Introduction
This article presents an anthropological approach to the rising prominence of Islam in Indonesian politics since the collapse of the Suharto government in 1998, and specifically to the manifestations of this politics at the sub-national levels of Indonesia's hierarchy of governance (i.e. the levels of regency/municipality and province). My goal here is to enhance the growing literature on the Islamic turn by adding a contextualisation that, until now, has been absent from the existing accounts (a representative sample of which would include Buehler Reference Buehler2016; Bush Reference Bush, Fealy and White2008; Hooker Reference Hooker2008; Kamil and Bamualim Reference Kamil and Bamualim2007; Lindsey Reference Lindsey2012; Mudzakkir Reference Mudzakkir2008).Those accounts have generally agreed on the background of the Islamic political turn, which might be summarised as follows: the decentralisation of Indonesian political authority has resulted in open electoral contests at provincial and regency/municipal levels. In electorates with high Islamic populations, these contests have required candidates to self-represent in styles and forms that project a pious profile to voters. At the same time, the decentralisation regulations enabled governments at these levels to make laws reflecting the cultural heritage of the communities concerned, leading some governments to make regulations that explicitly reflect Islamic norms (variously called ‘Shariah Regulations’ or ‘Civic Order Programs’). The accounts have also referred to candidates’ strategic collaborations with leaders of Islamic organisations. Candidates hope that such collaborations will secure the support of voting blocs. A further explanation, perhaps less salient in comparison with explanations pointing to political strategizing, has identified the religious convictions of individual leaders as influencing the increase of Islamic normativity.
However, these accounts have overlooked the possibility that the Islamic civic order programs are– to some degree – precisely what many of their architects claim they are: expressions of cultural dispositions deemed authentic by the Indonesian communities in the regions concerned. An example of such a claim was made in a recent interview (Republika 17 June 2016) with the Regent of Tasikmalaya, in Indonesia's West Java province. The regent was keen to explain why the Shariah regulations passed in that regency had been so well received by its population. This had happened, he said, because the regulations were in fact expressions of ‘local knowledge’ (kearifan lokal). He stated that because they were expressions of indigenous tradition, they were in harmony with the preferences of the population.
His explanation served two strategic purposes. The first relates to constitutional law; when legislative powers shifted to sub-national governments as result of Indonesia's decentralisation program, these governments received power to make laws based on local tradition, but the power to make laws about religion was reserved for the central government (Kamil and Bamualim Reference Kamil and Bamualim2007: 115–116). This reservation creates a question regarding sub-national governments’ legal capacity to legislate on religion. By stating that the laws were in fact expressions of regional culture, the regent was affirming that the regulations did not offend that reservation. The second reason was more political in nature. At a time when civic order programs are widely criticised by parties worried about their implications (see below), he was asserting their legitimacy by representing them as the authentic cultural dispositions of the Tasikmalaya community. Implicitly, they embody expressions of popular will. This possibility, which requires analysis beyond the strategic level and has not been considered in the analyses appearing to date, is the subject of this article.
Through reference to recent developments in West Java Province, I argue that the Islamic turn in regional politics should be understood, amongst other things, as an opening up of the political process to patterns of Islamic ritual practice and sociality that have long defined lifeways in much of the province. This argument involves examination of the ways in which routines of embodied observance engender a specific conception of public ethics. In making this argument, I draw on lengthy field experiences in West Java, an Indonesian province in which the Islamic turn in politics has been very pronounced. Across a number of projects since 2002, all of which involved joining as a participant observer in the embodied observances of Muslims, I have been witness to a significant correlation between, on the one hand, the practical forms and legislative outputs of the regional Islamic turn, and on the other, a characteristic notion of public decorum that is asserted in routines of embodied Islamic observance.
Why has the academic literature not yet made connections between the civic order programs and routines of bodily practice in regions with high Muslim populations? The answer lies in a lack of attention to a public ethics that prevails in a number of Islamic regions, but which is little understood outside a current of anthropological work. This lack can be understood as a combination of three methodological constraints. The first is that social scientists have generally been reluctant to understand Islamically-based norms as indigenous lifeways (see generally Soares and Osella Reference Soares, Filippo, Osella and Soares2010:2–5; for relevant Indonesia sources, see Woodward Reference Woodward1988). Scholars have distinguished them from indigenous conceptions of culture and social order, even in regions where Islam has been a dominant, structuring presence for several centuries. Of course, this distinction was common when the colonial government, concerned about political threats from a unified Muslim community, reified indigenous, pre-Islamic normative systems (adat). In more recent times, perhaps reflecting conditions in western settings where religion has moved from the centre of social and political life, social science scholars have been unresponsive to the idea that a monotheism could provide the grounding principles of indigenous social orders.
