The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town, c.1910s-2010 (Second Enlarged Edition)

7. Conclusion: Re-Islamization of Java

208 7 CONCLUSION Re-Islamization of Java The struggle (perjuangan) to achieve a truly Islamic society (masyarakat Islam yang sebenar-benar-nya) is a struggle which has no breaks (tak putus-putus). It is like a relay race (permainan estafet); generation by generation (generasi demi generasi) taking turns to carry forward the relay baton [of the struggle] on the track of history. (Bulletin Lustrum Ke-I, S.M.P. Muhammadiyah VII, Kotagede, 1970, p. 21). The thesis that has been developed in the foregoing chapters is that orthodox Islam in the form of a reformist movement, Muhammadiyah, has arisen from within the traditional Javanese Islam as its internal transformation rather than as an outright import of a new ideology made complete elsewhere. The reformist version of orthodox Islam has been a vigorously proselytizing religious ideology and has brought, is bringing, and will bring about profound changes in social, cultural, economic and political aspects of Javanese life. To support this thesis, attempts have been made to document, describe and analyse major aspects of this ongoing process of re-Islamization as it occurred in a local town, Kotagede in south Central Java, over the past seventy years or so. If the thesis can be regarded as having been substantiated sufficiently, at least for one local case, then the view expressed here may appear to come into direct conflict with an assumption widely held among students of contemporary Indonesia that Islam, especially its reformist version, is losing Conclusion 209 political strength. For example, George Kahin has recently expressed such a view in his preface to Ken Ward’s The Foundation of the Partai Muslimin Indonesia (1970). Kahin states: Today [1970] Islamic political power in Indonesia has become considerably weaker [than in the early 1950s], and the influential Modernist Islamic elements who previously led the Masjumi are without political focus and organization (ibid., p. iii). Another foreign observer of Indonesian politics, studying the results of the 1971 general election, noted a “surprisingly poor showing” of the electoral support the Parmusi obtained (Nishihara 1971, p. 50): the Parmusi votes of 5.36 per cent of the total votes in 1971 are compared to the Masyumi votes of 20.9 per cent of the total in the 1955 general election, and the figures have been regarded as firm evidence for the drastically weakening political strength of reformist Muslims (ibid., passim). Nowadays it has become common among the circles of Indonesian observers to hear expressions of surprise, “Muslims are still strong!”, or “They are still holding out!”, when there has happened a show of Muslim political strength. Foreign observers were certainly surprised by the NU’s persistence in the rural areas of Central and East Java in the 1971 election or by a more recent event of the passage of the Marriage Law with numerous amendments to appease Muslim critics despite Muslim political parties’ numerical weakness in the post-election parliament. Obviously, the assumption underlying this kind of surprise is that the weakening of Muslim political strength is a natural process to expect, and the opposite is rather exceptional. So much so that academic interest now (mid-1970s) seems to be shifting to studying how long and how far Muslim political forces can survive and resist this process in terms of their relationships vis-à-vis the overwhelming power of the military dominated government. In this general climate of opinion, the thesis of this study seems to belong to a tiny minority view which holds that Islam has been getting stronger. Drewes, the great Dutch scholar of Indonesian Islam, observed in the early 1950s that “the Islamization of Indonesia is still in progress, not only in the sense that Islam is still spreading among pagan tribes, but also in that peoples [sic] who went over to Islam centuries ago are living up more to the standard of Muslim orthodoxy” (Drewes 1955, p. 286). Hoesein Djajadiningrat, the Indonesian Islamologist of international reputation, assessed the situation in the mid-1950s that “the number of ‘white people’, or those who have knowledge of Islam and are living up to Islamic principles, is increasing” (1958, p. 384). Daniel Lev, the American political 210 The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree scientist studying the social basis of Islamic legal institutions, obtained a strong impression in Jakarta in 1971 that many people are now undertaking Islamic obligations such as fasting in the month of Ramadan more seriously than before, “almost enthusiastically” (1972...