended to be evoked by “ordinary” middle-class Indonesians’ exhibition of family pictures when they go on a pilgrimage or engage in other religious practices. Hence there is much more room for ambiguity here with regard to the question how the private is informed by a public and vice versa, or whether the two realms are distinguishable at all, which has consequences for Indonesians’ ethical perception of their online practices (as will be explicated below). The comments that I was able to record during fieldwork indeed suggest that this relationship can considerably vary, especially in light of the fact that the “public-forming properties” (Millie, 2016: 121) of social media are also multiple—in the sense of a scalable public–private

38

M. SLAMA

continuum that characterize online socialities (Miller et al., 2016). For most Indonesians, “the public” of their social media activities consists, to varying degrees, of their extended family, friends and colleagues, i.e. a group of different people that can hardly be confined to either a distinctly public or exclusively private realm. What is clear is that pictures of the nuclear family or of husband and wife in Mecca are not considered private to an extent that they should not be seen by a larger group of people. They rather present the central units of the middle-class family to what Lauren Berlant (2008) has called—in the rather different context of an American “women’s culture”—an “intimate public” with which one can share such moments of familial intimacy. Such publics, however, are not devoid of norms and constraints, and the degree of intimacy that is displayed there can be contested as well pointing to its ambiguous nature. Interestingly, my female interlocutors distinguish between such intimate pictures of husband and wife in the context of religious practice and other pictures that show husband and wife being mesra (which can be translated as “intimate”), yet which can also have sexual connotations. It would not be appropriate, they affirm, to share such mesra pictures on their social media accounts.11 These pilgrimage pictures with their normative posturing of an unerotic intimacy where sexuality is controlled by religion are meant to conform to the particular image of the harmonious Muslim middle-class family. While social media platforms are seemingly the perfect site for exhibiting one’s Muslim middle-class status (see also Slama, 2021), pilgrimage pictures convey the central traits of middleclassness in Indonesia: mobility, i.e. being able to visit a place as far as Mecca; piety, i.e. practising one’s religion as pilgrims; and harmony, i.e. doing this happily together with one’s partner and children.12 This particular image of the Muslim family has become a central theme in the sermons and publications of Islamic preachers and self-help experts. When they outline their vision of a harmonious family life, they refer to a keluarga sakinah (literally “calm” or “peaceful family”), an image that is often visualized through pictures of the nuclear family (see e.g. Hoesterey, 2016: 64). As Leonie Schmidt (2017: 82) has pointed out, these figures’ 11 Conversation with middle-class women who are active in the organization of Islamic study gatherings in Yogyakarta, 24.7.2018. 12 Reinforcing one’s status through conducting the pilgrimage is a phenomenon that is not confined to Indonesian Muslim women in the current era of social media. For the hajj of elite and royal women in the Ottoman period see Sayeed (2016: 73–74).

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

39

“expertise is confirmed through the use of photographs” that display “family skills and happiness”. Husband and wife of the keluarga sakinah are portrayed as responsible citizens of the Indonesian nation and as pious Muslims that take particular effort to care for and religiously educate their children. Taking the children on a pilgrimage to Mecca can thus be seen as a particularly noble way to translate the keluarga sakinah into action. In light of this, educating one’s children implies turning them into religious tourists and the pilgrimage into a family holiday that is exhibited accordingly on one’s social media accounts. Posting pilgrimage pictures thus has become a perfect practice of display that constitutes middle-class positioning today. It is important to note here that posting such happy family pictures is a practice almost exclusively pursued by women. On these pictures, women appear together with their family in their roles as wives and mothers. Positioned within the realm of the keluarga sakinah, these visual representations are anchored in a space of high legitimacy, as they perfectly correspond with the ideal of a happy harmonious family. This has to be seen against the backdrop of public debates concerning the public role of women in Indonesian society. As Carla Jones (2012: 146) has argued, “middle-class women are at the center of anxieties about how the rise of a public consumer culture threatens private morality”. In these discourses, middle-class women are portrayed as self-serving individuals occupied with their career, the consumption of expensive goods and their fashion-conscious outward appearance. Another figure that has become an object of these debates is the fashionably pious woman that, representing a response to their more secular counterparts in the first place, has come under criticism as well, i.e. “for pursuing piety as a fashion statement rather than as a religious statement” (Jones, 2012: 161). In light of these controversies about the public appearances of middle-class women, pilgrimage pictures seem to constitute a rather safe haven of gendered display, given that the strictly regulated clothes of female hajj pilgrims are incontestable.13 Concerning the umroh that allows for more flexible Islamic clothing, this is not entirely true, as umroh dresses of Indonesian celebrities sometimes do

13 They should of course be worn in the correct way. And if they are, the pictures have to be manipulated in order to provoke debate, as happened in the highly politicized case of Jokowi’s umroh discussed above.

40

M. SLAMA

arouse debate.14 However, the visual self-representation of celebrities comprises a different logic of display from the family pictures posted by Indonesian middle-class women enacting the keluarga sakinah image. Wearing Islamic clothes in the presence of one’s husband and children displayed for family and friends is meant to evoke other associations than the posing of celebrities in Muslim dresses for their large crowd of fans.15 By posting these pictures middle-class women rather reassume a role online that has been assigned to them in their offline life, namely being responsible for creating a harmonious atmosphere in the family, which includes letting people know about their happy family.16 Compared to other gendered middle-class activities, the pilgrimage is a comparatively uncontested, legitimate form of consumption, especially if it is conducted with the family, and this status of legitimacy also applies to its visualizations. However, from a theological standpoint, media practices that display forms of Islamic worship are not unproblematic and rather ambiguous when it comes to their signification. For example, posting religious activities on social media may invite accusations that one is committing riya’ , i.e. showing off one’s piety, which is strongly discouraged in the classic Islamic literature (Husein & Slama, 2018). Contrary to other Islamic online practices, however, posting family pictures of pilgrimages is usually not associated with riya’ . They are, evidently, associated with the happy family life of the pious keluarga sakinah, which seems to be regarded as a riya’ -free realm. In the context of the keluarga sakinah, women become wives and mothers and thus assume well-defined private 14 For the case of the Indonesian dangdut singer Iis Dahlia who posted her umroh pictures on her Instagram account, see: https://www.dream.co.id/lifestyle/pakai-rancan gan-igun-saat-umroh-baju-iis-dahlia-panen-kritik-170613h.html (accessed 16 December 2018). One of her dresses was criticized as being too colorful and tight. 15 What Crystal Abidin (2018: 17) has generally stated is also true for Indonesian

celebrities, namely that they “are increasingly duplicating their content from traditional media to social media to engage with a wider (and often younger) audience”. 16 In cases of women who experienced a divorce and subsequently remarried, the posting of pilgrimage pictures of the harmonious family can also be fuelled by the desire to display one’s emotional happiness and financial security for a social media audience that partly still consists of members of the family of the former husband. Although actual family economics might be more complicated, the ideal is that the male breadwinner takes the family to Mecca. One of my interlocutors, who did a family umroh trip with her second husband, wanted to convey exactly that message when she posted pictures of her and her husband in order to, as she said, “make them [family members of her first husband who divorced her] livid” (panas-panasin mereka).

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

41

instead of more contestable public roles. Exhibiting this privateness is thus not associated with the illicit practice of showing off one’s piety. In other words, indicating the sometimes paradoxical relationship into which notions of the public and private can enter, it is the private character of the nuclear family that turns the public display of piety into an authentic and legitimate practice.17 Given these intricate interconnections between family and piety, and the private and the public, one should not be surprised that the religious perceptions of pilgrimage pictures and associated media practices can vary. For example, one of my interlocutors described the practice of posting pictures from the hajj as dakwah, a term that summarizes activities related to proselytization (Slama, 2017: 156). Dakwah is usually performed by learned scholars of Islam and is closely associated with the practice of public preaching (see e.g. Millie, 2017), while posting pictures is a media practice requiring only minimal technological skills. By ranking the posting of pilgrimage pictures among dakwah activities, however, this particular media practice becomes a religious practice and the pilgrimage an at least partly public affair. My interlocutor particularly stressed that the family at home, i.e. members of the extended family, will see one’s pilgrimage pictures implying that they are the target audience of one’s dakwah.18 According to this perception, pictures of the nuclear family (along with other pictures of the hajj ) become tools to proselytize among the extended family, which again confirms the scalable and intrinsically ambiguous nature of being public and private in these religious online settings with the practice of dakwah being privatized and the family becoming a public. With the introduction of social media and the propagation of the pious harmonious family, the uses of family pictures have changed compared to pre-digital family photography in Indonesia, while at the same time they point to important continuities. Karen Strassler (2010: 165–206) asserts in her study of popular photography in Indonesia that in the late Suharto era this genre was understood as “documentation” (dokumentasi) of the “family history” (sejarah keluarga). Neatly arranged in photo albums, it 17 I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing to the potential paradoxes in the public–private relationship of the cases that I discuss in this chapter. 18 That pilgrims “share their experience with relatives back home” by way of using social media is also mentioned by Bunt (2016: 242). However, he does not give an account of how the pilgrims interpret this practice.

42

M. SLAMA

was intended that members of the extended family and guests view the pictures, while sitting with the host in the front room of the house, a space designated for representation in middle-class homes. The front room is indeed a special place in Indonesian homes with regard to the (visual) display of the nuclear family. According to George Quinn’s (1992) study of Javanese novels, in Javanese houses the front room “is the arena in which the public face of the family is exhibited” (ibid.: 201); it is there where “an image of social and marital stability, of prosperity, respectability and contentment, in short, of public harmony” (ibid.: 201) is cultivated. This site of public harmony is thus the perfect place to present pictures of the harmonious family. Still in today’s digital era, on the walls of the front room of middle-class homes often hang pictures that affirm this kind of Muslim middle-class status, such as pictures of the children’s graduation ceremonies at university, of weddings, as well as of pilgrimages, the Ka’ba and highly stylized portraits of the nuclear family often dressed in Islamic clothes. The popularity of the latter pictures along with Islamic calligraphy, which is also displayed in the front room, led Moeslim Abdurrahman (2000: 188) to speak of “Islamized” guest rooms that he could observe in Muslim middle-class homes in the 1990s. One can thus discern continuities between the pictures posted on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Muslim middle-class women and the pictures that hang in the front room of Muslim middle-class homes. Just like the digital pilgrimage pictures, the photographs that are exhibited in front rooms bear witness of legitimate consumption as it takes place in the realms of family life, religion and education—important status markers among middle-class Indonesians that are attracted by the “appeal of Islamic alternatives for clean consumption” (Jones, 2018: 194). Especially for women, both forms of visual representation, online and offline, provide opportunities to assert status without easily inviting criticism of being materialistic. Such pictures thus represent a way out of the dilemma that Muslim middle-class women face, i.e. having to emphasize middle-class status while keeping a positive image of modesty and piety. One might also say that, with these pictures, women are able to seize the hegemonic discourse of a legitimate female middle-class piety thereby undoing the ambiguous significations that pictures of a consumptive piety can provoke. While considering these similarities between offline and online realms, one should, however, not overlook the differences that are rooted in the different temporalities being at play here. Although belonging to the same

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

43

genre of middle-class family pictures, the images posted on social media are not meant to document the family history, but its activities in the here and now. One can of course use Facebook also to look into the past, but—in contrast to the family album—this seems not to be a popular practice when it comes to how pictures on social media are perceived.19 In addition to this temporal feature, pilgrimage family pictures in particular comprise also a spatial aspect, since through them temporal closeness and spatial distance find their expression in the reaffirmation of one’s middleclass status. Photography is used here to represent—almost in real time— one’s presence at a holy site in a way that perfectly conveys the image of the pious Muslim middle-class family. Due to their uses of social media, middle-class Muslims are able now to refresh this image through status updates not only in a technological but also in a sociological sense; they can literally update their middle-class status, and they can do this in an ethically acceptable way.

Concluding Remarks Focusing on pilgrimage pictures, I have tried show in this chapter that within Indonesia’s Islamic context these pictures express or are intended to express different degrees of publicness and privacy. They also bear witness to tensions between different constructions of the public and the private and to the ambiguities that representations of being public or private can entail. Tensions and ambiguities come to the fore when particular claims of being public and private are contested, when these notions are invested with new meaning (following attempts to cope with or oppose hegemonic discourses) or when it is not clear where the realm of the public ends and the private begins. Never having been regarded as a representative of the Muslim middle-class, Suharto’s hajj —our first and prominent example—nonetheless was intended to be seen as a sign of sympathy for the latter. However, the pictures of his “private” hajj do not convey the image of familial privacy but of an official journey

19 Whereas Facebook sometimes urges the user to consider older postings that auto-

matically appear on one’s timeline (chosen by an algorithm), other social media such as Snapchat—its slogan is “The fastest way to share a moment!”—make pictures inaccessible to users within a short period of time (e.g. 24 hours). Needless to say that the latter are less popular among middle-aged middle-class Indonesians that want to give their followers more time to view and react to their postings.

44

M. SLAMA

of a group that, among others, also includes family members. Although his wife and children joined the pilgrimage, the nuclear family as such is conspicuously absent. The pictures thus do not give witness of a family holiday and the perspectives taken by the photographer hardly evoke a touristic gaze, but rather the one of a court chronicler. The claim of a private family pilgrimage was foiled by exactly the same pictures that have been published (and much later republished) in order to substantiate that claim. But this contradiction was not much of a problem as long as Suharto stayed in power, since his regime was experienced in suppressing questions that arose from much more striking contradictions in his biography and his version of Indonesian history. Lacking Suharto’s means of dictating the discourse, Jokowi’s “private” umroh was even more characterized by tensions. Yet he sought to resolve these by posting exactly the pictures that were missing from Suharto’s hajj , i.e. pictures of the nuclear family, which were supposed to prove that his pilgrimage was “really” a private affair. Although Jokowi, like Suharto, went to Mecca not just with his family but with a whole entourage, the pictures suggested that this was a family pilgrimage just like so many other pilgrimages of middle-class Indonesians. Performed by the nuclear family and documented through the perspective of the tourist gaze, at least with regard to their representation the hajj and umroh began to resemble one of the global middle classes’ major private rituals, i.e. the family holiday. Posing for the “right” kind of pictures, Jokowi was using a genre of pilgrimage pictures that at the time of Suharto’s hajj was just emerging. It was thus easier for him to “prove” the privacy of his pilgrimage by doing exactly that what other Indonesian middle-class pilgrims like to do when they are in Mecca and which he might have done anyway, had he not become a politician and had he embarked on the umroh with his family as the businessman that he had been before his political career started, namely taking selfies in front of the Ka’ba. At the same time, not unlike Jokowi’s umroh, due to their mediation these middle-class pilgrimages are not confined to the private realm. In the case of presidents or presidential candidates one might argue that they are public events, whatever the prominent pilgrims themselves might claim them to be. In the case of middle-class Indonesians who are not public figures, the particular visual representations that circulate on social media make these family pilgrimages also into something that cannot be described as an exclusively private affair. These pictures speak to a public of different scales in terms of its actual size and publicness, and

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

45

they are posted to convey particular messages. Thus, it can be only a small step from the politics of being public/private that we have encountered in the Suharto and Jokowi cases to the micropolitics of middle-class Muslims as they are pursued within Indonesian families and other smaller social environments. Especially these micropolitics are highly gendered with regard to how they relate to questions of the legitimacy of the public appearance of pious Muslim women, given that visual representations are often perceived as morally ambiguous. However, with pilgrimage pictures evoking the pious Muslim middle-class family, Muslim women have found a perfect photographic genre to present themselves as pious women to particular publics of extended family and friends. In other words, pilgrimage pictures provide glimpses into one’s private life that at the same time represent legitimate and authentic piety to limited publics. To whatever extent these publics might differ from case to case in terms of size and their actual publicness, a crucial point that I want to reaffirm in this conclusion is that the pious Muslim middle-class family needs an audience to confirm its status. Here, again, pilgrimage pictures help us to grasp how this audience can be constructed, namely as a public that is welcome to partake in one’s pious experiences and intimate familial moments. In this vein, the extended family can be imagined as a social universe where proselytization (dakwah) through posting visual images takes place. Posting thus becomes a pious deed, and what the social media audience is intended to see is the enactment of an ideal of spiritual and familial harmony. In this regard, social media accounts are reminiscent of the front rooms of middle-class homes. Like their offline counterparts, these digital front rooms are located at the interstices of the public and the private, eliciting dynamics in terms of space and temporality that make it even more difficult to distinguish clearly between public and private realms, as conventional Western social science literature would like us to do. As I have tried to show by means of different cases of pilgrimage pictures, images of the nuclear family can represent both at the same time, familial intimacy and public piousness, and both are far from innocent when it comes to the (micro)politics that these notions can entail. Acknowleggments This chapter represents an outcome of the Austrian Science Fund project Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia (FWF P26645-G22) that I led from 2014 to 2018.

46

M. SLAMA

References Abdurrahman, M. (2000). On Hajj Tourism: In Search of Piety and Identity in the New Order Indonesia. PhD thesis: University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Abidin, C. (2018). Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. Emerald Publishing. Alatas, I. F. (2016). The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Assembling Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to H . ad.ramawt, Yemen. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58(3), 607–635. Berlant, L. (2008). The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke University Press. Brenner, S. (1998). The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth and Modernity in Java. Princeton University Press. Brenner, S. (2011). Private Moralities in the Public Sphere: Democratization, Islam, and Gender in Indonesia. American Anthropologist, 113(3), 478–490. Bunt, G. R. (2016). Decoding the Hajj in Cyberspace. In E. Tagliacozzo & S. M. Toorawa (Eds.), The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam (pp. 231–249). Cambridge University Press. Darmadi, D. (2013). Hak Angket Haji: Pilgrimage and the Cultural Politics of Hajj Organization in Contemporary Indonesia. Studia Islamika, 20(3), 443–466. Campo, J. E. (2016). Visualizing the Hajj: Representations of a Changing Sacred Landscape Past and Present. In E. Tagliacozzo & S. M. Toorawa (Eds.), The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam (pp. 269–287). Cambridge University Press. Heiman, R., Freeman, C., & Liechty, M. (Eds.). (2012). The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography. School for Advanced Research Press. Hefner, R. W. (2000). Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton University Press. Heryanto, A. (1999). The Years of Living Luxuriously. In M. Pinches (Ed.), Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia (pp. 159–187). Routledge. Hoesterey, J. B. (2016). Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru. Stanford University Press. Hoesterey, J. B. (2017). Sincerity and Scandal: The Cultural Politics of ‘fake piety’ in Indonesia. In M. Slama & C. Jones (Eds.), Piety, Celebrity, Sociality: A Forum on Islam and Social Media in Southeast Asia. American Ethnologist website, November 8. http://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/ piety-celebrity-sociality/sincerity-and-scandal Husein, F., & Slama, M. (2018). Online Piety and Its Discontent: Revisiting Islamic Anxieties on Indonesian Social Media. Indonesia and the Malay World, 46(134), 80–93. Jones, C. (2012). Women in the Middle: Femininity, Virtue, and Excess in Indonesian Discourses of Middle Classness. In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, &

2

CONSPICUOUS PILGRIMAGES AND THE POLITICS …

47

M. Liechty (Eds.), The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography (pp. 145–168). School for Advanced Research Press. Jones, C. (2018). Consumption and the New Middle Classes. In R. Hefner (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia (pp. 187–196). Routledge. Liddle, R. W. (1996). The Islamic Turn in Indonesia: A Political Explanation. The Journal of Asian Studies, 55(3), 613–634. Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., Spyer, J., Venkatraman, S., & Xinyuan, W. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. UCL Press. Millie, J. (2016). Re-Embedding Media Trajectories of the Islamic Resurgence. In D. Black, O. Khoo, & K. Iwabuchi (Eds.), Contemporary Culture and Media in Asia (pp. 111–121). Rowman & Littlefield. Millie, J. (2017). Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam. Cornell University Press. Quinn, G. (1992). The Novel in Javanese: Aspects of Its Social and Literary Character. KITLV Press. Salazar, N. B., & Graburn, N. H. H. (2014). Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Tourism Imaginaries. In N. B. Salazar & N. H. H. Graburn (Eds.), Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (pp. 1–28). Berghahn. Sayeed, A. (2016). Women and the Hajj. In E. Tagliacozzo & S. M. Toorawa (Eds.), The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam (pp. 65–84). Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, L. (2017). Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular and Visual Culture. Rowman & Littlefield. Slama, M. (2014). From Wali Songo to Wali Pitu: The Travelling of Islamic Saint Veneration to Bali. In B. Hauser-Schäublin & D. Harnish (Eds.), Between Harmony and Discrimination: Negotiating Religious Identities within Majority/Minority Relationships in Bali and Lombok (pp. 112–143). Leiden. Slama, M. (2017). Social Media and Islamic Practice: Indonesian Ways of Being Digitally Pious. In R. Tapsell & E. Jurriens (Eds.), Digital Indonesia: Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Revolution (pp. 146–162). Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Slama, M. (2021). Tracing Digital Divides in Indonesian Islam: Ambivalences of Media and Class. CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East and Islamic World, 15(1), 290–313. Strassler, K. (2010). Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java. Duke University Press. Tagliacozzo, E. (2013). The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Oxford University Press. Tim Penyusunan dan Penerbitan Buku Perjalanan Ibadah Haji Pak Harto. (1994). Perjalanan ibadah haji Pak Harto. Toko Gunung Agung. Urry, J. (2002). The Tourist Gaze (2nd ed.). Sage.

CHAPTER 3

Minority Islam in Indonesia’s Public Square: The Shia Emergence and Its Effects Dede Syarif

Why would a religious group movement aspire to a public presence? Why would it wish that its activities be witnessed by other citizens? What does it gain from such a presence that is denied to it in its non-public existence? These questions might not have relevance in plural political environments of the West, where governments stand back from practical engagement in religion, intending to create a level playing field for citizens to pursue their religion with their own resources. In Indonesia, however, these questions have important implications for the social and political order. This is especially evident in Bandung, the city where I teach and live. In Bandung, many religious actors care very much about the public presence of religious movements, to the point where they are prepared to plan and commit resources to establish their own public presence, and/or to undertake actions in opposition to the public presence of other groups. We have recently observed a minority Islamic current (Shiism) achieve a

D. Syarif (B) Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, UIN, Bandung, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_3

49

50

D. SYARIF

public presence it was previously denied, only to be met by a countermovement specifically wanting it to return to the private domain. Those events are the empirical focus of this chapter. The answers to the questions above are not to be encountered in any attributes internal to religion, but in the social and political contexts within which religious forms are enabled to enjoy different levels of legitimacy, and within which access to the status of ‘public’ is not evenly distributed. My discussion below adds to a growing body of literature that addresses the reorganisation of Indonesia’s religio-political constellation that took place in Indonesia after 1998, when the authoritarian period presided over by President Suharto (1921–2008) ended (Buehler, 2016; Formichi & Feener, 2015; Hasan, 2006; Hilmy, 2010; Menchik, 2016; Mietzner, 2009). I focus specifically on the aspiration of a minority religious group to achieve a public profile and the projects of resistance to this process. I argue that this aspiration and resistance can be explained by looking back on a recent history of authoritarian government, and on a specific status quo determined by the legal constraints the Suharto regime placed on public association. The effects of that status quo help to explain why a public presence is a desirable thing in the present period of liberalisation. They also explain why public actors are willing to mount such resistance to the liberalisation. The public and private geographies of Indonesian Islam were radically changed with the reform of the Indonesian political sphere that commenced upon the end of the Suharto period (1966–1998). Throughout the Suharto era, religious activity in the public arena was severely constrained by a government wanting to insulate its development programs from critique and accountability. Some Islamic organisations were enabled to have public status on the condition that their political action remain limited, while others were completely prohibited from all activity. After the end of the Suharto period, however, many of Indonesia’s religious currents emerged publicly after three decades of invisibility (Bamualim, 2015; Burhani, 2014). They emerged from an existence in which they were unable to advocate for their programs or reveal their existence in public, into an environment where they had a legitimate expectation that their members would enjoy public performance of worship and would be able to establish institutions. Islamic minorities such as the Ahmadiyyah and Shia asserted public profiles, as did the followers of local belief systems. As this happened, religious freedom was

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

51

endorsed as a public value, especially in the period of President Abdurrahman Wahid (1999–2001) who advanced a number of reforms with the intention of moving towards institutionalised religious pluralism in the country. In what follows, I observe the emergence of one group from the status of ‘nonpublic’, their motivations for doing so, and the consequences of this emergence for Indonesia’s public Islamic sphere.

The Status Quo of Public Islam A key question in this chapter is: what motivates a religious group to work towards a public profile? Answering this question involves paying attention to the constraints that shape public Islam in a Sunni-dominated urban centre such as Bandung. A set of legal tools used by the state has contributed to the shaping of public Islam. During the Suharto era, the government imposed restrictions on public association and political activity. This body of regulation is known as the law concerning ‘civil society organisations’ (Ind: organisasi kemasyarakatan or ormas ). Simply put, these laws made it mandatory that all social and religious organisations were to obtain official status by applying for a permit to the Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1985, a new condition was introduced: all political, community and religious organisations were to have Indonesia’s state ideology (Pancasila, or Five pillars) and the 1945 Constitution as their sole ideological bases. This was a high point of Indonesian authoritarianism (Hefner, 2000; Heryanto & Mandal, 2003: 6). It is important to note that these laws did not ban any religious orientation, but they meant that a religious organisation without legal status could not hold activities in public space, could not own and manage institutions. In short, it could not have a public presence. The Muslim civil society organisations that were enabled to exist as public bodies consisted of a number of ‘heritage’ institutions that had been established in the colonial period. These organisations represented the main factions of the massive Sunnite majority of the country (Traditionalist, Modernist, Reformist, Arab Indonesians, etc.). These organisations were forced to curb their political programs to remain as public institutions, and no change was allowed to the status quo thereby formed. In this way, the status quo bolstered Sunni Islam as the national Islamic identity. That dominant identity continues to be prevalent today, when its self-identifying label has become Ahlu al-sunnah wa al-jama‘ah

52

D. SYARIF

(People of the Prophetic Traditions and the Congregation). This label is basically a synonym for Sunnite, and is usually interpreted to exclude the Shia communities of the Islamic world. Islamic minorities did not generally have public profiles during this period. The group whose public emergence I focus upon here is a minority Muslim group that self-identifies as Shia. The members of this group amount to probably less than 1.2% of the Muslim community.1 The organisation claiming to represent them did not gain its status under the Civil Society Law until 2000, in the early years of the post-authoritarian period. The public emergence of this organisation, called the Indonesian Association of Congregations of the People of the Prophet’s Household (IJABI), tells us much about the politics of the public/private distinction in Indonesian Islam. The above-mentioned framework that regulated civil society organisations of the Suharto period is still in use today. It has remained controversial. The framework was amended in 2013. Those amendments made it harder for the state to withdraw the legal status of a civil society organisation. In a controversial amendment made by the government in 2017, however, the president claimed back power over civil society organisations by removing the requirement that Parliament approves a withdrawal of legal status. This amendment was specifically intended to allow the government to remove from public activity religious organisations that it deemed unsupportive of the state ideology and constitution. In other words, the regulatory mechanism is still used by Indonesia’s democratically elected government. In 2011, legal status was granted to the millenarian group known as The Nusantara Dawn Movement (Gafatar). In 2016 this legal status was withdrawn by a Joint Decree by the Minister of Home Affairs and the Minister of Religious Affairs. Two reasons led the Ministers to take this step. First, leaders of the movement were facing prosecution under Indonesia’s blasphemy law, and second, the movement had been the focus of serious aggression from 1 Official census figures record Muslims as an undifferentiated category, so they provide no detail about the internal diversity of the Muslim population. In an interview, the Shia leader Jalaluddin Rakhmat estimated that the Shia community was around 2.5 million, equating to around 1.2% of Indonesia’s Muslim community. I am not suggesting this figure is correct, but it has the merit of being an informed estimate by a qualified observer. See ‘Kang Jalal on Shia in Indonesia’, Tempo News (4 Sep 2012), http://www.tempo.co/ read/ news/2012/09/04/055427522, accessed 23 Aug 2017.

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

53

protesters objecting to its teaching and doctrines, which were interpreted as aspirations for the creation of a community that could be independent of the state. More recently, in 2017 the transnational mass organisation known as the Party of Liberation (Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, or HTI) had its legal status withdrawn. The reason for this step was that HTI’s Islamic program included the struggle for a global caliphate, a goal which compromises its loyalty to the constitution and state ideology. The correctness of both decisions is hotly debated in Indonesia, but they illustrate the continued use of bureaucratic measures to constrain public action by religious groups. This legal-bureaucratic framework has important connections with other registers of publicness. It connects to the spatial visibility of religious practice, by which I mean the witnessing of religious performance in public locations. The religious texture of public space is a feature of Indonesian life that differs from conceptions of public and private that govern some public domains in the West, where public space is generally not considered as the site for the private performance of religion. In societies of the European tradition, public space is held to represent universal values that some citizens might see as being threatened by religious performance. In Indonesia, however, citizens are accustomed to religious performance in public. Furthermore, Islamic spaces are frequently used by Muslims of diverse segments. This is unlike for example the Christian tradition in which denominations establish houses of worship for sole use by their denomination alone. Public Islamic spaces in Bandung, such as the mosques owned by the state and communities, are used by Muslims of contrasting orientations. As I show below, Indonesians expect that public space will be used by religious groups, but at the same time, the Civil Society Law can limit the range of groups that are free to do so. Many religious groups place great importance on their activities being witnessed publicly. Places of worship are not merely spaces for ritual performance. They enable groups to communicate their existence to the broader community, to make implicit claims in support of the public value of the group, and to create important solidarities with other groups. Performance on the public stage provides members with a sense of confidence to practice their religious activity alongside other groups that make up Indonesia’s plural community. The public performance also securitises a religious group, for public witnessing gives some legitimacy to the public acceptability of the group concerned: citizens assume that the

54

D. SYARIF

group has been approved by the authorities that makes decision about permissible Islamic forms. Bandung has important sites for this kind of public witnessing. These have different grades of publicness. State-owned places of worship are the most public. For example, Bandung’s central square is dominated by a massive mosque owned by the provincial government that has become an icon of the city. It sits in a park that is used by families visiting from outside the city. The city has other large mosques owned by municipal governments, and a multi-function Centre for Islamic Dakwah (Pusdai) in the centre of Bandung. These are public resources with rosters and schedules in which the names of various Muslim groups of Bandung feature (Millie et al., 2014). Formal recognition under the Civil Society Law is essential for a group wanting to participate in public locations. It is illegal for a religious organisation without status to, for example, hold a collective prayer ritual on a public field. Permission to hold religious activities in a state-owned facility is also difficult without legal status. This notion of public Islam leads to the problems at the centre of this chapter. State-owned mosques are public assets, and it follows reasonably from this that all Islamic currents are entitled to performance within such assets. At the same time, the management committees that control access to such facilities operate under the influence of the status quo just mentioned. Often, the members of the committee will in fact be influential figures in the organisations that have a privileged position within that status quo, and that identity might lead them to refuse access to certain groups. Apart from the committees, members of the surrounding communities are often sensitive to the nature of Islamic activities taking place in its mosques. There are Sunni actors who take an interest in the range of activities taking place in locations like the Centre for Islamic Dakwah, and make a public issue when religious actors they deem unsuitable hold activities in them. This is indeed what happened after the public emergence of IJABI in the early 2000s. Some Muslim figures in Bandung—officials, activists, organisers, scholars—were not ready to consider that the group was entitled to a public presence, even after it had received the necessary recognition under the Ormas law. This leads to an important question: Is the committee of a public mosque entitled to reject an application for access from a group that has been granted legal status under the Civil Society Law? That question illustrates the key issues here, for it points to the possibility of disjunction between the administrative and popular modes of

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

55

publicness. The granting of legal status under the Civil Society Law appears to provide the green light for the establishment of a public presence by an Islamic group. Yet the granting of such an approval does not always run in parallel with broad acceptance of the religious group concerned. The conditions for broad acceptance need to be understood in the context of the status quo established during the authoritarian period. The public emergence of IJABI shows that public Islam facilitates contradictory expectations in Indonesia: religious groups aspire to the legitimacy and acceptance that comes with public status, but at the same time, the scope of public Islam is understood narrowly by some Muslims and Muslim activists.

The Shia Public Emergence In the early stages of Islam’s arrival in the region now known as Indonesia, it seems that concepts and symbols associated with Shia Islam were introduced to Indonesian communities (Formichi & Feener, 2015; Marcinkowski, 2009), yet the role of Shiism in the spread of Islam to Indonesia has been largely written out of the historical reflections of Sunni historians. The earlier bearers of Islam to Indonesia were, according to popular accounts, all Sunni Muslims (Sofjan, 2016). This historiography harmonised with the status quo of public Islam in the Suharto period. Shia Muslims were largely invisible to the broader public. At the same time, Shia theology and practice were constructed in the public realm as a peril to the public good, a process that Sofjan (2016) has aptly referred to as minoritisation. The political waves of the Iranian revolution of 1979, which caused concern to Sunni regimes around the world, did not help the image of this Islamic current. So while Indonesia’s Shia Muslims concealed themselves from the public gaze, the image of their religious current worsened. Their privacy made them vulnerable to false information and negative stereotyping. As is well known, Shia doctrine incorporates this need for privacy. Privacy is attributed with a sort of legitimacy through the doctrine of taqiyya (dissimulation), which is the concealment of one’s beliefs or identity when a person’s life, property or reputation is in danger. This doctrine reflects the historical reality that in many countries Shia Muslims have lived under regimes not supportive of their creed. On the same basis, Indonesian Shia have supported the practice of taqiyya (Zulkifli, 2013: 108–110).

