The Arab Middle East and Religious Authority in Indonesia

This publication presents a broad overview of the religious relations between the Arab Middle East and Indonesia over roughly the last five hundred years. It shows that the Middle East has always held and continues to hold an extremely important place in Islamic life in Indonesia, but that, especially since independence, Middle Eastern Islam is being engaged with more critically, and that Salafism and other intolerant and radical forms of Islam from the Middle East are being combatted on an ideological level by propagating the specific Indonesian understanding of Islam, called Islam Nusantara.


Introduction
The concept of 'Arabization' is increasingly discussed in discourses on Islam in Indonesia. This idea suggests that intolerance and Islamic radicalism are being exported from the Arab Middle East to Indonesia and that consequently the specific tolerant and peaceful character of Islam in Indonesia is being diminished.
In this inaugural lecture, I examine the influence of the Arab Middle East on Islam in Indonesia and investigate how religious relations between the Middle East and Indonesia have developed over the centuries. I will end with some comments on the idea of 'Islam Nusantara'.

The Significance of Mecca in Indonesia
First of all, it must be stated that Islam originated in the Arabian Peninsula and from there was spread all over the world -Asia, Africa, and Europe. Aside from all kinds of questions about the start of the Islamization process in Southeast Asia 1 This is the English translation of my inaugural lecture which I gave in Dutch on 20 September 2019 on the occasion of the acceptance of the chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at Leiden University. The acknowledgements in the original lecture have been left out.
(from the end of the 13th century onwards), Islam thus originates from the Middle East, and in various Indonesian Islamic literatures, persons and events from the early Islamic history -which thus took place in the Middle East -play a role.
Furthermore, the ritual obligation of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) is an important aspiration for most Indonesian Muslims. Every year, large numbers of pilgrims from Indonesia go to the Holy City, which involves a huge logistical operation. As is widely known, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world with more than 225 million Muslims (out of a total population of more than 270 million inhabitants) and more than 220,000 pilgrims came from Indonesia during the last hajj. 2 Moreover, Muslims from all over the world face Mecca during the five daily ritual prayers. For these reasons, Mecca is a spiritual focal point in the lives of all Muslims -whether from Indonesia or other parts of the world.
In addition to this, Mecca has long functioned as the pre-eminent centre for the study of Islam. Many Indonesian pilgrims have stayed behind in Mecca after performing the hajj to deepen their knowledge of Islam. We have seen examples of this since the 17th century 3 and over time Mecca developed into the main centre for the study of Islam for Indonesian students.

Early Indonesian Islamic Literature
This is not to say that from an early period there were no Islamic intellectual activities in Indonesia itself. Among  other languages of the archipelago, such as Javanese, Acehnese, and Macassarese.
These indigenous literary traditions often provide a fascinating picture of how Islamic views and ideas were understood, accepted or rejected in local cultures, but at the same time, show that the authors of these indigenous literatures also had a certain-major or minor-involvement in the cosmopolitan practice of the Islamic sciences in Mecca, which they had acquired either through study in the Middle East or through Islamic texts in Arabic or other languages, circulating in the archipelago. 5 This meeting between Islam and local cultures in the archipelago is a fascinating topic, but what I am concerned with in this lecture is the connection of local authors with Islamic scholarship in the Middle East. This is where the ideas ultimately came from and here was the main centre for religious authority: when one wanted to know the precise nature of things, one turned to Mecca.
An interesting early example of this orientation towards Mecca is an incident from around 1630. During that period the Sultan of Banten in West Java sent three books to Meccan scholars. These books dealt with certain forms of monistic mysticism, known as Wujudiyyah, and which was inspired by the work of the just mentioned Ibn `Arabi. It is clear that these works had caused controversy in Banten and that the sultan expected to end this disagreement by asking and getting an authoritative opinion from Meccan scholars on the matter. 6