A second reason concerns our capacity to theorise connections between embodied action and public spheres. The western tradition of thinking on this connection has proceeded from an image of public spheres built around abstractions, rather than embodied practice. Habermas's celebrated version of this image envisages deliberation for the common good based on the free circulation of information and debate by enlightened citizens (Reference Habermas1989). The concept of the bourgeois public sphere saw exemplary authority being generalised away from physical bodies towards the context of rational debate (Warner Reference Warner and Calhoun1992: 387–388). The concept has had a striking normative influence. Indeed, analyses of contemporary Muslim public spheres have tended to prioritise the circulation of ideas and symbols and the fragmentation of authority that accompanies it as their constituent features.Footnote 2 Separately, in the bourgeois public sphere religion is relegated to the domain of private actions and preferences. As a result, embodied practice is doubly barred from being recognised as a publicly beneficial contribution. First, it lacks the abstraction that public spheres appear to be dependent upon for their efficacy, and second, because it is private action, it cannot yield a public ethics. We must look to a current of anthropological writing, cited below, for the possibility that a public ethics can be founded on bodily practice.
This neglect of the embodied dimension of public life not only affects academic analysis in the western tradition; it is also influential in writings by prominent Indonesian analysts of Islam. Much of this writing would lead one to think that bodily practice was a thing of the past. This impression is conveyed in much of the work produced by the scholars working in the universities under the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Many of these men and women are committed to research and commentary about Islamic discourses around themes such as gender, civil society, democracy, and human rights, a commitment of which these scholars are understandably proud (Jabali and Jamhari Reference Jabali and Jamhari2002: 47–51). In a seminal textbook from 1974, the scholar considered the founding father of that system, Harun Nasution, wrote that Islamic modernity required a realisation that Islam was “more than mere rules and bodily practice”. The important task was to understand its philosophical, moral, mystical, and cultural dimensions (Nasution Reference Nasution1974: 33–34). However, these injunctions give an incomplete impression of the realities of public ethics in Indonesia; Muslims never stopped their collective ritual in many areas of Indonesia, and would strongly disagree with Nasution's low evaluation of the public efficacy of “rules and bodily practice”.
A final reason for the low visibility in academic analysis of the connections between bodily practice and the civic order is the uneven distribution of the Islamic political turn across Indonesia. The collective commitment to ritual practice with which I engage here occurs within communities with very high proportions of Muslims, where individuals and institutions combine in public projects of embodied practice. Indonesians outside of these communities might have little knowledge of such projects. Buehler (Reference Buehler2013:76) has published a table listing the eleven contemporary Indonesian provinces in which civic order programs/Shariah regulations had been legislated. If we compare that list with the table showing the concentrations of Muslims by province prepared by Suryadinata after the 2000 census, we find that those eleven are all within the sixteen provinces with the highest proportion of Muslims in the Republic.Footnote 3 This discussion is not about Indonesia, but Islamic Indonesia.Footnote 4
Against this background, I focus here on an ethical imaginary based on collective ritual and its sociality, which engenders a characteristic concern about public propriety and decorum. I identify expressions of this sociality and decorum in the practical forms of regional Islamic politics in West Java, including its legislative products.
Following this introduction, I begin with a short overview of the embodied routines of Islamic life as I have experienced them in West Java and then introduce the line of anthropological theorising that enables us to see how collective embodied practice generates a public ethics. The next two parts illustrate how the Islamic political turn can be understood as an opening up of politics to these embodied routines and to its public ethics. The first focuses on the adaptation of public routines of practice for the purposes of the self-representation and impression management that are so significant to political campaigning. Candidates and incumbents lodge their bodies and messages into the routines. In the second part, I turn to the text of one of the civic order programs, which I argue should be read in this context as an objectification of this public ethics, and as an indigenous aspiration for this ethics to be implemented in civic life. The example I use is A Religious, Values-based Social Order for the City of Tasikmalaya (2014).Footnote 5 I conclude with some reflections on one of the unavoidable consequences of the opening of formal politics to a practice-based ritual decorum, describing how this codification has clashed with Indonesia's national political consensus, which is based on the exclusion of bodily practice from the national conversation.
This article does not purport to wholly account for the emergence of the Islamic turn and its various forms. Such an account would consider not only the political cultures of specific populations, but also the roles and inputs of many parties that combine to shape those politics, including individual candidates and their backers, bureaucrats of local executive government, military and police personnel, political parties, entrenched regional elites, Islamic leaders acting as vote-brokers, and Islamic ideological actors of all types. Instead, I draw attention to a core element of the Islamic turn that has not received sufficient comment: a notion of public ethics engendered within the collective commitment to embodied observances.
