THE SALAFI MOVEMENT IN INdonesia

THE SALAFI MOVEMENT IN

INDONESIA

The puritanical "cleansing" of Islam has a long

history in Indonesia, as does close interaction

between Indonesian scholars and Middle Eastern

mentors. Literalist interpretation of the Quran may

not reflect mainstream practice, but historically it is

a well-established tendency within Indonesian Islam.

That said, the salafi movement that arose in the

1980s in the country did not consciously build on the

past, and its leaders saw little to admire and much to

condemn in earlier movements. Thanks to assistance

from the Gulf states, the new movement had access

to resources and educational opportunities hitherto

unimaginable, and it made good use of them to

increase its ranks rapidly.

A. ORIGINS

Salafi scholars themselves trace the movement back

to the so-called Padri Wars in Sumatra from 1803 to

about 1832.15 It began when three local leaders from

West Sumatra, who were in Mecca when the Wahabi

movement occupied it in 1803, returned to teach the

Wahabi message, including cleansing Islam of all

impurities, returning to strict interpretation of the

Quran and hadith, and eradicating vice from daily

life, including cockfighting and tobacco. Men were

required to grow beards and wear turbans, women to

cover their faces. The men leading this purification

drive undertook armed assaults against villages that

would not accept the new teachings, and in the

process, undermined the old social order and

established a new one more conducive to trade. The

Padri Wars changed the political, economic, and

social fabric of large swathes of West and North

Sumatra, and it was only when pilgrims returning

from Mecca in the 1820s began reporting that Wahabi

influence had sharply declined that the strict controls

in Padri strongholds began to relax.16 The influence of

Middle Eastern developments on one of the earliest

15 Some go further back. Ja'far Umar Thalib in an article

entitled "Pasang Surut Menegakkan Syari'ah Islamiyah", gives

credit to the Acehnese Sultan Iskandar Muda (1603-1637) for

being a pioneer of tajdid or renewal. See Salafy, special

edition No.40, 1422/2001, pp. 2-12.

16 Christina Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing

Peasant Economy, Central Sumatra 1784-1847, Scandinavian

Institute of Asian Studies, Monograph Series No.47 (1983),

pp.128-187.

"purifying" movements was thus immediate and

direct.

Indonesian students returning from Cairo's Al-Azhar

University at the turn of the 20th century brought with

them the ideas of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad

Abduh, who called for renewal of Islam through return

to the sources of fundamental truths -- the Quran and

the hadith -- combined with the appropriate adaptation

of Western political concepts, such as democracy.

Abduh, not a favourite with today's salafis, was the

inspiration for Indonesia's most influential reform

movement, Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912.17

From the outset, Muhammadiyah, which developed

into one of Indonesia's largest Islamic organisations,

was more progressive than puritanical, more modernist

than fundamentalist, with a particular focus on

improving the education and welfare of its members

through construction of schools and hospitals. But

perhaps because of its origins in a back-to-basics

approach to Islam, it has always had a conservative

wing, and people of a Muhammadiyah background

are well-represented among the salafis today.

Mohammed Abduh and his successor, Rashid Rida',

were also the inspiration for the emergence of a much

more puritanical organisation, Persatuan Islam or

Persis. Founded in 1923 in Bandung as a discussion

group to explore new currents in Islamic thought, it

became a prominent voice for cleansing Islam of

innovations and for the application of the principles of

the Quran and the hadith to contemporary conditions.

Its focus was scholarly research, with particular

emphasis on religious ritual and the surrounding law.

It also made a point of trying to reach and educate the

Muslim public about Islam, through public meetings,

study groups, and various publications containing

fatwas and essays.18

In 1936, Persis set up a school, the Pesantren

Persatuan Islam in Bandung, which later moved to

Bangil, East Java, and can perhaps be considered the

first salafi school in Indonesia. It was the only

pesantren that explicitly opposed teaching any of the

17 Ja'far Umar Thalib calls Abduh a rationalist/mu'tazilite who

took an oath of allegiance to "Jewish Zionist Freemasonry",

and says his movement was a deliberate effort by international

Zionism to block the growth of salafism led by Muhammad

Abdul Wahab. See "Pasang Surut Menegakkan Syari'ah

Islamiyah", op. cit.

18 Howard M. Federspiel, Islam and Ideology In The

Emerging Indonesian State: The Persatuan Islam , 1923 to

1957 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 15, 21-22.

Indonesia Backgrounder: Why Salafism and Terrorism Mostly Don't Mix

ICG Asia Report N°83, 13 September 2004 Page 6

four schools of Islamic jurisprudence (mazhab), and

focused almost exclusively on study of the Quran and

the hadith.19 Today it is very much part of the salafi

movement, and some of the leading salafi figures

have studied there, including Ja'far Umar Thalib (who

is more charitable to Persis than to other reform

movements). A few of the Bali bombers had Persis

family backgrounds, most notably Imam Samudra.

Al-Irsyad is another organisation that continues to

feed into the salafi movement. It emerged in the early

1900s as an association of the growing Arab-

Indonesian community, mostly from the Hadramaut

region on Yemen, under the leadership of a Sudanese,

long resident in Mecca, Ahmad bin Mohammad

Surkati (sometimes seen as Soorkati). Al-Irsyad

focused on education for the Hadrami community but

also was committed to purifying Islam and Islamic

practices from innovation and idolatrous practices.20

Surkati, a disciple of Rashid Rida', is now seen in

retrospect by Indonesian salafis as having been too

accommodating to non-salafis, a fatal flaw.21 But a

number of al-Irsyad schools, particularly in central

and east Java, today form part of the core of the salafi

movement, and there is a disproportionate presence of

men of Hadrami descent among the salafi leadership.

The three decades following Indonesian independence

in 1949 were lean ones for Islamic puritanism, in part

because of the political climate. A series of regional

rebellions against Jakarta, waged in the name of Islam,

made President Sukarno and the army suspicious of

all groups on what they called "the extreme right".

While Persis, parts of the al-Irsyad organisation,

conservatives within Muhammadiyah, and others

kept aspects of the puritanical vision alive, there

was little evidence of anything resembling a salafi

movement.

It was only in the 1980s that such a phenomenon

began to develop, largely because of four factors: the

availability of Saudi funding; the development of

campus-based groups that spurred the growth of a

Muslim publishing industry; the war in Afghanistan;

and the establishment in Jakarta of the Institute for the

19 Martin van Bruinessen, "'Traditionalist' and 'Islamist'

pesantren in contemporary Indonesia", Paper presented at the

ISIM workshop on "The Madrasa in Asia", 23-24 May 2004;

Federspiel, op. cit.

20 Natalie Mobini-Kesheh, The Hadrami Awakening:

Community and Identity in the Netherlands East Indies

1900-1942 Ithaca, 1999), pp. 54-63.

21 ICG interview, Jakarta, May 2004.

Study of Islam and Arabic (Lembaga Ilmu

Pengetahuan Islam dan Arab, LIPIA) as a branch of

the Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh.

Today's salafis, in fact, do not see themselves as

carrying the torch of earlier efforts to purify the faith.

The movement that emerged in the 1980s, in their

view, was a clean break with the past.