Varieties of Religious Authority: Changes and Challenges in 20th Century Indonesian Islam

10. RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND THE SUPERNATURAL, by Kees van Dijk

177 10 RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY AND THE SUPERNATURAL Kees van Dijk Many topics have been discussed by staff, researchers and visiting exchange fellows of the “Islam in Indonesia: the Dissemination of Religious Authority in Twentieth Century Indonesia” programme. In accordance with the subdivisions of the programme, their studies were clustered around four main themes: ulama and fatwa; tarekat; education; and dakwah. The results are diverse. Some scholars have focused on Islamic education and the changing role of the ulama in Indonesian society. Other research has concerned the issuing of fatwa and the impact of such authoritative rulings on society at large and on specific organizations or religious communities. Other topics pursued have been the importance of the Middle East for religious developments in Indonesia; the Shia community in Indonesia; the role of Islam in early nationalism; and individual Islamic organizations from the moderate to the radical, and those in between. As planned, two conferences have already been held; one on fatwa, the other on dakwah, and this gathering is the third, concluding one of the programme. The researchers affiliated with the programme were also present at many other scholarly meetings. Dr Nico Kaptein has calculated that they have participated in more than a hundred seminars and conferences in Indonesia, the Netherlands and elsewhere in the world. 178 Kees van Dijk Much of the research carried out within the framework of the programme has been of a sociological or historical nature. This may be one of the reasons why the spiritual factor has not been a main topic of research and has been touched upon only in the passing; unavoidable as in many instances it is to mention God-given and sanctioned authority and correct behaviour. In a sense we have, so to speak, forgotten God. Nevertheless, in Islam the rewarding and punishing God is the ultimate religious authority. For some Muslims, He is so in a very direct and concrete way. A striking example is provided by the well-known case of the stoning of a member of the Laskar Jihad found guilty of raping a thirteen-year-old girl in Ambon in March 2001. The man in question, Abdullah, was said to have undergone his punishment voluntarily. He had been given the opportunity to withdraw his confession, but refused. In the absence of four male witnesses (of good characters) to the rape it would have been impossible to sentence him had he retracted. His crime would have become a matter “between him and God” (Shoelhi 2002, p. 75). His consideration was said to have been that by evading justice on earth, the punishment in the Hereafter would be much more severe. It “was better to receive the mentioned sentence passed to be free of sin and the threat of torture in the Hereafter” (Shoelhi 2002, p. 73). Whenever misfortune strikes, such pious Muslims consider it a punishment by God for the human disregard of religion. A prime example is Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. He and other leaders of the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (the Indonesian Jihad Fighters Council) are convinced that not obeying Islamic law inexorably brings disaster. A few months after the MMI had been founded on 7 August 2000, they sent a letter to President Abdurrahman Wahid with copies to a great many politicians, social and religious leaders, and editors of mass media. In it, Indonesia’s “multi-dimensional crisis” of that moment was blamed on the being in office of a secular government and the wrath of God that not upholding Islamic law had evoked. All that had gone wrong — the severe economic crisis at that time, the widespread poverty, the large-scale violence in Aceh, the Moluccas, Kalimantan, and elsewhere in the country — was attributed to the absence of an Islamic government in Indonesia, though on other occasions Ba’asyir and MMI did not fail to mention “the Jewish foreign currency adventurer”, George Soros and Zionist and Christian scheming as causes of Indonesia’s misfortunes (Anshari 2002, pp. 68–75, 79, 102). Proof that with the introduction of Islamic law problems would almost automatically disappear they descried in contemporary developments in Aceh. Reading the signs wrongly and disregarding statements by the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM), Free Aceh Movement, claiming its struggle was a political and not a religious one, they thought that the Religious Authority and the Supernatural 179 Acehnese no longer wanted independence. After all, Aceh was the first and only province in Indonesia...