Routines of Embodied Practice
Muslim life in Indonesia is structured around repetitions of activities such as visiting, worship, performance, supplication, commensality, study, and remembrance. Described most often by West Javanese Muslims with the word ‘ibadah (worship/service), these routines correspond to a number of calendars and cycles, including the Islamic calendar, the civic calendar, and the human life cycle. These cycles are so significant in the structuring of everyday life that a number of ethnographies of West Java and other Indonesian regions with high Muslim populations are wholly or partially structured in a sequence of chapters that corresponds to the cycles and describes the practical undertakings that take place around the individual events (e.g.Geertz Reference Geertz1960; Hellman Reference Hellman2008; Moestapa Reference Moestapa1913; Möller Reference Möller2005; Snouck Hurgronje Reference Snouck Hurgronje1924 [1891–1892]; Soeganda Reference Soeganda1982).The specific practices are not static in their forms; observances described in the older ethnographies take different forms in the present, and even the events that constitute the cycles have changed to some extent. What has not changed, however, is that Islamic sociability is constituted by routines of observance.
The day is structured by Islamic routines, divided by the fivefold regime of ritual worship (salat). The passing of the week is marked by the collective prayer, held every Friday (for males only). For many mature and older women, the week is punctuated by attendance at study gatherings (majlis ta‘lim). The year is marked by a sequence of observances including (here I use the West Javanese terms for the celebrations): the commencement of the Islamic year (muharraman), Prophet's birthday (muludan), Prophet's ascension (Mi‘raj), fasting month (puasa), celebration of the end of the fasting month (‘id ul-fitr/lebaran), and feast of the sacrifice (‘id ul-adha). Celebrations of lifecycle events (weddings, circumcisions, visitation of the sick, and burials) take Islamic forms, and events of the secular calendar, especially National Independence Day, although they do not have Islam as their legitimising premises, are commonly marked with a sermon and/or prayer.
For many Muslims, the importance of these routines is amplified by a shared sense that the Indonesian nation is suffering from a ‘moral crisis’.To some extent, embodied observance is understood as an effort to gain protection from this crisis. For example, the national piety movement of the Bandung-based celebrity preacher Abdullah Gymniastar gained enormous popularity in 2004 because of its thematic focus on Indonesia's so-called moral crisis (Hoesterey Reference Hoesterey2016:121–146). Parker and Nilan's (Reference Parker and Pam2013) study of moral panic about youth socialising expresses the frustration felt by Indonesians towards a public sphere that appears to be characterised not by pious decorum, but rather by a culture of permissiveness that emphasises consumption and materialist values. Accounts such as those by Hoesterey and Parker and Nilan reveal a list of ills that are perceived by Muslims to have caused the crisis: frequent cases of corruption amongst the political classes; media and information technologies that appear to work against the desired goals and effects of Islamic education and practice; the cultural power of the west; representations of women in national media that contrast with Islamic idealisations; and the presence of other, mission-oriented religions in Indonesia, some with greater material resources than those of Muslim communities. This reflexive defensiveness is highly relevant to public appreciation of Islamic routines in contemporary times: Muslims perform ‘ibadah with the feeling that it is not just worship, but also a form of defence against powerful and omnipresent forces that appear to work against its goals.
Nevertheless, Muslims are not left totally to themselves in performing their collective rituals. Muslim civil society organisations such as Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama and the Islamic Association (Persis) have led programmes of public practice since the early decades of the twentieth century, and more recently, corporations and government organisations have supported public piety by implementing rituals within public spaces such as workplaces, corporate premises, and places of study (Rudnyckyj Reference Rudnyckyj2010). They also spend large sums on mosques and Islamic centres. This assistance highlights that embodied observance has not been discarded with the institutionalised complexity and differentiations of postcolonial modernity. In fact, individual Muslims, civil society, and the state are collaborating to ensure its continuance.
While the description here has necessarily been pitched at a general level, it would be incorrect if it gave the impression that all Muslims of West Java are constantly performing observances as a uniform whole. Four brief qualifications are in order. The first is simply that not everybody participates. For example, young people are less attracted to collective ritual in comparison with mature and older Muslims. Second, my use of the adjective ‘collective’ should be qualified. Observances differ in style according to preferences that correspond to social and economic class, diversity of social affiliations (family, workplace etc.), and ideological and cultural preferences. Therefore, while it is true that many West Javanese Muslims mark the prophet's birthday by attending some kind of commemoration, they do so with a range of differing commemorations that reflect the diversity of Islamic society in the region.
