Ilmuan Islam di Turki dan Indonesia

Martin van Bruinessen,
‘Secularism, Islamism and Muslim intellectualism in Turkey and Indonesia:
some comparative observations’,
published in: Mirza Tirta Kusuma (ed.), Ketika Makkah Menjadi Las Vegas:
Agama, Politik dan Ideologi, Jakarta: Gramedia, 2014.

Secularism, Islamism and Muslim intellectualism in Turkey and Indonesia:
some comparative observations

Martin van Bruinessen

Dedicated to Pak Amin Abdullah,
who bridges the waters between
Turkey and Indonesia

Does it make sense to compare two countries that do not have much of a shared history, such
as Turkey and Indonesia? How can we make it more than just the juxtaposition of two
unrelated cases? To what extent may our acquaintance with one of the two countries help us
to understand the other better? Can similarities and differences between the two provide an
insight into global social processes? It all depends, I suggest, on what exactly is being
compared. The following observations, I hope, may hint at productive ways of making such

comparisons.
There is a simple reason for my original interest in making comparisons between Turkey and
Indonesia, and that is my own life history. Like Pak Amin, I have long been involved, and
deeply so, in Turkey as well as in Indonesia. I had travelled extensively in Turkey and had
carried out research there, long before my first visit to Indonesia. My research was primarily
on the sociology and history of the Kurds of Turkey and neighbouring countries, but I was
also interested in Sufism and the rise of political Islam in Turkey. When I began my research
in Indonesia and was reading the classical books by Geertz, Benda, Deliar Noer, Boland and
Pijper, 1 I was struck by the apparent division of Indonesia’s Muslims into ‘modernists’ and
‘traditionalists’, and by the great influence Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida were said to
have had in Indonesia. It surprised me that I had never even heard the names of Abduh and
Rida in Turkey, and I had never noticed a similar bifurcation of Turkish Islam into
‘modernist’ and ‘traditionalist’ streams. This was in part because I had not paid sufficient
attention to Turkish Muslim intellectual debates of the early twentieth century — I later
discovered that Turkish (or rather Ottoman) intellectuals were in fact aware of the Egyptian
Salafiyya. But the Ottoman reformist thinkers who were inclined to rational analysis, such as
1

Clifford Geertz, The religion of Java, New York: The Free Press, 1960; Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the
Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation 1942-1945, The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1958;

Deliar Noer, The modernist Muslim movement in Indonesia 1900-1940, Kuala Lumpur, etc.: Oxford University
Press, 1973; B. J. Boland, The struggle of Islam in modern Indonesia, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; G. F.
Pijper, Studiën over de geschiedenis van de islam in Indonesia 1900-1950, Leiden: Brill, 1977.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

1

Abdullah Cevdet and his disciple Ziya Gökalp, were more radical than Abduh and Rida in
their rejection of tradition, and they became advocates of scientific positivism and strict
secularism. 2 The Turkish revolution and the establishment of a secular republic led by
Mustafa Kemal cut short many religious-intellectual debates, which however resurfaced in
the late twentieth century, when the state relaxed its control of religious expression. 3
Studying the relationship of state, civil society and religion in Indonesia, the emergence of
Islamist movements and of liberal and progressive discourses, it became natural for me to ask
whether I could find similar developments in Turkey, and how differences as well as parallels
could be explained.
Not long after I had started my research in Indonesia, I had the privilege of having several
long conversations with the late Fazlur Rahman, whom I met at a conference in Jakarta. 4 He
spoke of his pessimism about the state of intellectual debate in the Muslim-majority world,

with two major exceptions. Indonesia and Turkey, he said, were the two main countries that
held out hope for the future, because conditions there favoured the development of
sophisticated Muslim intellectual thought. His favourable opinion of these two countries no
doubt was in part inspired by the fact that he had dedicated Turkish and Indonesian students,
who did much to spread his thought and influence among their compatriots.5 However,
perhaps there was a constellation of factors that these societies had in common and that made
them more receptive to Fazlur’s neo-modernism.
More recently, both Indonesia and Turkey have been held up as examples to show that
democracy and commitment to Islam are not incompatible, as is claimed by Muslim
fundamentalists as well as Western Islamophobes, but may very well go together. During the
uprisings of the so-called Arab spring, several observers remarked that Indonesia’s recent and
relatively successful transition from authoritarian rule to a more or less functioning
democracy provided an excellent example to be studied by North Africans in search of their
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Bir siyasi düşünür olarak Abdullah Cevdet ve dönemi, Istanbul: Üçdal, 1981; M. Şükrü
Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in opposition, Oxford University Press, 1995; M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, ''Garbcilar': their
attitudes toward religion and their impact on the official ideology of the Turkish republic', Studia Islamica 86,
1997, 133-158; Serif Mardin, Religion, society, and modernity in Turkey, Syracuse University Press, 2006.
2