56

D. SYARIF

With the end of the authoritarian period and the public emergence of so many groups making claims on public relevance, a sense of insecurity emerged about Islamic difference in Indonesia. Public judgements about the correctness of this or that group became a part of public communication. In this environment, the founders of IJABI faced a choice. If Shia Muslims were to continue to be an invisible minority, performing their rituals in private, without the legitimacy of public status and the acceptance that public performance signals, they would be even more vulnerable to the negative stereotyping that had already been accepted as truth by many Indonesian Muslims. This was a good reason to undertake the difficult transformation towards public acceptance. IJABI was established in July 2000 at a public declaration held in a historic building in the centre of Bandung, the capital of West Java province. After this declaration, the organisation sought legal status from the Ministry of Home Affairs, and specifically from its Director General for National Unity and Community Protection (Safwan, 2001). The permit was granted very quickly, an indication of the liberal political dynamic that was prevailing in the immediate post-authoritarian period. With this legal status, IJABI became legally equal with other mass organisations. Prior to this, public claims of Shia identity had been extremely rare in Indonesia. Some Shia institutions had maintained a very low public profile, such as the Muthahari Foundation in Bandung, a Shia institute that represented itself as an educational institution and charitable foundation. A few Shia schools in East Java had operated without revealing their Shia identity (Latief, 2008; Zulkifli, 2004). After the public declaration of 2000, IJABI could work towards gaining acceptance in the public sphere described above. The founders of the organisation, and most notably the high-profile leader and public intellectual Jalaluddin Rakhmat (1949–2021), were not focussed solely upon the proselytisation of Shia religion. This is important for understanding the Shia emergence. Rakhmat was a public intellectual during the Suharto period who preached critical Islamic ideas to audiences at his local mosque in a neighbourhood in Bandung. He had developed a radically confrontational style in which he opposed political and religio-political status quos, as well as the stagnation of thinking that he saw had been their natural consequences. His personal turn to Shiism in the 1980s can be interpreted as a strategy that engineered conflict with the Sunni status quo as a means to engender a more enlightened

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

57

public sphere in Indonesia (Latief, 2008; Malik & Ibrahim, 1998). In that sense, his Shiism is not a project that seeks to assert the superiority of a specific doctrine or worship style, but one that seeks to create an Indonesia in which minorities occupy a more visible space in public life. In IJABI’s official articles, it was indeed stated that the organisation was intended to accommodate Shiism in Indonesia and function as its ‘ark of safety’. Yet Rakhmat did not set out to create a group that was solely for Shia Muslims, but one that would also be a medium for them to integrate with their Sunni Muslim fellows (Safwan, 2001). IJABI was to be a ‘non-political, non-sectarian’ organisation that placed a higher priority on ethics and good behaviour than strict compliance with the letter of the law (Rakhmat, 2002). An example of the inclusive motivations guiding the formation of IJABI was its choice of the term ‘People of the Prophet’s Household’ (Arabic: Ahl ul-bait ) in its organisational label. This term indexes Shiism because Shia Muslims trace the origins of their group genealogically from the Prophet through the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah, the wife of ‘Ali, whom Shia regard as the originating figure of their group. Yet the term resonates for Sunni Muslims also, for the Prophet’s kin and companions are commemorated as exemplary moral figures and the first members of the Muslim community. IJABI’s articles of association state: ‘We would like to open a wide definition of the lovers of the People of the Prophet’s Household’.2 In the speech he delivered at the declaration, Rakhmat said, ‘IJABI is open to members of all currents and groups. After all, we are all united in our love for Allah, for the Prophet Muhammad, and also for the People of his Household’ (Pikiran Rakyat newspaper, July 2, 2000). In other words, the organisation welcomed support from all streams of Shiism as well as from Sunni Muslims. If the granting of status under the Civil Society Law was the first milestone in the public emergence of IJABI, the second was surely the first celebration of Ashura in public. Ashura is the most distinctive commemoration of the Shia ritual calendar, at which Shia remember the death of Husayn, the son of ‘Ali and grandson of the prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Karbala. This event is not celebrated by most Sunni Muslims. In 2010, IJABI was granted permission to celebrate its Ashura festival at the Centre for Islamic Dakwah. The Centre for Islamic Dakwah (Pusat 2 The articles of association can be viewed at the IJABI website: http://www.majulahijabi.org/visi-dan-misi.html, accessed July, 2016.

58

D. SYARIF

Dakwah Indonesia) is a multifunctional Islamic centre conceived by the provincial government in 1977–1978 in order to accommodate religious activities of different groups in West Java, particularly urban Muslims around the city of Bandung. For IJABI followers, this event marked an important moment in the transformation of the Shia community from its status as private and ‘unofficial’, to one that was legally recognised and public in its program of activities. Since then, the celebration has become a regular public occurrence. After it acquired legal status as a religious organisation, IJABI did not seek to establish an office or place of worship that would be publicly recognised as Shia. The mosques it uses, as well as the schools it owns and manages, are not designated as exclusive places for the IJABI congregation only. In my interview with Rakhmat, he explained that the spirit of IJABI was the reason for not creating a Shia identity around the institutions or places of worship used by the IJABI congregation. IJABI’s goal is to become an inclusive and open mass organisation for all groups. If the group’s public spaces were interpreted as being explicitly supportive of Shiism, this goal would be frustrated. For that reason, IJABI celebrated Ashura in spaces like the Centre for Islamic Dakwah, which are resources shared by the Province’s Islamic communities. As a mass organisation, IJABI has expanded its organisation into many contexts. For example, it has been able to expand into campuses due to the popularity amongst students of its leader, Jalaluddin Rakhmat (Latief, 2008). It has branches and sub-branches in many regions and has coordinators in regions where a branch has not yet been established. It has also expanded through the formation of specialised bodies such as the Association of Indonesian Ahl ul-Bait Students, the Board for Advocacy and Development of Law and Human Rights, and a women’s branch, Fatimiyyah. Its practical activities include the facilitation of Ashura and other celebrations, but it also aims to serve as a source of reliable information on Shism in an environment where there is no shortage of incorrect and prejudicial information in circulation. The public emergence of Shiism through the vehicle of IJABI did not simply add to the plurality of public Islam in Indonesia: it also set in motion actions by other groups advocating that it should remain in the private domain. Before turning to the specific forms of this reaction, I would like to briefly make two sociological observations about its emergence in public view, in the light of the specific nature of the public Islamic sphere described above. When IJABI was declared as a

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

59

legal organisation, this initiated a process of categorisation by which people could be understood as members or non-members of this organisation. Indonesia’s mass organisations provide ways for Indonesians to self-identify and also to understand others; they help citizens make sense of their surrounding social environments in an environment where religious identity is a matter of public not private relevance. Here now was a public classification through which community members could be allotted to the category of Shia. In this way, IJABI’s public birth laid another layer of intra- and inter-religious group identity to the mosaic of Indonesian Islam, something that has always been a source of keen contestation in the public sphere, and which often sparks religious conflict. In other words, its public emergence enabled the identification of Shia and nonShia to become a more substantive part of public communication about Islam in Indonesia. Suddenly, Muslims in Bandung encountered a new category that could be evaluated in public communication. As I explain below, much of that communication turned out to be negative in tone. The second point adds a level of sensitivity to the public systematisation of identity. As noted, the religious mission of IJABI is an inclusive and plural one. It is not accurate to understand the group as a Shia advocacy project. But even so, it is impossible for this organisation—dedicated to pursuing a distinctive Islamic program, to avoid the charge that it is prosecuting the superiority of its truth claims in comparison with the existing variants. It cannot avoid the earlier history behind the Sunni/Shia split and the ensuing contest over precedence as the true and righteous successors of the prophet Muhammad. In recent times, the bitterness of this global struggle over supremacy has increased, and many Indonesians have been caught up in the fervour of this struggle (Zulkifli, 2013: 84). In Indonesia’s conservative public sphere, the emergence of IJABI as a publically acceptable Islamic affiliation strained the status quo. The granting of the legal status and the public celebrations probably did not offend ordinary Muslims, but for groups that take an interest in public Islam and believe that it should be regulated to reflect the well-being of the Sunni majority, IJABI represented an Islamic current that ought to remain private.

60

D. SYARIF

A Public Mobilisation As noted, Indonesia’s Sunni majority has dominated public Islam in the country. The groups that form this status quo publically attest to their membership of this status quo by self-identifying under the label of Ahlu al-sunnah wa al-jama‘ah (People of the Traditions and the Congregation). In fact, the groups that claim this identity display many differences in aspects such as their legal orientations, practice and outreach programs. These differences are significant, but do not stop these groups from participating side by side in public activities. So, even though the strict legalistic orientation of, for example, The Islamic Association (Persis) distinguishes it from the more contextual positionings of public groups such as Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, they are able to perform rituals, commemorations and celebrations together, and have been doing so in Bandung for almost a century. As noted, these co-participatory rituals have never included Shia groups, at least not in Bandung. Within this status quo, responses to the Shia emergence vary greatly. A small number of incidences of serious violence against Shia communities have been widely discussed (Farida, 2014; Formichi, 2014; Makin, 2017; Panggabean & Ali-Fauzi, 2014; Takwin, 2016; Zulkifli, 2013). The largest mass organisations of Indonesia, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, maintain a neutral stance towards Shia Islam in their official programs. Nevertheless, individual Islamic leaders within these organisations, some of them holding quite senior positions, are active opponents of minority Islams. The more highly coordinated anti-Shia positions are encountered amongst the smaller activist groups, and amongst these, those that place importance on a strict interpretation of Islamic law have always advocated against Shia Islam and other minority Islamic groups. The most vocal opponent has historically been the Indonesian Council for Islamic Predication (DDII), an organisation known to be in close relations with global Islamic organisations, such as the Muslim World League (Rabitah al-‘alam al-islami) (Hasan, 2006: 32). The rank and file support for this group is extremely small. The organisation that emerged specifically to oppose the public emergence of IJABI was an alliance of these smaller organisations that included some individuals from the larger ones. The organisation was named ANNAS Indonesia (The Indonesian National Anti-Shia Alliance) and was launched in Bandung on April 20, 2014 (Farida, 2014). The leading role in the convocation of ANNAS was played by the Indonesian Forum for

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

61

Muslim Scholars and the Community (FUUI), a radical Sunnite group that emerged in 2001. This group also does not have a rank and file following, but has skillfully used media to influence public discourse on various issues including the Shia public emergence. The declaration produced at the launch of ANNAS stated four objectives: to obey the Qur’anic injunction to promote virtue and prevent vice; to take any measures necessary to prevent the spreading of heretical Shia teachings; to form good relations with other advocacy organisations and demand that the government immediately ban Shia and cancel all permits held by foundations, organisations and institutions owned by the Shia community (Farida, 2014). In my discussions with the founders of ANNAS Indonesia, it was clear that the public performance of the Ashura ritual in the Centre for Islamic Dakwah and other state-owned centres of worship was an important motivation for the formation of the Alliance. It was its transition to public status that could not be tolerated. The secretary-general of the organisation made this clear when he told me: ‘We feel that Allah’s law has been disturbed by their [IJABI] celebration in the Centre for Islamic Dakwah. If they want to shout about their beliefs in their bathrooms, that will be fine. But if they go out, we need to take action. Shia Islam is not Islam’. From this it is clear that Indonesia’s Shia should practice in private, invisible to the public. Private practice is the space in which Islamic diversity could properly emerge, while public Islam must remain a reflection of the Sunni status quo. The Alliance is a new initiative for Indonesia’s Islamic sphere, for such a mission was—like IJABI—impossible during the authoritarian period. This group was solely formed around the goal of forcing IJABI out of public life, which is an unusual rationale for public religious action in Indonesia. Some of its public actions are also unusual. For example, it organises gatherings of Sunni radicals on the festival of Ashura to protest against the public celebration of that festival. When this happened in 2014, 120 people demonstrated at Sidolig Stadium, Bandung, where thousands of Shia followers and supporters were celebrating Ashura (Farida, 2014). The constituencies of the organisations that combined to form ANNAS are numerically small, and the cause does not attract much attention from the general public, but the Alliance’s public profile is relatively high. I argue that there are three bases on which it has succeeded in establishing a public presence.

62

D. SYARIF

First, a well-established preacher was chosen as the figurehead of the organisation. The preachers of Bandung include preachers positioned at all points of the Islamic spectrum and even includes liberals like Jalaluddin Rakhmat, the founder of IJABI. Atian ‘Ali Da ‘i is Bandung’s best known conservative preacher, and is a veteran of causes opposing Islamic minorities and liberal thought in Islam. Based on this reputation, he commands a large audience in Bandung and West Java. He is important for ANNAS because he gives the Alliance an embodied presence: he is frequently invited to preach in public locations, and his routine preaching schedules attract small but consistent audiences. With him as its public face, the Alliance can point to an actual, face-to-face audience. Without him, it would find it difficult to assemble a listening audience around its cause. The second base for ANNAS’s public profile is its network. There are organisations all across Indonesia that are dedicated to protecting Sunni Islam against all manner of threats to it. They share common concerns about Islamic minorities, and ANNAS has been able to gain traction because of the combined efforts of these smaller organisations. Most of the groups and individuals that joined ANNAS had been previously involved in anti-Shia or anti-Ahmadiyah campaigns before. A third foundation for its profile is its media outreach. The organisational backing for ANNAS is accustomed to using media to influence public opinion. The Alliance’s website provides a constant stream of anti-Shia information and commentary, alongside material supporting similar programs falling within its anti-liberal mission. The sermons of Atian ‘Ali Da ‘i are posted on the site. More established media are also exploited. Advocacy and preaching on behalf of the Alliance are broadcast through radio stations (RRI Bandung) and local television (TVRI Jawa Barat). It is hard to measure the influence of these media. Nevertheless, for people seeking information about this cause, the broadcasts and websites are resources rich in facts and rhetoric. ANNAS invests in its public presence in ways other than preaching and online media. On August 28, 2022, the ‘Anti-Shia Dakwah Building’ was inaugurated in central Bandung (Lestari, 2022).3 This building is a material manifestation of the anti-Shia Movement. Through this building, the movement asserts its program in a highly visible way, and attempts 3 The building’s inauguration attracted wide attention in the Bandung media: https:/ /www.pikiran-rakyat.com/bandung-raya/pr-015394174/kemenag-sesalkan-peresmian-ged ung-dakwah-annas-di-bandung-dinilai-menebar-kebencian-beragama.

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

63

to create public legitimacy for it. The establishment of the building was supported by the Bandung City government: the mayor was present at the inauguration. The establishment of the building and the mayor’s presence at its inauguration drew strong reactions from various parties who considered the building to be a form of intolerance. Statements of disapproval were voiced by groups supporting tolerance in religious life, such as the pro-equality institute known as the Setara Institute, the West Java Inter-Religious Network, the West Java branch of the Indonesian Scholars Council (MUI) and even the central Ministry of Religion. These all deplored the Bandung City government’s support for the establishment of the Anti-Shia Da’wah Building. The building nevertheless illustrates the high importance many religious movements place on establishing a public presence (Fig. 3.1). It is hard to gauge the public influence of ANNAS. In my discussions with IJABI members, I was told that ANNAS did not have significant influence beyond the messages it continually sends into the mediated sphere through Atian’s sermons and the internet. Furthermore, there is no proof that the wider public is convinced about ANNAS’s claims about the dangers of Shiism. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, reactionary Sunnism is a growing part of everyday life, and the group has made some

Fig. 3.1 The ‘Outreach Building’ of ANNAS in Bandung, inaugurated in August of 2022 (Photo by Dede Syarif)

64

D. SYARIF

headway politically. In 2015, the mayor of the municipality of Bogor in West Java banned the public commemoration of Ashura. This mayor was known to be heavily courting Islamic leaders for political support, something that happens frequently in West Javanese politics, and he was widely criticised for the decision. Judging by Indonesian history, the Alliance will find it hard to convince many Indonesians that its cause is a good one. Indonesian Muslims are traditionally conservative, but have not rallied around divisive causes of this kind in large numbers. Public support for a tolerant and peaceful Islamic community is strong. And furthermore, the political opposition to the Alliance is significant. The founding figure of IJABI, Jalaluddin Rakhmat, became widely known and respected in Indonesia, and was even elected to Indonesia’s legislative assembly in 2014, representing West Java province. Rakhmat died in 2021, but his public action program in support of Islamic diversity is remembered widely in Indonesia. Nevertheless, the novelty of the Alliance points to a transformed public sphere. The Alliance represents a new variant of public Islam that was impossible to establish during the Suharto period. It is networked and mediated without a routine public presence and exists solely to discredit a new presence in the Muslim public sphere. In fact, a public Islam open to such reactive expressions might be the new reality of post-status quo public Islam in Indonesia.

Concluding Words These reflections on the meanings of publicness in Indonesian religion relate to a time of remarkable political transition in the country. Up until 1998, religion’s public role was tightly constrained. In 1998, Indonesians experienced a euphoric moment of political empowerment. Since that moment, however, the plurality of emerging public religious forms has appeared to threaten the cohesion that had characterised the status quo in place during the authoritarian period. The events and tensions analysed here are the legacies of that status quo. Taking the emergence of the Shia movement as an example, I have discerned three important elements of that legacy. The first is the fact that the status quo is still positively evaluated by some parties as a desirable public/private ordering of Indonesian Islam. It has a moral legitimacy for some actors within the status quo, and here I mean the activist wing of the Ahl ul-sunnah wa al-Jama’ah majority. In

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

65

their eyes the welfare of the Islamic community depends on the maintenance and protection of that status quo. The doctrines and practices of Shia Islam are, for them, a threat to the proper exercise of Islam. Those in favour of the status quo, which is not an unreasonable position to take considering Indonesia’s political history, argue that the state has a responsibility to ensure such religion remains in the private domain. However, the status quo is not positively evaluated by all, for Islamic currents not accommodated within it must remain beyond the public gaze. This is the second element of that legacy. In the democratic atmosphere arising since the end of the authoritarian period, minorities such as Indonesia’s Shia followers see a public benefit in a diversified Islamic public sphere and also are aware of the risk of minoritisation that feeds on absence from the public gaze. They are not to be constrained in their urge to go public and expect that the state will facilitate a plural public sphere. The third element of the legacy is the regulatory tools established in Indonesia’s legislation. The rules on civil society organisations were established by the Suharto government, which was intent on controlling political activity. Their scope and power have been moderated since then, but they remain in substance as tools for the government to regulate the texture of public religion. How should the state’s use of these regulatory measures relate to the status quo inherited from the authoritarian period? The most we conclude for now is that the contemporary status quo takes the form of a public tussle over the relevance of that status quo for post-authoritarian Indonesia.

References Ariel, H., & Sumit, K. M. (2003). Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia. Routledge Curzon. Bamualim, C. S. (2015). Islamisasi, Politik dan Aliran Kebatinan di Pedesaan Jawa Barat. In J. Millie & Syarif (Eds.), Islam dan Regionalisme (pp. 45–62). Pustaka Jaya. Buehler, M. (2016). The Politics of Shari’a law: Islamist Activists and the State in Democratizing Indonesia. Cambridge University Press. Burhani, A. N. (2014). Treating Minorities with Fatwas: A Study of the Ahmadiyya Community in Indonesia. Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 8(3), 285–301.

66

D. SYARIF

Farida, A. (2014). Respon Organisasi Massa Islam terhadap Syiah di Bandung Jawa Barat. Jurnal Penelitian Keagamaan Dan Kemasyarakatan, 27 (2), 159– 176. Formichi, C. (2014). Violence, Sectarianism, and the Politics of Religion: Articulations of Anti-Shia Discourse. Indonesia, 98, 1–27. Formichi, C., & Feener, R. M. (Eds.). (2015). Shia in Southeast Asia: Alid Piety and Sectarian Constructions. Oxford University Press. Hasan, N. (2006). Laskar Jihad: Islam, Militancy, and the Quest for Identity in Post-new Order Indonesia. Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Hefner, R. W. (2000). Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton University Press. Hilmy, M. (2010). Islamism and Democracy in Indonesia: Piety and Pragmatism. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Latief, H. (2008). The Identity of Shia Sympathizers in Contemporary Indonesia. Journal of Indonesian Islam, 2(2), 300–335. Lestari, Arif. (2022, August 30). Kemenag Sesalkan Peresmian Gedung Dakwah ANNAS di Bandung, Dinilai Menebar Kebencian Beragama, Pikiran Rakyat. https://www.pikiran-rakyat.com/bandung-raya/pr-015394174/kemenag-ses alkan-peresmian-gedung-dakwah-annas-di-bandung-dinilai-menebar-kebenc ian-beragama Makin, Al. (2017). Homogenizing Indonesian Islam: Persecution of The Shia Group in Yogyakarta. Studia Islamika, Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies, 24(1), 1–32. Malik, D. D., & Ibrahim, I. S. (1998). Zaman Baru Islam Indonesia: Pemikiran dan Aksi Politik Abdurrahman Wahid, M. Amien Rais, Nurcholish Madjid, dan Jalaluddin Rakhmat. Zaman Wacan Mulia. Marcinkowski, C. (2009). Selected Historical Facets of the Presence of Shi’ism in Southeast Asia. The Muslim World, 99(2), 381–416. Menchik, J. (2016). Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism. Cambridge University Press. Mietzner, M. (2009). Military Politics: Islam and the State in Indonesia—From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Millie, J., Barton, G., Hindasah, L., & Moriyama, M. (2014). Post-Authoritarian Diversity in Indonesia’s State-owned Mosques: A Manakiban Case Study. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 45(2), 194–213. Panggabean, R., & Fauzi, Ihsan A. F. (2014). Pemolisian Konflik Keagamaan di Indonesia. Jakarta: Pusat Studi Agama & Demokrasi (PUSAD) Paramadina Magister Perdamaian dan Resolusi Konflik (MPRK), UGM dan The Asia Foundation. Rakhmat, J. (2002). Dahulukan Akhlaq di atas Fiqh. Muthahhari Press.

3

MINORITY ISLAM IN INDONESIA’S PUBLIC SQUARE: THE …

67

Safwan, A. M. (2001, February 21). “Ikatan Jamaah Ahlul Bait Indonesia (IJABI) Sebagai Gerakan Sosial Keagamaan.” [Paper presented to Muslim Student Association of Agricultural Technology Department, Gajahmada University of Yogyakarta]. http://raushanfikr.tripod.com/makatul/sosioagama.htm. Accessed 27 Jan 2016. Sofjan, Dicky. (2016). Minoritization & Criminalization of Shia Islam in Indonesia. Journal of South East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, XXXIX (2), 29–44. Takwin, Bagus. (2016). Studi tentang Toleransi dan Radikalisme di Indonesia: Pembelajaran Dari 4 Daerah, Tasikmalaya, Yogyakarta, Bojonegoro dan Kupang. Infid. Zulkifli. (2004). Being a Shia among the Sunni Majority in Indonesia: A Preliminary Study of Ustadz Husein Al-Habsyi (1921–1994). Studia Islamika: Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies, 11(2), 275–308. Zulkifli. (2013). The Struggle of the Shi‘is in Indonesia. ANU E Press.

CHAPTER 4

Public Faith in Action or Private Sect: The Salvation Army in the Present Jason Davies-Kildea

A longstanding tradition for understanding the public/private dichotomy within religious groups has been through the lens of church/sect theory. Although subject to many challenges and revisions for more than a century, an enduring thread throughout this theoretical stream has focussed on the varying ways that religious groups engage with and respond to their social contexts. Those groups that align with the ‘church’ side of the theory are public-facing and interact positively with their social environment, whereas sectarian groups inhabit more private domains, frequently rejecting external social patterns in favour of an inwardly focussed subculture. While these distinctions have illuminated some of the differences between religious bodies, the same principle can be applied to better understand the dynamics of complementary and conflicting stances within groups. This more nuanced approach acknowledges the many ways that religions interact with the communities in which they exist and

J. Davies-Kildea (B) Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_4

69

70

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

suggests that there are discernible and consistent patterns within religious organisations. In Australia, the social work of The Salvation Army has wide public recognition and approval but the organisation’s presence as a church in local communities is virtually unknown. These contrasting fortunes are the direct consequence of divergent attitudes to the immediate social context. While The Salvation Army’s social programs have engaged openly and positively with social change, most of their churches have taken a sectarian turn inwards, rejecting many shifts in the external environment. Consequently, intraorganisational conflict has developed as different parts of the one organisation adopted competing positions about various social attitudes and trends, from secularisation to increasing religious pluralism and more liberal views about sexuality and gender. These positions both reflect and accentuate the distinct approaches to public and private domains, replicating tensions within the organisation that are directly related to external challenges. Building upon Mark Chaves’ (1993) framework of the ‘dual structures of denominations’, this chapter draws on a series of interviews with Salvation Army officers1 about the varying ways in which the Christian movement to which they belong is active in public-facing work, as well as the ways that it withdraws into more private religious domains. While these patterns echo many of the well-known aspects of church/sect theory, they reflect entirely new boundaries because they are occurring within the denomination itself.

Churches and Sects: Religion in Public And Private Spheres Church–sect theory is one of the earliest and most influential formulations in the sociology of religion. In its first stages, the most prominent advocates were Weber, Troeltsch and Niebuhr. Max Weber introduced the notion that church and sect can be analysed as “ideal types” (Weber, 1958: 254–255). A key distinction was the path by which members were introduced—in the church, this usually happened at birth, whereas sect membership was primarily obtained through voluntary conversion. Ernst 1 Salvation Army officers are ordained clergy who are assigned a military rank and may be appointed to a church, social service or administrative role by the organisation’s leadership.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

71

Troeltsch moved the focus of the church–sect typology from membership to a relationship with the state. For Troeltsch, the church (understood primarily as the state church) has a positive relationship to its social environment. It is externally oriented and imbued with power because it dominates the masses. Because there is a mutually beneficial relationship with the state, the church has some acceptance of ‘the secular order’. Furthermore, because it is aligned with the ruling classes, it “both stabilizes and determines the social order” (Troeltsch, 1956: 331). On the other hand, the sect is a comparatively small group, which is primarily internally oriented, focussed on ‘inward perfection’ and ‘direct personal fellowship’ (Troeltsch, 1956: 331). Richard Niebuhr saw that, under certain conditions, some sects could become churches, or more specifically denominations. Having left their roots, these new denominations lose their capacity to engage with their original mission. As sect members become further separated from the disadvantaged classes that marked their origins, they will be less able to connect with newer recruits from the ranks of the ‘underprivileged’, with whom they have less and less in common (Wilson, 1990, : 124). Niebuhr specifically names The Salvation Army as an example of this kind of movement (Niebuhr, 1929: 20–21). Church–sect theory has received a significant amount of criticism, primarily for a lack of precision and verifiability (Goldstein, 2011: 77; Swatos, 1975: 174, 1976), which has resulted in some theorists taking a more modest approach to the distinctions first proposed between different religious groups. One element is central: whereas the church side of the spectrum is characterised by accommodation and compromise, even to secular institutions and values (Bainbridge, 1997: 39), the sect is first and foremost a protest group. The subject of sectarian protest may have shifted over time from the established or mainstream church to secularisation, the state or wider social trends (Wilson, 1982: 92). However, the essential position of dissent and uncompromising values remains. More recent analyses, for example (Bainbridge, 1997: 41; Christiano et al., 2008: 91; Swatos, 1975: 177), have often taken Benton Johnson’s framing of this essential distinction as acceptance (church) or rejection (sect) of the social environment in which a religious group exists (Johnson, 1967: 127).

72

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

Varying Responses within Religious Groups What most models of church/sect theory do not consider are varying responses to the social context within religious groups themselves. Rather than being monolithic entities, most large religious bodies are made up of many constituent parts. While these separate elements may be joined under the same faith banner, they can exhibit widely differing attitudes to and actions within society. Mark Chaves’ explanation of the dual structures within denominations provides a starting point for understanding these distinctions (Chaves, 1993). Pointing to historical developments, he notes that in the nineteenth century, a range of church-based special purpose agencies evolved out of denominations including publishing bodies, financing schemes, educational institutions and various missional programs, which also covered social service provision (Chaves, 1993: 151). Since that time the religious authorities and the agencies that their denominations once birthed have become “essentially parallel structures performing different kinds of tasks, responding to different parts of the environment, coping with different kinds of uncertainty and containing separate lines of authority” (Chaves, 1993: 147–148). The agencies that were created to serve specific functions within the church usually still share a related name but in most aspects of their work have become increasingly autonomous from their parent organisations. In Australia, where faith-based organisations are the largest nongovernment provider of social and community services, there is a multitude of programs operating under the banners of various Catholic Social Services, Anglicare and Uniting agencies. They usually exist as separate legal entities from their religious counterparts with varying links from chaplaincy in services to reserved positions on the board for clergy representation. Among its peers in this field, The Salvation Army has the most integrated structure, with all churches and social programs reporting through the same lines of organisational authority. However, this unified system also accentuates the differences between each stream, including varying approaches to the public/private dichotomy. These dual structures have fundamentally different goal orientations. Religious authority structures are internally focussed while agencies look outward (Chaves, 1993: 155). Chaves’ perspective is that churches exist largely for the benefit of their own members. On the other hand, agency functions, such as social services, exist explicitly for the benefit of others.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

73

These services are evaluated according to their impact on those outside the organisation, while churches (especially within the evangelical tradition) are judged on their ability to increase the number of people inside their own walls. The insight that denominations can be analysed as dual structures reveals important contrasts and dynamics within religious organisations. It also facilitates cross-denominational comparisons, as the common features of religious authority structures and agencies across different faith groups become clearer. Although the nature of the divide between these dual structures differs between churches due to varying ecclesiological and governance systems, the patterns of conflict are readily recognisable. The identification of varying goal orientations between churches and their agencies brings into focus the ways that organisational priorities and messages are shaped by their social environments. A religious group that sets itself against society will not form easy alliances with those who are more in tune with their social context. So, when two parts of the same denomination find themselves aligned in opposite directions, as interviews with Salvation Army officers revealed, tensions can be expected to arise.

The Salvation Army Today The Salvation Army is an international movement, founded over 150 years ago in London and brought to Australia in 1880. Its military nomenclature originally served to communicate the missional idea of being at war with sin and evil; it also produced a hierarchical organisational structure that suited its founder’s authoritarian leadership style. Organisational authority continues to be invested almost exclusively in The Salvation Army’s officers, who form the senior leadership of the organisation and hold executive decision-making power over all aspects of its work. Today, The Salvation Army exists in 128 countries and operates in more than 175 different languages. Just over 1.1 million soldiers2 make up its ranks, under the leadership of more than 16,000 active officers (The Salvation Army, 2017: 29). The Salvation Army has one international leader, its General, who operates out of the International Headquarters 2 A soldier is an adult Salvationist who has signed a covenant that commits them to a series of organisational beliefs and behaviours and has been enrolled in a Salvation Army church or ‘corps’.

74

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

(IHQ), which is still located in London. Administratively, the work of The Salvation Army is then broken up into geographic zones, territories and divisions. Australia currently belongs to the South Pacific and East Asia Zone. Since 1921, the country has been divided into two territories, the Australia Southern Territory (Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia) and the Australia Eastern Territory (New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and Queensland). At the time of writing, these two territories have just been merged back into a single national entity, the culmination of a three-year process that highlighted many of the internal tensions mentioned in this chapter. Some 313 Salvation Army churches, known as ‘corps’, are spread across Australia. Just over 900 Salvation Army officers, who are ordained clergy, can be found in both corps and social work in varying roles from hospital chaplain to youth worker, international disaster relief provider and ‘flying padre’.3 While almost all corps are led by officers, The Salvation Army’s social services are much more dependent upon professional staff and volunteers. Currently, there are almost 10 times more staff than officers and approximately twice as many volunteers as there are staff (The Salvation Army, 2017). Since its birth in the revival period of the mid-nineteenth century, The Salvation Army has remained dedicated to soul-saving evangelism at the core of its theology and practice (The Salvation Army, 2010: 132–133, 142). Not only has this commitment generated periodic tensions with the more pragmatic social service arm of the movement, but in an increasingly secular and pluralistic Australian society, this evangelistic project has been demonstrably failing for at least 50 years. Compounding an inability to attract outsiders into the church side of the organisation, there has also been a steady exodus of young people from the movement. Being born into the faith is not proving enough to hold on to young Salvationists,4 the clear majority of whom leave by the end of their teen years—though this is a pattern familiar to other churches as well (Hughes et al., 2010).

3 The flying padre is an officer appointment that encompasses both pastoral care and practical assistance to remote communities in the north of Australia. 4 ‘Salvationists’ is a term that refers broadly to the church membership of The Salvation Army.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

75

Although the organisation itself is highly recognised in Australia, much less is known about the inner workings of The Salvation Army and especially its religious elements. Yet, these elements are key to understanding the specific drivers of conflict within the organisation.