My third qualification concerns the experiential nature of collective ritual. Discussion of ritual practice might suggest disciplinary activities motivated by a commitment to solemnly reproducing the canonical orders of Islam. In reality, the ritual routines of West Javanese Muslims have multiple benefits beyond the satisfaction of pious obligations. Many of these activities include rewarding social dimensions, provide pleasurable elements of consumption, or involve signifying practices such as preaching that enable skilled mediators to stimulate listeners through nonreligious genres. These qualities of Islamic practice explain to some degree why participation levels are high in many Indonesian regions; Islamic participation does not invariably commit the Muslim to sufferance of solemnity and boredom.
My final qualification concerns the distinction between the subject's participation in ritual and his or her compliance with its established obligations. West Java and other regions of Indonesia are distinguished by high public participation in Islamic observances, but this does not necessarily indicate that people in these communities successfully implement the high ethical and moral standards expressed in the canonical parts of those observances. One of the remarkable things about collective ritual is that by participating in it, human subjects establish moral and ethical orders as obligatory, and preserve those orders against deterioration by attrition from the realities of everyday life (Rappaport Reference Rappaport1999). Through their public ritual, people indicate their support for the orders established in that practice. However, ritual cannot claim great efficacy in ensuring that subjects comply with those orders. Ritual establishes how things should be, but “it is not ritual's office to ensure compliance but to establish obligation” (Rappaport Reference Rappaport1999: 124). While this aspect of public ritual was famously clarified by Roy Rappaport, one does not need the words of an acclaimed anthropologist for such a clarification; Indonesian Muslim figures from all parts of the Islamic spectrum constantly remind their fellow Muslims that external practice is not to be mistaken for genuine piety. Faith, they say, requires more than formal performance.Footnote 6
Unfortunately for Indonesia, some of the strongest advocates of civic order programs exemplify this gap between formal performance and compliance. I have written with Agus Ahmad Safei about the celebrated case of Dada Rosada, mayor of Bandung from 2003 to 2013. In 2010 we wrote optimistically of the religious civic order he had formulated for the Bandung municipality (Millie and Safei Reference Millie and Safei2010). During his political career, Rosada attended ritual regularly as part of his effort to obtain electoral support from Islamic organisations and supported expenditure on public religious projects. Our second writing about Dada Rosada (Millie and Safei Reference Millie and Safei2016) described the 10-year prison term imposed on him because of a bribe paid to a judge hearing a case involving Rosada's subordinates and the misuse of social assistance funds for Rosada's political ends. As a political leader to whom voters looked for exemplary behaviour, Rosada was a failure. Nevertheless, his efforts to support public regimes of practice were successful because of the electoral support he derived from them.
The Public Ethics of Practice
The moral behaviour of individuals is not a critical issue in this discussion because regional Islamic politics are strongly oriented to a public ethic. We misunderstand the point of the Islamic turn if we focus too closely on public ritual as a means to instil moral behaviour in individuals. Rather, what these politics highlight is the notion that bodily practice is essential to the creation of a dignified and ethical public sphere. As many influential anthropological studies of Islamic societies have indicated, this notion invites a substantial reconsideration of conventional methods of framing ethics within public spheres (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006; Lambek Reference Lambek1993). Rather than identifying detached, informed deliberation and disembodied processes of consensus-making as requisites for an ethical public sphere, the authors of these studies invite us to consider embodied sociability as interactions in which respect for the proper manner and style of those acts and utterances is of great importance. I understand this respect as amounting to a public ethics, but because this ethics has bodily deportment as its basis for evaluating people's conduct and character, it might be more appropriately characterised with terms such as etiquette or decorum than by the lexicon associated with the liberal public sphere imaginary (Yeung Reference Yeung and Lambek2010).
This embodied notion of public ethics was extensively explored in an influential study by Charles Hirschkind (Reference Hirschkind2006) about the ways in which pious Egyptians understand sermonic listening as an embodiment of an ethical public subjectivity. This subjectivity becomes clearly apparent when Egyptians admonish their colleagues to assume it, and Hirschkind's book contains a number of reports of such admonitions. The preachers in Cairo's da‘wah community, for example, urge their listeners to perform formal observances, as one would expect of preachers. However, they go further to remind their listeners that performance of the embodied practices of Muslim piety requires adherence to norms of etiquette and politeness (Arabic: adab) that call for refined behaviour in relation to others. The wellbeing of the community depends not only on the observances, but also on the etiquette and decorum that are produced in their performance. In Hirschkind's words, these “affective dispositions, or virtues…undergird the character of the public subject” (2006: 130–137).
