Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism by Jeremy Menchik (review)

In Islam and Democracy in Indonesia, Jeremy Menchik has made an important contribution to our understanding of the politics of Islam in Indonesia, and to relations between Islam and democracy more generally. The book is complex, but three lines of inquiry stand out. Each deserves careful consideration by scholars and students of Indonesia, and of the Islamic world more generally.

First, Menchik analyzes tolerance of minorities among mainstream Islamic organizations in Indonesia, zeroing in on attitudes held by leaders of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah. Tolerance and the limits to it are the major concerns of Chapter 6, "Communal Tolerance," and this focus is well chosen. In a general sense, it is an important topic because liberal theorists view tolerance of minority opinion as a critical underpinning of democratic governance. Specifically, it is important because scholars have long viewed NU and Muhammadiyah as mainstays of Indonesian moderation, even, as Menchik puts it, as "a key reason why Indonesia is a democratic overarchiever" (15).

Yet despite Indonesia's democratic progress, and despite the much-praised tolerance of these organizations, leaders of both groups during the post-Soeharto period have participated in sometimes highly intolerant campaigns against minority groups such as Shias, members of the Ahmadiyah sect, lesbians and gays, and former communists. As the new institutions of Indonesian democracy have settled into place, it has often seemed that mainstream religious opinion has become more intolerant, not less. How do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory trends?

In seeking such a reconciliation, Menchik rightly criticizes much of the essentialist and reductionist writing on Islamic attitudes toward democracy, suggesting that "instead of asking whether Islam is compatible with democracy, researchers should investigate what kind of democracy Muslims prefer" (6–7). Menchik carries out such an investigation and, much to his credit, comes up with a clear finding. Groups such as Muhammadiyah and NU, he shows, support a vision, not of liberal democracy, but of "a communal and religious democracy" based on a vision of communal rather than individual tolerance (125). This vision is, in turn, premised on four foundations: emphasis on "communal rather than individual rights," belief in "communal self-governance," "separation between social and religious affairs," and "primacy of faith over other values" (146). On the first point, for example, groups like NU and Muhammadiyah do not "recognize unlimited individual freedom of conscience" (147), such that atheism or deviations from recognized monotheistic religions should be tolerated. Instead, they hold that major recognized (monotheistic) religious communities should have rights to regulate their own affairs and to receive government support when doing so. On the third point, to take another example, Menchik demonstrates that NU and Muhammadiyah leaders generally demonstrate high tolerance of Christians in social life (e.g., being willing to tolerate a Christian neighbor), but that tolerance precipitously declines as soon as the Christian is seen as impinging on Muslim religious affairs (e.g., by teaching in a Muslim school; 154). Menchik is able to demonstrate these arguments persuasively by using the findings of surveys he conducted of a cross section of the leaders NU and Muhammadiyah at national conferences of these organizations.

Menchik thus relies in part on the findings of fieldwork and survey research he carried out during the post-Soeharto period. But much of the book is historical. And in delving into the historical origins of Indonesian Muslims' vision of communal democracy, Islam and Democracy also presents a striking new interpretation of the relationship between Islam and Indonesian nationalism.

It is here that the book makes its second major contribution. While previous generations of scholars have sometimes rather lazily thought of Indonesian politics as being based around a cleavage separating secular nationalists from Islamic political forces, Menchik demonstrates persuasively that the religious embrace of Indonesian nationalism has held tight since Indonesia's very birth. Indonesian nationalism and modern Islamic political thinking and organizations have coevolved. In one of his more memorable formulations, Menchik argues that Indonesia presents above all a form of "godly...