3

Michael E. Meeker, 'The new Muslim intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey', in: R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in
modern Turkey. Religion, politics and literature in a secular state, London: I.B. Tauris, 1991, pp. 189-219; Serif
Mardin, 'Cultural change and the intellectual: a study of the effects of secularization in modern Turkey. Necip
Fazil and the Naksibendi', in: S. Mardin (ed.), Cultural transitions in the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp.
189-213.

4

This was at the conference ‘New trends in Islamic studies’ at LIPI, Jakarta, 15-17 August 1985. Fazlur
Rahman had been invited to the conference by his student Nurcholish Madjid.

5

Fazlur Rahman’s most influential Indonesian disciples are Nurcholish Madjid and Syafi’i Maarif; in Turkey,
the chief representatives of his thought are his students Alparslan Açıkgenç and Bekir Demirkol. On Fazlur
Rahman’s influence in Indonesia more generally, see: Abd A'la, Dari neomodernisme ke Islam liberal: jejak
Fazlur Rahman dalam wacana Islam di Indonesia, Jakarta: Paramadina, 2003; on his impact in Turkey, see:
Yasin Aktay, 'The historicist dispute in Turkish-Islamic theology', in: S. Gunduz and C. S. Yaran (ed.), Change
and essence: dialectical relations between change and continuity in the Turkish intellectual tradition,

Washington DC: The Council for Values and Philosophy, 2005, pp. 75-77 and 84-85.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

2

own transition, and Turkey’s AKP government was praised (and admired by many North
African revolutionaries) as a regime strongly committed to Islamic values but at the same
time to political and economic liberalism.

Some commonalities (and some significant contrasts)
Rich non-Arabic cultural heritage
Turkey and Indonesia are located at opposite ends of the vast continent of Asia, North and
East of the Arabic-speaking part of the Muslim world. Both are heirs to great civilizations,
Islamic as well as pre-Islamic. Sriwijaya and Majapahit remain present in the mind of many
contemporary Indonesians, as do the sultanates of Aceh, Mataram, Banten and the other
Muslim states of the Archipelago. Similarly, Turks not only remember the Seljuq and
Ottoman empires but also Byzantium, the Hittite empire and Urartu. The Muslim civilizations
that flourished in these two regions had non-Arabic languages as their major vehicles of
expression (Malay and Javanese, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish, respectively). Arabic, it

is true, was the language in which fiqh and `aqida, Qur’an and hadith were studied in
madrasa and pesantren, but mystical poetry, metaphysical speculation, pious legends and
sacred history were expressed in local languages. Both regions developed distinctly local
styles of Muslim religiosity: the mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri and the Javanese court poets
in Indonesia, and the Anatolian Sufism of Yunus Emre, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi and
numerous later Sufi-poets in Turkey. In both regions, though officially Sunni, there long
remained significant heterodox minorities, in whose beliefs and practices (abangan / kejawen
/ kebatinan and Alevi, respectively) traces of earlier religions could easily be discerned. 6
These cultural complexities are not unique to Turkey and Indonesia. Mutatis mutandis, the
same may be said of the Iranian and Indian cultural regions that lie between them, and to
some extent even of Egypt. In all these regions, modernity brought movements of purification
of religion, calls for a return to the Qur’an and hadith and more generally for conformity with
beliefs and practices in the Arabic heartlands. Turkish Islam proved much more resilient to
those calls, proud of its own religious traditions, than Indonesia. 7 This difference raises
interesting questions: could this Turkish resilience to Arabization (or to Salafism) be
explained by its history as a great empire that conquered and long dominated the Arab world
and had the power to define Islamic orthodoxy? And could Indonesia’s relative openness to
these influences be due to the role of Islam in the emergence of an Indonesian national
6

These heterodox minorities were the subject of my inaugural lecture at the University of Utrecht in 2000,
‘Muslims, Minorities and Modernity: The restructuring of heterodoxy in the Middle East and Southeast Asia’,
available online at:
http://www.hum.uu.nl/medewerkers/m.vanbruinessen/publications/Oratie%20korte%20versie.htm.