It was an admonition of this type that led the anthropologist Michael Lambek to realise the significance of this ethic of embodied practice. While attending an Islamic ritual during his fieldwork in a Muslim community in Mayotte, an island of the Comoros Archipelago, Lambek was surprised to be verbally chastised in public by an Islamic teacher for wearing clothing that was too informal and did not show sufficient respect for the ritual. He was surprised because he had been residing in the community for a relatively long time and had been received warmly within it. Although nobody had previously pointed out such a failure, after the event his friends confirmed the correctness of the teacher's admonition. This incident brought a moment of realisation after which he became aware that Mayotte Muslims approach ritual participation with high awareness of conditions involving “dress, posture, gesture and movement”. This awareness led him to substantially reframe his definition of Islamic knowledge. The following captures the connections between respectable deportment and routines of practice, and how the conduct of bodies is a meaningful, not subsidiary part of a practices of observance:
Islamic knowledge exists not only in the publicly accessible forms of written texts, but in the bodily practices of individuals, in their dress, their comportment, their propriety…A Muslim follows codes of politeness, food, dress, posture, and cleanliness, along daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms…For Muslims, Islamic knowledge is not only present in the abstract as a realm for speculation or calculation but is also found in the concrete practices and holistic experiences of daily life. (Lambek Reference Lambek1993: 152)
The admonition directed at Lambert is useful for my argument because this act is paradigmatic of the public attitudes that underpin the Islamic turn described below: Lambek himself found the teacher's disciplinary treatment shocking, but it was publicly acceptable because it asserted a shared commitment to ritual decorum.
My final example I source from my own work on preaching in West Java (Millie Reference Millie, Tomlinson and Millie2017), during which I found the same concern with public comportment emerging in the ways Islamic genres were treated in public discourse. It is a fact that West Java's Islamic preachers achieve high popularity with their audiences by not only conveying Islamic teachings, but also through their skills in nonreligious performance genres (singing, comedy, mimicry etc.). Preachers have been able to maintain lucrative careers because of public enthusiasm for their exciting and attractive preaching styles, and event organisers have also been enthusiastic about them because they guarantee high participation in Islamic celebrations. However, when these skills are evaluated publicly it is invariably in negative and critical tones. Rather than acknowledging the value of their skills to Islamic learning and practice, public discourse restricts recognition of the preacher's role to the conveyance of Islamic knowledge, and censures or ignores the entertainment dimension. They must constantly be recognised as practitioners of a noble mission, but never as brilliant performers. By doing this, the dignity of Islamic preaching is preserved, for to acknowledge the importance of skilful individuals to the success of Islamic teaching activities would detract from the otherworldliness that keeps religion separate from mundane realities. A consensus about public decorum is necessary to maintain this separation.
All of these examples describe Muslims attempting to improve their public environment through insisting on two things: Muslims should be participating in Islam with mind and body, and decorous performance is a valuable end in itself. In the sections that follow, I identify this public ethics within the Islamic turn. First, I describe the turn as an adaptation of practical politics to the embodied routines. After that, I interpret a specific civic order program as an objectification of this public ethics.
Islamic Routines and Campaigning
The cycles of collective ritual and commemoration provide a predictable sequence of public stages that political candidates and incumbents are compelled to appropriate for political purposes. They bring candidates face-to-face with voters, creating opportunities for self-presentation, impression management, and network development. This Islamic politics is a new phenomenon, and has been enabled by three developments. First, as previously discussed, as a result of the changes that occurred after the downfall of the Suharto government, electoral democracy became a substantive reality rather than the artifice it had been during the New Order period, and local issues, religion, and cultural persuasions suddenly mattered to political processes. Second, a ground-breaking relaxation of media regulation occurred; ownership and investment in media were deregulated, and content was no longer subject to the restrictions of the authoritarian era (Kitley Reference Kitley2008). As media spheres in provinces like West Java grew busy with assertions of piety, political actors became reflexive about their profiles. Currently, all aspirants to public office in Muslim heartland regions make Islamic piety – their own as well as the community's – a core element of their campaigns. With Islam being so highly valued in public and political life, no political aspirant wishes to run the risk of having his or her Islamic credentials called into question; as a result, political candidates frequently compete to present superior Islamic credentials (Bush Reference Bush, Fealy and White2008; Mudzakkir Reference Mudzakkir2008). The third element concerns Indonesian political culture. Michael Buehler (Reference Buehler2016: 105–106) has argued that party affiliation has low significance in voting behaviour in regional politics. Indonesian parties do not command voter bases in local contests. With limited means of assembling audiences through invoking party affiliation, taking advantage of Muslims’ routines of public assembly is essential for placing candidates before crowds.
