Franz Magnis-Suseno, SJ
In this article, I want to show that the most important factor regarding religious tolerance in Indonesia is state policies. Tolerance, which has deep roots in traditional Indonesian cultures, will prevail as long as the state enforces corresponding legislation and the Constitution.1
As a German-born Jesuit Catholic priest who has lived in Indonesia for almost fifty years, has become an Indonesian citizen, and has been an active participant in civil society and interreligious dialogues, I believe it might be useful for me to develop three central points. First, I analyze what I consider to be the basically very good and tolerant relations between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia and discuss factors that have contributed to this tolerance, but I also examine toleration breakdowns. Second, I document and analyze why Muslim-majority intolerance toward Muslim minorities (rather than toward Christians and other minorities) remains, in my judgment, the major religion-related problem in Indonesia’s emerging democracy. Third, I explore why I consider inaction by the democratic government actually more threatening to the quality of democracy in Indonesia than actions by authoritarian and violent religious groups.
Christian–Muslim Relations in Indonesia: The Founding (and Continuing) Pluralist Compromise
On August 18, 1945, one day after Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia’s independence under the nose of the Japanese occupiers (who had just surrendered to the Allied forces), its Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia (Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence), after sharp debate, adopted the Constitution of 1945, in which Indonesia was declared to be based on five fundamental principles known as “Pancasila.” The first principle was “belief in one God” (ketuhanan yang maha esa). Paragraph 29 of the Constitution proclaimed liberty of religion and worship.
In Indonesia, nondiscrimination on religious grounds was thus strongly written into the Constitution of 1945 (and all other Indonesian constitutions) and, in a generally satisfying way, into the law. There can be no doubt that there was and still is a strong political consensus in Indonesian society, always kept up by the Indonesian state, that all Indonesians are citizens in the full sense of their rights and duties. Members of minority religions can occupy high positions in politics, the military, and universities. Although the Department of Religion is primarily an answer to the needs of the Muslim community, the other (recognized) religions have their departments within it.
After the fall of Suharto, four amendments to the Constitution of 1945 gave human rights a strong constitutional position. These rights include freedom of religion. In fact, in most parts of Indonesia non-Muslims are free to worship. And unlike in many other Muslim-majority countries, there are no penalties for religious conversion.
How remarkable and extraordinary this philosophical and constitutional base was for tolerance and democracy in Indonesia will be obvious if we look at the religious map of the country. More than 85 percent of all Indonesians are (Sunni) Muslims. Almost 10 percent are Christians, two-thirds of whom belong to Protestant churches and one-third to the Catholic Church; and 1.5 percent are Hindu, most of them being the original inhabitants of Bali. The remaining 3.5 percent belong to indigenous religions, Confucianism, and the Buddhist community. These numbers mean nothing else than that Indonesia was at the time of independence and still is the nation with the biggest number of Muslims on earth. But at the beginning of the existence of the free Republic of Indonesia in 1945, its representatives unanimously decided to build a nation without religious discrimination and without giving Islam, the religion of the vast majority, any special constitutional or legal status. This decision was made with full awareness of its implications because it was preceded by intensive deliberations and bargaining about (as articles by Künkler and others in this volume show), first, whether Indonesia should become an “Islamic state” or not (the decision was not) and, second, whether at least the Islamic sharia should be declared binding on Muslims (this stipulation was unanimously dropped on August 18, 1945). I am of the opinion that only the willingness of the Islamist representatives not to insist on any special status for Islam made possible the continuance of Indonesia as a single state up to this day.
Since then, religious freedom and nondiscrimination, in spite of many frictions, petty discrimination, and even serious conflicts—which I come back to presently—has been a reality. Even radical Muslim groups have not challenged the principle that in Indonesia non-Muslims have the same legal and civil status as Muslims and are citizens in the full sense of the word. Thus, although there have always been interreligious tensions and petty discriminations, the religious communities of Indonesia have lived and continue to live together peacefully. Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, and Buddhists—all were officially recognized as legal by the state, all have a mandatory and paid holiday in honor of a day especially sacred to their religion, and all have a section in the Ministry of Religion devoted to them from which they receive some subsidies. Confucians were incorporated into this structure in the democratic period under the leadership of President Abdurrahman Wahid. Under the military and Suharto, anything smacking of being “Chinese” was outlawed, and Confucians were forced to register as Buddhists, making Confucian marriages impossible, for example.