An Army Divided The decline experienced by Salvation Army corps in recent decades coincides with a massive expansion of social programs. This expansion has been directly aided by changes in government policy that saw large-scale outsourcing of social and community services. The Salvation Army’s social program leadership took advantage of these policy changes because their fundamentally external orientation put them more in tune with their environment and they were ready to adapt to new opportunities. In 1986, the Australia Southern Territory was reporting social expenditure of just under $50 million, by 2005 it was more than $357 million (The Salvation Army, 2006). In the decade between 2005 and 2014, while adult corps membership declined by almost a third, the number of employees (now a measure almost entirely dedicated to social program and support staff) doubled, moving from just over 2552 to 5152 (The Salvation Army, 2005, 2014). At current rates, there will be more employees than Senior Soldiers in the Territory within five years. For those Salvationists who are already worried that The Salvation Army’s public image is dominated by its social programs, this represents a concerning shift in the balance of power. Historian Norman Murdoch argued that as early as 1890 the division of The Salvation Army’s work and its officers into separate wings “created two classes of Salvationists … The Army’s evangelists (spiritual wing) saw their mission as converting souls in Army corps (mission halls), a view that tended to alienate them from social wing officers and employees who worked to mend social inequities” (Murdoch, 2003: 1–2). According to Murdoch, because most of The Salvation Army’s leadership comes from the ‘spiritual wing’, social officers are seen as ‘second class’ and the alienation created over a century ago continues to be prevalent today. He claims explicitly that in “the Army’s officer ranks, all of whom are trained as evangelists, the social wing has always played second chair to soul saving” (Murdoch, 2003: 11). This comes in direct opposition to the external image of the movement, which celebrates its social work while largely ignoring its spiritual work. Murdoch notes that “the Army,

76

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

as Salvationists have seen it, contrasted remarkably with its public image ‘as others saw it’” (Murdoch, 2003: 1–2). Roland Robertson gives The Salvation Army’s social wing credit for both its acceptance by the wider society and a good degree of its accommodation to that society (Robertson, 1967: 55). Yet he also recognises the paradox inherent here. Although The Salvation Army’s social work is the basis upon which it has gained respect, been accorded many honours and indeed achieved a form of ‘indispensability’, “its doctrine, social teachings, organisation and the demands which it makes upon its members all underline the essentially sectarian nature of its self-conception” (Robertson, 1967: 55). However, Robertson also detects some compromise in its relationship towards society occurring in both the social and doctrinal positions of The Salvation Army (Robertson, 1967: 74). The former is accelerated by an essentially outward orientation characteristic of social services, while the latter is slowed by the more inward-leaning sectarian tendencies that favour tradition and conservativism. John Hazzard picked up similar trends, noting that The Salvation Army, like many other evangelical denominations, is largely unwilling to change its theology to reflect the increasingly dominant secular assumptions of society. Yet, when it comes to social issues, the organisation is more in line with mainstream denominations and the wider sociocultural environment (Hazzard, 1998: 128). The Salvation Army, in its component parts, wants essentially to reject secular society at the same time as it is being embraced by it. Because they were looking at the overarching organisational structure, which is typically dominated by evangelicals, neither Robertson nor Hazzard mention that the theology evolving in social programs tends to be more progressive, or that the social views of corps’ members can be much more conservative. However, the recognition of the fundamental difference between the dual structures of The Salvation Army allows for separate attention to be paid to the ‘world-affirming’ or ‘worlddenying’ behaviours of the organisation’s constituent parts; how these form consistent patterns and the ways in which competing approaches lead to conflict. Furthermore, utilising the church/sect focus on the relationship of a religious group to its environmental context complements the dual structures of denominations approach because it: (a) connects well with the claim that religious authority structures tend to be internally oriented, while agencies mostly look externally and (b) helps to

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

77

interpret the varying religious responses in each structural element, rather than simply assuming that one is religious and the other is not. The general lack of understanding among the Australian public of the religious aspects of The Salvation Army can be partially explained by secularisation. However, it also reflects the retreat of what was once a ‘religion of the streets’ to a more private sphere.

The Private Life of Salvationists For most Salvationists today, being part of Army life was not something that they chose—at least not until later in life: it was part of their family heritage. The National Church Life Survey showed that in the Australia Southern Territory, The Salvation Army had the highest level of ‘newcomers’ (people who had not previously been part of another church) of any denomination. However, this rate was still only 11 per cent and had decreased consistently over the past 10 years (NCLSResearch, 2012). The Salvation Army’s church membership, once built with converts from the streets, has become dominated by its own children. A few comments from interviews with Salvation Army officers illustrate the close ties between family and church: I was born into [The Salvation Army]. My parents were soldiers and actually it goes back to about … to my great, great grandparents. … as I found out more about my family in later life, I was related to probably 90 per cent of the people who attended. In hindsight, it was a family church, although growing up I knew I had aunts and uncles and great aunts there and great uncles but you don’t realise that when you’re growing up. … So my first entrance into The Salvation Army was at two weeks old, my mother tells me. (Participant 14) Born and bred into it – fifth generation. … Very traditional corps, very staid in terms of it was really all about earning your right to passage being through your usual sections whether it be your band and songsters and those sorts of things. It was never really about faith for me, nor was that kind of modelled. [It was about belonging to a group] and in that you’ll find your acceptance. (Participant 17) Grew up. Child of the regiment. My dad was CSM [Corps Sergeant Major]. Would have been a middle-sized traditional corps. 100-120 perhaps but brass band, songsters, etc. Number two corps in the Territory

78

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

… My dad was YPSM [Young People’s Sergeant Major] for twenty years, CSM for twenty years, and then finished all that when he was under fifty, so he started his leadership really early. My grandfather was a Divisional Envoy so I’ve certainly got the colours running through me. (Participant 5) Family were Salvationists and grandparents were Salvationists. So born into the Army culture, grew up through the ranks. … It’s a fairly traditional setting, musical sections and expectations to take part in a musical section. Grew up, YP [Young People’s] band, went into the Songsters and the Senior Band, obviously progressed through Junior Soldiership and did Senior Soldiership. (Participant 8)

The strong association between church and family life comes in stark contrast to the early revivalist days of The Salvation Army, which were characterised by large numbers of converts rather than familial association. Niebuhr speaks to this transition from a sect made up of converts who choose to participate and a church, whose primary membership stems from its own birth rate: The children born to the voluntary members of the first generation begin to make the sect a church … For with their coming the sect must take on the character of an educational and disciplinary institution, with the purpose of bringing the new generation into conformity with ideals and customs which have become traditional. (Niebuhr, 1929: 19–20)

The twin elements of education and discipline that Niebuhr identifies are neatly summed up in this short quote from one participant who said this about growing up in The Salvation Army: “Did it all – Directory,5 Junior Soldiers,6 Corps Cadets,7 yes sir, no sir” (Participant 19). A range of educational programs was developed to help young people learn and grow until they were ready for Senior Soldiership, the symbol

5 A very early form of childhood education in Salvation Army distinctives for children

up to 7 years of age. 6 A young person who from the age of 7 may make a commitment to Christian faith and who follows a course of education within The Salvation Army. 7 Usually following on from Junior Soldiership, a Corps Cadet is high school age and makes a further commitment to studying the Bible, prayer and active participation in the life of a Salvation Army corps.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

79

of full active participation as a member of The Salvation Army. Army life began at birth, when you were entered onto the Cradle Roll, and transitioned through Primary (a pre-Sunday School group), Directory and Sunday School to Junior Soldiers and Corps Cadets. Apart from Directory, which no longer exists, all the others continue to play an active part in the development of children in The Salvation Army today through to at least their mid-teens. In addition to these education programs, young people were often involved in musical groups—junior bands, singing groups and timbrels. The Salvation Army even has its own version of scouting activities, SAGALA (Salvation Army Guarding and Legion Activities), which has separate groups for boys and girls across three age ranges: Explorers and Moonbeams; Adventurers and Sunbeams; Guards and Rangers. This intensive educational and group activity schedule functioned to prepare individuals to live within the sectarian movement and oriented their attention inwards to more private domains. One of the outcomes of such a wide range of activities was that those involved in The Salvation Army rarely had much time to do anything outside the church. One officer describing the “47 things [the Army] had on in a week” suggested that, at the very least, it produced a good work ethic among those involved (Participant 3). However, all of this internally generated activity also produced and perpetuated an easily identifiable sub-culture that separated insiders from outsiders. For young people in my day, The Salvation Army was a very strong culture. It was the culture I understood best and felt more comfortable in. So, your Army mates were your real mates, your school mates were sort of peripheral mates. I suppose I only ever thought about the culture in relation to when I went to school on a Monday and other kids hadn’t done all the things I’d done on weekend, other kids’ parents had a drink, other kids had different experiences on a weekend for example. We soldiered in an inner-city corps, it was the largest corps in Brisbane, so it was ‘the’ Salvation Army corps. The culture was something I never analysed as a child because it was just something that you were part of. So, you got up on Sunday, you went to Sunday School, you went home and had lunch, you went back in for afternoon Sunday School and the band went to the park and then you went to Junior Soldiers after that and you stayed for the night meeting. Your mates and you would hoon around, so it was all lived in relation to a very stable friend group, which you had for the whole of your life (Participant 3).

80

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

While the strength of The Salvation Army subculture was in its ability to reaffirm a sense of belonging for those on the inside, there was a corresponding problem for those who were unable or unwilling to keep up with every aspect of the subcultural milieu. In some cases, this could be seen in a loss of perspective, such as the corps that “were embarrassed because we were Lieutenants and this was a Majors’ appointment. They were still in high neck [uniform] and bonnets” (Participant 17). Sometimes, it was a rigidity that alienated young people: “That was a culture where you bought your shoes off the band, you had to wear your cap in the car …. Not that any of us ever did that but I mean that was a very controlling … there were two full brass bands and a very rigid corps system and some reasonably judgemental people” (Participant 3). The message received within this subculture is that inclusion is about discipline and conformity. What remains of common values has become about what Salvationists do or do not do in a tightly controlled environment. The Salvationist is identifiable because they refrain from alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, and because their worship has peculiar features such as brass bands and timbrels. This strong internal focus is in stark contrast to wider Australian social patterns that value individual freedom, where the clear majority drink alcohol and very few listen to brass band music. Furthermore, The Salvation Army’s religious doctrines, its uniforms and military hierarchy no longer fit in today’s society the way they once did in the nineteenth century. To the degree that The Salvation Army’s corps subculture sets itself against Australian social trends, it can be seen to reflect sectarian patterns.

In the Public Eye---The Salvation Army and Australian Society In the late 1990s, Salvation Army officer Derek Linsell noted a stark contrast between the strong external image of The Salvation Army in Australia, which was reflected in a 94 per cent public approval rating, and an unusually high degree of uncertainty and anxiety within the movement’s own ranks: To say that The Salvation Army has an identity crisis is an understatement. The image of The Salvation Army in the public eye is not the reality from within. This is indicated at the Red Shield Appeal collection time. Every

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

81

year it is becoming increasingly harder to motivate salvationists to collect. One of the major reasons for this is that the average salvationist is divorced from the actual work that is done in many of the institutions. The public myth of The Salvation Army does not equal the internal reality [italics mine]. (Linsell, 1997: 74)

Linsell’s identification of the Red Shield Appeal, The Salvation Army’s major annual fundraising drive, as both symbol and symptom of missional disconnection is salient. Each year, when publicity around The Salvation Army’s social work within the Australian community is being highlighted and the public are being asked to ‘dig deep’ for donations, the gap between those collecting, who are primarily Salvationists and volunteers, and those who do the social work for which the organisation is known, who are primarily paid staff, is impressed upon all who are involved. When someone makes a donation and thanks the collector for the work that The Salvation Army does, the volunteer fundraiser may accept this gratitude knowing that the part they play enables The Salvation Army to do its work in the community, but the uniformed Salvationist is confronted by this in a different way. Linsell points out that “the average Salvation Army member seems to hide behind the good works of The Salvation Army’s social arm, but … there are very few Salvationists who are involved in this work or even mix with the poor and marginalised” (Linsell, 1997: 73). Most of the Salvationists who are accepting the public’s thanks and donations at the time of the Red Shield Appeal are doing so on behalf of an entirely different part of the organisation, from which they are largely disconnected and may even know little about. Across the range of interviews, it was broadly agreed that The Salvation Army had earned a right to speak out in the Australian community because of the credibility that had been established through service to the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalised. Some officers believed that this platform should be used to explicitly promote the movement’s Christian identity. However, such opinions fail to acknowledge the disconnection noted above between the primary forms of Salvationist spirituality, which emphasise beliefs and attendance at Sunday worship, and more socially oriented forms of Christianity, which appear to have spread more organically through social program chaplaincy. The diversity across interviews with Salvation Army officers clearly demonstrated that the movement does not represent a monolithic system of homogenous religious beliefs and practices. Instead, views about spirituality and religion are being

82

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

continually adapted to meet contextual needs and, to the degree that these contexts are shaped by inward or outward-facing values, they are not only divergent but sometimes incompatible. While the evangelistic narratives that remain dominant within traditional corps communities do not appear to be compelling to outsiders, the social arm of the organisation seems to be more in touch with its audience. If the Red Shield Appeal, The Salvation Army’s major annual fundraising and publicity effort, is an indicator of how well the organisation is communicating about its social programs, then the story is quite different to the evangelical tale. From 2005 to 2014, the Appeal went from $24.9 M to $41.5 M in the Australia Southern Territory. While this could be interpreted as an improvement only in fundraising capacity, the key message of that fundraising is about the effectiveness of Salvation Army social programs to help those in need. This message has a ready audience because it builds directly upon the Salvos’ historic reputation for pragmatic charity in Australia. By comparison, the invitation to attend church goes against all Australian social trends. If the organisation’s public identity is dominated by its social programs, this may be due to the way it uses its promotional materials. For instance, the Annual Reports of both Australian Territories make little mention of The Salvation Army’s spiritual activities, focussing almost exclusively on its social work, though this varies slightly between the Eastern and Southern Territories. Since 2005 when the word ‘God’ appeared a record 22 times in the Southern Territory’s Annual Report, it has been relegated to only a handful of mentions each year since, usually in mission statements and the Territorial Commander’s foreword. By comparison, in last year’s report the word ‘homeless’ appeared more than 60 times. The Salvation Army has learned to adapt its messaging to the intended audience, who are not looking for a religious message in the annual report of their favoured welfare organisation. However difficult reshaping the evangelical message appears to be for The Salvation Army today, there seems to be far less of a problem adapting communications regarding social service. This may be because the community is more receptive to the latter message or that the organisation is more prepared to make changes in one area than the other. Either way, communicating clearly in language and via methods that are understood by your audience is vital to the survival of any organisation in an era of instant global connectivity.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

83

Private Religion and Public Charity If The Salvation Army’s social programs have been more successful because they are more in tune with Australian society, this would fit Chaves’ proposal that agency structures are both more externally oriented and accepting of their social context. So where does this leave The Salvation Army’s corps? Several officers I spoke to suggested that The Salvation Army’s evangelical ministries have lost touch with the communities in which they exist. Perhaps the greatest negative impact of The Salvation Army’s subcultural separation in the twentieth century was that it “lost its capacity to communicate with the world” (Participant 3). Rather than continue to expose itself to new thinking, corps became “very inward looking” (Participant 5). One officer put it this way: It fails to engage. It sort of goes back into a hole and tries to sort of shield itself or disconnect itself from the world and all these sort of internal machinations become much more important for the Army. We’re probably in one of those periods at the moment, where we’re spending much more time navel gazing rather than engaging courageously with a broader world. (Participant 2)

Several officers pointed out that The Salvation Army’s inability to connect with its own young people was symptomatic of a wider disconnection with society. One officer identified “how to be church to the community” as one of the biggest challenges for the movement. “I don’t think we understand that”, they said: “I don’t think people in churches have an understanding of the average Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow. My kids now, they’re in their 30s, they wouldn’t set foot in a church because they don’t want to sit there and have stuff dumped on them. They want to be engaged in the conversation and I do too now” (Participant 14). The Salvation Army’s subculture, which helped to sustain a strong sense of organisational identity and connection for its first hundred years, now functions to disconnect its members from the rest of the community. As a result of this disconnection, one officer identified a further tension for those who tried to remain within the ranks, “I think we are so removed from … how people live their lives now and we place unrealistic expectations on people because of that in a lot of ways” (Participant 13). Linsell gave some examples of these ‘unrealistic expectations’:

84

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

Basic beliefs in The Salvation Army such as strong commitment and loyalty are out of tune with the lack of commitment displayed in the post-modern world. If businesses get five years out of an employee today they are pleased. The Salvation Army expects not only lifetime service, but a lifetime commitment. Loyalty, to the traditional Salvationist is, in the least, attendance at services twice on Sunday and many other meetings during the week. Comparisons with people these days who believe attendance once a fortnight, or once a month is commitment is (sic) poignant. (Linsell, 1997: 73)

In one interview, an analogy was drawn with the sterile quarters once set apart for a person with immune deficiency. “I think we are in a bubble”, said the interviewee, noting that this applied “especially [to] the corps side of things” (Participant 13). The challenge put forward for the church arm of the organisation is that this disconnection from the community was rendering it increasingly irrelevant to those outside its own ranks. According to one officer, it is “not that the world doesn’t like the church, [it is] that the world just doesn’t care anymore. Like we are so irrelevant to them that they’re not sitting at home talking about how bad the church is, they just don’t [talk about us at all]. I just don’t think people care. We’re not even a blip on the radar anymore” (Participant 12). While The Salvation Army is not alone among Australian churches who are facing decline, the inward-facing subculture highlights decreasing numbers, just as it does the failure of the movement’s evangelical efforts. There are fewer corps with bands and songster brigades, and generally less musicians in those musical sections that have survived. As older corps close down, new faith communities are still being opened but the overall patterns of identification and participation are continuing to trend downward. The internal focus of Salvation Army corps and their disconnection from the community also acts as a protective mechanism against change. While the external environment has presented all kinds of social and cultural challenges, The Salvation Army’s subculture has proven to be reasonably effective in resisting many of these. For instance, the organisation’s leadership, which is drawn almost entirely from officers with strong corps experience, remains largely patriarchal: in 2015, seven out of ten cabinet members were men, as were six out of seven of its trustees (The Salvation Army, 2016). In an increasingly multicultural community, The Salvation Army is one of the least multicultural churches in Australia. While just over half of Australians in the 2011 Census were both born in

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

85

Australia and had Australian-born parents, the figure for those identifying with The Salvation Army was almost three quarters. Only 12 per cent of those representing The Salvation Army were first-generation Australians, compared to over 30 per cent of the rest of the population (Hughes et al., 2012). The dynamics of change within social programs is a completely different story. Social programs are continually at the whim of government funding directions, shifts and trends in community needs and so must demonstrate processes and progress that reflect principles of continuous quality improvement in order to maintain their accreditation—a requirement of most government funding agreements. Regular cycles of funding and changes in government policy encourage social programs to demonstrate innovation, effective strategies for engagement and intervention and measurable outcomes in their field. For social programs then, it is not just their external orientation and general acceptance of their social environment that shapes their engagement: the composition of their staff is directly representative of Australian society. By contrast, most corps communities have directly facilitated the creation and maintenance of a distinctive subculture that, compared to the rest of Australia, is both older and less culturally diverse, in addition to their religious particularities. Furthermore, it seems that these religious characteristics of The Salvation Army, which were once either benign or positively attractive within the community, now act as barriers and symbols of social and spiritual disconnection.

Conclusions There is significant evidence to show that there is a religious impulse within The Salvation Army that reflects sectarian patterns and that this is strongly aligned with the movement’s institutional churches. By contrast, The Salvation Army’s social programs have explicit, contractual relationships with the state, forcing their attention outwards to the public realm. This dichotomy has extensive historical roots within the organisation and has been accentuated over time. In the light of church/sect theory, we can see that even within religious groups, these varying responses to the same external forces broadly align with each constituent part’s acceptance or rejection of social developments. However, there are also emerging patterns which suggest that the frontlines of these public/private distinctions are not permanently fixed.

86

J. DAVIES-KILDEA

Religion within The Salvation Army has a historic and enduring public dimension that yearns for external engagement, despite the many factors that may be pulling in the opposite direction. This can be seen through the religious engagement of Salvation Army chaplains in social programs and in secular institutions such as courts and prisons. It is also discernible in new and emerging forms of Salvation Army faith communities, which lean more on the organisation’s historic values than its forms. In these communities, traditional features such as uniforms and brass bands are notably absent. Like their social program counterparts, they are actively engaged in meeting the needs of people in their communities, seeing the gospel as something that must be lived as much as (or more than) it is preached. The varying church/sect emphases on embracing or withdrawing from the community continue to yield valuable insights but, like other public/ private distinctions, should not be too quickly reduced to a simple dichotomy. While more outward-facing elements have a greater exposure to social change, the more sectarian parts are not exempt, though change may take longer and arise in different forms. Paying attention to the divergent responses to external social change within religious groups can shed light on the dynamics of intraorganisational conflict, competition and cooperation.

References Bainbridge, W. S. (1997). The Sociology Of Religious Movements. Routledge. Chaves, M. (1993). Denominations as Dual Structures: An Organizational Analysis. Sociology of Religion, 54(2), 147–169. Christiano, K. J., Swatos, W. H., & Kivisto, P. (2008). Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Goldstein, W. S. (2011). The Dialectics Of Religious Conflict: Church-Sect, Denomination and the Culture Wars. Culture and Religion, 12(1), 77–99. Hazzard, J. W. (1998). Marching on the Margins: An Analysis of the Salvation Army in the United States. Review of Religious Research, 40(2), 121–141. Hughes, P., Fraser, M., & Reid, S. (2012). Australia’s Religious Communities: Facts and Figures. Christian Research Association. Hughes, P., Reid, S., & Pickering, C. (2010). Shaping Australia’s Spirituality: A review of Christian Ministry in the Australian Context. Mosaic Press. Johnson, B. (1967). On Church and Sect. In R. D. Knudten (Ed.), The Sociology Of Religion, An Anthology. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

4

PUBLIC FAITH IN ACTION OR PRIVATE SECT: THE …

87

Linsell, D. (1997). Thank God for the Salvos: An Historical And Contemporary Assessment for the Public Acceptance of the Salvation Army in Australia. Monash University. Murdoch, N. H. (2003, March 16). Frank Smith: Salvationist Socialist (National Salvation Army Social Services Conference, Orlando, Florida). NCLSResearch. (2012). Regional Church Life Profile. Strathfield NSW. Niebuhr, H. R. (1929). The Social Sources of Denominationalism. H. Holt and Company. Robertson, R. (1967). The Salvation Army: The Persistence of Sectarianism. In B. R. Wilson (Ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements. Heinemann. The Salvation Army. (2005). The Salvation Army Year Book. The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army. (2006). 2005 Annual Report of the Australia Southern Territory. The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army. (2010). The Salvation Army Handbook of Doctrine. Salvation Books. The Salvation Army. (2014). The Salvation Army Year Book. The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army. (2016). The Salvation Army Australia Southern Territory 2016 Annual Report. The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army. (2017). The Salvation Army Year Book. The Salvation Army. Swatos, W. H. (1975). Monopolism, Pluralism, Acceptance and Rejection: An Integrated Model for Church-Sect Theory. Review of Religious Research, 16(3), 174–185. Swatos, W. H. (1976). Weber or Troeltsch? Methodology, Syndrome, and the Development of Church-Sect Theory. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15(2), 129–144. Troeltsch, E. (1956). The Social Teaching of the Christian Churche (2 Vols). Allen & Unwin; Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scribner. Wilson, B. R. (1982). Religion in Sociological Perspective. Oxford University Press. Wilson, B. R. (1990). The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements In Contemporary Society. Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER 5

Habermas and Traditionalist Muslim Reflexivity in Indonesia Julian Millie and Asep Saeful Muhtadi

The influential political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) has consistently problematised religious voices as contributions to public deliberation in plural societies. Public reasoning in the form of religious speech could not, he argued, be enunciated in formal political processes that concerned the common good, for if religious reasons became justifications for common rules, such reasons would not be accessible to all citizens. Citizens other than those within the prevailing religious persuasion would not feel that they themselves were the authors of those laws. So, Habermas advocated a citizenship ethic in which citizens agreed that public reasoning would be expressed in non-religious terms, enabling all

J. Millie (B) Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. S. Muhtadi Faculty of Dakwah and Communications, Sunan Gunung Djati State Islamic University, Bandung, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_5

89

90

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

citizens to consider themselves as authors and subjects of the rules based upon them.1 When he put the spotlight on the place of religion and other kinds of particularity in public life, Habermas was drawing on his deep knowledge of the political and sociological realities of Western societies. He could not know the impact his normative vision of religion and politics would exert outside of the West. As it turned out, commencing in the 1990s, a number of intellectuals affiliated with Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ (‘Rising of the Scholars’, hereafter referred to as NU) seized upon the German’s theorising, as well as on the work of other scholars on concepts such as civil society, public sphere and related concepts. Their appropriation of Habermas’s work is the subject of this chapter. There is some irony in their appropriations, for these scholars translated Habermas in an environment where the secular ideal is widely rejected. Muslim scholars at all points of the Indonesian political spectrum reject the notion of political sovereignty that does not defer in some way to religion. The secularist interpretation of the enlightenment legacy is rejected. Yet even though one of its foundational premises is rejected, Habermas’s normative perspective on religion in public life appealed strongly. Ironically, the speech of a secular scholar whose work insisted on a keen separation of religious from secular speech has been appropriated into reasoning informed by unequivocal confidence in the value of religion for public life. This irony makes these Indonesian adaptations significant, for they point to positive evaluations of Habermas’s work that lie outside the secular/religious divide. As we argue in what follows, the significant value shared by Habermas and his intellectual appropriators in Indonesia is not a commitment to secularity, but a commitment to a certain kind of reflexivity in which religious individuals and groups are able to relativise their religious repertoires besides others circulating in the community. That is the argument we make here. Concepts such as civil society and the liberal public sphere were initially taken up by a certain segment of Islamic intellectuals in Indonesia, namely thinkers from the religious current that self-identifies as ‘traditional’. By contrast, intellectuals in the modernist current only picked

1 Illustrative works include Habermas (2006) and (2011).

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

91

up these topics in the wake of the traditionalists (Prasetyo & Munhanif, 2002: 14–15). There are a number of ironies in this sequence. First, one might have thought the progressive politics motivating Habermas were more amenable to the modernists, whose political project from the beginning embraced secular political forms and technical progress, consciously turning away from the precedents available in Islamic tradition. Yet the reality was that traditionalists were the first to see value in the German’s theorisations. Second, the political position being examined here presents something remarkable in the current climate of regressive politics: a renunciation of majoritarian politics. Traditional Muslims in Indonesia heavily outnumber modernist and reformist constituencies, but in what follows, we see traditionalist intellectuals arguing against a political calculus that connects numbers with power. In fact, the scholars discussed here argue that their massive constituency should have a sort of equality beside other much smaller cultural and religious groupings in the Republic. The political context has changed since then. After thirty years of authoritarian rule by Suharto ended in 1998, Indonesians commenced voting in elections. In the new political setting, segments of NU’s leadership initiated the establishment of political parties (Bush, 2009: 111–151). NU’s numerical advantage has now become something to be leveraged. The reasons and logics behind this striking pattern of intellectual appropriation are the main subjects of our chapter. As noted, our argument hinges on the notion of reflexivity. The German philosopher insisted that a citizenship ethics requires reflexivity from all citizens—religious and secular—about the kinds of reasons that ought to be admitted in the formation of public rules and policy. Citizens should appreciate the difference between reasons expressed in the specific language of their group, and those that can be accepted by all citizens. These ought not to be the same thing. This principle appealed to the two traditionalist scholars discussed here, Muhammad Hikam (b. 1958) and Ahmad Baso (b. 1971). They saw that the modernising Indonesian state was in tension with the hierarchies, worship practices, religious principles and subjectivities of traditionalist Islam. They observed a threatening reality: the national ethic of progress seemed very similar to the religious programme of the modernists, with its progressive, rationalising ethic (Nakamura, 2012; Peacock, 1978). Both problematised the lifeways and Islamic dispositions of traditional Muslims and based on this reflexive perspective, state Islam seemed inherently sectarian to critical traditionalists. This led Baso

92

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

and Hikam to prefer a multicultural model in which the particularities of all segments of the collective have equal status, and the formal procedures of democratic governance are free of domination by one of them. In what follows, we argue that Habermas was a compelling religio-political voice for these scholars because his endorsement of the idea that religious truth claims ought to be absent from collective deliberations offered a way out of this political difficulty.

Islamic Traditionalism in Indonesia Some background about NU and Islamic traditionalism is essential for the conversation we are establishing here.2 This organisation was first formed in 1926 on the densely populated island of Java, which currently has a population of 136 million, more than 90% of whom are Muslims. The stimulus for its formation was the emergence of the Islamic modernist movement in Indonesia, which took place in the first decades of the twentieth century. The modernist Muslims advocated a rationalised, egalitarian version of Islam that rejected the authority of the clerical class (Ind: kyai) who had for centuries presided over Java’s Islamic schools. The rapid growth of Islamic modernism, which held to a progressive ethos that dovetailed with the nationalist movement, was a threat to the interests of the clerical class. As a response to this threat, some of the most important traditional Muslim leaders of Java formed an organisation that represented their interests as well as the Islamic worldview of the masses—largely rural—whose religious life revolved around the kyai and their schools. The organisation deliberately adopted the label ‘traditional’, considering themselves defenders of a specific Islamic vision that was well established before the advent of modernism. At present, the main body of NU still consists of these two components: the scholar-principals (kyai) who preside over Indonesia’s Islamic schools and the large populations whose Islamic practice and belief defer to them. It maintains a political presence in a number of forms: the minister of Religion is generally chosen from the ranks of traditionalist figures; it has a partner political party

2 Key sources of NU history include Boland (1971), Fealy (1998) and Bush (2009).

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

93

that although structurally separate from NU nevertheless seeks to represent the interests of NU Muslims, and it has an (unarmed) militia that is sometimes mobilised in public demonstrations and security operations. NU has a strong tradition of intellectual inquiry. Already in the pre-national period (i.e., pre-1945), key thinkers from the NU were producing influential statements about the political role of Islam in the Indies (Noer, 1973: 216–295). When literacy rates began to rise as a result of universal education in the 1980s, the level of sophistication displayed by the movement’s scholars rose again, partly in response to the oppressive political conditions put in place by the Suharto government. A number of activist and advocacy bodies were established during this decade and the 1990s, and it was in this environment that the ideas of Habermas (and others) worked their way into NU agendas (Bush, 2009; Rumadi, 2015). Muhammad AS Hikam is the son of a kyai in Tuban, on Java’s north coast. Through his father’s association with Abdurrahman Wahid (1940– 2009), the NU leader who defined the political and intellectual direction of NU in the 1980s and 1990s, Hikam became a protégé of Wahid. He did postgraduate work in the fields of communication studies and political science at the University of Hawaii, from where he graduated in 1995. After working as a researcher within Indonesia’s national scientific institute (LIPI), he became Minister for Research and Technology under the Wahid government (1999–2001). After graduating from an Islamic boarding school in Sulawesi, Ahmad Baso studied at the tertiary level in Jakarta, where he was affiliated with the NU student movement (PMII). Following that he became an activist and researcher within a number of NGOs, including NU’s Institute for the Study and Development of Human Resources (Lakpesdam). NU publications have been an important channel for the dissemination of his ideas, many of which have been concerned with cultural diversity and indigenous communities in Indonesia. At present, he is generally referred to with the honorific Kyai Haji before his name. Kyai is a Javanese word used to respectfully address males—especially Islamic leaders—while haji is an Arabic word indicating completion of the pilgrimage obligation. Together, these words form the conventional honorific for the scholars/teachers that constitute NU’s elite class. Both Baso and Hikam are concerned with the same broad issue: what are the implications of Indonesia’s Islamic diversity for the religion–politics nexus? As noted already, they answer this question with a plea for

94

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

equality within the concept of civil society. But moving beyond this equality, there rises a further question that is at the centre of the concerns of this book: it is beyond doubt that ‘traditionalist Islam’ is a useful label for describing a segment of Indonesia’s population, but how one can speak qualitatively about the NU Islamic vision in national and public life? How does a traditionalist religious vision maintain relevance in the era of liberal democracy otherwise than as a label for a segment of a diverse population? Answering these questions requires that our analysis goes beyond the epistemological boundaries of the political sphere in which rational-empirical reasoning holds sway. By making civil society the domain of all religions, Baso and Hikam to some degree equalised all religions, but they cannot have meant by this that traditionalist Islam has no distinctive public value. As we indicate below, only one of the scholars discussed here (Baso) is prepared to characterise the NU religious vision and argue for its public benefit on that basis. A final qualification. Although the academic discourse we engage with here emerges from the intellectual environment of NU, these two scholars do not fully represent NU thinking. The organisation includes a number of intellectual currents, some of them in conflict with one another. The two scholars discussed here are major voices within what is sometimes called NU’s ‘cultural wing’. Their positions are disapproved of by NU scholars arguing for a more active involvement of NU in formal politics, sometimes called the ‘political’ faction (Bush, 2009: 90–93). In fact, the political faction achieved a major victory when in 1998 the NU agreed to the establishment of a political party, the National Awakening Party (PKB). Although the party lies outside of the NU structure, it is dedicated to NU interests, and the party and civil-society organisation are dominated by more or less the same network of elites. The decision to establish the party was made in anticipation of the liberalised political regime that emerged in the wake of the downfall of Suharto in that year. Hikam and Baso, along with many other NU-affiliated intellectuals, initially opposed the organisation’s involvement in formal politics (Baso, 1998: 96–106; Bush, 2009: 121). The public expressions we discuss below, then, belong to a historical moment that has passed, when the NU was free of formal politics, a freedom in harmony with the conviction of Baso and Hikam that claims for religious priority do not belong to the domain of formal political contest.