Caroline Paskarina's research on campaign strategies emphasises the significance of these routines of public assembly to the political process. Political actors used the term silaturahmi or silaturahim (Arabic: ties of kinship) to describe the meetings they and their campaign workers organise with voters at events of Islamic routines.Footnote 7 This concept, widely recognised in West Java, has an Islamic etymology and can be traced to prophetic traditions as well as Qur'anic verses which recommend the maintenance of good kin ties. In her research on campaign strategies in West Java, Paskarina identified two kinds of political strategising under the umbrella of silaturahmi sociability: “[first] a convenient means to present candidates to constituents in populist clothing and to furnish them with personal connections with voters. Second, it allows candidates to build clientelistic networks down to the community level, and to strengthen those networks by injecting into them strong elements of cultural tradition and emotional bonding” (Paskarina Reference Paskarina, Aspinall and Sukmajati2016: 204). Recognising the value of such opportunities, candidates will invest sums that enable routine events to attain a special character, or that enable economically impoverished Muslims to travel to events. Muslims in heartland areas typically lack resources to travel and eagerly accept funded opportunities to visit popular gravesites or hear a sermon by a celebrity speaker. By providing these facilities, the candidate appears to belong within and to support the routines that constitute the Islamic lifestyle in heartland regions. By supporting the pious activities of the collective, the candidate can also avoid any appearance of self-interest in the campaign process.
The opening up of the political process to routines of Islamic observance is affecting those observances and their contexts. Islamic ritual observances are being transformed through their appropriation for political purposes. This emerged in Acep Zamzam Noor's (Reference Noor2007) account of changes affecting the group ritual known as istighosah (from the Arabic istighatha, appeal for help, i.e. to Allah), which he describes as having become a “political phenomenon”. Istighosah is a ritual in which an Islamic leader guides a group through recitation of supplications. Communities frequently hold these to seek relief from difficulties such as drought or the perceived national moral crisis noted above. According to Noor, the ritual was being exploited for political ends even before liberalisation. He identifies its origins in former president Abdurrahman Wahid's practice of using istoghotsah to introduce political candidates such as Megawati Sukarnoputri and Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana (‘Mbak Tutut’, daughter of then president, Suharto) to voters. Wahid, by holding istighotsah before massive audiences of followers of the Nahdlatul Ulama organisation, of which he was a leader, hoped to create a favourable impression of the political aspirant. Tasikmalaya, where Acep Zamzam Noor lives, is home to many large Islamic schools (pesantren), and in response to the desire of politicians to exploit group rituals like the istighotsah, brokers have emerged from the ranks of pesantren members, offering to organise such events. Another noteworthy consequence of this trend has been the dissolution of theological objections that modernist politicians might have held towards the ritual. The istighotsah relies on concepts of intercession that some Muslims consider to be infractions of strict monotheism, but politicians overlook their theological objections to access audiences. For Acep Zamzam Noor, son of a famous Tasikmalaya Islamic leader, the shift in the function of their ritual has caused the ritual's sacrality to disappear: “an istoghotsah does not differ from a dangdut [popular Indonesian dance music] concert…they are both tools to assemble a crowd”.Footnote 8
Shariah Regulations as Objectifications of Public Ethics
The legislative products variously called Shariah regulations or civic order programmes have been the most widely recognised manifestations of the Islamic turn in regional politics. It is remarkable that these regulations are to a significant degree expressions of the same kind of public ethics identified by Lambek, Hirschkind, and me. The example I refer to here to support this assertion is a West Javanese regulation entitled A Religious, Values-based Social Order for the City of Tasikmalaya (2014). While this regulation adopts the forms of state legislation to reinforce the necessity for all religious people to carry out religious observances, it also goes further to specify the external states required for this to be done in a polite and decorous way.
Before turning to the document, a qualification is necessary: regional Islamic regulations have tended to go beyond merely expressing a ritual-based, public ethics. If they did not, they would hardly be controversial. Some of the Shariah Regulations have attracted criticism not only because the authority of the regency governments to pass them is doubted, but also because of their potentially serious implications for women, traders and Islamic minorities (Crouch Reference Crouch2014; Human Rights Watch 2010; Human Rights Watch 2013; Noerdin et al. Reference Noerdin, Rahman, Laelasari Y. and Aaripurnami2005; Robinson Reference Robinson2009). The Tasikmalaya version, which as I explain below has a long and controversial history, has provoked criticism on some of these grounds. Nevertheless, to focus solely on this criticism is to overlook the dimensions of the regulations that are shaped by and appeal to widely-held public conceptions of the public good. My goal here is to attend to the latter, because the high identification of Tasikmalaya residents towards this concept of the public good explains the broad support they give to the regulations.