7

On the dynamic relationship between ‘Arabization’ and indigenous Muslim traditions in Indonesia, see: Martin
van Bruinessen, 'Ghazwul fikri or Arabisation? Indonesian Muslim responses to globalisation', in: K. Miichi and
O. Farouk (ed.), Dynamics of Southeast Asian Muslims in the era of globalization, Tokyo: Japan International
Cooperation Agency Research Institute (JICA-RI), 2013, pp. 47-70.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

3

awareness and the struggle against Dutch colonialism, and the role of Mecca as a safe haven
for anti-Dutch ulama?

Armed Independence struggle, politically engaged armed forces, secularism

One thing that distinguishes Turkey and Indonesia from most other Muslim-majority nation
states is that both attained their independence as new states as the result of a prolonged armed
struggle that was conceived as a jihad against alien occupying forces. In the case of Turkey,
Islam became a core aspect of national identity; most non-Muslims were expelled and the few
remaining Greek or Armenian Orthodox Christians and Jews were never accepted as fully
equal citizens. But the new republican regime led by Mustafa Kemal adopted radically
secularist policies and largely banned religion from the public sphere. Upon Indonesian
Independence, most Dutch, many Eurasians (Indo) as well as indigenous Indonesians who
had worked for the colonial administration left the country. There were, however,
considerable Christian minorities (as well as a high proportion of abangan), who would have
strongly objected to Indonesia’s becoming an Islamic state, so that Indonesia, too, became a
secular republic (although its secularism was very different from that of Turkey).
Indonesia’s founding fathers were aware of the Turkish revolution, which had taken place a
quarter century before Indonesia attained its independence. They looked upon Mustafa Kemal
and his comrades as anti-imperialist heroes to be emulated, and appear to have generally seen
Kemal as a reformer rather than an enemy of Islam. 8
The armed forces of Turkey and Indonesia long retained a dominating role in politics that
was legitimized by their role in the independence struggle. In Turkey, the army considered
itself the custodian of society and guarantor of the Constitution (i.e., of the secular order); in
Indonesia, under the infamous Dwifungsi doctrine, the armed forces until recently completed

dominated political life. In both countries the armed forces have consistently acted as staunch
defenders of the secular order and repeatedly intervened against perceived Islamist threats, as
well as against civil society more generally. Only recently have they been forced to retreat
from politics and restrict themselves to a more professional military role.
Both countries went through long periods of authoritarian rule, and Muslim associations
arguably played crucial roles in the transition to a more liberal democratic system (as well as
neo-liberal economic policies). The modalities were not the same, but the role of
Muhammadiyah and NU in providing stability in Indonesia during the years of post-Soeharto
transition is undeniable, and in Turkey it was the AKP that as the ruling party since 2003 has
carried out democratizing reforms and sent the army back to the barracks. Both countries are
reasonably well-functioning democracies (especially when compared to other Muslimmajority countries), and the majority of the population in both appear to be committed to
8

On Indonesian perceptions of the Turkish revolution, see: Chiara Formichi, 'Mustafa Kemal's Abrogation of
the Ottoman Caliphate and its Impact on the Indonesian Nationalist Movement', in: M. Al-Rasheed, et al. (ed.),
Demystifying the Caliphate: Historical Memory and Contemporary Contexts, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

4

secularism and to reject the idea of an Islamic state. This was shown clearly, in the case of
Indonesia, by the rejection of the Jakarta charter in the 2001 and 2002 sessions of the MPR ad
the decreasing electoral support for Islamic political parties. In the Turkish case, it was the
AKP that broke with the Islamist ideals of its predecessors and redefined itself as a
conservative party, implicitly accepting the country’s de facto secularism. In the heyday of
the Arab spring, the AKP’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told North Africans that for pious
Muslim politicians a secular polity might be preferable to all other alternatives.
The AKP has its origin in a succession of ‘pro-Islamic’ parties that were banned for
violations of Turkey’s secularist laws and then replaced by a new party appealing to the same
constituency. The AKP however successfully broadened its electoral base by de-emphasizing
Islamic issues, embracing liberal democracy and embarking on a combination of welfare
policies and neo-liberal economic reforms that appealed to other segments of the population.
In this, it represents a broader trend in Muslim societies that has been dubbed ‘post-Islamist’
by certain authors. 9 It is the first political party with an Islamist background that not only
came to power through elections but succeeded in increasing its share of the vote in two
succeeding elections. Understandably, Islamist parties elsewhere take a great interest in the
AKP’s success and seek ways of emulating it. In Indonesia, the PKS has not only closely
observed the rise of the AKP but made somewhat similar efforts to broaden its base by
appealing to voters beyond the narrow group of ideologically motivated Islamists. (In this

case, the transformation from a small, purist avant-garde party to a broader pragmatic mass
party, with its fair share of corruption scandals, occurred so rapidly that it may well prove to
be the party’s undoing.)