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

95

Habermas on Religious Speech Our brief account of Habermas’s normative conception of religious speech, based on some of his widely read pieces (2006, 2011) commences with his observation that the separation of religious institutions and the state had enabled certain advantages to plural societies. This was a lesson learned in Europe after the harmful political effects of the confessional split. Because the state is obliged to remain neutral towards competing world views, public deliberations must be expressed in language and reasoning that is accessible to all citizens. This excludes the truth claims of religions from public reasoning. Such truth claims are to be accepted as justifications for rules only if they are first translated into language accessible for all citizens. The ability to recognise the need for this translation is an epistemic attitude that should ideally be cultivated as principles of ethical citizenship. The learning project by which citizens come to take this epistemic stance is critical to Habermas’s conception. This learning project is to provide the basis for citizens’ recognition of normative legitimacy in a democratic procedure emptied of cultural particularity; in this way, citizens would acquiesce to their social interaction being restrained by the state without feeling marginalised or discriminated against in the process. The constitutional state will generate this legitimacy on the satisfaction of two interlinked conditions: it must provide equal participation to all citizens and second, that participation must be grounded in an episteme of rationally acceptable outcomes. All this does not mean that religion is denied efficacy in public life. Religious reasons are validly enunciated in the domain of the political public sphere (in earlier writing, civil society). Habermas separates this domain from the ‘formal proceedings within public bodies’ such as parliament (2006: 10). A filtering process facilitates the translation of reasons between these two domains, with the result that the true content of religious reasons cannot enter the institutionalised domain of politics without first being translated into publically accessible reasons. Furthermore, Habermas is keen to avoid asymmetry in the project of cultivating reflexivity in citizens about the need for rational reasons. It is not only religious citizens who are to cultivate this reflexivity: non-religious citizens are to develop a reflexive critique of the historical specificity of the secular ideal. The political legitimacy described here is one for the ‘post-secular world’.

96

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

At first impression, this might seem to be bad news for NU, a group that—like almost all Islamic organisations in Indonesia—rejects the notion that public life should be insulated from religion. Nevertheless, Muhammad Hikam and Ahmad Baso were attracted to key elements of this model because they aspired for Indonesia to become a community that had overcome conflicts between competing religious views by bestowing legitimacy upon a democratic process in which none of them were dominant.

Religious Distinctiveness of Nahdlatul ‘Ulama ’ At the centre of the NU domain is the figure of the kyai (Islamic scholar), whose authority rests on his mastery of one or more of the branches of the Islamic sciences. These men generally attain their position through a combination of genealogical inheritance, mastery of Islamic learning and communicative competencies. They are not appointed through bureaucratic-rational processes. Although these figures are based in Islamic schools, their authority appeals to the surrounding community, and in this way, the kyai has influence over a wide area in which he communicates with ordinary Muslims through sermons at rituals and celebrations. For the masses, such figures are the heirs of the Prophet’s legacy and are sources of blessings (barokah) that can be attained through co-presence (listening) or physical contact. Conventions of deference are followed by Muslims in proximity with a kyai: students at the traditional Islamic schools kiss the hands of their teachers, lower their gaze when in their company and even turn to face away from their kyai when he passes. This structure of religious authority has implications for public communication. Traditionalist Islam consists of a complex of practices and symbols, mobilised in public ritual, that differ from those of other Islamic groups. The kyai is able to draw emotive responses from NU audiences through mobilisation of these symbols at public events, and this is frequently used to serve the political interests of the NU (Muhtadi, 2004). An example is the tradition of mass supplication (Arabic: istighatsah) under the leadership of a revered kyai. Masses will attend such events, which are often held as expressions of support for political interests. Public communication of this kind affirms affective ties between kyai and his congregation. It also facilitates a defensive group solidarity that can be easily invoked in a way that marginalises segments outside the NU fold.

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

97

Apart from that, the modes of communication favoured by NU audiences project a subjectivity that is frequently evaluated in Indonesia as a passive, dependent one. Many contemporary Muslims hold in high regard a conception of Islamic communication as a tool for individual empowerment. In contrast, the communications enjoyed by NU followers reveal them as subjects under the influence of social structures and cultural norms: they enjoy communications that appear to be more about laughing and enjoyment than self-empowerment; in performing group supplications, they evaluate efficacy according to the identity of the figure leading the gathering, so the more senior the leader is, the more efficacy will attach to the prayer; their attendance follows patterns of worship defined by communal routines (Millie, 2017). In short, NU communications events are frequently referred to by Muslim progressives as signs of backwardness. In their critiques of NU Islam, modernist critics frequently draw upon a modernising teleology. It is important to refer to this briefly here, for modernist thinking and its political implications provide the background to the responses we discuss here from Baso and Hikam. Kuntowijoyo (1943–2005) is an illustrative example. In a widely cited paper (2017: 305–318) first delivered to a listening audience in 1987, he constructs an evolutionary schema through which Muslim society has overcome challenges brought upon it by rapid social change. Muslims of Indonesia’s agrarian societies, he writes, developed an Islamic worldview full of ‘mysticism and magic’ to cope with the challenges of their environment. Stories of the powers of saints, the use of powerful formulas and remedies, blind loyalty to charismatic leaders and so on, these were things that helped agrarian societies to create social cohesion, but also left them unable to cope with industrialisation. In the period of industrialisation, a preferable Islamic vision was the one based on the inherent rationalism of the Qur’an. Rational and empirical thinking, things valued and enjoined in the Qur’an, were qualities that would enable Muslims to overcome the problems of industrial society. The evolutionary narrative Kuntowijoyo sketches leads to individual self-mastery and empowerment, whereas traditionalist practices are objects that enable us to view the earlier stages of that narrative.3 In critiques such as this, NU Islam is presented as pre-modern religion. We show below that Muhammad Hikam and 3 In this piece, Kuntowijoyo appears as an exemplary exponent of the ‘moral narrative of modernity’ theorised by Webb Keane (2007).

98

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

Ahmad Baso were very aware that the critique represented by Kuntowijoyo overlapped in important ways with the modernising teleology of the Indonesian Republic.

Hikam on Civil Society Hikam optimistically embraced major aspects of Habermas’s political philosophy as viable options for Indonesia’s political development. Yet from the outset, we need to acknowledge significant differences between the underlying premises guiding Habermas, and those guiding Indonesian scholars generally. While Habermas envisions that citizens would come to identify transcendental value in a secularised democratic process, Hikam and other Indonesian Muslim intellectuals did not do the same. Hikam was generally opposed to the legacy of the enlightenment as a transcendental paradigm for the collective. In Habermas’s view, ‘In a liberal democracy, state power has lost its religious aura’ (2011: 24). Not so in Indonesia, where all Muslim intellectuals reject the idea of an Indonesian state without divine power amongst its legitimising bases (Rahardjo, 2015). They do this even though the explicitly religious element of Indonesia’s state ideology does not extend beyond a general statement in the constitution that monotheism is one of the foundations of the state. Yet even with this openness to the notion that sovereignty had some kind of divine foundation, Hikam was very attracted to the idea that religious reasoning did not belong in formal political processes. It would have greater public benefit, he argued, when located in the domain of civil society (Hikam, 1996). Democracy and Civil Society (Hikam, 1996) was based on his Hawaii research and is probably the most comprehensive translation of the civil society concept into Indonesian conditions (see also Hikam, 1994). In this work, he frequently refers to political role models who worked with grassroots communities to oppose authoritarian governments. Prominent amongst these were the Czech dissident turned statesman, Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) and Adam Michnik (b. 1946), the activist/journalist who later became a member of the Polish parliament. The fact that these two had been public intellectuals in post-1989 democratic movements was important to Hikam. In Indonesia in the 1990s, Hikam saw around him a troubled political environment. The Suharto government had succeeded in bringing political and economic stability to Indonesia

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

99

but had failed to pursue democratisation in substance. Hikam’s judgement of 1990s Indonesian politics can be reduced to three observations: the state was intervening too heavily in society and had created dependencies, most notably a middle-class that could not function to provide constraints on government; primordial conflicts based on religion and ethnicity had continued because of the stunted social development of Indonesian communities, leading to the exclusion of minority groups from civic life, and; the rural masses had been systematically excluded from political participation. The democratic movements of Poland and Czechoslovakia contained important lessons for Hikam: even though the masses were excluded from political participation, if they could create an inclusive civil society framework outside the corridor of power, they could form a movement for political emancipation that would succeed not through confrontation but through a gradual assumption of control over its own interests, which eventually would enable it to gain the capacity to restrain the state. Hikam was writing as an intellectual member of the Nahdlatul Ulama movement, but the civil society he advocated was not specifically intended to benefit this organisation. Rather, it was a broad-based one that would ideally work for the betterment of all social and religious groups in Indonesia. This broadly inclusive vision saw him come into conflict with rivalling interpretations of the ways in which Islam was to contribute to Indonesian public life. The key to understanding Hikam’s preference for a broadly inclusive civil society model, we contend, lies in his perception of where NU Islam was positioned in relation to Indonesia’s modernisation process. He was highly aware that the NU demographic consisted mainly of rural Muslims living for the most part according to traditional Javanese/Islamic lifeways. He had watched the developmentalist state, through its educational system and modernising discourse, attempt to shape Indonesians as empowered, independent subjects. For NU intellectuals like Hikam, this attempt was a threat: In Indonesia, as in other marginal capitalist states, the process of forming new individuals in accordance with the imperatives of modernisation and capital accumulation was not only done via education and skills training, but also through discourse. Conceptualisations of modern subjects with entrepreneurial outlooks which were opposed to traditional agrarian subjectivities, for example, became an important discourse in society. In the scientific world, the categories of ‘new’ and ‘modern’ subjects with

100

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

their identifying characteristics (cultural and psychological) were discovered and applied in order to support a project of subject formation that was in accord with modernisation processes. (Hikam, 1996: 191)

The problem for Hikam was that the state’s ‘project of subject formation’ corresponded precisely with the Islamic vision that was NU’s traditional rival: Muslim modernism. And as our brief reference to Kuntowijoyo indicates, the thing to be changed—agrarian subjectivities—were the very things that bound NU and its following. The blueprint for reforming this subjectivity had been announced by modernists in the late nineteenth century. The mass organisation Muhammadiyah, for example, was identified by Peacock as ‘rational, progressive’ (1978). The state project aimed for similar transformations: a subjectivity purified of the dependencies and efficacy paradigms that distinguished traditionalist Muslims. The specific reflexivity displayed by Hikam here, emerging through a sociological perspective from within the NU movement, is that of the critical Muslim intellectual aware of the alterity of their religious dispositions in the era of the nation state. As Hikam saw it, the problem was not a purely Indonesian one but was emerging in similar forms outside of Indonesia. Scholars had given various names to this global movement: ‘re-Islamisation’ (Kepel, 1994) or the ‘reconstruction of Islamic identity project’ (Stauth, 2002). This movement was an attempt to reconstruct an Islamic modernity that would be purified of the secularism and materialism that appeared to characterise Western modernity. This reconstruction was to materialise as Islamisation of all spheres of social and political life. Because the modernist Islamic project and the developmentalist state shared the same conceptions of desirable subjectivity, Hikam discerned a dangerous sectarianism in the overlap between them. If this project became a public reality, it would create a harmful division within Indonesian society, and threaten the integration of Muslims into the life of the state. On that basis, Hikam argued in favour of a basic Habermasian principle: government should not be the agent of a religious majority. Accordingly, religious projects would not be widely beneficial when they were located in government. Rather, their proper place was within the domain of civil society (1996: 220–223). In a programme statement that conflicted with the modernist impulse of the time, he claimed that it was imperative that religion in any particularised form should not be the normative basis of state political action. Even though the reconstruction

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

101

of identity movement claimed to work for the benefit of the entire Islamic community, the practical reality was that it would end up advocating for the interests of specific Islamic segments (147–148). So what was the texture of this civil society? Hikam saw it as a movement to create a political subjectivity appropriate for a plural Indonesia, and for cultivating a social ethic on which future Indonesian politics could be based. Drawing on models provided by Habermas and Arendt, Hikam defined three goals, all of which were impossible under the existing regime: (1) individuals and their groups would develop autonomy in relation to the state; (2) subjects would participate in a public sphere that would guarantee the free circulation of ideas and; (3) thus empowered, civil society would develop the capacity to constrain state action (Hikam, 1996: 83–86, 215–217). Islam was critical to this endeavour. It was through Islam that grassroots communities could be engaged in the political sphere inculcated through civil society; Muslim intellectuals were to be leaders in the creation of a social ethic that could underpin Indonesian democracy, and the Islamic canon provided the normative bases for critique. At the same time, in accordance with the fear of sectarianism mentioned above, the Islam within civil society would not provide a dominant normative basis, but would co-exist beside other religions followed in the Republic; these would complement each other in the civil society endeavour. For Hikam, the minority communities that had been the targets of religion-based hostility were not to be excluded from the fold. And what about NU distinctiveness? Hikam’s traditionalist reflexivity enabled him to see the advantages of Habermas’s conceptual scheme. Based on his work, the concept of civil society and the inadmissibility of religious reasoning became—for a period—part of NU’s repertoire of religio-political concepts. But the distinctiveness of NU Islam is not an element of Hikam’s analysis. It is true that he does make some efforts to characterise religion, describing it as a ‘distinctive structure of meaning’ that modern political life had excluded from the range of knowledges that could have public benefit (he draws on Foucualt and Said to make this point). And he recognises Islam’s public value as a source of critique, a point for which he cites the sociologist José Casanova as support. Yet he provides no representations about NU Islam as a public resource; NU is reduced to equal status with other groups suffering exclusion because of the modernist/development state ethos. We would of course expect this reduction from Habermas; what is important for him is that all religious

102

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

truth claims are excluded from formal political contexts, and this does not require attention to the particular values distinct truth claims might hold. Yet we are entitled to think Hikam might argue for the distinctive value of NU Islam. NU is totally committed to the value of its Islamic vision, and people like Hikam—being NU advocates—are of course aware that the religious project of NU differs from others being supported in the Republic of Indonesia. The real difficulty, perhaps, is in how to characterise the public value of NU distinctiveness beyond its value as a label for a segment of the population. This is understandable, for the problem is an epistemic one. Arguing for the interests of a group on the grounds that they are distanced from political participation suits the political science environment in which Hikam studied. Yet as Habermas insists (2006: 14–18), arguing for the public value of a religious programme requires an openness to epistemic difference. Hikam has nothing to say about this. Because of his preparedness to traverse that epistemic barrier, Ahmad Baso provides an appropriation that differs from Hikam’s.

Ahmad Baso: Epistemic Pluralism Ahmad Baso’s focus on Habermas is less specific than Hikam’s. He refers to the German alongside a number of other influential continental theorists. Nevertheless, Baso shares a central preoccupation with Habermas: what value do and should the languages and epistemologies of specific groups have in public deliberation and collective decision-making? There is, however, an important distinction between the basic premises from which they worked. The German and the Sulawesi-born scholars stand in different relations to colonisation and its cultural effects. As noted, Habermas does not inquire into cultural particularity: the textures of particular cultures followed within segments of the sovereign polity are not important, for after all, the basic requirement is that formal democratic processes need to be free of their languages. As a postcolonial thinker, Baso sees contemporary Indonesia as an aggregation of contrasting societies forced by colonisation into a modernising political format that holds little legitimacy for many of its groups, and on that basis, Indonesia’s cultural diversity—not its formal political arrangements—has served as the medium through which segments marginalised by that modernity had been able to contest it. His analysis is characterised by close attention to Indonesia’s cultural diversity and the epistemic dimensions of that diversity.

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

103

Baso’s awareness of this difference emerges in his comparisons between his own work and that of the Europeans he cites. Indonesia’s multiculturalism, according to Baso, distinguishes it from the cultural contexts in which Habermas and Arendt were writing. In Baso’s view, when Habermas, Arendt and others attributed normative value to culturally neutral institutions of political representation and decision-making, they underestimated the role and value of culture. They minimised cultural specificity and made formal processes of representation and decisionmaking the real site of citizen empowerment. Baso’s observation is that this is specific to European experience: ‘Cultural alternatives bring the threat of a regime based on cultural supremacy that will be facist, racist, neo-nazi, ultra-nationalist, zenophobic, anti-migrant and antisemitic. And it is precisely these things that are frightening in the democratic context of continental Europe’ (2006: 441). As we show below, Baso’s emphasis on the empowering potential of culture in Indonesian public life distinguished his appropriation from Habermas’s original and Hikam’s version. Nevertheless, Baso shows a similar reflexivity about Islam in public life as Hikam. Basing his theorising on Edward Said’s reading of Foucault, Baso observed that although NU Muslims form the largest Islamic segment on Java, NU Islam had been marginalised in the Republic of Indonesia since the colonial period (Baso, 1999, 2006). In the colonial period, Islam was considered a threat to colonial rule, mainly because of rebellions attempted by the leaders and followers of sufi orders (tarekat ). This was the Islam of the unlearned masses, who saw power in amulets and relationships of loyalty with charismatic leaders. The Dutch responded by co-opting indigenous elites into a bureaucracy which valued textual learning and rationalisation of the social order. This cooptation installed a textually oriented, abstracted Islam as the preferred religious form of the state and stigmatised ‘popular religion’ (amulets, grave-visiting etc.) as fanaticism. The stability in governance that was achieved by this collaboration between the state and rationalised Islam was continued in the national period, when ideals of national progress also required a devaluation of the unique Islams of specific contexts. Baso’s reflexivity on this point resonates with Hikam’s: With its ideology of nationalism, the nation state offers Muslims emancipation in the field of economics and politics, and the anti-colonial struggle was of course part of this. But the consolidation and regulation of a single

104

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

identity, that is the Indonesian identity, brings a process of marginalisation to those religious groups considered not relevant or conducive to the further development of this modern national identity. This marginalisation affects groups such as traditionalist Muslims, practitioners of syncretic religion, followers of spiritualist movements or other marginal communities considered primitive and isolated. (Baso, 2002: 28)

Much of Baso’s thinking about public Islam in Indonesia is concerned with the marginalisation of groups ‘considered not relevant or conducive to the further development of the modern national identity’. This concern leads him in the same direction as Hikam, i.e., towards a conception of formal politics in which religion was not to be a normative basis of reasoning. It was not surprising then that in 1998, the year of Indonesia’s transition from the authoritarianism of the Suharto period into electoral democracy, Baso was lukewarm about the prospect of NU entering into electoral politics. As noted, in that year NU established its formal political partner, the political party known as The Rising of the Nation Party (PKB). Throughout Baso’s writings, he points out that the modernist as well as traditionalist Islamic projects had failed to develop the substantive and inclusive political programmes the national community had required (Baso, 1999, 2006, see also Bush, 2009), and if NU were to re-enter formal politics as a political party, this would mean falling back into the sectarian pattern that had dogged Islamic politics in Indonesia and other nations. In Baso’s view, the purifying episteme of modernist Islam has led to a destructive national politics and that was not to be resolved by a further wave of purifying politics. Baso’s plan of action does not insist on fair political representation, nor does it attempt to reconstruct an identity or defend the traditional Muslim subjectivity. The way forward, in his view, is to inculcate epistemic difference as a public value. The way for the state to develop a democratic ethos is for the state to become genuinely dialogical with its own diversity, and such a dialogue is not helped by a formal politics in which Islam provides a normative base. Of course, it is a consequence of this position that NU particularity is equalised with that of all other groups of the Republic. With this effort to put epistemic diversity onto the public agenda, Baso is following in the intellectual footsteps of Abdurrahman Wahid, the Javanese leader of NU who became the fourth President of the Republic. Throughout his career, Wahid had promoted a concept that he named

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

105

the Indigenisation of Islam (Ind: Pribumisasi Islam) (Wahid, 1989). For Wahid, it was not adequate to define Islam as a creed or as a textual canon. Rather, Indonesia’s Islamic communities were distinctive for the way Muslims embodied Islamic norms through their everyday culture. The existing lifeways of Islamic communities held authority as Islamic manifestations, alongside its textual and credal foundations, and Islamic life was a bricolage to be understood in the light of this distinctiveness (Wahid, 1989). Wahid intended that the indigenisation concept should work on two levels: it was useful for understanding the historical development of Islamic diversity in Indonesia, but it was also a principle of value in the ongoing task of structuring public life in Indonesia. Baso saw that Wahid’s indigenisation concept offered resources to counter the marginalisation suffered by ‘unconducive’ groups. It was potentially empowering. Baso notes that Wahid never saw Islam as an ‘alternative’, as had the supporters of the ‘reconstruction of identity project’ mentioned above (2006: 283). Throughout the Suharto period, modernist Islamic intellectuals had insisted that Islam was a transformative social and political resource that could enable Indonesia to develop politically, economically and socially without following the path of the West’s secularising project. This insistence on transformation, of course, had negative implications for existing styles of worship and practice. It created anachronisms out of them. For Wahid, this was looking at development and Islam from the wrong angle: it was preferable to take a perspective on the uniqueness of Islamic life from within the diverse communities of the Republic rather than from the privileged position of a transformative project. The main goal of Baso’s project is to loosen the nexus that modernisation constructed between the rationalising state and a modernist, abstracted, textually oriented, purified Islamic vision.4 This

4 Baso expresses particular disapproval towards the assumption of some Indonesian modernists that formal politics could be a vehicle for the simultaneous advancement of Islamic society and national progress. This opposition underpinned the stance he took in a polemic about the concept of ‘civil society’ (Rumadi, 2015: 221–232). As noted above, Hikam and Baso see civil society as a realm apart from formal politics in which Islamic diversity would be expressed and cultivated as a basis of ethical citizenship. Some modernists preferred to equate ‘civil society’ with the political compact Muhammad had made with disparate groups on his arrival in Medina, which was given quasi-constitutional expression in the ‘Medina Charter’. For some Indonesian modernists, this was a blueprint for national politics in Indonesia, and would lead to the creation of a ‘civilised society’

106

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

homogenising, disciplining process would be unsettled by diversifying the epistemic content of public Islam. The first step was to ensure that marginalised groups could be enabled to speak. Where NU was concerned, this involved rescuing it from exoticisation. NU had for too long been objectified by the knowledge-making apparatus of the state, especially by academics. Its followers had been constructed in the form of the other needing to be protected from their own inherent fanaticism. Experts had been able to construct alterity around NU because they accepted that it ‘was not capable of understanding its own nature’ (Baso, 2006: 10). Baso bends Foucault into metaphors borrowed from the paradigms used to study Arabic grammar in order to convey the nature of the epistemic rescue required here: NU has to be recognised as fa‘il (actor) rather than maf‘ul (the object of action) (2006: 412). The path to achieving this involves broadening the epistemic range of public religion and culture through face-to-face meetings at which bicultural oppositions would be openly shared and reconciliations be performed. Cultural genres of Indonesian communities provide the resources to break down tension and exclusivism between official Islam and the practices of indigenous forms (Baso, 2002: 95–112). In the activist context in which Baso was active, these gatherings of members of different cultural groups were called halaqah budaya (cultural circles/ seminars). The cultural histories of Indonesian groups reveal that cultural identities are shaped by interactions with neighbouring groups, so the resultant ‘hybridised’ cultural forms provide models of compromise and reconciliation. These interactions enable the formation of a democratic politics not tethered to the modernist, rationalising episteme. The concept of the halaqah budaya overlaps strongly with Habermas’s emphasis on the learning project required for citizens to develop reflexivity about the particularity of their own languages; Baso calls this ‘bicultural opposition and reconciliation’. When comparing Hikam with Baso, we observe two different evaluations of culture and its role in shaping a democratic ethos. For Baso, culture was the means of effecting epistemic exchange between citizens,

(Masyarakat Madani). Baso’s main response to this blueprint was to point out that it projected a future in which the innovations offered by progressive Muslims of urban communities were assumed to be acceptable to all. It posed an authoritarian solution which presumed Islamic, religious and cultural diversities could be homogenised according to the aspirations of an urban Muslim elite (Baso, 1999: 270–283).

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

107

so it is not surprising that he paid close attention to a description of NU alterity and the public benefit it could yield. This was necessary if NU was to achieve the status of fa‘il (Arabic: actor). In other words, where Hikam stopped at the epistemic border between the public sphere and religious particularity, Baso felt that the public sphere demanded the epistemic reflexivity that characterisations of religious particularity would effect. His characterisation of NU Islam foregrounds the mystical ethos of Islam indigenised in Javanese society (Baso, 2006: 20–26). According to Baso, NU Islam has an outer form and a structuring cosmology.5 The outer form consists of the words and actions of the religious elites who form NU’s privileged figures (kyai). Their words and deeds are considered as subversive by the standards of worldly society, besides which they appear as irrational and illogical. Yet the ordinary believer obtains a benefit through listening to and interpreting these words and actions, participating in a pious, social activity referred to in Islamic parlance as suhbah (an Arabic term not actually used by Baso). In this way, the subaltern knowledge cultivated within NU elites grounds a community of practice. These acts and utterances are not to be received as practically useful information within the NU social segment. They are not guidelines for practical action, for their content does not have the predictability that would make them functionally useful. The words and utterances of the kyai are more inclined to disturb and frustrate the everyday order than to provide a guide to it. This is their true efficacy. They stand for a distinct cosmology, one based on a mutual coherence between worldly life and the afterlife. Baso summarises this coherence as follows: ‘Worldly life becomes important when understood as preparation for the afterlife, and will lose meaning if not treated as such’ (2006: 24–26). This means that anticipation of the afterlife cannot dominate worldly life. The two domains are related on equal terms. In other words, this cosmology obliges Muslims to live fully within the diversity of human society, including its political forms. In this cosmology, important things find their balance, including the Islamic sciences (i.e., the afterlife) and the social order. Baso does not provide this description with any missionary intent. Other groups are encouraged to enunciate their epistemes, and in this 5 Baso’s characterisation of NU Islam is not constructed out of doctrine, but attempts to convey the individual subjectivity cultivated within NU sociability. It overlaps with other characterisations of NU Islam, such as Nakamura’s (1996: 85–88).

108

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

way, through opposition and reconciliation, culture becomes the medium for the development of the democratic ethos that Indonesian politics has so far failed—in Baso’s view—to inculcate. It is remarkable that this plan replicates an aspect of Habermas’s vision that critics have characterised as highly aspirational (see Bortolini, 2017): Habermas (2006) felt that citizens should appropriate epistemic attitudes through complementary learning processes. This was because religious citizens should not be expected to bear a cognitive burden heavier than those of secular citizens. If religious citizens were to be reflexive about their religious languages, then non-religious citizens were to maintain a similar reflexivity about the secular episteme. Otherwise, non-religious citizens would be merely exercising tolerance, an exercise that does not enable the ‘expected cooperation with fellow citizens who are religious’ (Habermas, 2006: 15). Baso recommends a similar reflexivity. The task of developing a democratic ethos in multicultural, postcolonial Indonesia would require Indonesians to perform a public sharing of contrasting epistemes.

Concluding Words Baso and Hikam are intellectuals who evaluated Indonesian public and political reams as sites for religion in general and for the religion of their own segment more specifically. In the process, they identified problems. They found solutions by translating Habermas’s normative political conception into Indonesian realities. That translation of course required some critical substitutions. Most notably, in Habermas, the fundamental dichotomy affecting public reasoning is between religious and nonreligious citizens and their languages of reasoning. In the Indonesian appropriations, the fundamental difference is between Islamic currents that harmonise in their episteme with the agendas of the modernising state and those that appear as ‘not conducive’ beside those agendas. It is striking that—despite this substitution—the Indonesian adaptations find such resonance in certain of the German’s ideas: both Hikam and Baso problematise the admissibility of religious truth claims in formal political processes, and Baso goes a step further than Habermas in affirming the obligation on all citizens to be reflexive on their own epistemes and to engage with those of their others. This is a condition for acceptance by all citizens of the sovereignty of the democratic process. Apart from that, can it be said that Hikam and Baso have enhanced Habermas’s ideas? We think they have. One of the demanding aspects

5

HABERMAS AND TRADITIONALIST MUSLIM REFLEXIVITY …

109

of Habermas’s post-secular project was his observation that all subjects should be made aware of the specificity of their positions. Secular citizens as well as religious ones should understand the historical and contingent nature of their secularity or religiosity. Hikam and Baso point out the difficulty of this observation as a practical project. It was traditionalists like them who turned to Habermas’s ideas because they could perceive an evolutionary teleology in which their practice and belief could easily appear to be anachronistic. After all, they were aware of their own ‘exoticism’. For this group, then, reflexivity is imperative because it is a matter of the survival of their religious affiliation. The more difficult reflexivity project might be the one that is shouldered by their modernist neighbours, for whom the sameness between their religious outlook and the modernising narrative of national progress might obscure the imperative of reflecting upon the specificity of one’s own subjectivity.

References Baso, A. (1998). NU, Kebangsaan dan Nalar Politik. In Munib Huda Muhammad (Ed.), Pro-Kontra Partai Kebangsaan Bangsa (pp. 93–106). Fatma Press. Baso, A. (1999). Civil Society Versus Masyarakat Madani: Arkeologi Pemikiran “Civil Society” dalam Islam Indonesia. Pustaka Hidayah. Baso, A. (2002). Plesetan Lokalitas: Politik Pribumisasi Islam. Desantara. Baso, A. (2006). NU Studies: Pergolakan Pemikiran Antara Fundamentalisme Islam & Fundamentalisme Neo-Liberal. Erlangga. Boland, B. J. (1971). The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia. Nijhoff. Bortolini, M. (2017). Found in Translation: Habermas and Anthropotechnics. The European Legacy, 22(5), 583–599. Bush, R. (2009). Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power Within Islam and Politics in Indonesia. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Fealy, G. (1998). Ulama and Politics in Indonesia: A History of Nahdlatul Ulama, pp 1952–1967 . PhD diss. Monash University. Habermas, J. (2006). Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy, 14(1), 1–25. Habermas, J. (2011). “The Political”: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology. In E. Mendieto & J. VanAntwerpen (Eds.), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (pp. 15–33). Columbia University Press. Hikam, M. (1994). Khittah dan Penguatan Civil Society di Indonesia: Sebuah Kajian Historis dan Struktural atas NU sejak 1984. In E. K. H. Dharwis (eds.), Gus Dur dan Masyarakat Sipil (pp. 133–164). LKIS.

110

J. MILLIE AND A. S. MUHTADI

Hikam, M. (1996). Demokrasi dan Civil Society. LP3ES. Keane, W. (2007). Christian Moderns. University of California Press. Kepel, G. (1994). The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World. Polity Press. Kuntowijoyo. (2017). Paradigma Islam: Interpretasi untuk aksi. Tiara Wacana. Millie, J. (2017). Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam. Cornell University Press. Muhtadi, A. S. (2004). Komunikasi Politik Nahdlatul Ulama: Pergulatan Pemikiran Politik Radikal dan Akomodatif . LP3ES. Nakamura, M. (1996). The Radical Traditionalism of the Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia: A Personal Account of the 26th National Congress, June 1979. In G. Barton, and G. Fealy (eds.), Nahdlatul Ulama, Traditional Islam and Modernity in Indonesia (pp. 94–109). Monash Asia Institute. Nakamura, M. (2012). The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree. A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town c.1910-2010 (2nd ed.). ISEAS. Noer, D. (1973). The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900–1942. Kuala Lumpur. Peacock, J. L. (1978). Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam. Benjamin/Cummings. Prasetyo, H., & Munhanif, A. (2002). Islam & Civil Society: Pandangan Muslim Indonesia Jakarta. Gramedia Pustaka Utama/PPIM-IAIN Jakarta. Rahardjo, M. D. (2015). Agama di ruang publik politik. Societas Dei, 2(1), 95– 126. Rumadi. (2015). Islamic Post-Traditionalism in Indonesia. ISEAS. Stauth, G. (2002). Politics and Cultures of Islamization in Southeast Asia. Transcript. Wahid, A. (1989). Pribumisasi Islam. In D. Rahardjo (ed.), Islam Indonesia Menatap Masa Depan (pp. 81–96). Perhimpunan Pengembangan Pesantren dan Masyarakat.

CHAPTER 6

Public Islam and Preacher-Disruptors in Indonesia: A Case Study Moch Fakhruroji

In August of 2018, followers of the Indonesian Islamic preacher Evie Effendi (b. 1976) were surprised to read reports that this youthful, up and coming preacher was the subject of a complaint made to police by aggrieved Muslims in the city of Bandung, West Java. The core of this complaint was that Effendi had insulted the Prophet Muhammad in a sermon about a number of Qur’anic verses from the 93rd chapter known as ‘The Morning Hours’.1 Effendi had told his listeners:

1 The specific verses under discussion were verses 6–8, which may be rendered in English as: ‘[6] Did He [Allah] not find you as an orphan, and protect you? [7] Did he not find you lost and give guidance? [8] And did He not find you poor and make [you] self-sufficient’.

M. Fakhruroji (B) Department of Communication Studies, Faculty of Da’wa and Communication Studies, Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Gunung Djati, Bandung, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_6

111

112

M. FAKHRUROJI

‘Every human was misguided … at the beginning … including Muhammad. And so, if people celebrate the Prophet’s birthday, what are they commemorating? They are commemorating the misguidance of Muhammad’.