The Religious, Values-based Social Order places great importance on ensuring that collective ritual takes place. The law is not solely concerned with bodily practice, as it includes goal statements that concern righteous behaviour more broadly: “Every person is obliged to practice the teachings of their religion as a code and guide for life, in their private life as well as in the community, and in their lives as citizens” (Article 5 [1]). However, in other articles the obligation to bodily practice is dominant. For example, it emerges in the provisions requiring government and the community to facilitate religious education, which in Islam is considered as a form of practical worship with public benefit (‘ibadah) (Article 13). It strongly predominates in the document's relatively few sanction provisions (Chapter 7). These sanctions are to be applied to corporations and workplaces that fail to allow and enable performance of observances by employees. Specifically, all institutions above the level of the family are to join in the task of making Tasikmalaya a city where all Muslims participate in ritual observance. The civic order desired in these regulations is one in which people perform worship with their bodies.
The provisions make it clear that a satisfactory environment is not achieved simply through bodily practice, but also by accompanying that practice with correct etiquette and deportment. Many of the injunctions resemble the admonition directed at Michael Lambek in Mayotte, urging Muslims to comply with standards concerning their external states. This is established in the initial statement of the code's overriding goals: “to create a social and community environment that is harmonious, peaceful, in accord, safe, orderly and free from disturbances” (preamble). The code's rather striking definition of the term religius addresses not only acts but also external states: “religius means bearing [sikap] and behaviour that comply with religious teachings” (article 1 [3]). Attention to bearing is strengthened by the many references to norm of politeness (norma kesopanan), and together these values constitute an orienting basis for the code. In fact, the dominant moral orientation of the document might be expressed as follows: Tasikmalaya will be a better social environment if people practice their observances and do so in a polite manner that creates a decorous public environment.
When it aspires for a social environment made satisfactory through a commitment to bodily practice and the decorum attaching to that, Tasikmalaya's Religious, Values-based Social Order expresses a conception of public ethics with which the region's population closely identify. It is strongly concerned with publicly visible behaviour. However, by emphasising Islamic embodiment in public life, the code proposes a contrasting ethics to the one that has underpinned Indonesia's constitutional arrangements since independence. The remainder of this article examines the conflict that has emerged between the aspirations of the regional regulations and national law.
Concluding Words: a Conflict of Public Ethics
The Islamic turn in regional politics is a novel attempt to introduce an embodied conception of ethics to Indonesia's legal and political order. The implications of this attempt are challenging for Indonesia. As Charles Hirschkind observed in his 2006 study of Cairo's Islamic counter-public, such an attempt creates a disjunction between this public ethics and formal political structures, because Muslims who wish to advocate for formal norms based on embodied Islamic sociality naturally prosecute that project within national political structures that are not calibrated for it.
Specifically, supporters of this public ethics are advocating a conception of public order that collides with other notions that also have a strong pedigree in Indonesia. Since the establishment of the Republic in 1945, Indonesia has been a constitutional, parliamentary democracy. The national ideology created by Sukarno in 1945, the Pancasila (Five Principles), and the provisions of the Indonesian constitution express a revolutionary ethic of equality that was constructed in opposition to colonialism as well as to the feudal structures of pre-independence Indonesian societies. The constitution and the Pancasila guarantee citizens the right to perform observances in accordance with their own religion and belief.Footnote 9 All subsequent Indonesian governments have promoted this guarantee as an authentic expression of the values of Indonesian peoples, sometimes in authoritarian fashion. Islamically-based objections to the state ideology have been expressed, but these have come from Islamic segments with limited support bases (Federspiel Reference Federspiel2001; Feener Reference Feener2007). In fact, in the post-authoritarian period, Muslim leaders have been amongst the strongest and most vocal advocates of Pancasila as a national ideology that is compatible with Islam.Footnote 10
Nevertheless, this liberal-constitutional vision projects a disembodied notion of public ethics. Islamic observances are neutralised by being made equal with all religious observances, and implicitly it is of no significance to the national future if people bother to perform them or not. The national ideology that Sukarno created, the Pancasila, excludes bodily practice from the national conversation.
