Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia

2. Religious Elites and the State in Indonesia and Elsewhere: Why Take-overs are so Difficult and Usually Don't Work

2 RELIGIOUS ELITES AND THE STATE IN INDONESIA AND ELSEWHERE: WHY TAKE-OVERS ARE SO DIFFICULT AND USUALLY DON’T WORK M.C. Ricklefs The present age is really the same old age: It is either the men of prayer or the politicians who are in charge. — Muhammad Iqbal1 This chapter argues that Iqbal was correct to identify two major kinds of elites — the “men of prayer” and “the politicians” — but that a scholarly rather than poetic consideration leads to the conclusion that “men of prayer” find it very difficult to be “in charge”. Rather, state-controlling elites — “the politicians” — typically maintain primacy.And — remarkably — this seems to hold true across times and cultures, despite social, cultural, political, economic and technological differences. Here we ask how such consistency can be explained. I will argue below that the answer is to be found in (1) an asymmetry of capacities between religious and state elites 18 M.C. Ricklefs and (2) the different epistemological standing of the authority of those “men of prayer” and “politicians”. In a consideration as full of slippery areas as this, we must be clear about our definitions at the outset. By religious elite, I mean here those who are defined, legitimated and inspired by their religious standing. They are the priests in religions that have priests, the ordained theologians in others, or — of particular relevance in the Indonesian and other Islamic cases — the learned scholars of the faith, the respected interpreters of scriptures, recognized as such by their community. This can be a problematic category in Islam, where formal processes by which one becomes such a person are few. By political elite or state-controlling elite, I mean those who control the state, its apparatus, institutions and symbols, or those who are in competition with other similar figures to do so. So these are the politicians of our day, the kings and emperors of previous days and their colleagues. In some states, this state-controlling elite includes the military. In our present age, we see cases of such religious elites aspiring to control or to exercise decisive influence over states in order to carry out their religious, moral and legal agendas. Yet historically we rarely see such aspirations succeeding. It is necessary therefore to ask why that might be so, for the historical experience may shed light on contemporary circumstances. The consistency mentioned above — that of the primacy of the “politicians” over the “men of prayer” — may not at first be obvious. Looking at the past, one might think that a distinction between religion and the state was moot. Precolonial states often had kings who claimed supernatural powers, were reputed to be shadows of God upon the earth and were surrounded by supernatural sanctity. Panembahan Senapati Ingalaga (r. c.1584–1601), Sultan Agung (r. 1613–46) and other monarchs of Java’s Mataram dynasty were reputed to be the supernatural husbands of the Goddess of the Southern Ocean, who controlled the spirit armies of Java. Pakubuwana II (r. 1726–49) — or, more correctly, his influential Sufi grandmother Ratu Pakubuwana — sought to make Javanese kingship a subset of Islamic kingship, with Pakubuwana II eventually presenting himself as the conquering king of Holy War (Ricklefs 2008). Those who did not rule, but rather rebelled against the monarchs of Java, normally invoked supernatural authority on their behalf. So the boundaries between religion and politics often seem obscure, perhaps even meaningless, in precolonial sources. Religious Elites and the State 19 If religious and state authorities sometimes appear tangled together in precolonial times, they may seem differently related in more modern times, where state legitimacy tends to be secular in nature. Yet here again the picture is complicated. In the circumstances of contemporary Indonesia, there has been no shortage of people wishing to take over the state so as to impose shari‘ah law, or to capture specific institutions as a means to impose their views on society and to suppress the contending views of other Muslims. We will discuss several of these below. Here, a distinction between state authority and those religious activists who seek to take it over seems obviously relevant, as is the wish of the activists that the distinction should not exist. The slippery element here is this: many of these religious activists are not to be considered members of the religious elite. They are typically products of secular educational institutions and, however profound their personal...