In accordance with their standard practice, Effendi’s media team uploaded a video of the oration to his YouTube channel, after which it started to attract negative responses from viewers. Becoming aware of this, Effendi issued apologies through his media channels and social media, but these did not stop the complaint from being submitted to the police. Although the complaint was resolved by November 2018 through conciliation, this was traumatic for Effendi. Event organisers, nervous about whether he would be accepted by audiences, stopped engaging him as speaker. Subscribers and visitors of his YouTube and Instagram sites reduced in numbers drastically, and negative comments about him were published on social media. After this, all material was pulled from his YouTube account. It was as if he had disappeared from online publicity. In what follows, I use this example to make some observations about public Islam in Indonesia, and the effects of online religious forms upon this public Islam. The term ‘public Islam’ is capable of many meanings, so I need at this early stage to give some clarity about the understanding of it that I bring to this chapter. Public Islam in Indonesia may be understood as a diversified sphere of public participation and expression in which actors (state, civil society organisations, Islamic entrepreneurs, ideological groups) expand and stabilise the range of acceptable Islamic expressions and positions. These interlocking processes of diversifying and stabilising religious expression are to be identified in many countries, but everywhere with contrasting nuances. In Egypt, for example, the mosque-university Al-Azhar is a privileged site for expanding and limiting initiatives. Zeghal (1999: 109) describes it as a ‘multilayered and complex institution [that] is able to entertain many religious tendencies and stabilise most of them within its own territory’. Evie Effendi belongs to a category of public Islamic actors that we could describe as ‘private’, meaning they are independent of the state and the civil society organisations. This category has recently thrived in Indonesia, thanks in part to preachers’ success in utilising new technologies to launch their preaching projects. This category is supported by audiences in Indonesia, but in the case study described here, Effendi’s project was stabilised by public interventions emanating from followers of a venerable institutional presence in public Islam, the civil

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

113

society group Nahdlatul Ulama. The Indonesian term for these organisations is ormas (Organisasi Kemasyarakatan, community organisations). The ormas play a stabilising role in public Islam in Indonesia, but when it comes to attracting contemporary audiences, the ormas cannot compete with celebrity preachers. These people adopt media technologies to craft individual profiles based on their distinctive verbal skills, something the ormas cannot do. The case study here is noteworthy because followers of an ormas exploited the public vulnerabilities of a star preacher like Evie Effendi, with limiting effects for his career. It is not my argument that this is the only way to understand public Islam in Indonesia. The concept has many possible lines of definition. Yet the case study I work with here supports my contention that Indonesian public Islam is accurately understood as a process in which ormas enable an accommodation and stabilisation of Islamic diversity. They contribute to a dynamic Islamic public sphere but defend their interests against actors from outside the ormas structure. This chapter belongs to that strand of literature on Islamic societies that deals with the fragmenting effects of innovation on established authority. A more contemporary term for this process is disruption. There have been a number of waves of fragmentation/disruption. For example, the modernist movement of the late nineteenth century was a serious challenge to the authority of established Muslim authorities (‘ulama) whose legitimacy depended on their expertise in the legal schools (madhzab). The modernists’ devaluation of the legal schools brought a fragmentation of the structures of Islamic authority that existed then (Hourani, 2013). But the relevant fragmentation for my case study here is the one brought by the emergence of audience-seeking mediators whose success relies on media technologies (Bayat, 2007; Eickelman, 1992; Eisenlohr, 2017; Fakhruroji, 2019; Hoesterey, 2015). Such mediators are able to successfully appeal to Islamic audiences in ways beyond the capability of established authorities like the ormas. In Indonesia, observers began to notice the reorientation of public Islam brought by popular preachers as long ago as 1990, when a major national affairs magazine covered the emergence of the superstar preacher Zainuddin MZ (TEMPO, 1990). This report noted how his success depended upon his use of media technologies and cultural strategies to command audiences, without the backing of the social infrastructure created by civil society organisations.

114

M. FAKHRUROJI

Evie Effendi is such a figure. His case is important, I argue, because it reveals the compelling benefits that online media offer a public preacher, but it also reveals the vulnerability of such figures to the distinctive structure of public Islam in Indonesia. It is possible that Indonesia’s Islamic ormas no longer have the social and political influence they used to possess, but their institutional presence is strong, and their legacies in Indonesian history give them a compelling public legitimacy. Evie Effendi’s tribulation reveals a structural tension in Indonesian society in which popular mediators with no institutional backing must take care to respect the ormas-based public Islam. Online religion has brought a level of danger to the practice of the independent preachers. For preachers like Effendi, the internet is a means to high popularity, but simultaneously, it subjects them to surveillance by rival Muslim actors. It enabled Effendi to reach vast audiences, but through the same medium, his detractors and critics were able to expose his ‘errors’ to equally vast audiences, and the consequences of that have been disastrous for him. In what follows, I first give an overview of ‘ormas public Islam’, after which I describe an ongoing phenomenon in Indonesian Islam: the coming and going of independent preachers who appear to disrupt the status quo by developing audiences around their unique styles outside of the ormas configuration. I introduce the figure of Evie Effendi in this background section. This contextualisation is continued with a brief description of the special mobilisations of media and communications technology that were taken advantage of by Evie Effendi and which were instrumental in his downfall. There follows my substantive analysis: I examine how his independence from ormas public Islam mattered greatly in the events that led to his demise. My central argument is that the public Islam created and maintained by Indonesia’s Muslim civil society organisations represents a compromise between rivalling segments and that public voices from outside that compromise are vulnerable when they fail to negotiate it.

Ormas and Public Islam in Indonesia As noted above, Indonesian public Islam is influenced heavily by Muslim civil society organisations (ormas ). In 1912, Muslims in the centralJavanese city of Yogyakarta assembled to create a progressive association, which they called Muhammadiyah. This was a foundational moment. Being located within the Netherlands East Indies, Yogyakarta’s Muslims

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

115

lived under colonial rule. At this stage, the colonised population of the Netherlands Indies had not formed its first political party. Sovereignty did not become a reality until 1949. After 1912, however, the Muhammadiyah commenced establishing modern schools and social institutions. In other words, the ormas began to do things for the benefit of Indies natives that a sovereign government would have done had it existed at that time. This provided impetus for other ormas to emerge, and this process formed a distinct pattern. The Muhammadiyah was formed by urban progressives and appeared as a threat to rural Muslims, whose religious ideologies, observances and institutional engagements differed from their urban co-religionists. They formed a rival organisation in 1926, Nahdlatul Ulama (the Resurgence of the Scholars). This ormas was intended to assert the interests of a traditional elite that was threatened by the emergence of Islamic modernism. In this way, a jigsaw of corporations committed to advocacy of rival Islamic understandings formed even before an independent Indonesia existed as a nation state. Many ormas /civil society organisations survive as public institutions into the present. They typically own and manage educational institutions and other social infrastructure such as orphanages and hospitals. Ormas receive insignificant funds directly from the Indonesian government, but the state does provide financial support for the social infrastructure they manage. This is important for my argument about public Islam, for in contemporary Indonesia, Islamic ormas have constructed various social roles and infrastructures. The most common infrastructure controlled by ormas is educational institutions; ormas were educating Indies natives before Indonesia achieved sovereignty and have continued to do so after independence. Hospitals and orphanages are also owned and run by ormas. Although ormas generally avoid being directly involved in formal politics, the largest of them are associated with specific political parties that are understood to represent their interests in legislative deliberations. Muslim ormas differ from other civil society organisations because they base their existence and goals in religious justifications. As such, Islamic learning and scholarship figure dramatically in their hierarchies, structures and activities. Most ormas have fatwa-making bodies within which affiliated scholars provide reliable judgements on contemporary problems. The styles of scholarship contrast from one to the other. The scholars of Muhammadiyah work within a current of Islamic scholarship supportive of the renewal project that motivated its establishment. The scholars

116

M. FAKHRUROJI

within Nahdlatul Ulama consider themselves bearers of the legacy of the Shafi’i legal school. The distinctions between these currents of scholarship reflect significant boundaries dividing Muslim populations across the globe. Through these civil society organisations, Indonesian public life has accommodated Islamic difference in a remarkable way. The two largest ormas in contemporary Indonesia, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, remain in disagreement on key theological issues, but between them, they have normalised a range of acceptable Islamic positions as publically acceptable ones. It is publically acceptable to be a trouserwearing, Muslim rationalist holding all humans to be basically equal in their religious value. On the other hand, it is equally acceptable to belong to the ‘sarong-wearers’ (the sarong is the patterned fabric worn wrapped around the waist) who look for inspiration and enlightenment to lineages of revered, learned Muslims, and make supplications at their graves, believing those sites to be superior places for asking for Allah’s favour. Due to the accommodation between ormas just described, both positions have claimed as authentically Indonesian Muslim subjectivities. When the first governments of an independent Indonesia were established, those governments were generally careful to stand back from the contrasts in creed and practice that polarised civil society. The Ministry of Religious Affairs was established to administer aspects of religious life, but it has never been within this Ministry’s brief to publicly advocate specific doctrinal positions of a creedal nature. This has more or less continued into the present.2 In the absence of government leadership, civil society organisations have established and maintained the accommodation between conflicting Islamic outlooks. It is true that Indonesian governments have pursued national development goals that match closely with the rationality-oriented ideological repertoire of the Muhammadiyah organisation, but Indonesian governments have also avoided any policy innovations that might offend the traditionalist organisation. Both of the giant ormas have representatives in government and see this representation as a way to maintain influence. This was shown recently

2 A more detailed account than is necessary here would give attention to a recent development that has complicated the map of public Islam in Indonesia. Since the end of the authoritarian period (1998), a national Council of Indonesian Islamic scholars (MUI) has gained influence in public life, creating a new source of authority that conceivably claims a broader representative mandate than the established ormas.

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

117

when Muhammadiyah followers expressed concern that the 2014–2015 presidential cabinet included not one cadre of Muhammadiyah, while including six members of the rival ormas, Nahdlatul Ulama (Burhani, 2016: 115–118). As a result, the diversity of public Islam in Indonesia is to a large degree a product of the rivalry between its Muslim civil society organisations. In summary, Indonesian public Islam is to a large extent constructed by civil initiatives that have developed institutional presence of various sizes. We can generalise about why contemporary Indonesians would identify legitimacy in these organisations: they established their roles as advocates of Muslim society during the colonial period; they are regarded as authoritative bearers of legacies of Islamic scholarship; they develop and maintain social welfare infrastructure; and they have strong representation in government and political representation.

Disruptive Preachers The jigsaw of civil society initiatives just described does not have a monopoly on public Islam. There is one class of Islamic public figures who have always carved out a space independent of the ormas public: popular mediators. Popular preachers have been able to thrive outside of the ormas structure because they successfully do two things that are outside the operational scope of the ormas. First, the enabling foundations for the work of the popular mediator are popular cultural forms and the mass media, not structures of learning. In contrast, the ormas defers to its historical legacy and infrastructural context as the platform for its public acceptance. The popular preacher understands that contemporary cultural subjectivities can be mobilised to connect with audiences, and engages with them as models for creating a following. The mediating style is given priority. The second difference concerns communications technologies. Popular preachers have always exploited emerging technologies that enable acceptable mediations on a greater scale. This is something the ormas cannot accommodate in their operations. An early example was the super-successful preacher Zainuddin MZ (1952–2011). He connected with audiences by using highly contemporary language inflected with the characteristic linguistic traits of his Batavian (native Jakartan) ethnicity. The media technology that propelled him to national stardom was the audio cassette tape. His cassettes travelled to all corners of Indonesia and stimulated invitations asking him to

118

M. FAKHRUROJI

give sermons in person in many of those corners. In 1990, his amazing success was the subject of a feature in a national current affairs magazine (TEMPO, 1990), which reported that in the first fifteen years of his career, he had released no less than 52 cassette titles. A more recent example was the preacher Abdullah Gymnastiar (b. 1962). He took impression management to new levels, styling at this time in the garb of a masculine fighter pilot standing before a jet fighter from the Indonesian air force, and the next moment as a loving father, doting on his wife and children in scenes of domestic harmony (Hoesterey, 2015). Zainuddin MZ and Gymnastiar were dedicated to a goal that is not easily accommodated within the ormas model: constructing a listening and viewing audience focussed upon themselves as mediators with distinctive styles. The popular mediator only exists if he can succeed in doing this. This requires liberality and boldness in relation to conventions of Islamic mediation that are outside the capability of the ormas teacher or preacher. Evie Effendi is a mediator for millennials of Indonesia’s highly populated cities. His audiences consider him within the category of gapleh preachers. This portmanteau term combines two Indonesian words: gaul meaning open, relaxed, sociable and the loanword from Arabic soleh (from Arabic) meaning pious. This is an approving term used by listeners who welcome Islamic mediations that are harmonious with accepted cultural forms and trends. His gapleh character emerges in his appearance and style. While the classic preaching garb consists of clothes marked as Islamic in Indonesian traditions, Effendi wears a simple flannelette shirt over a t-shirt, on top of which he prefers a parka-style jacket with a small Palestinian logo on the sleeve. His headwear is far from Islamic convention, preferring a fedora or beanie, both of which contemporary Indonesians recognise as fashionable streetwear. His style is copied by young Muslims, especially in his hometown of Bandung, in West Java. His oratorical style relies on plain, casual utterances in an understated, hipster mode. He speaks primarily in registers of Indonesian used by young people, and his sermons are full of metaphors adapted from the lexicon that has developed around social media use. This reflects the fact that his audience are digital natives. His characteristic tag-line is the question rek kitu wae? This question, borrowed from his native Sundanese language, means ‘Do you want to go on like that?’ It gently challenges his listeners to transform in a pious direction. This has become his signature phrase, and signals also his popularity amongst the Bandung-based youth

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

119

movement known as Shift or Hijrah (migrate). Although this community provided the platform for his increasing success, he came to be a preferred preacher for larger audiences beyond that movement. Before the disaster described above, Effendi’s career was flourishing. It was important for the growth of Effendi’s popularity that he appears to not be affiliated with any ormas, for if the public associated him with a specific ormas, that association could restrict his audience to followers of that ormas. In this sense, he is independent of the public Islam constructed by civil society organisations. His independence is also implied by the fact that his Islamic education did not include studying at a school dedicated to the study of Islam (Ind. pesantren). A pesantren education is a basis for many preachers’ claims to authority, and such schools are frequently affiliated to an ormas. In contrast, Effendi once claimed that he studied Islam directly from the Prophet and his companions (Redaksi, 2020), a claim that harmonises with the aura of youthful independence he projects. If he is to be associated with any group, it is with the loose grouping of younger preachers who form the movement known as hijrah (migration, i.e., of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina). The audience for this group consists largely of younger, urban Muslims whose religiosity does not include ormas affiliation. His independence from conventional organisational structures helped his appeal to this audience. Nevertheless, in the eyes of some observers, Effendi is associated with the conservative ormas known as The Islamic Association (Persatuan Islam, or Persis). Effendi was not been formally affiliated with this group at the time, but had previously studied at one of the organisation’s schools in Garut, West Java. This organisation, formed in 1923, is a very well-established Islamic civil society organisation in Indonesia (Federspiel, 2001). Its modest following makes it one of the smaller ormas in Indonesia, but it has a dedicated following in Effendi’s home city of Bandung, where it owns and manages schools and mosques. The Islamic Association is known for its highly pious, textually oriented Islamic worldview. It typically takes a conservative position on social issues, and its ideologues frequently oppose the government on religious and social issues. The Islamic Association’s followers support this orientation, but the strictness of the group’s programmes has limited its popularity in Indonesia. As noted above, Effendi did not publicly identify as a follower of the Association, opting to develop a profile broadly acceptable for all groups. Nevertheless, the perception that he was somehow affiliated

120

M. FAKHRUROJI

with The Association was a problem for him, for followers of Indonesia’s largest ormas, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), regard The Association as an ideological opponent of their Islamic worldview. This left him vulnerable to critiques such as those described here. In general, the ormas cannot but look with admiration at the multitudes who gather to listen to the preaching of celebrity preachers, who purchase their merchandise, and subscribe to their social media. The ormas would like to attract these multitudes. The ormas are civil society organisations dedicated to the public good who require the participation of volunteers. To the ormas, something appears to be going wrong when popular mediators, independent of the ongoing civil society initiative, attract so many people who appear not interested in their own programmes of social progress. Yet the ormas are sources of other objections about preachers like Evie Effendi. For some, the liberality and boldness that the preacher uses are also outside the acceptable limits of Islamic etiquette and decorum. For example, some ormas-based critics object to the individualisation of the preaching voice that underpins the success of an individual stylist (Millie, 2017). And there are objections concerning their credibility as learned Muslims. It is not that Evie’s learning is not respected, for like most preachers, he draws knowledgeably on the Qur’an and hadith. But his knowledge lacks the guarantee provided by the ormas. He relies not on his organisational context but on his own verbal artifice and skillful adaptation of cultural materials. Effendi’s charismatic speaking style was not backed by any political or social infrastructure such as that provided by the ormas, each of which has roots and branches running into government and other institutions. And his Islamic scholarship is not vouchsafed in the public mind by the credibility attached to the scholarly legacies claimed by the ormas. This contributed to his dramatic fall.

Technology and Disruption As noted already, Effendi can be located in a lineage of Indonesian preachers who were open to the benefits that new technology might provide to their preaching practice. The millennial Muslims who form Effendi’s audience are digital natives. Indonesians have been enthusiastic internet users, especially in the urban centres of western Indonesia, including the island of Java (Purbo, 2017), and the use of Facebook has been especially popular (Jurriëns & Tapsell, 2017). The digital natives

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

121

who make up Effendi’s audience are accustomed to using a number of online Islamic resources and interactions (Barendregt, 2009; Nisa, 2018; Slama, 2018; Slama & Barendregt, 2018). Effendi’s online presence was closely tied to the preaching he delivers to physically co-present audiences. His diary was busy with invitations to give sermons in a diversity of public and private locations. Recordings of these events provide content for his YouTube, Instagram dan Facebook platforms. A team of workers is responsible for recording, editing and uploading these sermons, and for supervising the comments posted about them. Most of these were posted on his own YouTube channel, which attracted a healthy number of subscribers before it was shut down. They could also be viewed on other channels. The commercial potential of this online media for a preacher is significant, and quite a number of preachers employ teams that include experts in the monetisation of their content (TEMPO, 2018). After news of the offending posting began to spread, social media enabled an interesting dialogue. A number of other well-known preachers posted videos on YouTube in which they criticised Effendi and his statement. Some of these were no doubt motivated by the desire to make a substantive correction to Effendi’s statement. Others clearly sensed an opportunity to attract the audience attention. One preacher, known for outrageous posing, made a video in which he claimed to be so offended by this offence towards the Prophet that he was prepared to fight a duel to the death with Effendi. Netizens could observe something characteristic of online media: the conduct of a passionate and intemperate dialogue between rivals who would never even meet in a co-present context. The medium through which Effendi had attracted such a wide audience was also the medium for his public condemnation.

The Complaint As noted above, in August of 2018 a sermon uploaded by Evie Effendi’s staff to his YouTube channel drew a reaction from Muslims complaining to be offended by statements contained within it. The complainants were members of the Association of the Nahdlatul Ulama students (IPNU). At the heart of the conflict is difference in interpretations about what constitutes proper Islamic practice. For the Nahdlatul Ulama, the ritual celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad is an important moment on the Islamic calendar. On the 12th day of the month of

122

M. FAKHRUROJI

Rab ‘i ul-Awwal, NU followers gather together to celebrate by listening to sermons, reflecting on the Prophet and his life and enjoying Islamic performance genres associated with the occasion. The celebration is especially significant for the schools that affiliate within Nahdlatul Ulama. These institutions implement a yearly schedule of collective ritual in which the celebration is one of the most important moments. Celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday are high points of public celebration in the Islamic institutions owned and managed by NU elites. For many Muslims, however, and especially for the many influenced by the modernist Islamic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cyclical routines of celebration maintained in the traditional institutions have little value as Islamic worship. They have moved beyond the notion that particularistic observances of local tradition might provide ways to become closer to Allah. And there is also the doctrinal perspective: in their view, the Qur’an and Prophetic Traditions do not provide justifications for thinking that the Prophet’s Birthday celebration is a valid form of Islamic worship (Arabic: ‘ibadah). For The Islamic Association (Persis), the celebration of the Prophet’s birth lacks any basis in Islam’s normative sources (Federspiel, 2001). Since its founding in 1926, that organisation has published fatwa and other doctrinal statements advocating that position. These doctrinal disagreements have been the cause of friction in Indonesia, but the public Islam structured around the co-existence of ormas has stabilised this friction in a manageable way. Evie Effendi ignited an outbreak of this friction with this question and answer: ‘What does the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday commemorate? It commemorates the misguidedness of the Prophet Muhammad’. According to the IPNU complainants, this was an offence to the Prophet and also to that segment of Indonesian society for whom the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday was a core observance. As noted, they felt strongly enough about this to complain to the police that Indonesian laws on hate speech had been breached. Effendi’s former affiliation with a rival ormas that opposed the celebration made him very vulnerable to the charge. After news of the complaint spread, street demonstrations were held by the Indonesian Islamic Student Movement (PMII), another group affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama. In the flurry of public communication that followed the posting, almost all of it on social media and online platforms like YouTube, a classic critique of preaching disruptors appeared: Effendi was accused of being insufficiently qualified in the Islamic sciences to act as a preacher. Another

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

123

popular preacher, Hariri, posted a YouTube video in which he argued that Effendi’s theology was defective: he had overlooked the status of purity into which all humans are born.3 Abdul Somad criticised Effendi for not understanding the context for the revelation of the verse in question.4 These two critiques came from independent preachers with no strong connection to any ormas, but nevertheless, they foreground a logic that is central to the ormas monopoly on public Islam, for as noted above, ormas typically regard specialisation in Islamic knowledge as one of their characteristic features. In their view, a prosperous Islamic society relies upon the influence of properly qualified scholars. It is easy, then, for organisations to discredit unaffiliated preachers like Effendi on the ground that their Islamic knowledge is not sufficient to sustain the important role they play in the mediation of Islam. Before the posting of the offending sermon, Effendi could not have been publicly criticised in this way. Although Effendi and others like him frequently do not have the highest levels of Islamic knowledge, they are extremely popular amongst Indonesians because contemporary audiences find their preaching styles so compelling. If an ormas or public figure were to criticise them on the ground of insufficient knowledge, the critic would have risked appearing as jealous or pedantic. This dynamic was altered by the posting, for many Muslims within the NU demographic would no longer support him, and many neutral fans would have been put off by the controversy. Critics felt safe in joining the chorus of disapproval being expressed via the internet. The disruptor was suddenly vulnerable. The specific historical moment is relevant to the context of this complaint. Although there is a remarkably high level of harmony between religious persuasions in Indonesia, recent years have seen an increase in tensions. During the authoritarian Suharto period that ended in 1998, tight regulation restricted the public advocacy and politicisation of Islamic identities. After the liberalisation of 1998, Indonesia’s public sphere has become very busy with rival expressions. The introduction of an open electoral process has seen the further politicisation of Islam by candidates. These developments have brought tension to public communication of Islam in Indonesia.

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-wFvcxqOzA. 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gs86GyZ8d8.

124

M. FAKHRUROJI

Furthermore, Indonesia’s legal framework incudes laws that prohibit offences against religion and religious groups, including a law that has come to be referred to as Indonesia’s ‘blasphemy law’. Prosecutions under this law have resulted in imprisonment for mediators of dissenting or unorthodox programmes. The blasphemy law is not the only regulation that could lead to the prosecution of a person found to have caused offence against religion or a religious group. In 2008, the Indonesian government passed laws prohibiting the publication and spreading of defamation, threats and harassment through electronic communication (the Law on Electronic Transactions and Information, or UU ITE).5 These laws have created great debate in Indonesian society, especially after a prosecution under the blasphemy law led to the imprisonment of a candidate in a gubernatorial election. The candidate, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, widely known as Ahok, had made some casual references to the Qur’an while campaigning in September 2016. Footage of these references by this Christian candidate of Chinese-Indonesian ethnicity was uploaded to YouTube by a person wishing to draw negative attention to them. After months of public agitation, he was imprisoned under the Blasphemy Law, an outcome which some regarded as a political abuse of power. The complaint against Evie Effendi was resolved eventually through conciliatory dialogue, but it could have potentially led to him being prosecuted under such laws. That case would have been unusual, however, for Effendi does not belong to a dissenting Islamic current or minority. His Islamic views are centrist and widely accepted by the younger audiences to whom they are aimed. It is very unusual for such a complaint to be made against a centrist, Sunni preacher. Furthermore, it was evident to neutral observers that Effendi had made a minor slip-up that was not indicative of any intent to offend the Prophet or another group. Furthermore, disagreement about the religious validity of the celebration is not a new thing for Indonesian Islam. The theological objection to it has for a very long time been widely published by ormas such as The Islamic Association (Persis ). It is not restricted to private contexts and can be read in publications of their programme and is openly taught in their institutions. It is a doctrinal position that is commonly expressed in public forms. So,

5 This law is the subject of intense debate at time of writing due to the effect its harsh defamation provisions have had on freedom of expression.

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

125

if the theological objection is already widely publicised, then why should Evie Effendi be singled out for such treatment? The answer to this question points to the stabilising effect the ormas have created in Indonesia. The jigsaw of Indonesian ormas has normalised a compromise through which Indonesian public Islam is able to accommodate remarkable diversity. In fact, the scholars of the Islamic Association and NU disagree passionately on the issue of the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. But the ormas status quo preserves harmony between them, despite their differences. This compromise, it appears, does not protect independent speakers. Through posting a message that a segment could find offensive, Effendi became vulnerable to a number of claims that can all be understood against the logics of the public Islam created out of ormas mutual accommodation: he infringes etiquette because he wants to attract audiences around his individual self; his Islamic knowledge is insufficient; he does not respect Indonesia’s Islamic diversity, and so on. As an independent preacher, he has none of the political capital that bolsters the social position of ormas figures. Evie Effendi’s vulnerability to this complaint reveals an underappreciated side of the ormas public Islam: voices from outside the jigsaw must navigate their way through the accommodation without protection from the social and political establishment that the established ormas represent.

Concluding Words Is this incident a manifestation of some important development? Or, is the conflict described above just another iteration of a potential for conflict that has long existed? After all, the ormas jigsaw shapes a public Islam that accommodates and stabilises differences, but at the same time, one could never expect that the stabilisation could be total. Audience-seeking preachers will thrive because they are free to innovate with culture and technology in a way that the ormas are unable to. From this perspective, the Effendi issue is just another manifestation of an existing tension. Yet I want to propose that this incident does point to something important, and that is the new conditions of interaction brought about by online platforms. It is not a new thing that public Islam in Indonesia is fragmented into segments. It has always been so, and this segmentation has enabled Muslims to engage with mediations that are specific to their context of interaction. The video online platforms, however, create risks where they did not previously exist. For many Muslims, especially

126

M. FAKHRUROJI

young ones, the internet provides a sphere of Islamic experience and engagement. Messages previously restricted to offline settings can now be viewed across interactional settings. Muslims can watch objectionable messages being delivered by real people. Online video platforms have enabled minor slip-ups such as Effendi’s to be circulated to polarised audiences as ‘proof’ of the malevolence of their opponents, without any regard to local nuance or the slippages that inevitably occur in everyday interaction. At the same time, Indonesia’s public Islamic sphere is at the time of writing brittle and sensitive. In recent years, videos of such slippages have been politicised with dramatic results. In this environment, Evie Effendi was caught in a polarisation that appears to be increasing in a sensitive and brittle public Islam. Had he been an identifiable member of an ormas, it is doubtful that this incident would have escalated to the extent that it did. He accidentally expressed a position that is associated with a specific ormas, and which could be found offensive by its rival organisation, and watched on helplessly as it was rebroadcast via the same media, but this time framed explicitly as an offence against a specific segment. If he was working within the ormas status quo, the incident would probably have passed without being noticed. But the independent disruptors are vulnerable in the way that those affiliated with ormas are not.

References Barendregt, B. (2009). Mobile Religiosity in Indonesia: Mobilized Islam, Islamized Mobility and the Potential of Islamic Techno Nationalism. In I. Alampay (Ed.), Living the Information Society in Asia (pp. 73–92). Yusof Ishak Institute. Bayat, A. (2007). Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the PostIslamist Turn. Stanford University Press. Burhani, A. N. (2016). Muhammadiyah Berkemajuan: Pergeseran dari Puritanisme ke Kosmopolitanisme. Mizan. Eickelman, D. F. (1992). Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies. American Ethnologist, 19(4), 643–655. Eisenlohr, P. (2017). Reconsidering Mediatization of Religion: Islamic Televangelism in India. Media, Culture and Society, 39(6), 869–884. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443716679032 Fakhruroji, M. (2019). Digitalizing Islamic Lectures: Islamic Apps and Religious Engagement in Contemporary Indonesia. Contemporary Islam, 13(2), 201– 215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0427-9

6

PUBLIC ISLAM AND PREACHER-DISRUPTORS …

127

Federspiel, H. M. (2001). Islam and Ideology in the Emerging Indonesian State: The Persatuan Islam (PERSIS) 1923 to 1957 . Brill. Hoesterey, J. B. (2015). Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru. Stanford University Press. Hourani, A. (2013). Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Cambridge University Press. Jurriëns, E., & Tapsell, R. (2017). Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence. Yosuf Ishak Institute. Millie, J. (2017). Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam. Cornell University Press. Nisa, E. F. (2018). Creative and Lucrative Dacwa: The Visual Culture of Instagram Amongst Female Muslim Youth in Indonesia. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 5(1–2), 68–99. https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340085 Purbo, O. W. (2017). Narrowing the Digital Divide. In E. Jurriëns & R. Tapsell (Eds.), Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (pp. 75–92). Yusof Ishak Institute. Redaksi. (2020). Astaghfirullah! Belajar Islam Otodidak, Evie Effendi: Guru Saya Rasulullah dan Para Sahabat. Retrieved February 5, 2023, from suaraislam.co website: https://www.suaraislam.co/astaghfirullah-belajarislam-otodidak-evie-effendi-guru-saya-rasulullah-dan-para-sahabat/ Slama, M. (2018). Practising Islam Through Social Media in Indonesia. Indonesia and the Malay World, 46(134), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811. 2018.1416798 Slama, M., & Barendregt, B. (2018). Introduction: Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 5(1–2), 3–31. https://doi.org/10. 1163/22142312-12340090 TEMPO. (1990). Laporan Utama: Saya Ustadz, Bukan Artis. 20/9, 74–83. TEMPO. (2018). Laporan Utama: Dakwah Kekinian. 4717, 26–37. Zeghal, M. (1999). Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–94). International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31(3), 371–399.

CHAPTER 7

Patriarchal Territoriality: Women’s Worlds in the Sacred City of Banaras Shivani Gupta

Banaras is a city in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, renowned amongst Hindus as a site of sacrality and holiness.1 This renown reaches far back into North Indian history but is also being reinvigorated in recent efforts to reshape India’s social, political and religious landscapes as Hindu ones.2 The rhetorics of this sacrality and holiness are privileged in every possible discourse around and about the city (Eck, 1982; Singh, 2009). They construct the city as eternal and archaic, making it a unique, mystical site in which human subjects are inevitably submerged in 1 The ancient name for Banaras is Kashi. Varanasi is the name given to Banaras after independence and is mostly used for administrative purposes. People still refer to the city as Banaras in everyday situations, and for this reason, this research also uses this name of the city. 2 The construction of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor is an example of contemporary claims to affirm the dominant Hindutva religiosity of the city. Such endeavors erase the historical cosmopolitanism that once defined the city (Kumar, 2019).

S. Gupta (B) NUS College, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_7

129

130

S. GUPTA

religious and spiritual realms (Gaenszle & Gengnagel, 2006). Scholarly, touristic and religious discourses have sustained and perpetuated this. My research is concerned with the lives of women in Banaras, and the specific religious and cultural meanings that emerge in their negotiation of the city. My ethnographic work was with the city’s women residents, from whom I obtained narratives, stories and interpretations, discovering within them subjectivities and experiences of corporeality that sit uneasily beside dominant narratives of the city’s sacredness. Banaras women are integral to the fabric of city, but their capacities to be public subjects are constrained by socio-spatial constraints that arise out of a culture of patriarchy determined by religion and caste. In my research, I explore how women’s everyday experiences involve confrontation with this patriarchy. Banaras is a city in which men are the default inhabitants, and in which women’s lives are ridden with control, negotiations and violence, even though their actualisation of everyday worlds is what makes and sustains the city. In what follows, I work with conceptions of patriarchy that are well-established in feminist studies of Hindu doctrine (Arya, 2020; Chakravarti, 1993; Mitra, 2020; Omvedt, 2000; Rege, 1998, 2013). I add to this literature by focussing specifically on the effects of patriarchy manifesting in spaces, bodies and minds. I use the term patriarchal territoriality as a label for these effects. Overall, patriarchal territoriality is a concept that accounts for marginalisation of bodies expressed through spatial politics deployed by patriarchy and its custodians. I theorise patriarchal territoriality to investigate the amalgamation of patriarchy with socio-spatial–temporal diktats that formulate a world that is different for women. My chapter commences with a review of feminist work on Hindu patriarchy, then turns to my research interlocutors to articulate the specific effects of patriarchy upon women’s negotiations of the city. I then consider the relations of these constraints to the public/private distinction, noting that the qualities of public and private are not inherent in specific spaces, but are produced in a liquid fashion by the demands of social relations. I propose the terrace as an example of a characteristic Banaras site that moves between the status of public and private.

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

131

Banaras Banaras currently has a population of 3.67 million of whom 1.92 million are male and 1.75 million are female (Pradesh, 2011). In the east, it is bounded by the River Ganges. Varanasi, the modern name of the city, is derived from the union of rivers Varuna and Assi (Eck, 1982). The reputation of the city is determined by its religious meanings (Desai, 2012), to the extent that in colonial times some writers termed it as the ‘religious metropolis of India’ (Dodson, 2012). The Ganges has much to do with this reputation, for the Ganges itself is considered holy and sacred amongst Hindus, many of whom believe that all sins are washed away by bathing in its water. The holy water of the Ganges is where young children are brought to be ritually bathed as well as where ashes of the dead are immersed—embodying the cyclical notion of birth and death in the same space (Tiwari, 2010). The religious meanings of the city are also shaped by understandings that place it beyond regular time. There is no denying its antiquity, for the city has been continuously occupied for around 2000 years (Desai, 2017), but more significantly, Hindus consider it as the permanent residence of Lord Shiva, which locates it in mythological, ahistorical times (Michell et al., 2005).3 The public architecture of the city also speaks of its spirituality: a recent count calculated that it was the home of 3347 public religious structures (Haskett, 2018). These structures, all of which are technically open to the public, give the city a uniquely religious facade, and define the city, especially for Hindus, as a sacred terrain beyond the ordinary, out of the everyday (Gaenszle & Gengnagel, 2006). Because of these associations, parallels are often drawn between Banaras and other religious cities like Mecca, the Vatican and Jerusalem (Eck, 1982). This construction affirms a sense of belonging and authorship over Banaras and its religious sites amongst Hindu men. They control the access and approaches to sites, especially by upper-caste Hindus. This inadvertently means that the how, when, where and why of access to city spaces is decided by men for women and other marginalised communities. This control illustrates how power relations materialise in the 3 Shiva is considered one of the supreme gods in Hindu mythology and Banaras is his adobe. He is believed to protect the inhabitants of Banaras in his various avatars.