Despite this overall legal tolerance of all religions by the state, some intolerant aspects of Indonesian laws must be mentioned. One grave ongoing violation of human rights is that people belonging to tribal religions cannot legally marry due to an extremely one-sided marriage law passed in 1973. Mixed marriages, too, have to be conducted according to the rites of one of the six now officially recognized religions.
Nonetheless, Christianity developed exceptionally well after Indonesian independence. The fact is that religious life in most of the Christian communities on Java, Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and other Muslim regions of Indonesia goes on without any hindrance. There is freedom of worship, freedom of religious instruction, and freedom to baptize and to become a Christian (or a Muslim). Church bells ring out at liturgical hours every day in churches on Java. Although being a Christian has not been an advantage if one wants a career in government or as a state employee, Christians are not systematically discriminated against and can be found in all professions and at all levels of Indonesian society. This is the long history of Christianity in Indonesia. But I would be remiss if I did not discuss a much more troubling short history, roughly between 1990 and around 2005, when the democratic transition was completed.
Worrying Events Starting with Suharto in 1990
In 1990, Suharto took his famous turn to Islam. Many Muslim leaders regarded the change of attitude as long overdue. For them, the twenty-yearlong shunning of political Islam by the New Order was an extraordinary discrimination against the majority religion. They also suspected Christian influences behind Suharto’s negative attitude toward Islam. Thus, they regarded Suharto’s late “conversion” as a question of finally giving justice to the Islamic community.
Christians, however, saw themselves increasingly excluded from public positions; they now felt discriminated against and like a threatened minority. But what really frightened Christians was a growing number of violent attacks on churches. More than six hundred churches were destroyed or violently closed, not counting churches destroyed in connection with the civil wars in the early stages of the democratic transition in eastern Indonesia discussed by Sidney Jones in chapter 6 in this volume. Really traumatic for Indonesian Christians were four completely unprovoked attacks in 1996–1997 in Java, beginning with an attack on ten churches in Surabaya in 1996 (where damage was slight), then in Situbondo, Tasikmalaya, and Rengasdengklok, where all forty-eight churches (except one in Tasik) were systematically burned down by mobs. There followed two further mob attacks: one in November 1998 in Jakarta, followed two weeks later by Christian riots in Kupang that led to the expulsion of the Bugis people; and one in January 2000 on the island of Lombok. Especially worrying for Christians is the fact that not a single perpetrator has ever been brought to court for these crimes—at least to my knowledge.2 During this period, Christians were increasingly asking themselves whether their constitutionally guaranteed right of worship, even their right to openly identify as Christian and remain safe in majority Muslim regions, could be violated with impunity.
Although there have been no more large-scale devastations of churches since 2000, attacks on single and often new small Protestant churches on Java are continuing. Thus, as Christians complain, it is still extremely difficult to build churches in Java and in other Muslim regions even when the Christian community clearly needs a church. Without its own church building, the community is forced to hold its services in a school or a similar building, but doing so is often forbidden because the building has not been zoned as a house of worship. The argument often goes that a church should not be built in the midst of a Muslim community, which, of course, would mean the end of religious tolerance because a minority by definition lives among a majority of another religion. It is, as I have heard, also difficult for Balinese Hindus to get building permits for their pura (temples) or for Chinese to build a klenteng temple among the Muslims. I have no information on whether similar complaints are voiced by Muslim communities in Christian regions.
Mention has to be made here of an especially terrifying event: the Christmas night in 2000 when fifty bombs were placed in or around Christian churches from North Sumatra to the island of Lombok. Thirty of them exploded, resulting in seventeen deaths and more than one hundred wounded. The police made no serious effort to apprehend the perpetrators. Only after the perpetrators of the Bali bombings in the tourist district of Kuta were caught in 2002 did it transpire that they were also involved in these Christmas bombings two years earlier.
