Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia

6. Marketing Morality: The Rise, Fall and Rebranding of Aa Gym

95 6 Marketing Morality: The Rise, Fall and Rebranding of Aa Gym James B. Hoesterey On the eve of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Asian–African Conference in 2005, Kiai HajiAbdullah Gymnastiar, the charismatic television preacher known across Indonesia as Aa Gym, admonished Muslim leaders to become more savvy about marketing the ‘beauty of Islam’. Likening Muslim leaders to marketers and Islam to fruit, Aa Gym asserted: ‘If a person does not know how to market it right, even a delicious durian won’t sell’. Aa Gym himself had captured the hearts of Indonesians by marketing his message of Managing the Heart (Manajemen Qolbu or MQ) through books, nationally televised sermons and Islamic training seminars. More than a preacher, Aa Gym had become a self-help guru and MQ his formula for Islamic virtue. By 2002, millions of Indonesians were watching his television shows; hundreds of thousands were making pilgrimages to his Islamic boarding school (pesantren); and politicians were lining up for photo-ops during campaign season. His multi-level marketing firm MQ Baroqah (MQ Blessings) sold Qolbu cola, Qolbu noodles and MQ shampoo . Aa Gym had succeeded in turning himself into an icon of Islamic virtue, his turban into a trademark, and MQ into a nationally recognised brand name.  The presently defunct MQ Baroqah was a direct marketing firm selling dozens of MQ products through a pyramid network of salespeople. Many of the products were household and hygiene products for women. 96   Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia Then, at the pinnacle of his public adoration, Aa Gym took the path of polygamy. Everything changed. Feeling heartbroken and betrayed, his female followers abandoned him and his polygamous marriage became the subject of national scandal. Infotainment shows and gossip magazines circulated stories of former admirers shredding his pictures, boycotting his television shows and cancelling weekend pilgrimages to his pesantren and ‘spiritual tourism’ complex, Daarut Tauhiid. Under pressure from the public protests, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) ordered a review of the national marriage law. Overnight, Aa Gym became a political and corporate liability. He lost his pending television contracts, his business empire started to crumble, and Daarut Tauhiid became a ghost town. In this chapter, I examine the rise, fall and current comeback campaign of Aa Gym. I look critically at marketing as a technique of religious proselytisation (dakwah) that fuses the corporate and the religious. Drawing on nearly two years of fieldwork in Aa Gym’s pesantren, I reflect on how he employed marketing strategies—such as branding, positioning and differentiation—to transform himself into a celebrity preacher, to legitimate his claim to religious authority, and to attempt to reclaim that authority in the aftermath of his dramatic fall from public grace. I want to be clear that I do not pit ‘authentic’ dakwah against ‘superficial ’ marketing. Rather, I engage and build on the work of those scholars of Islam who explore ‘the ways in which material objects, consumption practices, and certain forms of media engagements are constitutive of religious experience, authority, and legitimacy’ (Schulz 2006: 223). By looking carefully at the relationship between marketing and dakwah— by understanding Aa Gym as both celebrity preacher and brand name—  In 2006, political parties courted Aa Gym because of his 91 per cent popular approval rating. His television ratings, however, had peaked several years earlier. In 2002, his Sunday afternoon program commanded 32.5 per cent of all television viewers during that time slot; during the month before the story that Aa Gym had contracted a polygamous marriage broke, it attracted only 5.8 per cent of viewers.  Although the English word polygamy is not gender specific, I follow the Indonesian use of the word poligami, which specifically refers to a man married to multiple women, or polygyny.  The polygamy story broke after the anti-pornography bill had lost momentum and just days after the widespread circulation of a video recording of a politician having extramarital sex with a popular music (dangdut) singer. Hidayat Nur Wahid, chair of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) and former chair of the Islamist Prosperity and Justice Party (PKS), rushed to Aa Gym’s defence, chastising the president for reacting against polygamy while doing nothing to address pornography.  See also Hefner (1998), Özyürek (2006), Soares (2005) and Starrett (1995). Marketing Morality: The Rise, Fall and Rebranding of Aa Gym   97 I hope to contribute to an understanding of the...