132

S. GUPTA

regulation of spaces and relations between and amongst the city’s inhabitants (Lefebvre et al., 1996). Caste, class and religion define the public/ private dimensions of everyday life, and I am here specifically interested in how these define the urban spatiality of the city. In this way, Banaras is constructed and controlled by privileged men, mostly uppercaste Hindus, as they view themselves as legitimate protectors, interpreters and guardians of the social order as well as the women who are part of, as well as excluded from, this order. In this article, I move beyond the dominant sacral rhetoric of the city to examine the gendered worlds that feed into religiosity through the operationalization of what I describe and theorize as patriarchal territoriality.

Patriarchy in India Patriarchal territoriality is conceptualized through feminist discourse, especially Dalit feminism, to comprehend its oppression through sociospatial techniques. Patriarchy is a form/system of structural inequality that privileges abled and advantaged males and marginalises, deprivileges, exploits and oppresses women and groups on lower axes of the power hierarchy (Walby, 1989). Alongside other autonomous structures like caste and religion, patriarchy produces multiple hierarchies within the identity spectrum. Caste is a social structure that is hereditary, hierarchical, endogamous and relies on the practice of purity and pollution premised on control of women’s sexuality (Mitra, 2021). This highly stratified social structure is also known as the four-fold system of varna, and those who exist outside of the system are the untouchables or Dalits.4 Uma Chakravarti (b. 1941) has been a significant shaper of discourse about Hindu patriarchy. She argues that in the Indian context, especially within the Hindu paradigm, women have been severely subordinated through powerful instruments afforded by religious traditions. In her view, a marked feature of this subordination is the ‘extreme expression of social stratification in which women and lower castes have been subjected to humiliating conditions of existence’ (1993: 579). Women form the pivot of this structure, as the ritual and social orders are sustained by them. Thus, caste and gender hierarchies become organising principles of 4 The Brahman caste is placed at top of the order; Shudras are at the bottom and Dalits are placed outside the system of varna. The middle castes are made up of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas (see Ambedkar & Rege, 2013).

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

133

Hindu society. Chakravarti (1993) investigates the Hindu social paradigm by examining the subordination and oppression suffered by women of the upper castes, which is justified and promoted by Hindu religious texts like Bhagwadgita, Manusmriti, Rig Veda, Ramayana, Arthashastra and others. To characterise the exploitation and subordination of uppercaste women within the Hindu social order, and the compulsion on women to participate in its perpetuation, she coined the term ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’. Chakravarti further explains that Brahmanical patriarchy is characterised by anxiety and fear that women might become sexually involved, or marry individuals of lower caste and consequently destroy the caste order.5 Hence, the social order presupposes that women should never be independent and should remain under the protection and control of male members of the family. Brahmanical patriarchy controls and regulates women’s sexuality by exploiting, subordinating, secluding and ensuring immobility premised on strict endogamy and violence. It has manifestations in everyday processes and thereby enables the functioning of the society as well as maintaining the appearance of that process as a proper social order. As part of a broader explosion of Dalit activism in the early 1990s, the concept of ‘Dalit patriarchy’ emerged to account for the experiences of Dalit women that were markedly different from upper-caste women. Rege (1998) argued against this multiplication of hierarchies such as Brahmanical vis-à-vis Dalit etc. She argued amongst other things that such a label only demonises Dalit men, already a much-maligned social class and that it required Dalit women to make a choice between loyalties to community or gender. Thus, Rege argues that differences within feminist politics should neither become exclusively identarian nor sectarian, but rather called for intersectional engagement that theorises how differences lead to oppression.6 Arya (2020) confirmed and enhanced this position, stating that Brahmanical patriarchy is an umbrella term that accounts for 5 Women marrying lower-caste men is considered a bigger taboo as it involves the ‘pollution’ of a woman’s body by lower-caste men through physical penetration, which is irreversible. Such exogamous marriages are known as pratiloma (Mitra, 2021). 6 Rege (1998: 45) defines the Dalit feminist standpoint as, “A Dalit feminist standpoint

is seen as emancipatory since the subject of its knowledge is embodied and visible … [the Dalit feminist standpoint] places emphasis on individual experiences within socially constructed groups and focuses on the hierarchical, multiple, changing structural power relations of caste, class, ethnic, which construct such a group … the subject of dalit feminist liberatory knowledge must also be the subject of every other liberatory project

134

S. GUPTA

gender and caste inequalities, and its intersections, in Indian contexts. She writes, “… Brahmanical patriarchy is never meant to signal the patriarchal practices and norms followed within the same caste. Rather, it refers to the Brahmanical form of patriarchy operating in India …” (222). In expanding the notion of Brahmanical patriarchy to its effects on the gendered ordering of space, I have also found it useful to refer to Gail Omvedt’s (2000) notion of graded patriarchy: patriarchy ought to be differentiated in its effects upon differently positioned women, especially for those who remain outside of Hindu formations in dominant caste discussion.7 Omvedt (2000) notes that ‘a crucial aspect of Brahmanical patriarchy was linkage to caste hierarchy and differential impacts on women at different levels in the caste hierarchy’ (187). In this manner, graded patriarchy becomes a way to analyse the difference and similarities in oppression and exploitation suffered and the logic of that differentiation to analyse women belonging to social identities other than Hindu. Even though Hinduism is a hegemonic presence in Banaras, women following Islam, Christianity and other religions are circumscribed and impacted by it as well, while they continue to be impacted by patriarchy in their own households and other sites. In this sense, a Muslim woman is impacted by patriarchy that is a result of both Islam and the Brahmanical order and may be further marginalised when viewed as the social ‘other’ within Banaras society. Awareness of graded patriarchy has helped me to realise the varying axes of social identities that constrain women of all religions in Banaras.

Patriarchal Territoriality Patriarchal ideologies produce structural inequalities, whereby women are ‘matter out of place’ (Taneja, 2017: 119) when inhabiting city spaces. The notion of space here is a structuring category that pervades bodies, minds, traditions, cultures and popular notions. It maintains and perpetuates gender inequalities by constantly moving and shifting boundaries and

and this requires a sharp focus on the processes by which gender, race, class, caste, sexuality—all construct each other”. 7 This is to reiterate it that I am not stating that other religious communities in India do not have caste hierarchies. They definitely do and there is a wide academic discussion on them (See Shaikh [2021] and Levesque [2021]). My contention is on reaching an understanding of patriarchy that encompasses women across communities.

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

135

parameters and in turn producing gendered sites and claiming it through process of territoriality. Territoriality manifests when subjects recognise the ways in which the control and regulation of certain spaces are predetermined and that presence within them is conditional. Occupation of such spaces comes with an obligation to assent to those conditions and to not destabilise them. If this agreement is violated it produces aggression and anxiety between the ‘consenting’ parties and results in violence. Robert Sack (1983) defines territoriality as ‘the attempt to affect, influence, or control actions and interactions (of people, things, and relationships) by asserting or attempting to enforce control over a geographic area’ (55). The matter is not simply one of restricting the subject’s experience of geographical space: the restrictions are not just rules about how to behave in varied spaces; they also have the effect of privileging the powerful and strengthening their claims. Thus, the term patriarchal territoriality, as I understand it in this context, signifies the forms in which patriarchy takes control over women through spatial practices which eventually move beyond corporeality to imply control and power over materiality of spaces, boundaries, identities, relations and representations. As I show in what follows, this conception of patriarchal territoriality, when applied to women’s worlds, disturbs the binaries of public/private, individual/collective, day/ night, and loose/respectable amongst others to expose the gendered ways urbanisms are produced. It is important to state here that while patriarchal territoriality is about the ways in which women are controlled and discriminated against, patriarchal territoriality is not wielded by men exclusively. Patriarchy finds women as its allies when they play roles as its custodians and vanguards. Territoriality is embedded in everyday practices (Certeau, 1984), for women are required to uphold the traditions, culture and norms which sustain patriarchy at an ideological as well as material level (Mitra, 2021). Therefore, patriarchal territoriality is perpetuated through multiple actors, individuals as well as collectives. In this way, the question of who poses a threat to territoriality is a complex one. Stranger men are seen as threatening, implicated in class and caste bias (Annavarapu, 2022), when they assert their dominance over sites, so familial members regard territoriality as a way to protect woman and invoke it for her own ‘good’, as legitimised and promoted by Brahmanical patriarchy. This logic inadvertently categorises woman as an inferior being who requires protection of men;

136

S. GUPTA

and in-turn makes men indispensable to women’s use, access and presence in various sites. At the same time, men (mostly strangers) in public spaces view themselves as legitimate occupants and claim their territoriality by becoming dominant in certain sites (once again based on class, caste and religious configurations). This combination of space and cultural processes can make patriarchal territoriality a powerful and dangerous concept; if women do not abide by the dictates of patriarchal territoriality, its inherent violence manifests as a way to punish and discipline women. Patriarchal territoriality ensures women follow the tenets and decrees formulated by Brahmanical and graded patriarchy by deploying surveillance. A non-negotiable tenet for women is to produce and perform respectable femininity (Mitra, 2020) to inhabit various spaces in the city.8 This was very clear in the descriptions women of Banaras provided for me about their everyday negotiations of the city.

In/Visible in Transit One of my interlocutors whose experiences most sharply expressed the territorial dimensions of patriarchy in Banaras was Ankita. This 34-yearold, single, upper-class, woman belongs to a Christian family. She resides at Sigra—an upmarket locality in Banaras—with her parents. When Ankita elucidated her experiences of being present in public spaces, she explained that women in Banaras have to look out for themselves and have to constantly find ways of being in the streets. According to her, the dominant presence of men in public makes women resign themselves to a cautious and wary demeanour. This is because women are expected to appear in the public sphere only in transit and never in a way that involves settling in a public location (see also Ranade, 2007). This restraint results in women having to follow a list of norms in order to avoid attracting any attention from men. In fact, they must become invisible. Ankita listed the ways in which women become invisible when present on the streets or in public places: First, a woman can never be loud.

8 ‘Respectable femininity’ is a discourse interpreted by feminist scholars, especially within

a South Asian context, to account for the role that femininity plays in social lives of women to make them legitimate or “good” through preserving honour and virtue in the public arena. Evidence of a ‘good’ woman is materialised through the overt manifestation of femininity, that Gilbertson (2014) states is featured in purposeful movements, demure posture, modes of clothing, avoidance of lower-class men.

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

137

Second, women have to become inconspicuous and numb to their surroundings. They must walk without looking anywhere other than straight ahead or down at the ground, so that they can ignore sexually explicit comments and gestures that come their way. She explains that if you make eye contact with a man, he might presume it to be an invitation, which can then lead to bigger problems. She explains that ‘when I am in public, I shut out everything so that I do not notice anyone staring at me. The only thing I reckon with is that I need to finish the job I have come out to do’. This analysis of being in public suggests that women can only be outside for specific purposes and have to ensure to make themselves invisible by shrinking their bodies and avoiding touching or interacting with strangers (see also Dube, 1988). Patriarchal territoriality dictates a politics of in/visibility which defines and controls women’s presence and purpose in various sites. This also brings forth the implication that women are not really required to be in public spaces, especially not for the purpose of leisure, for leisure is assumed to be a domain exclusively held for men (Phadke et al., 2011). Ankita also reflected on women’s powerlessness to confront this territoriality: male dominance is strengthened by the fact that one can never confront the harassers. This is because such a confrontation can end in one of two ways. It could resolve in concerned members of the public coming to one’s support and physically restraining the harassers, but this is rare. The second, more likely outcome is that the man would become even more aggressive and threatening. According to Ankita, ‘we can never be what we want in public because we do not know how men will react or behave. We just have to make sure we are careful and always cautious’. In attempting to be safe, Ankita succumbs to violations of patriarchal territoriality and its anxiety towards feminine presence in public places. Ankita has adjusted to the territoriality of her environment. Patriarchal territoriality relies upon everyday practices of social production and regulation (Abraham, 2010), and implies that when women decide to inhabit places—in private or public—they invariably have to negotiate and find ways of being in them. Ankita has learned to negotiate the conditions and predetermined ways in which women can be present in their gendered urban sociality. This is why women chart out the city in terms of spaces that are more or less female/male dominant, friendly/ threatening or safe/unsafe than others. Most women have a mental map of how these conditions might be present to different degrees at different times of the day in areas such as shops, nooks, corners, streets and

138

S. GUPTA

bazaars. This gendered urban sociability is internalised from a very young age through representations of spaces (Lefebvre, 1991). The conspicuous gender imbalance in public spaces is continuously pointed out by different actors (like family members, friends, teachers, colleagues, partners and so forth) during one’s lifetime, and through this process, the specific conditions of their public presence are imparted to women. The embodiment of this imbalance guides women’s negotiation of space in Banaras. Thus, the body becomes the locus of actions, experiences and articulations that shape and inscribe spaces and their relations. Shilpa Ranade (2007) explains that ‘it is through the body that the everyday is lived, executed and experienced’ (1523). I encountered multiple registers in which this embodiment takes effect: it registers in women’s strategies of performing and enduring surveillance, in their expectation of violence, in their notions of victimisation, in their strategies for the overt presentation of respectability, in the politics of dressing up and in their awareness and fear of darkness and night. Each of these components has gender implications which are closely interlinked and define the socio-spatial relationships in and of the city—as spaces are constituted of and sustained by power and exclusion (McDowell, 1983).

Transcending Public/Private The ideological discourse and operational aspects of patriarchal territoriality have a striking relationship with the cultures of public/private. They supersede the binary of public/private, while at the same time, this opposition is critical to the ways in which patriarchal territoriality sustains itself, for it relegates women to ‘private’ and reinforces privileged men’s claim and ownership of spaces. The oxymoronic nature of patriarchal territoriality renders it powerful and keeps gendered urban sociality in its place. The reason lies in the gendered construction of spaces vis-à-vis social relations of the society, and the ways in which they lead to identity formations (Massey, 1994). In this context, patriarchy informs, sustains and reinforces the social configurations of spaces through regulating sexual identities, race, caste and religion, literally showing women their place, which is the household or domestic sphere. But at the same time, its effects do not disappear in either the public or private realm. This emerged clearly in my discussions with Meena Agrawal, a 50-yearold, upper-class, upper-caste, woman who is a well-known doctor in the city. When describing her everyday routine, Meena explained how her

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

139

responsibilities differed from her husband’s. She has to ensure her boys are in school with a nutritious fresh lunch packed for them (she has help from her home staff in doing this, but the responsibility is nevertheless with her). Following which, she has to serve hot breakfast to her in-laws and husband. She then tidies up the kitchen and, when all her household responsibilities are completed, she leaves for work. Her morning routine stands in contrast to her husband’s. He wakes up, has his tea in the bedroom, gets ready and then leaves for work after breakfast. His primary responsibility is to work and earn for the family. According to Meena, this is always the case even though as a practitioner of general medicine she would typically see more patients than her husband. In short, she needs to manage all the household responsibilities before she can leave for the hospital. Thus, the notion of women being passive, emotional and inherently suited to child-rearing, nurturing and caring is sustained and has made women invariably into beings of the household realm (Maithreyi, 2010). She is intrinsically linked to her household work and duties. This phenomenon has marked domesticity as feminine, and feminine as private and sacred. Yet even though the domestic is marked as feminine, women do not have control over it, nor can they act as sole decision-makers in that domain. As Dorothy Smith (1987) has observed, ‘the domestic realm becomes a discrete and lesser sphere that is both confining and confined to women, and on which the domain arrogated by men has continually encroached’ (5). Meena’s case is typical for Banaras women: women’s routines revolve around their husbands and all their decisions are approved by their male counterparts in the house. The conditions affecting women’s work in Banaras display the simultaneous construction and denial of the public/private divide. Meena’s account reveals the double burden of labour borne by many women. In the domain of professional work, she is paid and acknowledged as a contributor; on the other, her role is considered ‘natural’ and unpaid (Spain, 2014). The unpaid and unacknowledged work Meena does at home is socially validated as her primary responsibility and duty, whereas her work at the hospital is considered secondary and optional. In this manner, Meena is socially marked as a private presence, even though she continues to work at both home and outside of it. As Massey (1994) has suggested, this kind of restriction of women to the private sphere through spatial control in essence has the effect of controlling women’s social identities. Home is the site of relationships and duties that are

140

S. GUPTA

regarded as sacred and intimate, and these values provide very little scope for challenging or subverting male-dominated territoriality. The femininity of private spaces is constructed in opposition to masculine spaces (Wrede, 2015). Masculine spaces are places that exist outside of the home. They are places where one travels to earn their livelihoods and engage in leisurely activities, like tea stalls, ghats (descent to a river or body of water), bars and food stalls in gallis (alleys). Masculine spaces are designed for cis-abled privileged males who are active, and who take charge and handle work responsibilities while enjoying the pleasures of the ‘outside’ spaces (Spain, 2014). These places have been defined as public, or in other words as male because women have never been thought to be public (Fernandes, 1997; Wrede, 2015). In this way, the public then becomes a domain and phenomenon associated exclusively with men. The need to keep women inside in a more familiar space of the home than outside is an effect of patriarchal territoriality. Therefore, in Banaras, public and masculine have become synonymous, just as the feminine and private become synonymous, but the latter pairing is subjected to the logic of the former. Meena’s account expressed the characteristic territoriality of the ‘private’ by referring to her duties towards others. Other interlocutors gave a different perspective, one focussing on performance. The femininity of and in domestic spaces is so ingrained within the patriarchal structure that women at home are expected to perform it. As Judith Butler (2006) has argued, essential femininity consists of everyday actions, speech utterances, gestures and representations, dress codes and behaviours as well as certain prohibitions and taboos. This conditionality affects private spaces in Banaras. Devaki—a 56-year-old, upper-class, upper-caste, married woman explained to me that she was always required to be veiled in the house unless she was in her room. She could never make eye contact with any of the elders in the family. She was told not to talk or laugh loudly. She was asked to walk slowly and quietly so that her movements do not make her hyper-visible. She was fundamentally required to be invisible. Thus, the malleability of patriarchy with spatial ways of being becomes conspicuous. In effect, these are the same requirements that Ankita had described in her account of being present in public spaces. Devaki gave me an account of the historical evolution behind this similarity. In earlier times, the demand to perform femininity in private was rigidly implemented, for women were not allowed to go outside often, unless they were in the

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

141

company of family members. Recently, as women have started to step outside of their homes to receive education, to work and for various purposes, they have been required to take this exacting femininity with them (Gilbertson, 2014; McDowell, 1999). Spain (2014) notes that ‘the traditional gender expectations [of femininity] were inscribed on the urban landscapes’ (585). Thus, the norms of femininity are deeply entrenched in both public and private. It was in my conversations with interlocutors about public and private spaces that I could most clearly see how the relational association of spaces with gender comes intuitively to women and determines their own locations within it (Low, 2006). Prerna is a 42-year-old, uppercaste, middle-class, divorced woman, who works as an emcee. Prerna was born and brought up in Banaras. She explained, in a very matter-of-fact manner, the constraints of the household and the city. For Prerna, her room is the only place she really belongs to. She pointed out that she was never allowed to play in the streets, whereas her brothers could set up wickets in any galli (alley) of the neighbourhood and play cricket. Prerna was brought up to think that the entire city is a man’s playground, while she was made to sit in a room and play with toys. This sets her apart as a member of the upper-class, for in the vast majority of homes in Banaras, children and adults do not have a room that they can consider ‘their own’. So, women from early on in life are taught the difference between ‘being in public’ and ‘being in private’ because of the representations. From the time a girl child is born, she is instructed to define and imagine herself within the four walls of the home. The planning of the Banaras city space has confirmed that instruction, for there are barely any parks and common areas with facilities that make women feel safe enough to be in them. This does not affect men, who can generally occupy the darkest parts of the city without fearing any danger.9 Vishwanath and Mehrotra (2007) explain that men are able to occupy tea stalls, shops, paths and parking lots without having to think of conditions that could harm them. Women, on the other hand, are relentlessly in transit to places in hope of being safer (Ranade, 2007). On one hand, the notion of safety here is one that pertains to a woman’s physical well-being: a woman might be physically safer in her ‘private space’, though its known that private spaces are 9 Even men have inhibitions in public, especially in relation to their caste, class and religion, but the everyday fear and incessant constraint that women experience does not usually apply to men.

142

S. GUPTA

ordinary spaces for violence against women. But patriarchal territoriality further encompasses safety of a second kind, defined in terms of protectionism and paternalism where violation to a woman’s body is seen as dishonouring family. This creates an assumption that a danger felt more widely than an individual’s physical safety lies in public places, further affirming women’s vulnerability in public. These notions seldom apply to men.

In-between Territoriality: The Terrace As noted above, patriarchal territoriality is not something inherent in physical spaces but has an effect through the embodiments of religious and cultural inequalities. This means that specific spaces can shift between different modes of territoriality. As noted, women are educated within the household about where they can be seen and not seen. The space of the living room is ‘allowed’ to women if their friends or relatives are visiting but if the same space is occupied by non-filial males then women are prohibited from it. All spaces are fluid, changing and can be re-inscribed. Patriarchal territoriality involves moves and shifts in its powerful effects. The narratives above demonstrate the complex ways in which women are arranged in both public and private spheres, that intersect, as determined by patriarchal territoriality. This fluidity reveals spaces ‘in-between’, where the conditions of territoriality might veer between danger and liberation. The in-between here connotes a threshold which is transitional, contingent on the use or practise of it (Andrews & Roberts, 2012). The in-between may be the site of the inversion or suspension of the oppressive normative social and moral structures of everyday life; or even provide for alternative social order as Maunaguru (2019) espouses. During my fieldwork, the terrace, a feature of many homes, emerged as an in-between space where politics of public/private and in/visibility are manipulated. Terraces are situated within the house architecture but are simultaneously open spaces that enable a two-way gaze: the person on the terrace can see people around and below, and in most cases, people around and below can see the person on the terrace in most cases. In Banaras, the two-gaze phenomenon (Low, 2006) is unequal in its effects on in/ visibility. In public interactions, men’s gaze is understood as viewing women in their corporeality (Low, 2006) whereas women’s gaze is seen

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

143

as a strategy of caution where she is attempting to protect her corporeality from ‘buri nazar’, which translates as ‘bad gaze’ or ‘dirty look’.10 But on the terrace, women are not necessarily aware of the ‘bad gaze’ because they are situated within the private sphere and are free to thus engage in activities that might in public be deemed shaming and humiliating by the family and community. When a woman on a terrace becomes visible, she is not subject to the same territoriality as when she is in a public place and the experience can be liberating. However, it can also be anxiety-inducing for the family, who inevitably take a paternalistic view of women, their safety and their intelligence. The terrace, like a public space, requires women to be there for a purpose, like washing clothes or putting out clothes for drying, but if women are not there for such a purpose, then the tenets of patriarchal territoriality apply to that space. This example highlights how the border between public and private is not a substantive border inhering in actual spaces. The structure within the ‘private rendered public’ speaks of the pervasive and shifting nature of patriarchal territoriality. Sheetal Agrawal, a 55-year-old, single woman, from an upper-caste, middle-class family, told me that she was prohibited from going to the terrace: When I was younger, I used to often go on the terrace to get away from my chaotic household life. My presence on the terrace started to make my brothers very uncomfortable. They started to suspect that I was having an affair with our neighbour’s boy. The fear of inter-caste marriage and chances of elopement terrified the family and they locked up the terrace so that I wouldn’t have access to it. My family could not comprehend my reasons for going to the terrace every day. They assumed the worst and did the worst to me, even after I tried convincing them that there was no such thing. It made no impact on them. Their over-protectiveness coupled with fear of shame resulted in me never getting married. So, now they find me to be a burden. A single 50-year-old woman who has no companionship. But even now I cannot live alone because that will be humiliating for them.

10 I adapt the term buri nazar as used by my informants. While describing their everyday routines in public spaces, many women explained that they ignore the stares and harassment of men because they could see the buri nazar beneath it.

144

S. GUPTA

Sheetal’s narrative, like those of Ankita, Meena, Devaki and Prerna, demonstrates that patriarchal territoriality transcends spatial configurations and makes itself omnipresent. The dichotomy of private/public, for example, only partially corresponds with the conditions it places on women’s public presence. The stories above exhibit how patriarchal territoriality is located on women’s bodies, men’s minds, in physical materialities, customs, traditions and cultures. It overarches the spectrum of identities as well as spatial divisions/categorisations. The same configuration is produced as violence when the dictates of patriarchal territoriality are not met by women.

Violence As noted a number of times already in passing, women who choose to oppose the ubiquitous, pervasive and powerful nature of patriarchal territoriality are censured and put in their place with violence. And that violence produces a rhetoric that further deprivileges women and marginalised people and enhances vulnerability. This rhetoric insists that violence in the public space is ‘the worst thing that can happen to a woman’. It designs public spaces to be dangerous for women, as men in public spaces can violate, abuse and harass them as if they are strangers. Thus, movement outside of the home is qualified by the terms of patriarchy and its territoriality, which is innately anxious of women’s presence. The fear of public spaces instilled in women is deep-rooted and has a significant effect: the violence that occurs in domestic spaces becomes unremarkable. It is ‘let go’. The cause of this dismissal is the territorial character of the private as sacred for women. The home is thought to be a space where a woman is protected obsessively, and in turn becomes a captive, whose functions and duties are only suited for the environment within the four walls of the home (Dworkin, 1992). So, it is assumed that if a woman does not exit the overprotected private sphere she cannot be harmed. Further, talking about violence in this sacred/ feminine space would bring dishonour to the family, something which women are expected to uphold. Therefore, the issue of domestic violence is subjected to an imposed silence, when in fact the experience of violence at home can make it more unsafe than public space. Nita is a 34-year-old, Dalit, woman who lives in a small semi-concrete house in a crowded and chaotic neighbourhood. Nita is not allowed to

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

145

work outside the house. Her understanding of being present in public and private is underpinned by violence, and my conversations with her were punctuated by her uncontrollable crying. She explained that in the last 12 years of marriage, she had birthed 7 sons and has terminated multiple pregnancies. She stated that, Every night, 28 days out of 30, he beats me up and then forces me in bed. I have all my children sleeping in the same room. The eldest one being 18. It is so awful and humiliating and it is all because he drinks. He is an alcoholic. I do not understand the point of living like this, but I have to because of my kids. Every day I wake up wanting to run away from home. People say the worst that can happen to a woman on streets is she can get raped or trafficked. But I get raped every day and if I am sold into prostitution, I will at least make some money … but I cannot do anything because where will I go? Who will support me or take care of me? My mother-in-law tells me this is how it is for women in our house.

Her mother-in-law, Kusum, also experienced domestic violence every day while her husband was alive. Although Nita would prefer to encounter and deal with violence in public than being ‘trapped’ in her house, she cannot remove herself from the household because of the feminine sacred, meaning the domestic realm which needs to be protected, as the honour of the family is located here (Bhatla & Rajan, 2003). This is implicit in her mother-in-law’s advice: she demanded that she accept domestic violence as part of her life. Women who suffer violence in the everyday are inhibited from making it known to others. There is a silent acceptability of violence, within the private, which ensures that the custodians of patriarchal territoriality can control and discipline woman in any way deem fit. Women are unconditionally required to protect the honour of the family and that honour is located on their bodies (Chakravarti, 1993; Menon, 2012). This in turn requires protection for and justifies constraints on women in public spaces. Thus, women are made to rationalise the violence at home and made to fear it in public—a formulation mandated by patriarchal territoriality.

Final Words By requiring them to be feminine within the private and public domains, Banaras’ culture of patriarchy compels women to succumb to the ‘masculine’ codes governing human bodies in the city. This succumbing

146

S. GUPTA

perpetuates the culture, for it ensures that women do not confront the norms of territoriality that have been generated over the years through control, containment, restriction and violence within gendered urban sociality. In this sense, patriarchal territoriality becomes insidious and ubiquitous, operating through multiple actors to ensure women’s relationship with spaces remain difficult, prone to strife, and even violent. In this manner, women continue to be un-belongers in the city of Banaras. In closing, it is necessary to make the point that the control, containment and restriction engendered by patriarchal territoriality are not absolute in their effects in Banaras. Everyday situations provide exceptions. Based on his research into the sociabilities he encountered at a ruined fort in Delhi that had become a centre of Muslim supplication, Anand Vivek Taneja (2017) noted that everyday practices of religion are not all ‘pre-scripted’ and that women’s roles in them can enable interactions of a more exploratory nature. Temples are sites of this kind in Banaras also. Temples dot the city’s landscape, and women can generally have access to them fairly easily. Being religious places, temples are of course not outside of patriarchal territoriality, but access to them is made simpler by the fact that the notions of decorum, moral behaviour and religious duty that prevail within them are different from other sites. My Hindu informants often stated that temples were spaces they could access and inhabit without struggle. These are places for meeting friends, hanging out and even holding picnics and other leisurely activities. Some informants also used temples as places to enjoy time in solitude. In them, women are able to tarry without having to show an intention to move quickly out of the public gaze. Thus, while patriarchal territoriality is omnipresent, permeating the everyday lives of women and reigning over them, there are opportunities for women to experience a sense of spatial belonging in Banaras beyond its dictates.

Bibliography Abraham, J. (2010). Veiling and the Production of Gender and Space in a Town North India: A Critique of the Public/Private Dichotomy. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17 (2), 191–222. Ambedkar, B. R., & Rege, S. (2013). Against the Madness of Manu: B.R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy. Navayana Publication.

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

147

Andrews, H., & Roberts, L. (2012). Introduction: Re-Mapping Liminality. In H. Andrews & L. Roberts (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (pp. 1–17). Routledge. Annavarapu, S. (2022). Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions: Gender, Class, and Cabs in Hyderabad, India. Social problems. Arya, S. (2020). Dalit or Brahmanical Patriarchy? Rethinking Indian Feminism. CASTE/A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, 1(1), 217–228. Bhatla, N., & Rajan, A. (2003). Private Concerns in Public Discourse: WomenInitiated Community Responses to Domestic Violence. Economic and Political Weekly., 38(17), 1658–1664. Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. Chakravarti, U. (1993). Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State. Economic and Political Weekly, 28, 579–585. Desai, M. (2012). City of Negotiations: Urban Space and Narrative in Banaras. In M. S. Dodson (Ed.), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories (pp. 17–41). Routledge. Desai, M. (2017). Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City. University Of Washington Press. Dodson, M. S. (2012). Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories. Routledge. Dube, L. (1988). On the Construction of Gender. Economic and Political Weekly, 23(18), 11–19. Dworkin, A. (1992). Women in the Public Domain: Sexual Harassment and Date Rape. In A. C. Sumrall & D. Taylor (Eds.), Sexual Harassment: Women Speak Out. Crossing Press. Eck, D. L. (1982). Banaras: City of Light. Knopf. Fernandes, L. (1997). Beyond Public Spaces and Private Spheres: Gender, Family, and Working Class Politics in India. Feminist Studies, 23(3), 525–547. Gaenszle, M., & Gengnagel, J. (2006). Visualizing Space in Banaras: Images, Maps, and the Practice of Representation. Harrassowitz. Gilbertson, A. (2014). A Fine Balance: Negotiating Fashion and Respectable Femininity in Middle-class Hyderabad, India. Modern Asian Studies, 48(1), 120–158. Haskett, C. (2018). On Varanasi’s Tiny Temples. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 18, 1–20. Kumar, S. (2019). How Modi’s Kashi Vishwanath Corridor is Laying the Ground for Another Babri Incident. The Caravan. https://caravanmagazine. in/religion/how-modi-kashi-vishwanath-corridor-is-laying-the-ground-foranother-babri-incident

148

S. GUPTA

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell. Lefebvre, H., Kofman, E., & Lebas, E. (1996). Writings on Cities. Blackwell Publishers. Levesque, J. (2021). Does Caste Play a Political Role among Muslims in India? GIS Asie, 2021. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03196813 Low, M. (2006). The Social Construction of Space and Gender. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(2), 119–133. Maithreyi, K. (2010). Women, Embodiment and Personhood. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(17), 39–42. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place, and Gender. Polity. Maunaguru, S. (2019). Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War. University Of Washington Press. Mcdowell, L. (1983). Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space. Environment & Planning D: Society and Place, 1, 59–72. Mcdowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Polity Press. Menon, N. (2012). Seeing Like A Feminist. Published By Zubaan In Collaboration With Penguin Books. Michell, G., Singh, Rana P.B., Arni, C., & National Centre for the Performing. (2005). Banaras: The City Revealed. Marg Publications on behalf of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. Mitra, D. (2020). Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton University Press. Mitra, M. (2021). Insidious Interlocking of Gender and Caste: Consequences of Challenging Eendogamy. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 22(10), 45–56. Omvedt, G. (2000). Towards a Theory of ‘Brahmanic Patriarchy.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 35(4), 187–190. Phadke, S., Khan, S., & Ranade, S. (2011). Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. Penguin Books. Pradesh. (2011). Varanasi [Online]. Retrieved May 08, 2017, from https://var anasi.nic.in/demography/ Ranade, S. (2007). The Way She Moves: Mapping the Everyday Production of Gender-Space. Economic and Political Weekly, 42, 1519–1526. Rege, S. (1998). Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position. Economic and Political Weekly, 33(44), WS39–WS46. Sack, R. D. (1983). Human Territoriality: A Theory. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73(1), 55–74.