The climax of interreligious conflict were two civil wars that devastated parts of the Maluku Islands and Central Sulawesi for almost four years. These wars raged from 1999 to 2002 and resulted in about eight thousand deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom have not yet been able to return to their homes owing to the uncertain security situation. But it is clear that in both regions the reasons behind the violence were highly complex, including, as Marcus Mietzner and Sidney Jones document in chapters 5 and 6 in this volume, some military involvement as a part of the military’s rearguard action against its marginalization by a full democratic transition. But it is also important to stress that some of the conflicts reached back into history or even into local culture (people in the Maluku Islands have traditionally been warriors, and fights between villages were quite common3), and others were connected with ethnographic and economic change as well as with both local and national politics, as many Indonesians believe. But to say, as some do, that these conflicts were in fact not religious in character is wishful thinking. The fact is that for more than three years the answer to the question “Are you a Muslim or a Christian?” decided life or death for many people. Although these conflicts were of another nature than the antiminority violence in Java mentioned earlier, being more political, economic, and communal, the disturbing fact is that the conflicts tended to boil down in all these cases to confrontations between Christians and Muslims. Religious hatred can thereby grow and develop its own momentum. The whole atmosphere between the involved communities gets poisoned. Add long-standing suspicions and prejudices, and new outbreaks of conflict can be easily provoked by politically or otherwise interested parties.
Nevertheless, although these conflicts are conflicts between communities defined by their respective religions, they have not much to do with the teachings or other specific traits of Islam or Christianity. They should be characterized as communal conflicts, by which I mean that emotions, hatred, and prejudices relate to the collective identity of a group, united by language, local culture, locality, religion, tribalism, and so on. If a member of such a community acts against a member of another one, the victim’s community will react collectively against the perpetrator’s community.
In fact, the Ambon and Poso conflicts are only a part of a general climate of easy recourse to violence that exists in Indonesian society today. Small frictions, misunderstandings, and confrontations easily evoke violent reactions and physical fighting with weapons. Such fights very often quickly involve whole communities, which then clash with each other. If, for instance, there is a fight between an extortionist and a taxi driver, and the one is a Muslim and the other a Christian (as happened in Ambon), there is always the chance that it may become a war between their respective villages or kampungs. Indeed, the conflict may widen, especially if kampungs are tribally or religiously homogenous, to become a war between ethnic groups (as happened on Kalimantan) or between religious communities.4
These developments have left their scars in religious communities. Many Christians have asked themselves about their future in Indonesia. The existence of hard-line groups that sometimes resort to violence (especially against “sinful places” such as gambling dens and even coffee shops, but in some instances also against Christian institutions that they say are engaging in “Christianization”) has added to this atmosphere of apprehension. Hard-line Islamic publications have openly voiced extremely sectarian views, often directly alluding to Christians. There has been, in my view, an unfortunate tendency toward religious segregation. A fatwa promulgated twenty-five years ago by the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulama Council) but only effectively enacted after the fall of Suharto commands that Muslims should refrain from expressing Christmas greetings to Christians. Since then, a whole tradition of grassroots-level interreligious contact has dried up. I have heard Muslim friends express their dismay at the fact that the teacher of religion at their children’s schools tell Muslim children not to have contact with non-Muslim and Chinese children. Christians are also worried about the tendency of local authorities to enforce sharia regulations in their regions. Hand in hand with local “shariazation” goes a policy of making religious life for Christian communities more and more difficult in certain districts, often in the name of the newly won “autonomy of the regions.”
Positive Muslim–Christian and Democratic Developments
Despite all that I have just acknowledged, the astonishing fact is that relations between Christians and Muslims, although still far from being without problems, are developing well. The democratic period has seen five major developments, undetected by most of the public, that I consider positive for Muslim–Christian relations and, more important, positive for the deepening development of an inclusive, pluralist, democracy in Indonesia.