Muslims in West Java do not perceive the state ideology and practice-based public ethics as rivals. Processes of national education and increasing literacy have made Muslim populations worldwide appreciative of diverse conceptions of civic and political order (Eickelman and Salvatore Reference Eickelman and Salvatore2002). In my experience,those communities that place high value on routines of embodied practice also respect the Pancasila. The two understandings of publicness are not inherently incompatible. However, problems arise due to difficulty in identifying the limits of an embodied public ethics. What are the constituent elements of the public decorum I have discussed here? Does the maintenance of public decorum require, for example, restrictions upon women's mobility and clothing, as has been attempted with some regulatory measures? Is public decorum harmed by minority Islamic currents such as the Ahmadiyah, which governments in West Java have tried to prohibit from public activities (Halili and Naipospos 2014)? These questions point to conflicts between the public ethics of embodied practice and the Indonesian citizenship model.
The Tasikmalaya civic order regulations exemplify this conflict. Undoubtedly, an initial impulse for these regulations was the desire of political aspirants to create favourable relations with leaders of Islamic institutions (Buehler Reference Buehler2016: 169–171; Hasyim Reference Hasyim2007). However, the journey from those attempts at electoral brokerage to the passage of valid legislation has been a tortured one, and the text of the regulations passed by the Municipal government in 2015 reflects years of dialogue with the national government. In 2009, the municipal government proposed a draft law entitled Development of a Values-based Social Order Premised on Islamic Teachings and Societal Norms. The draft was severely criticised by national women's organisations, which focussed on multiple provisions concerning the formation of a moral police, prohibitions on prostitution and abortion, and regulation of women's clothing and conduct (Institut Perempuan Reference Institut2015; Noerdin et al. Reference Noerdin, Rahman, Laelasari Y. and Aaripurnami2005). Women's advocates argued that these conflicted with the state's duty to protect women. In addition, the law did not pass scrutiny by the National Internal Affairs Department, which contested the power of the municipal government to make some of the regulations into law.
In 2015, the mayor of the city of Tasikmalaya announced the implementation of the amended version described above, A Religious, Values-based Social Order for the City of Tasikmalaya. The civic order proposed in the newer version is less intelligible as an Islamic normative vision. The title and much of the language has been deconfessionalised, with many Islamic concepts replaced by denominationally-neutral religious terms.Footnote 11 For example, Article 11(1) of the 2009 version contains the following obligation, “Every Muslim of full age must wear clothes that conceal the limits of modesty (aurat) in accordance with Islamic teachings”. For some Muslim advocates in Tasikmalaya, a polite and decorous public sphere requires that women dress strictly in accordance with Islamic norms. The national women's movement, however, claimed that women's interests are harmed by public regulation of their deportment. For authoritative reference, the activists of this movement turn not to ritual decorum, but to Indonesian law, as well as to the concept of human rights and the international legislation that enshrines it (e.g. Mulia Reference Mulia2005: 217–233). The equivalent article in the later document (14[1]) lacks the term aurat, a term that marked the earlier provision as an expression of Islamic legal norms, and states a far more flexible and general restriction: “All people must wear polite clothing in accordance with the teachings of their respective religions, and the norms of politeness of the community of Tasikmalaya”. The earlier version had given little room for choice to the women of Tasikmalaya in relation to their dress. The later provisions enabled them to argue for a far wider range of permissible clothing styles. The drawn-out process of negotiation illustrates the potential for tension between a civic order program based on ritual practice and decorum, and the disembodied public sphere concept which ignores religious deportment.
The civic order established in Indonesia's constitution and state ideology is so widely accepted in Indonesia, and so readily recognisable as a model adopted in many postcolonial states, that the disembodiment that it entails has been easily overlooked until recently. It might be assumed, especially by observers accustomed to public spheres where religion is conventionally allocated to the private realm, that all citizens approve of its neutrality towards religious observance, and that the specific quality of a citizen's Islamic observance is not a matter of public concern. In communities such as Tasikmalaya, however, bodily performance of religious obligation is considered a matter a public concern. The regional Islamic turn in politics is a reminder of this. The value of the anthropological approach I have outlined here is that it cautions us against understanding the Islamic turn as something alien to cultural dispositions that are popularly supported within large Indonesian populations, or as an assertion of zealous piety uncharacteristic of these populations. To some degree, it amounts to the extension of a public ethics based on embodied practice into the political regimes of Indonesian life.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Professor Yoon Hwan Shin and Associate Professor Soyeun Kim, both of Sogang University, as well as Professor Vedi Hadiz, of the University of Melbourne, for organising the 2017 AAS in Asia Conference panel where this paper was originally delivered. Gratitude is also expressed for the assistance given by anonymous referees. This research was supported financially by the Australian Research Council's Future Fellowship Grant Deliberation and publicness in Indonesia's regional Islamic spheres (FT140100818).