7

PATRIARCHAL TERRITORIALITY: WOMEN’S WORLDS …

149

Shaikh, J. (2021). Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor. University of Washington Press. Singh, R. P. B. (2009). Banaras: Making of India’s Heritage City. Scholars Publisher. Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press. Spain, D. (2014). Gender and Urban Space. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 581–598. Taneja, A. V. (2017). Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Standford University Press. Tiwari, R. (2010). Space-Body-Ritual: Performativity in the City. Lexington Books. Viswanath, K., & Mehrotra, S. T. (2007). Shall We Go Out? Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1542–1548. Walby, S. (1989). Theorising Patriarchy. Sociology, 23(2), 213–234. Wrede, T. (2015). Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century [Special Issue]. Rocky Mountain Review, 69(3), 10–17.

CHAPTER 8

Mediumship and Evidence in Australian Spiritualism: Conjunctions of Private and Public Matt Tomlinson

When my father was dying of cancer, he did not seem to acknowledge it. A writer all his life—of many short stories, several true crime books, freelance work of all sorts, and a novel—he finally began his memoirs too late: he barely made it past the mention of his college graduation fifty-one years earlier. And, in the slightly more than 30,000 words of his incomplete memoirs, there is no mention of the fact that he was writing in the shade of death. He had turned yellow one day, as if jaundiced, and was diagnosed with bile duct cancer. The diagnosis was daunting: bile duct cancer is rare, works quickly, and is almost always fatal. Writing in this condition, my father began his memoir with his birth and got as far as a job he had held the summer after his freshman year at college. Along the way, he

M. Tomlinson (B) School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_8

151

152

M. TOMLINSON

discussed the deaths of several relatives as well as a workplace friend; but after describing how the latter was killed at the end of the Korean War, he added, almost apologetically, “I hate to end this chapter on such a grim note.” He never mentioned his own state of health. I had moved to Australia a year before he died, and the sheer distance between New Jersey and Melbourne obviously shaped our interactions, although I had been living away from home for many years before then— just not quite so far. In a way, his writing is the way he still speaks across a divide to me, now an existential one rather than a geographical one. I am telling this story at the beginning of this chapter for a particular reason: to raise the topic of not talking about death. My family, one example of a particular kind of Christian/post-Christian, middle-class, educated family of European descent in the northeastern USA of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, is also one that happens not to discuss death explicitly. The historian Philippe Ariès argued that in twentieth-century “Western” societies death was hidden, made secret to the point where “ordinary men have become mute and behave as though death no longer existed” (1975, 135; see also Ariès, 1981, 2010). The sociologist Allan Kellehear (2007) has developed Ariès’ argument that as the management of dying has become more public—taken over by institutions such as hospitals and states, for example—people’s own experiences of dying have become more private. For scholars such as Ariès and Kellehear, the privatized aspect of dying means that identifying oneself and having others help identify oneself, as dying has become remarkably difficult. It was definitely the case that my father did not identify himself (to me, anyway) as dying. Aware of the power of writing, he delayed work on his memoir, as if writing up his life would mean closing it down.1 Talking about the deaths of family and friends is hedged by well-known rules, at least in the situations I know having grown up in the USA and worked for fifteen years in Australia. In general, one does not speak too freely about matters such as violence, suicide, drug overdoses, or stigmatized diseases. When someone mentions a death, they often do not voluntarily say what the cause of death was. This conversational rule is

1 “In point of fact,” Ariès (1975: 139) cautions, “it must happen quite often—but the dead never tell—that the sick person knows quite well what is happening, and pretends not to know for the sake of those around him.” This was likely the case with my father; but as this chapter will make clear, Spiritualists would argue that the dead often do tell about the processes and circumstances of their deaths.

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

153

mirrored in obituaries, wherein the manner of death is rarely mentioned (“a short illness” being shorthand for nearly anything). Inevitably, there are exceptions. Many families are not as reticent as mine, and in literature, film, and tabloid news stories death can be treated bluntly or sensationally. But in daily life for many people, I submit, death is relatively distant or even absent. When it is called to attention, one often keeps the details of death—from personal anguish to physical details—matters for private spheres, not public ones. Yet in the religion known as modern Spiritualism, making details of death public—describing them to an audience, many of whose members are strangers to each other—is a significant ritual act. It is something that helps accomplish a medium’s main task: to prove that she can discover details of a deceased person’s life by communicating with that person, learning what they were like and how they died. To perform effectively, a Spiritualist medium must demonstrate that she is in contact with the spirit of a deceased person, and the most effective way to do this is to make private details public, unknown details known. Mediums’ aim, in short, is to provide evidence. (Some make a point of referring to themselves as “evidential mediums.”) Evidence is situated at the hinge point of two dialogues: in one direction, mediums communicate back and forth with people in the spirit world; in another, they engage with living audience members to verify that these people in the spirit world are recognizable personalities: not just a middle-aged man who loved fishing and died of a heart attack, but specifically your mother’s uncle. Evidence also stands at the hinge point of private and public. It brings together the halves of a “language ideology of differentiation,” as Susan Gal describes it, in which the categories of private and public are used to co-construct each other (Gal, 2005; see also Gal, 2002, Gal & Irvine, 2019). In Spiritualist services, speaking about death is a core public activity which helps constitute the Spiritualist “public” itself. Whereas Gal notes how private/public ideologies creatively index difference and separation, in this chapter, I explore how Spiritualist practice ritually conjoins the two in the pursuit of evidence. I focus on public performances called “demonstrations.” Many mediums practice their skills in small groups called “circles” and also offer private readings for a fee, but these contexts are not the subject of this chapter. I begin the chapter with a brief discussion of Spiritualist philosophy and terminology. Next, I describe how Spiritualists present evidence in public demonstrations. In

154

M. TOMLINSON

the third and longest section of this chapter, I analyse two lively readings given by a British medium during her public demonstration in Canberra in March 2017.

Defining Death, Defining Spirit Much has been written in past decades about Spiritualism’s origins and growth, especially its articulations with nineteenth-century social developments such as women’s rights and other progressive social movements; new technology (especially telegraphy and photography); and mass deaths from war (e.g., Braude, 1989 and Owen, 1989; Faust, 2008; Peters, 1999, esp. Chapter 2).2 Fewer ethnographies of Spiritualist practice have been written, and this chapter is meant as a contribution to that comparatively thin field.3 2 The historian Alex Owen analyses the private/public distinction in early Spiritualism as it articulated with the era’s gender and class ideologies (Owen, 1989: 49–50). Women have always been prominent in Spiritualism, and in the contexts Owen examines, private mediumship was considered more respectable:

Within the [S]piritualist vocabulary the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ (or, professional and domestic) mediumship were a matter of everyday parlance, and their meanings had been roughly assumed from the ‘separate spheres’ ideology [of gendered natures and responsibilities]. A public medium was one who had entered professional life, gave séances to which there was general entry, and was paid for the demonstration of her gifts. Her mediumship had become her livelihood, and her ability to please and satisfy her audience was thus vital. Spiritualists liked to emphasise that public mediumship was a comparative rarity, a mere ‘one in a thousand’, whilst private mediums were to be found flourishing ‘in every rank of life, from royalty down to the humblest household’. A private medium invariably operated within a small circle of family or friends, her séances were closed to outsiders, and she received no direct payment. (Owen, 1989: 49) She notes how the private/public distinction was manipulated. For example, mediums seeking to remain respectable while also earning a living could receive a salary from a benefactor and then give ostensibly free séances. But class dimensions were difficult to escape: “Although believers chose not to express this directly, public mediumship was associated not only with the working classes but also with middle-class assumptions about lower-class morality.… The bottom line was that public mediums were often suspect where private ones were not” (1989: 51). 3 Ethnographies include Skultans (1974), Wilson (2013), Kalvig (2017), Yerby (2017), Tomlinson (2019), and Tomlinson (n.d.). A notable recent analysis of scholarship on Spiritualism is a paper by Timothy Jenkins (2014). In it, and drawing in part on the work of Owen (1989), he argues that Spiritualism helped shape the categories through

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

155

Some philosophical ground-clearing is necessary. In this chapter, I will write of “death,” but for Spiritualists, there is no such thing as death in its usual sense. As Lynette Ivory, a leader of the Canberra Spiritualist Association, explained in the first week of the mediumship-training course she led from April to August 2017: “Death doesn’t really exist, because we exist forever.”4 For Spiritualists, the process of physical death involves a person shedding their physical form and moving to a higher level of spiritual energy. Some Spiritualists believe that a person’s spirit can be reincarnated in other physical bodies. Others dispute this. But a key belief of Spiritualism, one that seems to have a general agreement, is that all humans are making “eternal progress,” spiritually speaking. Indeed, eternal progress is a key tenet of Spiritualism’s only sacred text, a list of “Seven Principles” commonly held to have been given to the British medium Emma Hardinge Britten by the spirit of the utopian social activist Robert Owen.5

which it is now apprehended, and that these categories distort its origins and dynamics. Jenkins writes that the force of Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” in shaping Spiritualism is underappreciated by scholars, and notes that Christian Science, Theosophy, and New Age emphasis on the power of positive thinking are all successors to Mesmerism, like Spiritualism. (And, to be sure, Theosophy and New Age ideals have both partly developed from and dialogically reshaped Spiritualism.) All are movements seeking “direct inspiration” from extrahuman agents working through human minds, as Jenkins puts it. Once Mesmerism birthed Spiritualism, he argues, Spiritualism and its post-Mesmer kin were “contained” by emerging disciplines in the science of mind: “It is not clear that either Psychology or Psychoanalysis could have existed in anything like the forms we know them without these generative social movements to serve as stimulus, object and silent collaborator” (Jenkins, 2014: 16; compare Brown, 1997: 19–20, 167–173, 179–183 and Bubandt, 2012). Jenkins’ argument goes further yet, as he points to two other frameworks Spiritualism both generated and became misunderstood by: the rise-and-fall narrative which functionally situates Spiritualism as a response to past social crisis (while ignoring its continuation to the present) and Modernism itself: “Spiritualism joins intuition and mechanism, it embodies another view of language and its possibilities, it implies radical social critique and new personal potentials, and disturbs conventional accounts of both time and space. In all these respects, it is Modernism avant la letter” (Jenkins, 2014: 16; see also Pels, 2003). 4 In the transcripts of mediums’ speech, I have edited lightly for readability without changing meanings. Ellipses mark snippets of deleted text, but I do not mark every deletion with ellipses. For example, I eliminate some minor repetitions (“And, and so” becomes “And so”), placeholders (“um”), false starts, and the like without indication. 5 For a sympathetic but critical historical examination of claims about the Seven Principles’ origin, see Gaunt (2013, 2014, 2015). The claim that death is not an ending is hardly unique to Spiritualism, but for Spiritualism the historical antecedents include

156

M. TOMLINSON

“Spirit” needs explanation, too, because the term is used in several different ways which reflect different aspects of general philosophy. (I will use capital-S “Spirit” to mark it as a term central to the ethnography and different in key ways from colloquial English “spirit.”) The essences of deceased people are often referred to as people “in Spirit,” with “Spirit” configured like a location—a beyond, but beyond that is accessible here and now. For example, in the Canberra Spiritualist Association service of May 21, 2017, the medium performing that day, Jane Hall, mentioned that a song we had sung “really reminds me of my father…who is in Spirit”; encouraged audience members to feel the presence of and “hopefully work [mediumistically] with your loved ones and your family in Spirit”; and asked a male audience member, “Would you understand your mum to be in Spirit?” Besides being location-like, Spirit is also characterized as an agentive being. In the service of August 6, 2017, the medium Penelope Murray told the audience as she began her mediumship demonstration, “So, today…I’ll connect with Spirit and bring through some messages. Sometimes it’s…not always about what you want to hear, it’s about what Spirit wants you to hear.” Although these phrases suggest that Spirit is singular, the pronoun generally used for Spirit is “they” or “them.” For example, in the service of May 7, 2017, the medium Janet Adams characterized “Spirit” as location, agent, and “them” when she said to the audience at the beginning of her mediumship demonstration: You’re aware, I would hope by now, you’ve been attending for a while, that we, as mediums—and there’s a few of us here in the room—endeavour to speak to your loved ones in Spirit. And we need your energy—come on, bring it up from your boots—we need your energy to lift so that Spirit can come and meet us halfway. Well, more than halfway, ‘cause it’s hard work for them.

In Spiritualist philosophy, then, humans are part of Spirit—indeed, are essentially, foundationally Spirit (or Spiritual) and not existentially separate—but Spirit is nevertheless something that can act upon people Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, and the varieties of American Protestantism influenced by those movements: “A new eschatology that influenced nearly all of Protestant thought ‘sought to narrow the distance between this world and the next, even to annex heaven as a more glorious suburb of the present life’” (Faust, 2008: 178–179, quoting James H. Moorhead).

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

157

and connect with them. The term “God” is used by some Spiritualists as a near-synonym for “Spirit” when speaking philosophically; but in performing their mediumship, mediums always say they are in touch with Spirit (rather than with God). This discussion of language may be dry and the philosophy abstruse, but it is important to realize that Spirit is a capacious concept, flexible and useful for Spiritualist thinking and practice. The concept of Spirit underlies the energetic ritual work Spiritualist mediums put into providing evidence that they can accurately identify people who have physically died.

Evidence The services of the Canberra Spiritualist Association (CSA) are held on the first, third, and fifth Sundays of each month, with a summer break during parts of December and January.6 In each service, a medium presents a short address to the congregation on a spiritual topic and also gives the demonstration, which is the longest part of the service and the ritual highlight. The demonstration, also called being “on platform,” takes place when the medium stands in front of the congregation and shows that she has a connection with spirits of the deceased and can thereby provide “evidence” or “proof of survival” of the human personality after physical death.7 Regular Sunday services are free and open to the public, although small baskets are passed around for donations near the end of the event. During my main period of fieldwork, nine of the ten mediums I saw on platform at CSA services (many on more than one occasion) were women. Some of the demonstrating mediums were members of the CSA, but some are not, and come as guests for the day. One medium gives a demonstration in each Sunday meeting. The audience is dominantly female as well, with women outnumbering men two to one. Between January 17, 2016, and December 2, 2018, I counted attendance at 45 CSA services, during which time the average attendance was between 17 and 18 people per service. 6 I am using the present tense to describe my early experiences with the CSA in 2015–2016 and the main fieldwork period of 2017–2019. 7 In Spiritualist services I have attended outside of Canberra, mediums have stood on small stages, making their performances “on platform” literally. In Canberra, the phrase is used but the medium simply stands on the floor in front of the seated audience.

158

M. TOMLINSON

Before beginning her work, the medium will “open up” or do an “attunement,” focusing her energies on connecting with Spirit. As I learned to do this in Lynette Ivory’s mediumship course, connecting with Spirit can involve closing one’s eyes, quieting one’s conscious thoughts, metaphorically sitting in one’s own perceived spiritual power, and mentally declaring one’s intention to be in contact with Spirit. When impressions then come through, they are taken to be spiritual signals. These signals can arrive through any of the six senses: visions may be seen, words heard, sensations felt, odours smelled, foods tasted, and intuitions received. My efforts as a trainee medium were earnest and bumbling, although I was instructed that having more confidence in my abilities would be the key to success. In a process similar to the cultivation of psychological absorption which Tanya Luhrmann (2012) describes for American evangelical Christians attempting to engage God conversationally, Spiritualists in Canberra work hard to develop their skills. The medium’s job is to convey her impressions as directly as possible to her audience—saying what she senses, even if it seems odd to her. But a medium can also develop interpretive codes, for example, coming to realize over time that when she “sees” a silver bracelet it signifies any personally meaningful inherited object, not necessarily a real bracelet.8 When attuning before going on platform, the medium may receive messages from Spirit about how the service will go: which deceased persons will be coming through, how many readings the medium will give, and which parts of the audience she will be drawn to, for example. In carrying out her work on platform, the medium sometimes broadcasts a description of a person in Spirit and waits to see if anyone in the audience recognises it. For example, on April 16, 2017, Lynette Ivory was on platform, and in her third reading of the day, she described a young man whom anyone in the audience was invited to recognize: I have a gentleman showing himself to me now who would have been in the Air Force. He was quite a tall man. He’s got a dark navy uniform on, possibly…an English uniform, if it’s not English then it’s Australian. I don’t believe it’s American, I don’t believe it’s European. This was a gentleman who would be somebody’s grandfather, looking at what he’s

8 This example comes from the medium Sarah Jeffery, whom I interviewed in December 2018.

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

159

showing me. He was only quite young when he passed, he passed during the war in a plane. And he was a real lad. God, he was a lad. He lived life to the fullest. He really crammed everything into his life that he possibly could, it was almost like as he was approaching his maturity, he knew that he wasn’t going to live to old bones because he wanted to experience everything. Can anyone relate to a grandfather or great grandfather who would have been killed in the war?

In contrast to this technique, mediums sometimes address a particular member of the congregation from the beginning of the reading, sensing that this is the correct person to connect with the signals. An example of this direct style comes from the service of November 19, 2017. That day, the medium was Norman Ivory, president of the CSA at the time. The first reading began with him looking at a woman in the audience and saying, “Coming to the lady here, hello.” She responded, “Hello.” Then Norman said: I’ve got an old lady with you. Not quite as tall as you are, and you’re not very tall, are you. She’s quite broad…. She’s wearing a hat for going out in the sun. Her hair has lost its colour, and is a bit thin on top. She’s got brown shoes on which are leather, I think. And she’s got something in her hand which I think is a whip, which suggests to me that she got around by driving in a pony and trap or something like that. Because this looks like a whip, which is something she would have had for going around the country, perhaps in a buggy, or a pony and trap, or something like that. And when I say “pony,” I’m seeing a white and brown horse, with patches…like it’s white with big brown patches. And I get the feeling that she’s mostly lived in the country, but I don’t think a long way from the city; I think in an outer area. And there’s pasture and farmsteads in this country that I’m seeing. I think she passed quite a while ago now. I would think you would have been quite young when she passed to Spirit. And she would—looks to me to have been in her eighties, her early eighties when she passed. And she would have had something wrong with her throat. Perhaps her lungs. I’m not sure about that. But what I’m getting is choking in her throat when she passed.

He went on to describe the woman as “quite a good cook,” adding, “I see her making jam tarts, yeah, on an old wooden, square wooden table in the kitchen.” He said that “Anna” might be part of her name, her husband passed away before she had, she had at least one son, and “she

160

M. TOMLINSON

liked water, she liked lakes, she liked rivers. She liked sitting by the side of moving water.” In response, the woman said “it could be any one of them, any one of my grandmothers.” Some mediums will vary their style during performances, using both direct and indirect approaches. My point in offering these examples is not just to show the different approaches, however, but also to note that describing the manner of death is often a vital part of mediumship demonstrations, key evidence that the medium is in touch with a person in Spirit. The young man killed in the war, the old woman with lung or throat problems: the ways they died are a recognizable part of their identities.9 Their identities run deeper than the ways they died, of course, and sketching what they were like as people—what made them distinctive— is considered significant (“he was a real lad”; “quite a good cook”). In fact, for Spiritualists, evidence might be defined provisionally as the revelation of a deceased person’s character. It is a description of a person the medium usually does not know, with details that are not matters of public knowledge.10 The revelation of character and description of the manner of death is witnessed by audience members, many of whom do not know the deceased either but can observe the reactions of the reading’s recipient. As Adam Reed and Jon Bialecki note in their proposal to theorize character anew in anthropology, “the identification of character does not inevitably require a long time stabilisation of that subject (it may occur for a brief moment and for a specific purpose, directed outwards at other subjects) nor does it necessarily require the subject that is attributed character to become self-aware or even possessive of that character” (2018a: 162; see also Reed & Bialecki, 2018b). Such is the case in Spiritualist services, when “new” characters are continually summoned up in interactions between mediums and audience members. The stabilization of character is temporary and purposeful, and the characterful subject comes and goes from the event while the medium and audience remain in place. Narrative plays a restricted role in mediumship, partly because recipients are not supposed to feed information to mediums. Although any 9 A lesson I learned in mediumship training courses was that if a death was disturbing, it should be described delicately. For example, a medium should not describe a murder victim as having been “murdered,” but rather, should say that his or her “life had been taken by another’s hands.” 10 In some cases, mediums do bring through spirits of people they knew in life, or people whom they have connected with the same recipient before.

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

161

deceased person is tangled in a skein of stories, in mediums’ readings a person will come through as discrete bits of description: she had a broad frame; she’s wearing a hat and brown shoes; she’s carrying a whip; she liked flowing water; there was “something wrong with her throat. Perhaps her lungs.” Audience members are not supposed to tell stories in response, but to say “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know” (or variations on these, such as “I can take that”) when the medium asks if these characteristics add up to a recognizable persona. Of course, stories of successful (accurate, insightful) readings from mediums can later be told as stories which are offered as evidence of mediums’ effectiveness and Spiritualism’s truth. Occasionally, chatty audience members try to give extra details or tell stories during the performance. The medium usually stops them from doing so, making it clear that making private details public is her job.

Making Private Details Public In March 2017, the Canberra Spiritualist Association hosted a visitor from the UK, the internationally known medium Lynn Probert. She occasionally teaches courses at Arthur Findlay College, the mediumshiptraining college of the Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, an hour north of London. The SNU is arguably the most prestigious Spiritualist institution in the English-speaking world, and many Australian Spiritualists look to it as a leading intellectual authority, even if they disagree on particular positions the SNU takes. Probert had come to Canberra the previous year, too, although I did not attend that time. In 2017, Probert’s events were held at the Gungahlin Lakes Golf Club, north of the city. On Friday, March 17, she gave a public demonstration. More than forty people bought tickets (at fifty dollars each) for the event. The room we were in was not especially large, and the meeting buzzed with a cheerfully energetic vibe. On Saturday the eighteenth and Sunday the nineteenth she held mediumship-training workshops, and the final event on Sunday was a CSA service, unusual for being held for reasons of convenience at the Golf Club and not at the usual venue in Pearce. Probert’s visit was electrifying. She showed how making private details public, in the hands of a highly skilled medium, can be engrossing and emotionally riveting. Two of her readings from the Friday night demonstration stood out for their intimate revelations of personal loss. As it happened, the recipient of both readings was the same woman,

162

M. TOMLINSON

whom I will call “Maura.”11 Probert was in front of the audience for approximately an hour and a half. She gave six readings in all, with a twenty-minute break between the first three and the last three. The two readings I analyse below were the second and fifth of the night. Before her demonstration, Probert set a lighthearted tone and made it clear that the event was meant to be entertaining. In explaining how mediumship works, she said, “Just ‘cause someone’s died in a physical sense, they haven’t lost their humour and their ability to have fun with you, and to me that’s what it’s all about.” She continued: And when I go to do a demonstration, I look at it that I’m going to a party. I just don’t know who I’m going to meet. ‘cause when we go to a party, we chat to someone for ten minutes, we get to know a bit about them, we talk, and then we go, “Lovely to talk to you,” and we go off and talk to someone else. So, that’s what we do as mediums when we demonstrate. We get to know people. So, I’m going to have a party with your relatives and friends, and thank you for that.

Probert instructed the audience to speak up and offered a reason: “I will need you to talk back to me, and not just nod your head or shake your head. Because there’s something in your voice that is like a recognition to the spirit world.” Speaking, rather than just nodding, would make her “perceive information easier and hopefully stronger,” enabling her to do a better job establishing a firm connection between the person in Spirit and the person in the audience. It would also, I note, let non-participating audience members follow what was going on more easily.

11 When I interviewed Maura in March 2018, she mentioned that her daughter had purchased the tickets for them to attend Probert’s demonstration, and she (Maura) had not been expecting to get a reading that night, let alone two. Although some audience members, known informally as “body snatchers” or “grabbers,” seem to think every message is for them, Maura was clearly not a grabber.

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

163

The Young Man Who Died in an Accident Her second reading of the evening began with Probert saying, “Okay, I’ve got a younger male now.” She continued: I know he’s taller, he’s slimmer. I feel he’s got quite a edgy personality, and when I say “edgy,” I don’t mean naughty or horrible. I just know that there’s a little bit of a swagger to him. But I know that I’ve got a kind young guy. I do feel that he would have passed quickly.… I get the sense with him, he was someone that looked quite serious, although he wasn’t. I feel that there was a studiousness to him, so I know that he was an intelligent young man. But I do feel that he got a little bit lost within himself just a short time before he passes. Now, I feel that…he would have had a wide circle of people that he knew, but he was very particular about who he kept close to him, or who he allowed close to him. Now, I feel that there was a suddenness to his passing, and as I get that sense, I know he would have passed in an accident. So I know that I pass quickly, I pass in an accident, and I know this was not his fault, regardless of anything that may have been said. So, who would I be with?

In this opening stretch, Probert begins sketching the character of the deceased young man—he has some swagger but is studious, is smart but “a little bit lost,” knows many people but has a select few with whom he is close. As sceptical authors have observed, internally contradictory descriptions of personalities are likely to be agreed to; but Probert goes on to offer a specific micronarrative: the man was killed in an accident, and although he was blamed, it was not his fault. Several people raise their hands to indicate that they recognize the description so far. Probert then adds another detail: “I know he passes within the accident. I know he passes instantly. I also feel that he would have a friend in the spirit world that passed either in a very similar manner to him or within a short space of time to him also.” With this extra information, only one audience member is left who says she recognizes the young man. “May I work with you?” Probert asks. Maura replies, “Yes.” “Good,” Probert replies jokingly, “I’d be really stuck if you said no.” The audience laughs.

164

M. TOMLINSON

Maura, reflecting the light mood the medium has been cultivating, answers, “I just wasted fifty bucks.” This comeback prompts more audience laughter.12 The reading is more than sixteen minutes long, notably long for a public demonstration, with verbal interaction between Probert and Maura (and some participation from Maura’s daughter as well) revealing the character of the young man. For example, near the beginning, Probert says, “I know that he’s been very active around you since he’s passed, to let you know that he’s still very much a part of your life. You would understand this.” Maura replies, “That’s it,” affirming that she has indeed sensed his ongoing presence. Later, Probert asks, “I got to talk to you about keys, okay? Because I don’t know if someone snapped a key just recently. Would you know of this?” Maura does not seem to recognize the information about a key, and Probert persists: “I also feel that there’s something about your keys moving. So, you put your keys down, you can’t find them. Or you put them in one place—.” Their exchange then continues: Maura: Probert: Maura: Probert:

Oh, just tonight! Right, okay. We just couldn’t find the keys tonight before we came. Okay, okay. [Audience laughter.] Well, I know he wants to talk about that, or he wants to draw his attention to that— your attention. But I also know that he sort of takes a little bit of responsibility for that too. ‘cause I feel, if he can do as much as he can to let you know he’s there—he’s the type— and again, he’s just put the thought in my mind: if I could jump out of a cupboard and scare you, I would.

At this point, someone in the audience (probably Maura or her daughter, but it is hard to tell on the recording) says, “Oh, dear,” which prompts more audience laughter. During the reading, Probert identifies the young man as Maura’s son. After joking that “keeping his room tidy seems to be an important thing

12 On the page, this response sounds like a criticism, but in context it was clear that Maura was playfully imagining aloud: why did I buy a ticket when I didn’t want to get a reading?

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

165

to talk about as well, because it wasn’t,” she goes on to say “I do feel as well—think he’s putting the word ‘Mum’ across your head.” That is, she sees the word “Mum” actually appearing on Maura’s forehead. Maura acknowledges that she is the mother of the young man who died in the accident. Probert responds by describing further what she feels: “I know I want to get you in a hug. And he just gives me that feeling of, ‘It’s my mum,’ and that’s why I saw it just written across your head there quite easily.” She also makes a quip about mediums’ desire to provide the strongest possible evidence. This moment comes during an exchange with Maura about a Mother’s Day card: Probert: Maura: Probert:

Maura: Probert: Maura: Probert: Maura:

I do feel, though, that he wants to say—now, you’ve kept a Mother’s Day card from him, haven’t you? Yeah. And Mother’s Day is a different time of year here to what it is in the UK. But he wants you to make sure that you get that card out. Put it out, pride of place, this year. He was born on Mother’s Day. He was born on Mother’s Day. Okay. I wish I’d told you that. [Audience laughter.] But that’s why it’s special. Okay. He was born on Mother’s Day.

In saying “I wish I’d told you that,” Probert is acknowledging how impressive the reading could have been if she had more firmly linked Mother’s Day with the young man: not just demonstrating that she knows Maura still keeps a card from her late son, but correctly identifying his birthday.13 As mentioned above, a key element of many mediums’ performances is the description of the manner of death. In this reading, after mentioning

13 Surprising details—that is, details that are meaningful to the recipient but seem

especially odd to the medium, who nonetheless feels she needs to pass them along—are called “clinchers.” In her mediumship course, Lynette Ivory gave the example of once mentally seeing a rabbit sitting on a dresser when she was giving a reading. Who would dream up such a detail? So Lynette passed it on, and the recipient affirmed that her mother had given her a rabbit before she died.

166

M. TOMLINSON

that Maura’s son could sometimes be introverted and difficult to reach emotionally (Maura: “That’s true”), Probert concludes, “I feel that it was a struggle sometimes to understand where he was coming from, or where he was going, so to speak.” She then turns back to his death: Probert: Maura: Probert:

Maura: Probert: Maura: Probert:

Maura: Probert: Maura: Probert:

But I still feel that around his accident there were a lot of question marks. Would that make sense to you? There were, yeah. ‘cause I feel that either he wasn’t somewhere that was so familiar to him, or his diary had changed.… He wasn’t meant to be where he was at that time— Yeah, he wasn’t. —his plans changed. Yeah. And that’s why there was—again, that was just one of the many questions: why was he there at that moment, at that time? Mm hm. But I know that he wasn’t the cause of this accident. You understand? Yeah. But I still feel that there may have been things that had been said or presumed in that way. ‘cause he wants to say, “Mum, thanks for being strong and standing my corner, and fighting for what you believed in. And that’s me.” Does that make sense to you? Okay.

In this example, Probert balances delicately between describing the tragic event and assuring Maura that her son was innocent in it. Indeed, she assures Maura by speaking in the first person as her son, either quoting or channelling him, although she does not change her tone or quality of voice in doing so. An enormous amount of work is carried out in readings like this. The medium’s main task—to provide evidence that she is in contact with a physically deceased person living in the spirit world—is accomplished to Maura’s satisfaction, and this is plain to see and hear for audience members. Maura is persuaded that Probert is in touch with her son. As an observer of this interaction, I found it emotionally riveting. I cannot

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

167

represent Maura’s own feelings at the time, but when I interviewed her a year later, it was clear that the readings had been meaningful and uplifting for her; but she also said that after receiving such readings one can feel a bit flat, realizing once again that the person is not physically present anymore. The Man Who Struggled with Drugs In her fifth reading of the evening, Probert did not explicitly mention the cause of death at the beginning, but suggested it had something to do with drugs. Saying “I’ve got a young gentleman now, a young guy,” she gave her opening description: And I know, I know that he wouldn’t have always walked the straight line of life, shall we say. So, I know that he would have got himself in a little bit of trouble at times. I do feel that there would have been an involvement with drugs with him. And I also feel that…he would have been familiar with people in uniform, can I say that [she gives a small laugh; the audience laughs too]. And so I know that he wasn’t adverse to getting himself in a scrape from time to time. I feel that he’s got this very caring nature. But I just get the sense there was a lot of influences around him at the time. And I feel it was more his friends than his family that just didn’t help him stay on track of life. That’s how I want to describe it. So, who would I be with—with a young man that there would have been drugs involved with him, I know that he would have been in trouble through his life from time to time, and—but there is still that innocence, and I don’t want to sort of say that he was a bad apple, ‘cause he really wasn’t. Some people are, but he wasn’t. There was something quite sensitive and gentle about him, but I just feel he lost his way in life. He lost his way in life. So, who would I be with?

As with the first reading, Probert cultivates a light tone, saying the man “would have been familiar with people in uniform” to suggest that he had gotten in trouble with the police. A set of contradictory qualities give depth to his character: he was sensitive and gentle, but friends led him to act in damaging ways; he worked to get his life in order, but lacked the strength at the end to succeed fully. A key detail is that he struggled with drugs.

168

M. TOMLINSON

A woman in the audience (not Maura) says that she might recognize him. Probert speaks briefly with her. Maura then indicates that she might also know him, and for a short period, it is not clear which woman will end up working with the medium. Both of them knew a man who had struggled with drugs, had come close to spending time in jail, and, as Probert put it, “it was almost like he had this self-destruct button.” Then she adds that he “wanted to fit in” and “was easily led.” Apparently sensing a negative response from the look on the first woman’s face, Probert says, “Not so much,” and the woman echoes, “Not so much.” Turning to Maura, the medium asks, “Okay, so if I’m to be with you, would you understand that there was one person in particular that sort of had an influence on him, around him?” Maura says “Yes,” and Probert tells the first woman, “Sorry, I’m here,” and then engages further with Maura. Unlike the first reading, Probert does not specify the manner of death, but Maura herself suggests it near the beginning of her reading. After deciding to proceed with Maura, Probert says, “you would understand that he sort of got himself on track. Or he started to—it started to look like, ‘Oh, thank goodness he’s starting to get with the programme of life now.’ And then everything went wrong. Would you understand that?” Maura answers, “He was on drugs, he got clean, and then he was diagnosed.” This micronarrative established, Probert goes on to say that the man was essentially a good person, an innocent one and that his family would not have realized how involved in drugs he was. She adds that he was a practical joker with a good sense of humour and that his drug use was an attempt to escape from emotional pain. In a noteworthy stretch of their interaction, Probert speaks with Maura about the man’s physical appearance, making it clear that she sees his face now: Probert: Maura: Probert:

Maura:

Now when he smiled, he just had one dimple here, didn’t he? Yes, he did, [inaudible]. Okay, because I know when he smiles, his eyes just really shine, okay? ‘cause I know he’s a good looking guy, but I know that—what happened—well, what he was doing, started to have an effect on his— I was just going to say that.