The first and most fundamental fact I want to stress is that the Pancasila national consensus—that Indonesia belongs to all Indonesians—still stands essentially unchallenged. Political parties that favor making sharia law a state law for Muslims represented only about 17 percent of the 2004 electorate. In that year, the two biggest political parties, Golongan Karya (Golkar, Functional Groups) (22 percent) and the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) (18 percent), but also Abdurrahman Wahid’s Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (National Awakening Party) (14 percent) and Amien Rais’s Partai Amanat Nasional (National Mandate Party) (6 percent) did not support the introduction of sharia. Even more significant is the fact that the leadership of the two big Muslim organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, Rise of the Ulama) and Muhammadiyah (Followers of Muhammad), have clearly stated that making sharia into state law does not fit with Indonesia’s social-cultural conditions.
A second highly significant and often overlooked fact is that the quasi-war between Christians and Muslims in eastern Indonesia between 1999 and 2002—in which both sides regarded themselves as the victims of violence from the other side—did not spill over to other regions. There were no revenge attacks on Christians by Muslims in the heavily Muslim majority territory of Java and no attacks on Muslims in the Christian majority parts of Indonesia. More amazing still, the much vilified political elite in Jakarta, including the political parties, did not use the terrible conflicts in the Maluku Islands and Poso for political gains during their election campaigns.
Indeed, the third remarkable fact is that during the fiercely contested campaigns during the 2004 and 2009 parliamentary and presidential elections, questions of religion were almost completely absent; even explicitly Islamic parties such as the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party) did not campaign in the name of Islam, but against corruption and for social justice. No party campaigned for the introduction of sharia (although some parties have it on their official agenda). All pairs of presidential and vice presidential candidates for the presidential elections were “mixed” between “Islamists”5 and “nationalists” (all of the “nationalists,” of course, were Muslim, too).
A fourth encouraging and notable development during the democratic transition has been a significant warming of relations between Christians and both NU and Muhammadiyah. When speaking about Islamic organizations, we have to distinguish between Muslim organizations in general, no matter how small and possibly noninfluential, and the few extremely large and influential national organizations, especially the “traditionalist” NU and the “modernist” Muhammadiyah. There exists quite a remarkable number of Islamic hard-line organizations of different ideological backgrounds, although many of them might be characterized as somewhat Wahhabist or Salafist. These groups are the hard-liners: promoting intolerance, violently threatening minorities, and very often succeeding in slowly destroying good communicative relations between local majority Muslim communities and non-Muslim religious entities, as discussed by Sidney Jones.
However, NU’s and Muhammadiyah’s attitudes are of national importance. NU, the big “traditionalist” Islamic organization claiming 40 million members, was for a critical fifteen years of democratic opposition and democratic transition led by Abdurrahman Wahid (often called “Gus Dur”). Gus Dur opened up traditional rural Muslim schools to communications with Christians, Buddhists, and others, a development that can be regarded as one of the greatest social success stories in modern Indonesia. Of course, one should not generalize. There exist within NU, as in other groups, narrow-minded, intolerant people. In general, however, with Gus Dur’s leadership, NU takes a tolerant, pluralistic attitude and specifically shows an awareness of its responsibility as a majority group for solving conflicts peacefully. Indeed, Christians are likely to go to NU members if they have difficulties and will very often get at least a sympathetic ear. Without idealizing it, we can say that NU is a very positive element in the social fabric of Indonesia and especially of Indonesian Islam.
But Muhammadiyah, too, the “modernist” organization with about 28 million members, although Wahhabi influenced and—for a long time on principle—adverse toward indigenous Indonesian cultures, has opened up during the past fourteen years or so, beginning with Amien Rais, who at the end of the Suharto government experienced an astonishing transformation from a person occasionally seen as a kind of “Christian and Chinese eater” into a more tolerant, pluralistic personality. His successor as head of Muhammadiyah, Professor Syafii Ma’arif, is one of the most open-minded, inclusive, and on principle, nonviolent people within Indonesian Islam. But even Ma’arif’s successor, Professor Din Syamsuddin, whom many regarded as more of a hard-liner and “a typical Muhammadiyah” man, has proved himself to be relatively open-minded, strictly against violence, and open to dialogue with other religious communities. Thus, Muhammadiyah, too, exerts a positive influence on the interreligious climate in Indonesia.