Secularism, secularisms, secularization
Not everyone may agree with my calling both Indonesia and Turkey secular republics. The
term secularism has negative connotations in Indonesia, and many Indonesians would point
out that the state ideology of Pancasila, which has the belief in God (keTuhanan Yang Maha
Esa) as its first principle, is not secular but religious. However, religious and secular are not
necessarily opposites.
Common definitions of secularism usually refer to the separation of religion and state or
religion and politics. But in actual practice, there are many varieties of secular political
systems, and in only very few are religion and state completely separated. In Germany, the
state collects church taxes on behalf of the church, and in some German counties, state
schools have crucifixes in the classrooms, the ultimate symbol of Catholic identity. Great
Britain has an established state church, the Anglican Church. In the Netherlands, the state
subsidizes Protestant and Catholic schools. Secularism, in these countries, does not mean that
state and church are completely separate, but that the state is expected to be neutral and
9

Most notably by the political scientist Asef Bayat. See his Making Islam democratic: social movements and
the post-Islamic turn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

5

maintain an equal distance to all religions. Jewish or Muslim schools should be entitled to the
same subsidies as Christian schools; non-Christian religious communities should have the
same rights as Christian communities.
The various forms of secularism that emerged in the Western world are the results of
different historical trajectories and may emphasize quite different aspects. A tentative
classification should at least contain the following types:
•

•

•

Separation of state and religion in order to protect religion from politics and to
guarantee religious freedom. The United States of America, which considers the
Pilgrims, who fled religious persecution in Europe, as its founders, presents the most
radical example of this type of secularism. Religion is highly present in the public
sphere, and all religions have great freedom to play public roles. The state does not
identify itself with any specific religion, although public ceremonies are pervaded
with prayers and references to God – something Robert Bellah termed ‘civil
religion.’ 10
Separation of state and religion in order to protect the state and the political process
from interference by religion. In its most radical form we find this type of secularism
(laïcité, ‘laicism’) in France, where revolutionaries had to conquer political space
from domination by the powerful Catholic Church. Religion is largely banned from
the public sphere; conspicuous symbols of religious identity are not allowed in state
schools and other public institutions.
Neutrality of the state towards religions (in the sense of equal distance towards all
religions). This variety of secularism typically emerged in multi-religious societies
with long histories of inter-religious conflict. India is the most prominent example
(where secularism is under permanent threat from Hindu fundamentalists). The
Netherlands, where Protestants and Catholics long fought each other, constitutes
another case. Under the conditions of this type of secularism, rights and privileges
available to (the adherents of) one religion, are also available to other religions.

Turkey and Indonesia provide variations on these basic types. Turkey consciously adopted
the French style of secularism (and even its name: laiklik) but combined this with aspects of
the Ottoman state tradition in which it was the state that controlled religion rather than the
other way around. Turkish secularism broke the hold of autonomous religious institutions
over society but consolidated the control of the state over the religious life of its subjects.
Through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which is directly answerable to the Prime
Minister, the state controls all major mosques, appoints and salaries mosque personnel (imam
and khatib), and takes care of religious education at all levels. The state, not civil society,
defines what acceptable Islam is. In the course of the Republic’s ninety-year history, there
have of course been changes in what the state considered acceptable Islam. Under military
10

Robert N. Bellah, 'Civil religion in America', in: R. N. Bellah, Beyond belief, New York: Harper & Row,
1970, pp. 168-189.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