Indonesian Participation in the Study of Islam in Mecca
Around 1850, the advent of steam shipping intensified traffic between Southeast Asia and Mecca and increased numbers of pilgrims and students came from this part of the world to the Holy City. In 1885 the Dutch Islamic scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) stayed in Mecca under his Islamic name 'Abd al-Ghaffar, and upon returning to the Netherlands he published an extensive study on Mecca, including an interesting and lively written part about the daily life in the cosmopolitan city of Mecca. Of special significance is the section on the so-called Jawa colony. (The Arabic word jawa in this period means Southeast Asia; someone from Southeast Asia is a jawi; jawi does not mean Javanese; Javanese in Arabic, at this time, is jawi meriki). This Jawa colony was the community of people from the Malay-Indonesian archipelago who stayed in Mecca, either as pilgrims, as students, or as teachers. Over time, a completely separate infrastructure was built up, with privately owned houses and buildings for meetings and education.
Numerous Indonesians stayed in Mecca for shorter or longer periods for study, and some even remained active as teachers in Mecca during their entire lives.
From this group, returning students brought a constant stream of books, materials and ideas from Mecca to Indonesia and, in this way, Mecca's stature as the centre for Islamic sciences was constantly confirmed and strengthened. Snouck Hurgronje goes so far in his book as to call the Jawa colony "the heart of religious life in the East Indian Archipelago". 7

Nawawi Banten (1813-1897)
A good example of an Indonesian scholar working in Mecca is Muhammad ibn `Umar Nawawi al-Bantani al-Jawi, better known as Nawawi Banten. As the name suggests, he was originally from Banten, where he was born in 1813. After an introductory study of Islam with local scholars in Java, he left for Mecca in 1828 to perform the pilgrimage and continue his studies. After three years he returned to his homeland for a short period, but soon left again for Mecca, where he stayed for the rest of his life until his death in 1897.
Within the Jawa colony Nawawi Banten taught in his house to many Jawi students and encouraged them to undertake further studies. Upon their return to Indonesia, many of these students started to teach themselves in the traditional Islamic training boarding schools, known as pesantrens. Among his students was Hasyim Asy'ari , who later became an important religious leader in Indonesia.
Besides teaching, Nawawi was also a prolific author and wrote about the Nawawi was thus a product of this tradition which he likewise continued.
Through his activities as a teacher and author, Nawawi formed an important link between Mecca and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago for the transmission of the classical Islamic sciences.

Cairo as a Centre for the Study of Islam
Throughout the 19th century, Muslims around the world increasingly came into contact with modern Western civilization with its secularization, technological innovations, and military and economic superiority. For these reasons, Muslims were forced to reflect on the backwardness of the Muslim world compared to the West and this resulted in a reinterpretation of Islam and a renewal of Islamic thinking.
Among the vast number of scholars who contributed to this reform were Muhammad 'Abduh, who died in 1905, and his student Rashid Rida (died 1935), and together they were the key figures in the Cairene reform movement. This movement started around the end of the 19th century and its main characteristic was that it regarded Islam as practiced during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations after him as the most original and authentic form of Islam, which had not been corrupted by later innovations. This pristine Islam of the "pious ancestors" was considered the most appropriate Islamic response to the challenges of the modern era, and by returning to this pure Islam, Muslims would once again be able to compete with the West.
This pure form of Islam could be determined on the basis of the oldest sources of Islam, namely the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition literature. The study of these sources was to be carried out in the light of modern knowledge and insights without the burden of the later traditional authorities. This activity of studying the original sources with an independent, fresh perspective is called ijtihad and is thus entirely opposed to the taqlid which, as we saw earlier, underlines the importance of the tradition. In short, a more modern and more puritan understanding of Islam was propagated, in which especially the traditional interpretation of the Law in the canonical schools of law and traditional customs of folk religion were rejected, and in this way an Islamic response to modern times was formulated. 9 These ideas were amongst others disseminated through the Egyptian journal  These political and religious changes in the Arabian Peninsula were a primary reason for the aforementioned Hasyim Asy'ari and others to establish a new Islamic organization in Surabaya in 1926, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which strongly rejected Wahhabism and which had as one of its aims to preserve and protect the Shafi`ite fiqh and Ash`arite theology as these had prevailed in Mecca prior to the Saudi takeover. 12 Although the Nahdlatul Ulama thus distanced itself from the Wahhabis on theological grounds, its orientation towards the Middle East, including the use of Arabic, remained strong.

