In their new book, Thomas B. Pepinsky, R. William Liddle, and Saiful Mujani want to provide a “corrective” to “sensationalist, sometimes even hysterical characterizations of Muslim beliefs that in the West so often drive public discourse” (p. 2). In order to do so, they examine whether there is a relationship between levels of piety among Indonesian Muslims and support for Islamist political parties; whether piety affects opinions about, and the use of, Islamic financial products; and finally, if, and if so how, piety shapes the way Indonesian Muslims interact with the broader world.
The authors’ public opinion survey, administered in the year 2008, found no systematic relationship between the religious orientation of Indonesian Muslims and their support for Islamist parties or Shari’a law. Levels of piety also do not determine support for democracy, Islamic finance, or views on foreign relations. In short, “evidence that more religious Indonesian Muslims think or behave differently than their less religious counterparts simply does not exist” (p. 4).
Pepinsky, Liddle, and Mujani provide evidence for their argument across four substantive chapters. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of “piety” and puts forward a research method to measure levels of piety through public opinion surveys. In Chapter 3, they examine whether pious Muslims are more likely to support Islamist parties that want to adopt Shari’a law than are less religious Indonesians. They find that “even among those respondents who are most sympathetic to political Islam, Islamist party ideologies only give parties an advantage over non-Islamist parties when voters are uncertain about parties’ economy policy platforms” (p. 62). Chapter 4 asks whether more pious Muslims are more likely to think favorably about Islamic finance products and make more frequent use of such services compared to their less religious counterparts. The authors find that levels of religiosity do not determine the ways in which Muslims in Indonesia engage with the modern market economy. Finally, they ask whether the revitalization of Islam across the archipelago has led to a reorientation among the Indonesian population toward the Middle East and away from the West. Here, the authors find that more pious Muslims indeed like to see closer relations with the Arab world. However, such views do not compete with pious Muslims’ preferences for engagement with other cultural realms, including “the West,” Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Chapter 6 provides a summary of the main findings and a discussion of how the Indonesian case can inform research in other Muslim-majority countries.
Piety and Public Opinion makes several important theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. Its main theoretical contribution is the finding that factors such as globalization and modernization, rather than levels of religiosity, shape attitudes toward politics, the economy, and the wider world in the largest Muslim-majority country and third-largest democracy in the world. Methodologically, the book’s thorough discussion on how to operationalize “piety,” a much-studied but hitherto poorly defined concept, and how to make it suitable for public opinion surveys will be of much use to academics working on the relationship between religion and politics in other Muslim-majority countries. Empirically, the book is a powerful opening salvo for future comparative research on whether the revitalization of Islam in Muslim-majority societies will shape politics and public life in distinct ways.
In addition to a host of new questions raised, and which are introduced by the authors in the final chapter, there are several additional issues that future research may want to take into account. The book goes to great length to conceptualize the main independent variable (piety) in a comprehensive fashion. The dependent variables, however, could have been discussed more critically. For instance, Chapter 3 examines whether levels of piety determine support for Islamist parties and the adoption of Shari’a law. The authors find that more pious voters are more likely to support Islamist parties if these parties put forward a policy platform that is clearer to voters than the policy platform of nationalist-secular parties. However, I found the definition and conceptualization of “Islamist party” and how that concept was then translated into Indonesian rather problematic. Concretely, according to the authors, “Islamist party” is to be understood as a party that wants Shari’a law as the basis of the political system. In contrast, an “Islamic party” may make frequent reference to Islam during campaigns and in party platforms but does not explicitly demand Shari’a law to be the basis of a political system. Since the Indonesian language does not differentiate between “Islamist” and “Islamic” party, the authors asked respondents whether they would support a political party based on Islam (partai politik yang berasas Islam) “wishing to implement Islamic law.” However, there is no consensus, not even among Islamist activists in Indonesia, as to what actually constitutes “Islamic law.” Rather, Shari’a law has been described as a “total discourse” that includes religious, legal, moral, and economic rules and regulations.
Since there is no agreement on what constitutes Islamic law, it has come to mean anything to anyone. The authors could have said more about how a concept as vague as Shari’a law potentially affects the book’s finding that there is no relationship between levels of piety and support for Islamist parties (i.e., parties that wish to implement Shari’a law). Furthermore, the battery of survey questions that Indonesians were exposed to in order to test the relationship between levels of piety and support for Islamist parties advocating the adoption of Shari’a law asks about a purely hypothetical situation. Not a single Indonesian party has called for the adoption of Islamic law in a national election campaign for the past 17 years. In the words of a leading scholar on party politics in Indonesia: “The issue of establishing an Islamic state or introducing Islamic law in Indonesia was buried in 2002 during the last round of constitutional amendments, and no Muslim party has seriously raised it again ever since” (Marcus Mietzner, Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation (2009), p. 334). The authors’ claim — that “[p]olitical parties in Indonesia range from avowedly pluralist social democratic parties to openly Islamist parties” (p. 72) — is therefore incorrect.
Likewise, the public opinion survey asked respondents whether they are more likely to support a political party that puts forward a clear agenda on how to improve the Indonesian economy and citizens’ welfare, rather than a party that lacks such a clear agenda. While the authors went to great length to conceptualize and operationalize “party platform,” this is again a rather artificial setup. In reality, Indonesian politics are deeply transactional. Instead of having the choice between different party platforms, or even clearly formulated and vague party platforms, Indonesian voters are confronted with party platforms that range from the fantastical to the outright nonsensical. Since the country became a democracy in 1998, no Indonesian party has put forward a comprehensive policy platform with concrete suggestions on how to address the archipelago’s many problems.
In short, there is a need for a more critical discussion of the fact that several of the dependent variables are either understood in Indonesian society in a multitude of ways (Shari’a law) or do not really correspond to the actual political environment in Indonesia (Islamist party; economic party platform) and how this may affect the validity of the survey results.
Finally, the main finding that levels of piety are inconsequential for democracy, partisan politics, support for Shari’a law, and Islamic finance, as well as foreign relations, leads the authors to conclude that “[p]ublic opinion . . . may have no causal impact on policy outcomes at all” (p. 22). Instead, they argue that elites play an important role in shaping policymaking. While this confirms previous research on the role of Islam in Indonesian politics, more could have been said about the rather complex interaction between elite-driven politics and public opinion.
Since 1998, at least 700 Shari’a regulations have been adopted across Indonesian provinces and districts. Most of these laws directly violate the constitutional rights of Indonesians. While this development may indeed be the result of a top-down process initiated and maintained by political elites, as this book and works by other scholars suggest, the question concerning why Indonesian society is not more vocal when it comes to resisting such developments needs to be discussed. Public opinion and even levels of piety may shape Indonesian policymaking not so much by actively calling for certain policies but by not resisting their adoption and subsequent implementation.
Overall, the proposed conceptualization of “piety” and the instructions on how it can be harnessed in public opinion surveys in other contexts will be useful for scholars working on other countries, while the empirical findings of Piety and Public Opinion are guaranteed to stimulate debate among area specialists.