Thus, the influence of the two big popular Muslim organizations, NU and Muhammadiyah, in the democratic transition must be said to be positive and very important. In general, they try to discourage violent intolerant behavior by their followers; they are open to dialogue with minority groups; and they stand ready to enter the public square to counter intolerant Islam with tolerant Islam.
These tendencies got a big boost from the growing terrorist threat hanging over Indonesia. The real watershed was the Bali bombings in Kuta on October 12, 2002. These bombings shocked Indonesians out of their complacent attitude toward the reality of religiously motivated terror.6 Two closely related changes grew out of the Bali bombings. First, liberal Muslim groups and the popular leaders of NU and Muhammadiyah began to present Islam more forcefully as an inclusive religion that, as the majority religion, felt responsible for the peace and prosperity of the whole of Indonesian society. These Muslim groups publicly condemned terrorism in the name of Islam and initiated prayer meetings among different religions for the victims of the Kuta killings. NU and Muhammadiyah leaders founded the Gerakan Moral Nasional (National Moral Council) consisting of the leaders of all Indonesia religions. Second, extremist groups that had used the new democratic openness after the fall of the Suharto government to come out into the open now retreated into more low-profile positions, and some distanced themselves from terrorist activities.
The fifth encouraging point I would like to insist upon is that during the elections of 1999, 2004, and 2009 there was essentially quiet on the religious front. This phenomenon deserves closer scrutiny. As was the case in the election campaigns of 1999 (in the midst of two civil wars) and of 2004 (peace having been precariously restored), so, too, in 2009 political parties (including parties from an Islamic background) and presidential candidates showed themselves to be inclusive, never alluding to religious or ideological divides. In the same way, all coalition talks between political parties as well as between presidential and vice presidential candidates seemed to avoid anything that looked like the infamous “Islamist versus secularist/nationalist” schism. It was probably that they instinctively believed that taking a “sectarian” attitude would diminish their electoral appeal. But I believe there was more. There was a growing recognition that what I have called the foundational compromise was now the dominant consensus in an increasingly democratic and pluralist Indonesia. There is a deep and growing realization among Indonesians, including the much disparaged political class, that Indonesian unity is such a valued good that it must not to be endangered by cheap religious politicking.
The Problem of Muslim Majorities’ Intolerance Toward Muslim Minorities
The question of inner-Islamic tolerance is a completely different story politically, theologically, and psychologically. Islam has always recognized the existence of other religions. In principle, Islam knows there are other religions. These other religions have, in Islamic eyes, their problems with God, but Islam recognizes them. Islam is not “insulted” by their existence and by their unacceptable, for Muslims, teachings and forms of worship. Moreover, Pancasila represents the constitutional recognition and protection of the existence of non-Muslim religions in Indonesia. Even Indonesian Islamic Hard-liners do not, in principle, deny the right of non-Muslims to full citizenship.
But the situation is completely different regarding sects or movements (aliran) within Islam itself in Indonesia. Most of the Muslim community sees such “sects” as direct challenges to their beliefs, as destabilizing their religion from within, and as unfaithfulness directly in the face of God’s revealed religion. Sects, of course, have long existed within Indonesian (and other) Muslim communities. But the moment they or different movements get public attention, they can excite intense hatred and easily lead to brutality and violence. This was and is the case regarding Ahmadiyya (Followers of Ahmad), an Islamic sect founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who is revered as a prophet by his followers, in a part of India that now belongs to Pakistan.
On July 28, 2005, the MUI issued a fatwa that condemned the Ahmadiyya sect. The consequence was an upsurge of violence against Ahmadis. Near Bogor, a major city in Java, thousands of men armed with sticks, clubs, and knives—among them many white-clad members of the Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders’ Front)—encircled the local Ahmadiyya complex, which was then forcefully evacuated by the police. Shortly afterward, an Ahmadiyya kampung near Sukabumi was attacked. In the course of that onslaught, several Ahmadiyya mosques were set on fire, and numerous private residences were looted or destroyed. In February 2006, Ahmadis on Lombok Island were also exposed to violent attacks.