Indonesia: Introduction
When we now direct ourselves to present-day Indonesia, we see that the Nahdlatul Arabic, by the way). In addition to this, the NU is active in more modern forms of education and in social issues and has a great deal of influence on political and social developments. With an estimated number of followers of at least 40 million people, the NU is one of the largest Islamic organizations in the world.
The intellectual tradition that was inspired by the modernists of Cairo is political system Muslims started to claim political power and, in the most extreme case, even wanted to make Indonesia an Islamic state. These claims were impossible before the fall of Suharto because during his reign, political expressions of Islam were suppressed.

Indonesia before the Fall of Suharto (1998)
This is not to say that before the fall of Suharto, there were no radical Middle Eastern inspired ideas in circulation in Indonesia, such as the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, 15 and Wahhabism usually referred to as Salafism. 16 This is an interesting and important topic and much can be said about it, but I will confine myself here to the role of the Saudi government in spreading Salafist ideas in the 1980s.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Saudis wanted to ideologically counter the Iranian assertions to moral leadership in the Islamic world, which were also well received in certain circles in Indonesia. The Saudis responded by generously providing scholarships for study in Saudi Arabia and by making available an abundance of anti-Shi`a propaganda literature and other literature that fought the "threats" to which their own Salafist Islam was exposed: not only Shi`ism but also the Ahmadiyyah, the Bahai, Christian missions, Orientalism and Zionism. 17

named Institute for Islamic and Arabic Studies (Ind. Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan
Islam dan Arab, abbreviated as LIPIA) and through this institute, which is free of charge for selected Indonesian students, Salafist Islam was and is taught with its associated intolerance towards persons with another opinion and its aversion to democracy. 18 Via LIPIA, but also through all kinds of other initiatives, in Indonesia, next to the more moderate mainstream of Islam, a more radical and intolerant interpretation of Islam became increasingly common and less unusual. As long as the Suharto dictatorship existed, however, there was no place for such ideas in the public space, but at the same time they formed an important undercurrent.

Indonesia after the Fall of Suharto
After the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the advent of democracy with the liberalization of the religious climate, this situation changed, and we have seen that these radical ideas were no longer suppressed by the government and that they started to play an increasingly important role in society.
This new openness after the fall of Suharto thus provided opportunities for radical Muslims to spread their message openly. This is well illustrated by an anecdote about the radical Salafist cleric Abu Bakar Ba'ashir (b. 1938) who is currently serving a prison sentence for setting up a terrorist training camp.
Previously convicted of conspiracy against the state during the Suharto regime, he fled to Malaysia in 1985 and returned to Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, when he was no longer in danger as a radical Muslim. As a Salafist he is strongly opposed to democracy -after all, not the people but God is the source of all political powerbut after the fall of Suharto he was able to preach in public again and one of his favourite jokes was: "Democracy has been good to me".

Islam Nusantara and Its Forerunners: Introduction
To eradicate these Islamically inspired acts of violence, the state is taking direct action through intelligence services, the police and the military, but at the same time there is a growing awareness among the government and NGOs that this is insufficient and that an ideological counterbalance must also be given and an alternative must be offered to potential radicals.

An important initiative in this area was taken in 2015 by the Nahdlatul
Ulama by declaring in its national congress that Indonesian Islam has its own national character and is pluralistic, moderate and democratic. The term Islam Nusantara was used as a name for this understanding of Islam. I will go into more detail on this in a moment, but will first mention two previous contributions by individuals who have theorized about the specific character of Islam in Indonesia compared to Middle Eastern Islam.

