Islam and National identity in Indonesia

Résumé du document

Because Indonesia's culture is strongly linked to the Islamic religion - Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, today with about 200 million Muslims out of 230 million Indonesians, in other words 86% of Indonesians are Muslims– both the official definition of Indonesian national identity made by the state since the independence and the unofficial 'feeling' by the people and by intellectuals and religious of their own identity have been defined according to Islam – by including or excluding it.
Thus, we can wonder in which way Islam has influenced the emergence of the Indonesian national identity and how it has been considered in use by the Indonesian Republic of the 'national identity' concept?

Islam had an obvious place in the rising national feeling of the Indonesians, whereas the radical changes in the Indonesian cultural and religious life during the 19th century made Islam inapt to gather all the Indonesians (I). Thus, the first Indonesian Republic defined a national identity different from, and sometimes even against the Islamic identity, although progressively this religion got an ambiguous place in public policy and in official discourses (II).

Extraits

[...] Islam : From the implicit Indonesian identity to the impossibility to constitute a national shared element The attempts to redefine the Indonesian identity by the Priyayi remained marginal on the global identical feeling shared by the population. Indeed, Islam has always remained an obvious historical link between the populations of the archipelago. Quite paradoxically, Islam failed to imposed itself as the common identical element shared by the Indonesian not because of the Priyayi theoretical claims, but because of the growing divisions within Indonesian Islam during the nineteenth century that made impossible any feeling of unity between the numerous and too different Islamic communities. [...]

[...] While the Dutch colonial domination create a of pro-Western elite who wanted to deny Islam and took example on European modernity to redefine an identity on pre-Islamic culture, another reaction to the weakness of Indonesians and to the Dutch political and cultural subordination was the Islamic reform in Indonesia. Indeed, when some Indonesians from the elite wanted do redefine their identity on a new (or rather very ancient) cultural system, others wanted to redefine Indonesian identity on a regenerated Islam tradition. [...]

[...] After the fall of President Suharto, numerous parties (and among them Islamic parties) emerged. The first president elected Abdhurrahman Wahid, or has been the leader of the Islamic party called NU and allied to a coalition of Islamic political parties (but not Islamist ones). As it was unsure that this new government would redefine the official Indonesian identity, President Gus Dur assured the public the secular-nationalism would remain the official ideology of the Indonesian Republic. The newly possible development of Islamic parties did not threaten the secular principle of the Indonesian state: although many Islamic groups such as have claimed to establish an Islamic state, the country's mainstream Muslim population represented by the two biggest Islamic parties Muhammadiyah and NU have always rejected the idea of an “Islamic Republic”. [...]

[...] Islam had not been imposed by foreigners, but it has been voluntary adopted by the Indonesians. The Indonesians had made after the long and durable implantation of Islam what M.C. Ricklefs calls a “mystic synthesis”, in other words a religious consensus between the Islam imported faith and the local traditional rites and mores that contributed to the rise of a particular Indonesian Islam. This “national” Islam gathered the whole Indonesian peoples under a common religious culture. Because Islam was the element shared by the Indonesians for centuries after the complete conversion of the archipelago, this religion constituted de facto Indonesian shared identity, and this before the proclamation of an Indonesian “nation-state” and independently from any kind of official definition of what an “Indonesian” is. [...]

[...] These two identities have always coexisted separately, and the “authentic” Islamic identity, partly because of its intern divisions that decreased its strength, has never taken control of the National official identity. [...]