6

rule in the 1980s, the so-called ‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis’, a conservative doctrine
incorporating Turkish nationalism as a major component of proper religiosity, was adopted as
the official doctrine. 11 Ten years of AKP rule have brought some changes, but surprisingly
several typically laicist measures, such as the headscarf ban in schools and universities, have
not been lifted.
Indonesia’s secularism is a variety of the ‘neutrality of the state’ type. The original
formulation of Pancasila was such that all the major religions could recognize themselves in
them (but later versions obliged Muslims and Hindus to redefine their religions as somewhat
similar to Islam and Christianity, with a single great God, prophets, and holy books). The
Ministry of Religious Affairs, although established as a friendly gesture towards pious
Muslims and overwhelmingly concerned with the administration of Islam, has subdepartments for the other officially recognized religions. A number of religious holidays of
each of the officially recognized religions (Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity,
Buddhism, Hinduism and, since 1999, Confucianism) were adopted as public holidays. The
intention to maintain equal distance to all religions in order to prevent inter-religious conflict
also clearly constituted the background of the 1969 joint decree of the Ministers of the
Interior and of Religion on proselytization and the construction of houses of worship. This
degree is the basis for a policy of not allowing proselytization among the followers of another
(recognized) religion or the construction of places of worship in districts dominated by
another religion and where the religion in question has hardly any followers. 12 The neutrality
of the state has its limits, however, for only a handful of religions are officially recognized
and the adherents of other religions or non-believers are deprived of essential civil rights.

Secularism as an ideology or as a characteristic of the relationship between state and society
should not be confounded with the process of secularization or with the secularization thesis,
which was long a part of modernization theory. The thesis claimed that the modernization of
a society was inevitably accompanied by secularization, in the sense of a decline of
religion. 13 The striking resurgence of religion almost everywhere except in Western Europe
11

Gökhan Çetinsaya, 'Rethinking nationalism and Islam: some preliminary notes on the roots of "TurkishIslamic synthesis" in modern Turkish political thought', The Muslim World 89, 1999, 350-376; Fusun Üstel,
'Synthèse turco-islamique entre traditionalisme et modernité', in: J. Thobie and S. Kançal (ed.),
Industrialisation, communication et rapports sociaux en Turquie et Méditerranée orientale, Paris: L'Harmattan,
1994, pp. 387-400.
12

For an insightful analysis of the decree and its background and consequences, see: Mujiburrahman, Feeling
threatened: Muslim-Christian relations in Indonesia's New Order, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 5762. In practice, the decree has mostly justified the bans of church construction in Muslim-majority regions, but
there have been cases where it was used to stop mosque construction in the Christian-majority Eastern provinces
of Indonesia.
13

Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics
Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, 2004; K. Dobbelaere, 'The Meaning and Scope of Secularization', in:
P. B. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

7

since the last quarter of the twentieth century has called the secularization thesis into
question. The sociologist José Casanova has shown, in an influential study, that the thesis in
fact made three distinct, mutually independent claims. 14 The first concerns the differentiation
of a secular sphere from religious norms and institutions (law, education, medicine, the
sciences, politics, the market became separate spheres of activity, no longer under the control
of religion; religion does not disappear but survives as a separate domain besides those
others). The second concerns the overall decline of religious beliefs and practices, and the
third claim concerns the marginalization of religion from public life and its restriction to a
private sphere. The first and second claims are strongly supported by empirical data, but the
third, Casanova argues, simply does not apply in most societies. Casanova even speaks of a
‘deprivatization’ of religion and an increasing presence of religion in public life. Many other
philosophers and sociologists have made similar efforts to rethink the nexus of modernity,
secularity and secularization. 15
Secular states are the result of secularization in the first of the three senses identified by
Casanova, the emergence of a public sphere not controlled by religion (along with other
differentiated spheres). This does not imply that their societies are secularized in the other
meanings of the term. In fact, as we have seen, large proportions of the population in secular
states may be deeply religious, and religious institutions and values may be prominently
present in their public spheres – as is the case in Turkey as well as Indonesia.

Turkey’s secular order
In the first years following the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), the Kemalist
regime abolished all religious institutions surviving from the Ottoman Empire and replaced
them by secular ones. The highest religious office, that of the shaykh al-islam or supreme
mufti (the Mashikhat), was abolished, and only much later did a new government body, the
Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, or briefly Diyanet) take over
some of its functions. The shari`a and shari`a courts were abolished, and legislation and law
courts borrowed from European examples. Religious schools (madrasa) were closed and
replaced by state schools with a secular curriculum. Sufi orders (tarikat) were banned and
Sufi shrines and other venerated graves were closed to the public. Traditional Muslim styles
of dress, such as the turban, were banned and men were ordered to wear European-style hats
instead. The Arabic script that had been used for writing Ottoman Turkish was replaced by
the Latin alphabet. There was even an attempt to replace the Arabic language by Turkish in
the call to prayer and recitation of Qur’anic verses during worship.
The most radical phase of laicism, when all that smacked of religion was abolished or
suppressed, coincided with the years of single-party dictatorship under Mustafa Kemal
14