Islam Nusantara and Its Forerunners: Hasbi Ash Shiddieqy (1904-1975)
The first person I want to mention is Hasbi Ash Shiddieqy (d. 1975). This scholar of Islam was born in 1904 and was a descendant of a well-known family of `ulama' in Aceh. He earned his education at modernist institutions in Indonesia, which were based on the ideas of the modernists in Cairo, namely the Irshad and Persis.
In 1951 he became a lecturer and later in 1960 dean of the Shari`a Faculty of the Indonesian State Academy of Islamic Studies (Ind. Institut Agama Islam Negeri; IAIN) in Yogyakarta, where he began to work on a form of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) that transcended the traditional schools of law. He was convinced that many parts of what was considered divine Islamic law in fact reflected specific circumstances in past Arab culture and society and that these, therefore, had no validity for Muslims living under different conditions. As an example of this, he mentioned Arab clothing, Arab cuisine and certain Arab customs concerning personal hygiene. In addition to transcending traditional law schools in this way, Hasbi also took into account the cultural context and the specific circumstances of

Islam Nusantara
As mentioned, at present the most influential contribution to the formulation of the specific character of Indonesian Islam is the concept of Islam Nusantara. The term Islam Nusantara has been around for some time and has been used in various ways. In a more neutral sense, it has been used as a geographical term: Islam Nusantara is Islam in Nusantara, meaning the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago or, more broadly, maritime Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the southern parts of Thailand and the Philippines.
Since the 33rd Congress of the Nahdlatul Ulama, held in Jombang in East Java in 2015, this organisation has appropriated the term and has the term acquired a strong ideological connotation. Islam Nusantara is seen as a form of Islam with its own Indonesian character, characterized by tolerance towards people with different views, pluralism, and peacefulness, and which strongly rejects radical and fanatical expressions of Islam. When, despite this peaceful variety of Islam, expressions of religious radicalism occur, these are not indigenous Indonesian, but come from outside, meaning from the Middle East, and in particular from Saudi Arabia with its variety of ultra-orthodox Wahhabi Salafism. 22 Since Indonesian Islam has been framed in this way, criticisms of Islam Nusantara have also emerged. In the first place, there is, as may be expected, criticism from the Salafist group. They believe that there is only one universal Islam, with their own interpretation as the only correct one. This criticism can also be heard within circles of the Nahdlatul Ulama itself. This faction within NU maintains that the NU belongs to the ahl al-sunna wa-l-jama`a (aswaja in Indonesian), "the People of the Path of the Prophet and the Community", which term is used to denote universal Islamic orthodoxy. According to them, this universal Islam can be applied everywhere and there is no need to Indonesianise it.

Conclusion
In summary, we can say that in Indonesia for a long time Mecca was taken for granted as the norm in religious matters and that the Holy City was rightly called the heart of Islamic life in the archipelago in the late 19th century. From the beginning of the 20th century, Cairo has been added as another centre.
However, we see that quite soon after independence, this orientation towards the Middle East has declined and that with increasing self-confidence the uniqueness of Islam in the young nation-state of Indonesia is emphasized and theoretically underpinned and that the religious authority of Middle Eastern authorities and institutions no longer has the monopoly.
After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the imported intolerant and radical forms of Islam from the Middle East emerged for the first time in the public space, as these were no longer suppressed by the regime. And we have seen that the own specific character of Indonesian Islam increasingly became used and is being used as an ideological counterweight, with as its last variety Islam Nusantara.
My overview of nearly 500 years of Middle Eastern influence in Indonesia and the responses to this are, of course, oversimplified and schematic, but they also show that the Middle East has always held and continues to hold an extremely important place in Islamic life in Indonesia. However, we see that Middle Eastern Islam is being engaged with critically and is no longer followed blindly and that Salafism and other intolerant and radical forms of Islam are being rejected by the vast majority of the population.
We have seen an increase in radicalism and intolerance over the last twenty years, but to end this lecture somewhat positively, I would like to say that I think that the attempts to combat radicalism through Islam Nusantara, among others, are promising because the government, sometimes under the name of Islam Washatiyya (moderate Islam), strongly supports it. Of course, I do not expect that radicals will convert to Islam Nusantara in large crowds, but I do expect that Islam Nusantara as an instrument of soft power and as a counter-narrative will limit the emergence of younger radicals.
Good education can also play a role in combating intolerance and radicalism, and I am delighted that Leiden University has played an important role in this for decades by training Indonesian students in Islamic Studies and in various other MA and PhD programs.