Managing Politics And Islam In Indonesia

First published in 2004. This text examines the politics of Islam and the state of Indonesia over recent decades, during which time there has been a notable resurgence of Islamic political movements. It argues that after the state had consistently worked to restrict and exclude political Islam from power, in the late 1980s and 1990s there was a change whereby Suharto courted the support, and began to incorporate, Muslim interests within the political system.

There are more Muslims in Indonesia than in any other country, but most people outside the region know little about the nation, much less about the practice of Islam among its diverse peoples or the religion's influence on the politics of the republic. In this illuminating publication, Robert Pringle explains the advent of Islam in Indonesia, its development, and especially its contemporary circumstances. The author's incisive writing provides the necessary background and demystifies the spectrum of politically active Muslim groups in Indonesia today.

Politics in Indonesia describes the attitudes, aspirations and frustrations of the key players in Indonesian politics as they struggle to shape the future. The book focuses on the role of political Islam; Douglas E. Ramage shows that the state has been remarkably successful in maintaining secular political institutions in a predominantly Muslim society. He analyses the way in which political questions are framed with reference to the national ideology, the Pancasila.

This book explains the relationship between Islam and the state and politics in contemporary Indonesia. President Soeharto's departure from office in May 1998 brought tremendous and far-reaching impacts to Indonesia's political landscape. At least 181 new political parties came into being, a sizeable portion of which use Islam as their symbol and ideological basis.

First published in 2004. This text examines the politics of Islam and the state of Indonesia over recent decades, during which time there has been a notable resurgence of Islamic political movements. It argues that after the state had consistently worked to restrict and exclude political Islam from power, in the late 1980s and 1990s there was a change whereby Suharto courted the support, and began to incorporate, Muslim interests within the political system.

Across the Muslim world, religion plays an increasingly prominent role in both the private and public lives of over a billion people. Observers of these changes struggle to understand the consequences of an Islamic resurgence in a democratizing world. Will democratic political participation by an increasingly religious population lead to victories by Islamists at the ballot box? Will more conspicuously pious Muslims participate in politics and markets in a fundamentally different way than they had previously? Will a renewed attention to Islam lead Muslim democracies to reevaluate their place in the global community of states, turning away from alignments with the West or the Global South and towards an Islamic civilizational identity? The answers to all of these questions depend, at least in part, on what ordinary Muslims think and do. In order to provide these answers, the authors of this book look to Indonesia--the world's largest Muslim country and one of the world's only consolidated Muslim democracies. They draw on original public opinion data to explore how religiosity and religious belief translate into political and economic behavior at the individual level. Across various issue areas--support for democracy or Islamic law, partisan politics, Islamic finance, views about foreign engagement--they find no evidence that the religious orientations of Indonesian Muslims have any systematic relationships with their political preferences or economic behavior. The broad conclusion is that scholars of Islam, in Indonesia and elsewhere, must understand religious life and individual piety as part of a larger and more complex set of social transformations. These transformations include modernization, economic development, and globalization, each of which has occurred in parallel with Islamic revivalism throughout the world. Against the common assumption that piety would naturally inhibit any tendencies towards modernity, democracy, or cosmopolitanism, Piety and Public Opinion reveals the complex and subtle links between religion and political beliefs in a critically important Muslim democracy.

This book explores the relationship between transnational and local Islam as expressed in public discourse and policy-making, as represented in the local press. It does so against the background of local governments in majority Muslim regions across Indonesia promoting and passing regulations that mandate forms of social or economic behaviour seen to be compatible with Islam. The book situates the political construction of Islamic behaviour in West Sumatra, and in Indonesia more generally, within an historical context in which rulers have in some way engaged with aspects of Islamic practice since the Islamic kingdom era. The book shows that while formal local Islamic regulations of this kind constitute a new development, their introduction has been a product of the same kinds of interactions between international, national and local elements that have characterised the relationship between Islam and politics through the course of Indonesian history. The book challenges the scholarly tendency to over-emphasise local political concerns when explaining this phenomenon, arguing that it is necessary to forefront the complex relationship between local politics and developments in the wider Islamic world. To illustrate the relationship between transnational and local Islam, the book uses detailed case studies of four domains of regulation: Islamic finance, zakat, education and behaviour and dress, in a number of local government areas within the province.

This companion volume to the highly successful Islam in Malaysian Foreign Policy explores the extent to which foreign policy in the world's largest Muslim nation has been influenced by Islamic considerations.