José Casanova, Public religions in the modern world, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

15

An excellent collection of thoughtful recent contributions to the debate is: Craig Calhoun, Mark
Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (ed.), Rethinking secularism, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

8

Atatürk and his successor Ismet Inönü. After the Second World War, Turkey exchanged its
single-party authoritarian order for a multi-party electoral democracy, and as a result the state
had to take at least some account of the conservative religious sentiments of the majority of
its population. The effort to suppress conservative religiosity gave way to efforts to educate
the masses in ‘enlightened’ versions of the faith.
As a first, highly symbolic gesture, the Arabic call to prayer was restored and broadcast on
radio. While madrasa and tarikat remained banned because they were considered to teach
backward ideas and superstitious practices, the state felt a need for ‘enlightened’ clerics to
teach an understanding of Islam compatible with the needs of modern society. A new type of
school, with a curriculum combining modern subjects with Arabic and Islamic disciplines,
was established to train prayer leaders and preachers (Imam-Hatip school), and faculties of
theology were opened to educate enlightened scholars of Islam. 16 The Directorate of
Religious Affairs (Diyanet) became a vast bureaucratic institution through which the state
strove to control the religious life of its citizens. 17 Diyanet controls all the major mosques in
the country and appoints their imams and khatibs; it writes the weekly Friday sermons – for a
long time, the same khutba was readout in mosques throughout the country – and all
textbooks on religion as well as a whole range of other publications. Different departments
supervise hajj and `umra services and answer questions about religious matters that are posed
by individual believers – the latter is essentially the official fatwa body, though it does not
carry that name.
It is interesting to note that the institutions established by the Kemalist state to control its
conservative religious subjects have often been used effectively by the latter to preserve their
own interests and to gain influence in the state apparatus. The Sufi orders and other pious
congregations such as the Nurcu and Süleymancı remained banned, but some of their
followers succeeded in gaining influential positions in the Diyanet apparatus, as did
numerous persons of a more Islamist persuasion. There have been repeated waves of purges
of Diyanet in order to get rid of these undesirable elements. The most remarkable
phenomenon is that of the Imam-Hatip schools, which became very popular among pious
sections of the population because they were the only schools that offered at least some form
of Islamic education. Although meant to train simple religious functionaries only, most of its
graduates had other ambitions than just becoming a prayer leader or continuing their studies
in the faculties of theology. Governments were under pressure from their electorate to allow
these graduates access to other streams of higher education, including not only the law and
political science faculties that trained much of the country’s political elite but also police and
16

Howard A. Reed, 'Turkey's new Imam-hatip schools', Die Welt des Islams 4(2-3), 1955, 150-163; Gotthard
Jäschke, 'Vom Islam in der heutigen Türkei', Die Welt des Islams 18, 1977, 1-18; Howard A. Reed, 'The faculty
of divinity at Ankara', The Muslim World 46, 1956, 295-312 and 47, 1957, 22-35; Günter Seufert, 'The Faculties
of Divinity in the current tug-of-war', Les annales de l'autre islam 6, 1999, 353-370.
17

Istar Gözaydin, Diyanet: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nde dinin tanzimi, Istanbul: Iletisim, 2009; Ismail Kara, 'Eine
Behörde im Spannungsfeld von Religion und Staat: das "Präsidium für relgiöse Angelegenheiten"', in: G.
Seufert and J. Waardenburg (ed.), Turkish Islam and Europe / Türkischer Islam und Europa, Istanbul-Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999, pp. 209-240.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

9

military academies. These schools have remained a site of contestation between secular
republican and religious-conservative forces in society until the present day. For several
generations, including Erdoğan himself and many other leading members of the AKP, the
imam-hatip schools were an effective vehicle of vertical social mobility and the creation of a
counter-elite. 18

