Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia

3. Modulations of Active Piety: Professors and Televangelists as Promoters of Indonesian ‘Sufisme’

40 3 Modulations of Active Piety: Professors and Televangelists as Promoters of Indonesian ‘Sufisme’ Julia Day Howell Adistinctive and remarkable feature of Indonesia’s recent Islamic revival has been the upsurge of popular interest in Islam’s mystical and devotional tradition, tasawwuf (Sufism). The resurgence of Sufism, especially among urbanites, during Indonesia’s Islamic revival runs counter to the powerful current of scripturalist Islamic modernism that has been hostile to Sufism for most of the past century. Modernist reformers, prominent in cities in organisations such as Muhammadiyah, commonly thought that tasawwuf encouraged violations of the core doctrine of the oneness of God through excessive adulation of the masters (syekh) of the Sufi religious orders (tarekat). Muslim modernists also objected to certain discretionary prayers (shalat sunnat) that Sufis appended to Islam’s obligatory prayers (shalat wajib). Not only did modernists find no scriptural precedent for such additions, and therefore branded them heretical inventions (bid’ah), but they judged the ‘irrational’, emotive and mystical states that the repetitive Sufi prayers could evoke to be out of keeping with the modern temper Muslims must cultivate to regain their proper place in the world. In the Middle East, the scripturalist and, increasingly, Salafist character of Islamic modernism was heightened in the middle to late twentieth  The Islamic reformist movements commonly referred to as ‘Salafist’ (either by proponents or critics) are diverse, but the reference here is to those twentiethcentury movements that seek to restore the ‘true’ faith in the face of corrupting modern influences by modelling religious practice wholly on that of the Professors and Televangelists as Promoters of Indonesian ‘Sufisme’   41 century as disappointment with secular ideologies of social transformation and social justice fuelled the popularity of political Islam. Global currents of Salafist thought, which gained prominence during the latter twentieth-century Islamic revival, have reinforced the suspicions of Sufism already raised by more moderate modernist Muslims. Such anti-Sufi agitation has played a part in Indonesia’s Islamic revival, as it has in Islamic revivals elsewhere. Nonetheless, as the twenty-first century unfolds, it is clear that Sufism has not disappeared from Muslim communities across the world, and is showing new vigour in many places where it had languished in the shadow of other articulations of Islam with stronger public recognition as ‘orthodox’ (Howell and van Bruinessen 2007). Indonesia is one of the places where Sufism appeared to be in decline by the middle of the twentieth century, but its resurgence in the last three decades of the century is now widely acknowledged and a matter of much discussion. This Sufi resurgence needs to be understood as far more than simply an increase in the popularity of traditional Sufi practices (such as supererogatory prayers or fasting) and institutions (the tarekat). Like all fields of the Islamic sciences, and like popular Islamic practice in general, tasawwuf has recently undergone particularly intense re-examination and shifts in colouration. The fact that the new enthusiasm for Sufism in Indonesia has been especially evident in cities and among the middle and upper classes (who constitute the sections of society most intensely drawn into modernising social change) should suggest—as is indeed the case—that tasawwuf today is assuming novel forms. This is signalled by the inclusion in the Indonesian vocabulary of a new word for tasawwuf: ‘Sufisme’. Clearly a borrowing from European languages, this term first became current in Indonesia in the 1970s when Western literature on Sufism began to circulate broadly. It was then taken into Indonesian-language works on the subject, which became among the best-selling books on Islam. This indicates that in Indonesia the Islamic science of tasawwuf salaf, the pious ‘predecessors’ (the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and their followers of the first three generations). Most self-identified Salafis do not wholly reject the medieval schools of Islamic law that developed during the first three centuries of the faith. However, Salafis commonly do read the canonical texts (the Qur’an and the Hadith) selectively and literally in ways that discredit many traditionalist Muslim practices (including Sufi practices) as heterodox foreign innovations (bid’ah). They are also hostile to liberal modernist Muslim reformers who have developed historically contextualised interpretations of the holy books in order to adapt religious practice to contemporary life.  See Azra (1993), van Bruinessen (1995), Darmadi (2001) and Howell (2001, 2007a). 42   Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia and associated spiritual practices are being reflectively contextualised...