8

Probert: Maura: Probert Probert: Probert:

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

169

—in the way that he looked. But I know before that, I’ve got a really good looking guy that I look at— Yes. —okay? And I feel that also he would know someone else that passed with drugs as well. Probably. Because I know that there are two or three in the spirit world that he associates with, or that he knows, that would have passed in the same way. Okay?

By this point, Probert and Maura have developed a rapport, working constructively with positive responses to flesh out the character of the deceased man. Unlike the first reading, his precise kinship connection with Maura is not established. (Maura told me later it was her brother, who had died in his mid-forties.) As in the first reading, Probert senses a car crash, and Maura replies, “He got paid out his super because he was dying, and he bought himself a car, and he drove it before it was insured, and crashed it.”14 Probert jokes “I thought that,” seeming to suggest, as she had with her earlier line about the Mother’s Day card, that she should have presented her impression more firmly as evidence. Now she goes further, saying, “I know he wants to talk about that. But I also want to acknowledge someone else that’s either damaged their car or scraped their car in the here and now.” Maura responds, “His son.” Through these exchanges, a kinship network and proto-narrative are being articulated, but many details remain unsaid. Spirit mediums and their respondents work together to create an emergent sense that meaningful communication is taking place, and spirits become emotionally vibrant presences even as stories about them are presented only in compressions and fragments. Maura’s second reading lasts thirteen minutes. As in the first reading, a nuclear family member’s early death is transformed into an emotionally uplifting dialogue tinged with humour. The second reading differs from the first in two key ways: Maura volunteers information about the manner of death, and her kinship with the deceased man is not specified. But the two readings have an overall sameness, as many Spiritualist readings do. The medium reveals knowledge that is private. She does so, crucially, in a public context, a roomful of strangers. It is entertainment, and Probert

14 “Super” is a reference to a superannuation fund.

170

M. TOMLINSON

gets the audience to laugh notably often. But it is also completely serious, intended to prove that there is life after death by showing, among other things, that the medium knows how those loved ones died and what they were really like as people because she is being told and shown so by them. The goal in revealing the manner of death is, paradoxically, to demonstrate that there is no such thing as death in the colloquial sense, only a transition from physical, earthly life to a higher and more refined level of spiritual existence—becoming a person “in Spirit.” Because I have described the mediumship of Lynn Probert, who is an especially skilled and confident performer, readers might get the impression that mediumship usually works smoothly. On the contrary, most mediums on platform routinely have difficulty. At moments in many Spiritualist services, verbal interactions are marked by awkwardness, silence, hesitancy, and doubt. Sometimes no one in the audience recognizes the description of the person in Spirit. When readings do not go smoothly, mediums later tend to share responsibility between themselves (they received impressions from the spirit world, but were unable to present them in a way the audience recognized) and the audience (they did not speak up, or were slow to recognize the connection).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to clear ethnographic space for the study of Spiritualist ritual by calling attention to the way “evidence” is foregrounded as the vital stuff of performance. Two kinds of evidence are (1) the telling details of character—the bits of description that convincingly flesh out the dimensions of a deceased person’s distinct personality and (2) the description of a person’s manner of death. In revealing the character of a deceased person and identifying how they died, making private details public, a medium is attempting to accomplish a specific task: to prove that your deceased loved ones are alive in the spirit world and want to communicate with you. Once this connection is established, the medium passes along a message from the person in Spirit to the person in the audience. The messages that the deceased give to the living are always positive. From her son, Maura received a message of love and birthday greetings for her brother or brother-in-law. From her brother, Maura received the message that he is proud of his son, Maura’s nephew, and that Maura needed to let him know that. I have never heard a

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

171

message that was threatening or pessimistic, and when negative things are mentioned—present-day difficulties, such as health or job worries—they are accompanied by an assurance that there will be better days ahead. I began this chapter with the memory of my father not talking about his coming death. From a Spiritualist perspective, it should be clear, he would definitely want to talk about it now. In conclusion, I must mention two readings I have received at public demonstrations in which it was suggested my father was present. One was brief and, like so many readings, contained some details that fit well and some that did not. The other was an especially interesting interaction because it reminded me of the emotional undertow that tugs performances in particular directions. At the beginning of the reading, it seemed like the medium wanted to work with me: she said she was in touch with a man from overseas who liked cars. We had a brief, and somewhat comical, dialogue about men liking cars, and the kind my father had owned when I was young, which, for the record, was a yellow Fiat in the 1970s. Soon another man in the audience jumped in to suggest he thought he knew whom the medium was in touch with, and she proceeded to work with him. Yet the details that then came forth surprised me. She mentioned another kind of car, a Jaguar, and I remembered how my father jokingly gave my mother a toy Jaguar because we could not afford the real, fullsized car. The medium said, “I very much feel him coming through now saying, ‘I want to talk about the New York Times, it’s about time, sometimes I didn’t have time for my family,’” and I felt a new jolt, remembering my father apologizing for not writing to the New York Times in time to have the wedding notice for my wife and myself listed there. These are the minor details—fragments, flashes—that suggest a story, and of course, I knew one version of the story well and felt it deeply. On that occasion, however, it remained private for me, canting in a different direction and winding up with a different public ending.

References Ariès, P. (1975). The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes Toward Death in Western Societies. In V. M. Stannard & D. E. Stannard (Eds., Trans.), Death in America (pp. 134–158). University of Pennsylvania Press. Ariès, P. (1981). The Hour of Our Death. In H. Weaver (Trans.). Penguin.

172

M. TOMLINSON

Ariès, P. (2010 [1974]). Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. In P. M. Ranum (Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. Braude, A. (1989). Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Beacon. Brown, M. F. (1997). The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age. Harvard University Press. Bubandt, N. (2012). A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond. Anthropological Forum, 22(1), 1–23. Faust, D. G. (2008). This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Alfred A. Knopf. Gal, S. (2002). A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction. Differences, 13(1), 77–95. Gal, S. (2005). Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of public/Private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 23–37. Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge University Press. Gaunt, P. J. (2013). The Creed of the Spirits: Principles of Emma Hardinge Britten. Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) Publications. Gaunt, P. J. (2014). How Many Principles made up Emma’s “Creed of the Spirits”? Pioneer, 1(4), 104–118. Gaunt, P. J. (2015). Were the S.N.U: Seven Principles Changed? Pioneer, 2(2), 33–40. Jenkins, T. (2014, November 3). Issues in the Study of Spiritualism [Paper presented at the “Locating religion” seminar, University of Cambridge]. Kalvig, A. (2017). The Rise of Contemporary Spiritualism: Concepts and Controversies in Talking to the Dead. Routledge. Kellehear, A. (2007). A Social History of Dying. Cambridge University Press. Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Alfred A. Knopf. Owen, A. (1989). The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth Century England. Virago. Pels, P. (2003). Spirits of Modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact. In B. Meyer & P. Pels (Eds.), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (pp. 241–271). Stanford University Press. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. University of Chicago Press. Reed, A., & Bialecki, J. (2018a). Introduction to Special Section 1: Anthropology and Character. Social Anthropology, 26(2), 159–167. Reed, A., & Bialecki, J. (2018b). Introduction to Special Section 2: Anthropology and Character. Social Anthropology, 26(3), 305–313.

8

MEDIUMSHIP AND EVIDENCE IN AUSTRALIAN …

173

Skultans, V. (1974). Intimacy and Ritual: A Study of Spiritualism, Mediums and Groups. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Tomlinson, M. (2019). How to Speak like a Spirit Medium: Voice and Evidence in Australian Spiritualism. American Ethnologist, 46(4), 482–494. Tomlinson, M. (n.d.). Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience. Unpublished manuscript. Wilson, D. G. (2013). Redefining Shamanisms: Spiritualist Mediums and Other Traditional Shamans as Apprenticeship Outcomes. Bloomsbury. Yerby, E. (2017). Spectral Bodies of Evidence: The Body as Medium in American Spiritualism [Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University].

CHAPTER 9

Epilogue: A Discussion with Ahmad Baso Ahmad Baso

Ahmad Baso (b. 1971) has a long and distinguished record of writing on state-society relations in Indonesia, and the shaping effects of religion and colonialism on these (Chapter Four above refers to one phase of his career). His work is notable for its strong attention to Indonesian realities but also for its close engagement with the Western canon of political philosophy and public sphere theorising (major works are listed below). Baso is a much-needed interlocutor in the discussion conducted in this book because he has never assumed that communities ought to strive to create public and political domains that privatise their religious traditions. More specifically, even though equality and pluralism are amongst his central concerns, he does not tie these to an imperative that citizens speak across borders in languages purged of particularistic affiliation. All his observations have proceeded from a premise, widely accepted in Indonesia, that religion ought to have a structuring effect of some kind in political and social affairs. Not only that, he has proposed that the religious styles and institutions of one particular current—traditionalist

A. Baso (B) Nahdlatul Ulama, Jakarta, Tangerang Selatan, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9_9

175

176

A. BASO

Islam—provide models for public communication in which equality and difference are assets rather than problems. In comparison with the main currents of Western thinking about religion in public spheres, Baso’s analysis is radical. In that body of theorising, it is accepted as a principle of universal application that discourse about the common good should be conducted in languages that are more or less religiously neutral. This principle has found support in Indonesia also. Yet Baso observes that in Indonesia the rituals of religion are not potentially divisive things, but efficacious rituals of social integration. It follows from this that the concept of a private sphere in which religious particularity is protected is given very little attention in Baso’s writings. For this reason, Baso is an ideal figure to provide an epilogue to this collection—his theorising attends to a complex, modern nationhood in which the crossing-out of God is at most an illusion enabled by the colonial political legacy. This integrative potential inheres not only in the embodied rituals of traditionalist Islam but also in those of other groups marginalised by modernity, such as Indonesia’s indigenous communities. History has confronted these groups with a momentous problem: the unstoppable impetus of modernity has marginalised their ritual practices, which are their most important political and social resources. Because of this, the activist programme encountered in Baso’s work has insisted that such practices are media for resistance towards and appropriation of that impetus. It follows that Baso’s perception of public ethics is not just about Islamic traditionalists: these Muslims belong to a larger aggregation of groups defined by their subaltern status. Nevertheless, when Baso argues that rituals belonging to particular groups have value for their potential as rituals of social integration, a reader might ask how this could succeed in such a diverse society as Indonesia’s. In response to this, Baso insists that rituals’ integrative potentials can only be manifest if they are understood not as expressions of particularistic meanings, but as negotiations that accommodate differences. The integrating potential must subsume purely religious interpretations of practices. A precedent for this can be seen, Baso points out below, in the example of the nine saints who brought Islam to Javanese communities in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. They gave priority to the integration of internally diverse communities over sectarian interests. In arguing this, Baso’s interpretation conflicts with other positions expressed in Indonesia’s public Islamic discourse.

9

EPILOGUE: A DISCUSSION WITH AHMAD BASO

177

Not many Indonesian public intellectuals, for example, are prepared to collapse the borders between indigenous beliefs and monotheisms in the way Baso does. The Indonesian and Javanese contexts in which Baso lives and writes are important contexts for understanding his theorising. Muslims of various currents form a majority of around 85–90% of the Indonesian population, yet public respect for religions other than Islam is generally high. Indonesia’s state political ideology grants equality to monotheisms. This ideology is a cause of constant political tension, but it does nevertheless overlap with very high public approval for religion and religious institutions. In the present, there is growing support for cross-border religious practices that embody the ritual interpretations that Baso identifies in the example of the nine saints. In Bali, for example, some HinduBalinese temples facilitate spaces for Muslim prayer. And Balinese teachers are frequently found amongst the leaders of the Islamic singing events that are so popular as mass gatherings for Muslims of Java. In other words, contemporary realities to some degree resemble the structuring of public religion that Baso associates with the example of the nine saints. Ahmad Baso’s intellectual development started at what he describes as a ‘Bugis Islamic school (pesantren) opened by a kyai who had recently returned from studying in Java’. The Bugis are the biggest of three ethnic groups that live in Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province. He later studied at a Saudi-funded college in Jakarta. Baso did not complete this qualification and has not completed any of the courses of tertiary study in which he enrolled. In his twenties, he became involved in the youth wing of the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, NU) organisation. This is a civil society organisation established in 1926 by Javanese religious leaders (kyai) concerned at the rise of Islamic modernism in the Indies and globally. The kyai are the leaders of Indonesia’s Islamic schools (pesantren). They attain their positions based on a combination of their genealogical lineage, scholarly achievements, and individual qualities. Many claim to be related by genealogies of learning to the nine saints who cultivated Islamic communities in Java and elsewhere. These institutions—kyai, pesantren, NU, the nine saints—are foundational in Baso’s analysis. It was in the NU intellectual environment that he became interested in critical thinking in Western traditions, especially post-colonial theory. His profile in the world of NGOs led him to accept a role in Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights. Since leaving the Commission, he has taught at a number of tertiary institutions and teaches courses in

178

A. BASO

Indonesian textual traditions in online and face-to-face modes. He lives in Jakarta, and spoke to Julian Millie in Ciputat in August of 2022. Julian Millie: The ‘Crossed-out God’ is a label for one of the effects of modernity, namely the removal of an interventionist Divinity from nature and social life, and its reconstruction as a spiritual resource to be called upon when required. This generalisation might be appropriate for some Western public spheres, and Indonesian political structures much resemble Western ideals…but does such a label express something about Indonesia?

Ahmad Baso: To answer this question, we need to appreciate the effects of colonisation on public life in the East Indies and Indonesia, as well as the contours of western scholarship, which continued some of the distortions put in place by colonisation. During the colonial period, the institutions, hierarchies and economies of the kyai and pesantren were limited in their activities within a sphere we can equate with civil society. They were completely excluded from the political sphere. In the formal political sphere, the kyai played no role during this period. The results of this are not fully recognised in the present. For one thing, observers and researchers, especially Western ones, assumed that the kyai and their institutions were not developing political competency under those conditions. Nothing the kyai did was recognisable to the colonial gaze as political, and as a result, they were constructed as belonging to an apolitical past. It was assumed that NU could not understand its own political nature, so a kind of enclosure was created around NU by scholars like Snouck Hurgronje, Clifford Geertz and Herb Feith. This impression has been maintained until recently. They portrayed NU as if it were politically non-active and quietist. More than that, this understanding had a normative dimension to it…the NU was held to be a good thing as long as its followers continued to practice their religion in private settings. Islamic Modernists gave support to this exclusion because they spoke in the language of modern political spheres, and this was easily understood by the colonial government and also by academic observers of Indonesian society. The modernist Muslim intellectuals deferred to the logics of modernity and capitalism. They put forward an Islamic politics that was, like secular politics in the European sense, a rationalising one. Of course, when they did this, they created distance between the rationalised project and the practices of actual communities. For example,

9

EPILOGUE: A DISCUSSION WITH AHMAD BASO

179

Indonesian modernists were enthusiastic about what they regarded as authentic Islamic political ideas like the Madinah Charter, but although they thought this ought to be a unifying idea for Muslims, in fact, it was an attempt to purify the public sphere of religious fragmentation. For that reason, modernists were natural companions for researchers like Snouck, Geertz and Feith, all of whom were very influenced by modernisation theory, or at least the notion that contemporary nation states ought to rationalise their political structures in order to enter the world of global capitalism as independent states. Modernist Muslims could have deep, sympathetic conversations with Western scholars, and as a result, they together strengthened the impression that the kyai, who spoke in political language threaded through with religion and culture, were disinterested or inept in politics. Foreign scholars, especially Americans, tended to accept this false image…they saw an Indonesian future that must necessarily belong to modernists. George Kahin, for example, was close with the main figures of the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), all of whom were Westernoriented, and the Muslim intellectuals in that circle were also oriented to a modernist vision, such as Natsir and Sjafruddin Prawiranegara. So they created the myth that the kyai class was an acceptable element of society as long as it refrained from practical politics. As a result, when they have intervened in party politics, we have been accused of opportunism and short-sightedness. And all this led to the myth that there existed a Javanese public sphere that was empty of religion, and a religious or civil sphere that had no political programme. In fact, this is based on the exclusions effected by colonialism … in reality the kyai and pesantren have always been active in the development of a distinctive Islamic politics. Julian Millie: What was the shape of the NU political programme that developed outside of the formal political sphere during the colonial period?

Ahmad Baso: What the researchers just mentioned did not appreciate was that the kyai and pesantren populations, which consisted of a Muslim majority but also other religious groups and social identities, were implementing a political vision that accommodated Islam and nationalism. This is the characteristic Archipelagic [Nusantara] Islamic vision. The nine saints who brought Islam to Java [fifteenth to seventeenth centuries] advocated for an Islamic politics which had diversity, national diversity,

180

A. BASO

structured into it. This politics was dedicated to creating a just society and a prosperous order (politik kemaslahatan bangsa). It was developed in the colonial period, a period in which scholars have held the kyai to be politically quietist, but this politics was highly efficacious in the post-independence period when they had the opportunity to be active politically in the formal political sphere.[1 ]. It is important to note that the religious politics of the kyai has maintained its character since before Nahdlatul Ulama took shape as a formal organisation in 1926. This can be seen in the textual corpus of writing by Indonesian Muslims, but also in forms of ritual sociability that transcended borders between ethnicity and religious identity. So talk of the privatisation of religion in Indonesia, of a narrative of secularity, is only plausible if we hold to the false notion that the religious sphere of Indonesia would be a modernist one purified of particularity. Recent history has proven this to be wrong. The kyai and the pesantren had long before independence developed an Islamic vision that took national diversity as one of its determining realities… Julian Millie: You imply that the Indonesian politics structured around the example of the nine saints could be acceptable to all Indonesians. And in your writings, you even talk about non-Muslims participating in practices that are particular to traditionalist Islam, such as the istighatsah (group intercessory prayer). But Indonesia is a diverse population, so how can a religious politics assume that followers of other religions might participate in this way? I mean, how does it work in practice?

Ahmad Baso: Well of course people and groups can and do keep their distance. None of what I say prevents that. Such a freedom is not a problem…but I adapt my model for this national politics from the empirical precedent of the Javanese kyai. The history of Java provides us with models. The kyai was the actor responsible for Islamic dakwah in his community, and in Java, these communities were plural ones. As the community developed, the kyai would often order his followers to buy 1 [Editor’s note: The Nahdlatul Ulama has had a shifting presence in Indonesian party

politics. In 1943 it affiliated with the Masyumi, an umbrella coalition for Indonesia’s Muslims. It broke from this coalition and established its own party in 1952. In 1984, in response to the political monopoly maintained by the Suharto regime, the organisation left the field of party politics, but in 1999, its elites once again established a political party as a vehicle for the organisation, the Rising of the Nation Party (PKB)].

9

EPILOGUE: A DISCUSSION WITH AHMAD BASO

181

a gamelan set [metallophone ensemble]. Now, he could have advised the community to raise money and build a mosque. Of course, this advice would have met with high approval, for after all, there are Islamic justifications for building a mosque. There is a divine reward for building a mosque. This is clearly expressed in revelation. But according to some kyai, the gamelan should come first…why? For one thing, a gamelan creates economic activity for a plural community, and the nine saints were concerned about creating economic activity, but more importantly for this conversation, the gamelan creates an inclusive culture. The rationale for building a mosque follows a sectarian logic, but the gamelan establishes grounds for coming together and negotiating differences, and from there arises the programme of creating a just social order. In Javanese, we call this anggelar adil palamarta [creating a just order], but of course, the Islamic idea underpinning this is kamaslahatan bangsa [national well-being]. Now for some Muslims, this is objectionable. The religious rationale ought to be given priority. But that was not the model followed by the saints of Java. They knew that rituals and practices could have great power as integrating forces as long as they were not determined by religious rationales. This is important because it takes away the threat of ‘dominance’. The saints of Java talked about society as dar ul-salam (the abode of peace) and did not generally use dar ul-Islam (the abode of Islam). The same thing happened in Aceh. And they intended their rituals not to be expressions of majority religion, but negotiations with realities. This is the real politics, the negotiation with the other. This should be the real site of Islamic politics, in civil society, where care is taken to negotiate rather than dominate. It is divisive to drag a so-called authentic Islamic political vision into the arena of formal politics. And of course, I am not the first to draw attention to this. The textual corpus that has developed around the nine saints expresses it, and subsequent scholars, especially Abdurrahman Wahid, a kyai who became the President of the Republic, also developed it under the label of ‘Islamic Indigenisation’. And to go back to the point about participation in a diverse society…I should point out that my perspective is based on the notion of a politics in which people are connected with one another…that is another presupposition that perhaps is not shared with Western theorists…it might be hard for thinkers in the Western tradition to imagine attendance at a neighbour’s ritual as a foundation of the political collective, but that is the case

182

A. BASO

here. The political subject I am talking about is one who is accustomed to practices of gathering that draw participation from outside the religious formation in a narrow sense and negotiates that otherness. It is about gathering and assembling, and I mean this in literal terms of embodied events such as the istighatsah as well as non-corporeal practices of association…it is perhaps difficult to credibly imagine these politics within a society oriented to individualism. It is not that Indonesia is homogenous…it is very diverse, but we recognise that our conventions prioritise shared efforts to achieve a level of cohesion around a common goal. One of the nine saints expressed it as kumpul bae maksudira…[Jv. we meet bodily, bringing our intentions together]. To clarify further…this is not about prescribing NU practices as national models to be followed for negotiating difference…practices of all groups have this integrative capacity. In an early book [Plesetan Budaya], I drew attention to another marginalised group, the Dayak of the Meratus Mountains in South Kalimantan. What I wanted to highlight is the way their political marginalisation was compounded by the rational political sphere, that allocated them to an identity as primordial and regional. In fact, as the research of Anna Tsing [In the Realm of the Diamond Queen] indicates, their storytelling practices were not static expressions of culture. The Dayak Meratus used them to perform negotiations with other groups with whom they had to co-exist, such as the Banjarese, and also the state. Their storytelling practices had enabled them to maintain their cultural cohesion, and at the same time, negotiate the presence of political forces…this is the model also for the politics of the nine saints. Of course according to the conditions of the rationalised political sphere, storytelling has no political efficacy as political communication, but in the politics I identify in the example of the nine saints, these are cultural practices with integrating potential, and marginal groups use them for negotiating their existence. I know this is a contrast to some of the really important idealisations of the Western public sphere. Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Giddens framed the public sphere as something that needed to be protected from particularities and specific cultural formations. That makes sense in the contexts in which they lived and wrote. They were writing in traumatised religio-political environments. But in post-colonial Indonesia, the cultural forms I have spoken of here are tools for marginalised groups to negotiate with the dominant ones. This is the proper role of Islamic politics also. It contests the exclusions of the so-called rational political processes of

9

EPILOGUE: A DISCUSSION WITH AHMAD BASO

183

Indonesian modernity, which marginalised groups like the Dayak Meratus as well as pesantren communities. Julian Millie: In contrast to that, present Indonesian realities display many religious actors who insist on a sectarian public sphere. In my introduction, I mention the fatwa from the Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI) that opposed inter-religious prayer. Dede Syarif writes above about efforts from activists, within NU also, to oppose the emergence of IJABI (the Shiite Advocacy Organisation) as a legitimate actor in public life. Mokh. Fakhruroji discusses the outrage confected by NU youth around a slipup by the preacher Evie Effendi. Does it matter to your political vision that some actors within NU make religious meanings a starting point for exclusive politics?

Ahmad Baso: The fragmented politics you refer to here has much to do with what I described above, the exclusion of Islam from the political sphere by colonisation and then the modernising period of the [authoritarian] Suharto era. More recently, religion has been thrust into the political sphere as an attempt at reactualisation. This is a real problem because those who want to reactualise an Islamic politics require an objectified political programme to suit their cause. A modernist like Nurcholish Madjid, for example, advocated for Islam as an authentic civilizational vision, but this contained a purifying ethos that created political conflict with other religions, with minority beliefs and also with traditional Muslims. This is the reality of conscious attempts to Islamise politics. The problem happens when the idealisation of a rational political sphere is laid over with a concept of a purified Islamic authenticity…the political sphere becomes exclusionary. And it is happening at the moment. When religion is objectified as a sphere of life and reactualised in politics, identity politics lifts in intensity. Those NU activists you are talking about feel threatened that their identity is being threatened by various contemporary movements in Islam. The precedent of the nine saints was not to separate the national community from religious rationales and practices. They did not know the notion of ‘Islam as alternative’. They did not consider Islam as a way to offset secular politics. It is unfortunate that in our nation and others in the post-colonial world, when political life is purged of politics, then efforts to reactualise it in the political sphere are going to place strain on group identities. Right now identity politics is becoming more and more of a problem in Indonesia.

184

A. BASO

We need to be aware of our tendency to succumb to a majoritarian vulnerability. As Islam has been mainstreamed, formal Islamic interpretations have been creeping into public discourse, in place of the priority of the national well-being [kemaslahatan bangsa] that I described above. As a result, minority and dissenting religious currents have been marginalised. I once wrote about a television programme broadcast on national TV called Kafir [‘The Non-believer’]. This programme was broadcast on national TV. The subject of this dramatic reconstruction was a religious minority living in West Java Province. This rural community practices the rituals that are connected to the agricultural cycle. Cosmologies of this kind have a long history here. But the publicity around the film’s release painted the community as deviants, especially with the word kafir [non-believer], which is a serious term for many Muslims. Perhaps the publicists felt that because the group was a minority, it was okay to label them in this way. But this implements a serious marginalisation from public life. The community made a legal complaint that it had been defamed by the film. Insecurity about identity needs to be carefully watched when the state becomes involved in protecting the majority. Tension about identity has been behind a number of legal measures that the state has put in place to ‘protect’ the majority. They have a negative effect on diversity in Indonesia. These laws indicate that we suffer from a sort of narcissism. It is as if we look at our image in the mirror and see minority groups as pimples that spoil our complexion. So we make laws that appear to grant rights to all groups equally, but which have the effect of emphasising and strengthening boundaries between communities, and this is detrimental to minorities. This can be seen for example in our national education laws, which sought to protect Muslims by protecting their rights to Islamic education, but which also add to the ‘otherness’ of the non-Islamic elements of our society. It can be seen in restrictions on marriage that prevented non-monotheists from legal registration of marriage, and in the laws we have to ‘protect religion from defamation’, and so on. These draw borders between groups and reveal our majoritarian vulnerability. This has to be kept in check, as it prevents Islam from playing a role as a resource for the negotiation of differences within society.

9

EPILOGUE: A DISCUSSION WITH AHMAD BASO

185

Major Works by Ahmad Baso 2002 Games with Locality: The Politics of Islamic Indigenisation. (Plesetan Lokalitas: Politik Pribumisasi Islam). Jakarta Selatan: Desantara. 2006. NU Studies: The Conflict Between Islamic and Neo-Liberal Fundamentalisms. (NU Studies: Pergolakan Antara Pemikiran Fundamentalisme Islam dan Fundamentalisme Neo-liberal ). Jakarta: Erlangga. 2021 The Historiography of the project and politics of Nahdlatul Ulama (A contribution to Indonesian Politics and the Study of Archipelagic Islam). (Historiografi Khittah dan Politik Nahdlatul Ulama (Sebuah kontribusi untuk Politik Indonesia dan Studi Keislaman Nusantara)) Jakarta: Yayasan Garuda Bumandhala.

Index

A Aceh, 181 affect, 104, 140 Ahlu al-sunnah wa al-jama‘ah, 51, 60 Ahmadiyyah, 50 Asad, Talal, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12 Asia-Pacific, 1, 3, 6–8, 23, 27

B Banaras, 21, 129–132, 134, 136, 138–142, 145, 146 Bandung, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58–62 Bangkok, 2 Baso, Ahmad, 8, 22, 91, 93, 94, 96–98, 102–108, 175–177, 179, 183 Bible Society, 17, 18, 78

C Casanova, José, 6, 11–13, 101 cassette, 117, 118 Catholic church, 9, 72 Civic, 3, 10, 11, 99

anti-civic, 12, 13, 23 Civil society civil society organisations, 21, 51, 52, 65, 112–117, 119, 120 Indonesia’s civil society Law, 53–55, 57 colonisation, 6, 7, 102, 178, 183 Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI), 16 Counter-public, 12, 13, 50 Crossed-out God, 6, 23, 178 D Da’i, Atian ‘Ali, 62 dakwah, 41, 45, 54, 57, 58, 61, 180 Dalit, 132–134, 144 Dayak Meratus, 182, 183 death, 22, 30, 57, 121, 131, 151–153, 155, 157, 160, 165, 167–171 developmentalist state, 99, 100 Dignity, 4, 5, 12, 14 disruption, 113 Douglas, Mary, 3, 9–11

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Millie (ed.), The ‘Crossed-Out God’ in the Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3354-9

187

188

INDEX

E Effendi, Evie, 111–114, 118–126, 183 efficacy, 3, 5, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 95, 97, 100, 107 elections in Indonesia, 31, 91 Embarrassment, 2–4, 14, 80 Enlightenment, The, 10, 90, 98, 116 Evangelism, evangelicals, 74

F Family Keluarga sakinah, 38–40 nuclear, 18, 28, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 169 Fatimiyyah, 58 Fatwa, 16, 17, 122

G Gafatar, 52 Gymnastiar, Abdullah (Aa Gym), 118

H Habermas, Jürgen, 20, 89–93, 95, 98, 101–103, 106, 108, 109, 182 hajj (pilgrimage), 29–33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 44 Hikam, Muhammad, 91–94, 96–103, 106, 108, 109 Hinduism, 134 Brahmanic Patriarchy, 133–136 Hizb ul-Tahrir, 53

I Indonesian Association of Congregations of the People of the Prophet’s Household (IJABI), 52

Indonesian National Anti-Shia Alliance, 60 Indonesia, Republic of, 16, 19, 32, 102, 103 Interfaith, 14–17 Islam Al-Azhar, 112 caliphate, 53 hijrah, 119 madhzab, 113 medina charter, 105 modernism, 20, 92, 115, 177 Muslim World League, 60 shiism, 49, 55–57 shiite emergence, 19 sunni, 19, 51, 54, 55, 57, 60–62 taqiyya, 55 istighatsah, 96, 180, 182

J Java, 22, 56, 58, 62–64, 92, 93, 103, 111, 118, 120, 177, 179–181, 184

K Kuntowijoyo, 97, 98, 100 kyai, 92, 93, 96, 107, 177–181

L Latour, Bruno, 2, 4, 6 The Crossed-out God, 23 Liberalism, 10, 12

M Madjid, Nurcholish, 183 Mecca, 29–32, 34, 37–39, 44, 119, 131 Medina, 29, 32, 119

INDEX

middle-class, 19, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36–40, 42–45, 99, 141 millennials, 118, 120 Miller, Daniel, 29, 38 Ministry of Home Affairs (Indonesia), 51, 56 Ministry of Religion (Indonesia), 8, 63 Modernity, 2, 4, 10, 20, 100, 102, 176, 178, 183 Muhammadiyah, 60, 100, 114–116 Muhammad, Prophet, 57, 59, 111, 121, 122, 124, 125

N Nahdlatul Ulama, 60, 99, 113, 115, 116, 121, 122, 177, 180 National Awakening Party (PKB), 94 National Church Life Survey, 77 Niebuhr, Richard, 70, 71, 78 Nine saints, 176, 177, 179, 181–183

P Pancasila, 51 Patriarchy, 21, 130, 132, 134, 135, 138, 144 pesantren, 119, 177–180, 183 photography, 34, 41, 43, 154 pilgrimage, 29–33, 35–45, 93 Prayer istighatsah, 96, 180 praying together, 15, 32, 35 Preaching disruptors, 122, 126 technologies and social media, 112 protestantism, 156 Public sphere Bourgeois public sphere, 13, 28 deliberation, 1, 89, 95, 102 intimate public, 38

189

public/private distinction, 29, 52, 85, 86, 130 religion, 1–3, 6, 10–13, 20, 22, 28, 64, 65, 90, 95, 106, 176, 179 technical specialisation, 2, 131 visibility, 53 Purification, 2, 3, 10, 12, 100 Purnama, Basuki Tjahaja, 124

Q Qur’an, 97, 120, 122, 124

R Rakhmat, Jalaluddin, 56–58, 62, 64 rationality, 116 Religion church/sect theory, 69–72, 85 denominations, 14, 53 minority religion, 50 practices, 3, 4, 12, 14, 28, 37, 176, 177, 183 sub-cultures, 8, 79 Ritual, 36, 54, 96, 122 social integration, 72, 176 Riya’ , 40

S Said, Edward, 103 Salvation Army, 19, 70–86 Secular post-secular, 109 secularisation narrative, 6, 70, 71 Shiism. See Islam Social media Facebook, 42, 43, 120, 121 Instagram, 42, 112, 121 selfies, 35, 36, 44 Spiritualism demonstrations, 153

190

INDEX

evidence, 2, 21, 22, 85, 153, 157, 160 mediums, 21, 22, 153, 157, 161, 169 Seven principles, 155 spirit, 11, 21, 58, 153, 155–158, 160, 163, 169, 170 Subianto, Prabowo, 32, 33 Suharto, 16, 28, 30–33, 35, 36, 41, 44, 45, 50, 52, 56, 65, 91, 93, 98, 105, 123, 183 Sunday school, 79

T Taylor, Charles, 2–4, 6, 10 The Islamic Association (Persis ), 60, 119, 122, 124 tourism, 34, 35 Transcendence, 14–16, 98, 144

Troeltsch, Ernst, 70, 71 Tsing, Anna, 182 V Veer, Peter van der, 1, 3, 6, 7, 22 W Wahid, Abdurrahman, 51, 93, 104, 105, 181 Weber, Max, 4, 70 Wiranto, 31, 32 Women Brahmanic patriarchy, 133, 134 violence, 130, 133, 136, 138, 144, 145 Z Zainuddin, M.Z., 113, 117, 118