Some Indonesian parallels
It is not hard to notice a number of interesting parallels to the Turkish developments sketched
above in the administration of Islam in Indonesia. Indonesia never closed its pesantrens and
madrasas, nor did it ban Sufi orders (except some minor ones that were considered ‘deviant’).
As a heritage from the colonial period, Indonesia’s legal system is also largely based on
Western (Dutch, in this case) law, but the shari`a has retained a place in family law and the
religious courts that administer it. Attempts to further secularize family law in the 1970s
failed. However, the state has shown a similar intent to supervise and control the religious life
of its subjects.
The Ministry of Religious Affairs was, especially during the New Order period, not unlike
Turkey’s Diyanet. The Ministry was the vehicle through which the regime attempted to
stimulate depoliticized, ‘enlightened’ and development-friendly interpretations of Islam. The
Madrasah Aliyah Negeri (and other madrasa that followed the same curriculum of 70 percent
general plus 30 percent religious subjects) are not unlike Turkey’s imam-hatip schools, and
came to play a similar role in upward social mobility. Because most pesantren combined the
traditional study of classical fiqh books (kitab kuning) with a modern madrasa-type
education, large numbers of youth of religiously conservative rural background gained access
to higher education. The major institutions catering to these madrasa graduates were of
course the IAINs, but like Turkey’s Imam-Hatip graduates, many Indonesian madrasa
graduates intended to continue their education in non-religious subjects.
The Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), established in 1975 with the primary aim of providing
religious legitimation for the government’s development policies and more generally of
constituting an interface between the government and the Muslim umma, does not have an
exact counterpart in Turkey – the various Turkish governments never felt a strong need for
religious legitimation. Diyanet does provide answers to religious questions – there is in fact a
hierarchy of mufti offices from the provincial to the district level – but it responds to
questions from ordinary believers rather than the government, and is in this respect more like
the NU’s bahth al-masa’il councils and Muhammadiyah’s Majelis Tarjih.
I mentioned above that in Turkey, the institutions established to control and discipline
conservative Muslims also offered opportunities to the latter to infiltrate them and gain a
See the interesting observations in: Ismail Çağlar, From symbolic exile to physical exile: Turkey's Imam Hatip
schools, the emergence of a conservative counter-elite, and its knowledge migration to Europe, Amsterdam
University Press, 2013.
18

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

10

degree of influence in the state apparatus itself. A remarkable Indonesian example of a
similar process is the dramatic change that took place in the MUI in the post-Soeharto period,
when it redefined its role from being the khadim al-hukuma to serving as the khadim alumma and became a mouthpiece for radical groups that had been marginalized during the
New Order.19
Turkey’s Faculties of Theology and especially Indonesia’s IAINs, which were both meant to
produce a class of enlightened religious scholars are highly successful examples of what may
be called ‘religious engineering.’ They produced a critical mass of well-educated scholars
with a deep interest in hermeneutics, who have had a significant impact on public discourse
on religious matters. Such thinkers as Fazlur Rahman and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, who have
had to leave their own countries because their hermeneutic approaches angered conservatives,
found eager readers and students in these institutions. They are also, to my knowledge, the
only institutions of academic theology in the Muslim world where they very idea of a
feminist reading of scripture can be discussed. 20

Islam and politics
The elites that founded and governed Turkey and Indonesia in their early decades were
largely secular-minded, even though some of them were privately practising Muslims. In
Turkey, resistance to the first secularizing measures was violently repressed. Muslim political
parties were never officially permitted (the same was true of parties based on class or
ethnicity). In post-1945 multi-party politics, the choice was between radical and conservative
varieties of Kemalism, and pious Muslims would always vote conservative. In 1970, a
German-trained engineer, Necmettin Erbakan, established the first of a series of ‘pro-Islamic’
political parties, which was soon banned for violating the secular order. Erbakan then
established another party, with a similar program, that took part in several coalition
governments in the 1970s but was banned after the military coup in 1980. This party too was
succeeded by a similar one, and so on. The parties are called ‘pro-Islamic’ because by law
they could not make any reference to Islam as the basis of their ideology or identity but
clearly did appeal to Islamist sentiments. Erbakan named his political ideology ‘the National
Outlook’ (Milli Görüş); it reflected the interests of small Muslim businessmen and farmers of
Turkey’s interior, was anti-Western and anti-capitalist and favoured a political and economic
reorientation of Turkey from the West to its Muslim neighbours. There was a certain

19

This transition is studied and analysed in detail in: Moch. Nur Ichwan, 'Towards a Puritanical Moderate Islam:
The Majelis Ulama Indonesia and the Politics of Religious Orthodoxy', in: M. van Bruinessen (ed.),
Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the 'Conservative Turn’, Singapore: Institute of
South East Asian Studies, 2013, pp. 60-104.
A major example from Turkey is the study by Hidayet Sefkatlı Tuksal, Kadın karşıtı söylemin İslam
geleneğindeki izdüşümleri [The projections of misogynist discourse in Islamic tradition], Ankara: Kitâbiyât,
2000 (originally a dissertation at the faculty of theology in Ankara); an Indonesian example is Siti Musdah
Mulia, Islam & inspirasi kesetaraan gender, Yogyakarta: Kibar Press, 2007.
20