What this example illustrates is that although the Indonesian state (somewhat timidly) tries to uphold the religious rights of non-Muslim religions, it does not offer the same protections to inner Muslim sects. In fact, the government’s attitude, up to the highest level, during the brutal anti-Ahmadiyya riots was shameful. When Ahmadiyya facilities close to Bogor were attacked, the president of Indonesia only said that the sect had been banned by the state anyway (which was not even true; MUI had many years earlier banned Ahmadiyya, but the state never had). Not a single word reminding people of their duty to respect the Ahmadis’ life and property was ever heard. People certainly would have listened had the president said something along these lines, but it did not happen. The attitude of the great majority of Muslim leaders was more or less the same. They just stood silent while the Ahmadis were driven out of their homes. It seems that the government—and parliamentarians—do not understand that these people have a right to their religious conviction.
The case of Ahmadiyya was eventually resolved by a decree in 2007 that was ambiguously formulated but that, according to Vice President Jusuf Kalla’s interpretation (for which he should be given credit), meant that the Ahmadis were free to live and worship according to their understanding of Islam as long as they stayed inside their compounds and did not try to convert others to their beliefs. Significantly for my argument, the number of mob attacks on Ahmadis after this state decree significantly decreased. (Sad to say, they have since 2010 increased significantly and dangerously.)
State “Inactivity” as a Failure of Religious Tolerance
There is a clear difference in the attitude toward non-Muslim religions and the attitude toward so-called heretical groups within Islam. Although non-Muslim minorities face a certain degree of discrimination and experience intolerant attitudes, the principle that all Indonesians regardless of their religion should be recognized as Indonesian citizens in the full sense of the word is not controversial. The state bases its attitudes toward its citizens on this principle, the big Muslim organizations accept it without question, and even more hard-line Muslim groups do not question it openly.
The situation of Islamic “heretical sects” is very different. Only a relatively small number of enlightened Muslims recognize their right to full religious freedom. Most others tend to see these sects as malevolent aberrations from the path of God that should return to the mainstream flock of believers. They are not treated with tolerance and easily can become victims of orthodox violence. The state seems to look at them in the same way and is extremely reluctant to provide protection against attacks.
There is a general problem regarding religiously motivated mob threats or mob violence in Indonesia. The state apparatus, especially the police, is very often slow to protect the property of minorities under attack (usually in connection with worship at “illegal” places or trying to build houses of worship). Here the state clearly fails in its duty to maintain the principle of the rule of law, whose most important element is that no violence in society is tolerated. The state lacks the courage to do its duty and thereby indirectly encourages popular violence and the impunity of intolerant groups and organizations.
There are two worrisome points here. The first is that the state and its organs are generally reluctant to uphold the law, without compromise, in the face of religiously motivated violent mobs. The second is that there is a specific lack of tolerance and understanding of the rights of inner-Islamic “heretical” groups.
But these two unquestionably negative points have to be seen in the context of a sociocultural religious background that has five features I consider positive and that our new democracy might build upon.
First, the fundamental consensus that Indonesia belongs to all Indonesians regardless of their religious beliefs is still intact. Second, Pancasila, the philosophical-ethical basis on which Indonesia is founded, is not questioned. Third, although there are all kinds of petty discriminations against minorities, in general they are not discriminated against, and the existence of non-Islamic religions in Indonesia is firmly accepted by the majority. Fourth, there has been a growing openness and conscious option for moderate positions within the large Islamic organizations NU and Muhammadiyah. This option includes much better communications with representatives of minority religions, specifically Christians. Fifth, on the difficult questions of “errant beliefs” (ajaran sesat) there is a growing discourse within Islam urging state enforcement of the law, and the number of Indonesians demanding religious freedom for such beliefs is growing.