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11

influence of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the religious authority to whom
Erbakan and his colleagues deferred was a charismatic Naqshbandi shaykh.
Indonesia never banned all Muslim parties; Masyumi was not banned for being an Islamist
party but for its leaders’ participation in the armed PRRI insurrection. The New Order regime
continued the ban of Masyumi, streamlined and marginalized the other Muslim parties, and
carried out a general policy of depoliticizing Islam while endorsing non-political expressions
of the faith. It may have been the very ban of Masyumi that facilitated an increasing influence
of the Muslim Brotherhood among Indonesia’s committed Muslims. The Dewan Dakwah
Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII), which was established by former Masyumi leaders, became the
major institutional vehicle for the transmission of this influence, through translations of
Brotherhood literature and scholarships enabling Indonesians to study in Saudi Arabia and
make direct contacts. The two main Brotherhood-connected underground networks, known in
retrospect as the Tarbiyah movement and Abdullah Sungkar’s Usrah movement, both had
prior connections with the DDII but made themselves independent of it. 21
The Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party, PKS), which was established by
Tarbiyah activists after the fall of the Soeharto regime, shows some similarities to the Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP), established in Turkey after yet
another of Erbakan’s parties, the Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party, FP), was banned. Erdoğan, the
strongest leader of the party, had gained national popularity when he represented yet another
of Erbakan’s parties, the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party, RP) as the mayor of Istanbul and
showed himself to be an effective administrator who brought welfare services to the poorer
districts and served the middle class as well. The AKP shed the last remnants of the antiWestern and anti-capitalist attitude of the National Outlook parties, embraced liberal
democracy, and reached out to broader segments of the population. For the PKS, the AKP
rather than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood became the model to be emulated – not only
because it was the first ‘related’ party to rule a large Muslim country but also because of its
perceived modernity. 22
In Indonesia, the PKS is only one of a broad range of Islamist and fundamentalist movements
with roots in the Arab world. Others include the Hizbut Tahrir, various wings of the Salafi
movement, and smaller radical groups that were influenced by radical offshoots of the
Brotherhood such as Egypt’s Jama`at Islamiyya. These movements never gained much of a
foothold in Turkey, because very few Turks are convinced of the superiority of Arab Islam.
Turkey has experienced a strong Islamic resurgence since the late 1970s, like Indonesia has,

21

Martin van Bruinessen, 'Genealogies of Islamic radicalism in Indonesia', South East Asia Research 10 no.2,
2002, 117-154.
The AKP, like the preceding Milli Görüş parties, was ‘related’ to the PKS through their relations with the
Muslim Brotherhood. Erbakan and Erdoğan, as well as the supreme guide of the PKS, Hilmi Aminuddin,
repeatedly attended the twice-yearly meetings of the Muslim Brotherhood, where the various national branches
of the Brotherhood and friendly organizations came together (interview with Hilmi Aminuddin, 2 November
2008).
22

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

12

but the organizations or jama`at (cemaat, in Turkish) that emerged were all rooted in the
Anatolian Islamic tradition, not imported from the Arab world.

Muslim associations
One of the chief distinguishing characteristics of Indonesian Islam is the presence of large,
hierarchically organized and bureaucratized associations, of which Muhammadiyah and NU
are the most prominent examples. Nothing quite like Muhammadiyah, with its networks of
schools, universities, hospitals and orphanages all over the country, exists anywhere else in
the Muslim world. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was established 16 years after
Muhammadiyah and has arguably made a larger impact on political Islam elsewhere than any
other organization, has neither achieved the same degree of institutionalization nor of
acceptance by the general public.
Turkey’s legislation does not allow parties or organizations on the basis of religious, ethnic or
class affiliation. Sufi orders remain officially banned, although this ban was considerably
relaxed in the 1980s, and some orders have come out into the open and gained a larger
following than before. For legal purposes, they have to adopt the form of an accepted type of
organization, such as the foundation (vakıf) or cultural association (dernek), and their
meetings may take the form of semi-academic seminars. 23 More influential yet than the Sufi
orders are a number of informal associations commonly referred to as cemaat (jama`a), most
prominent among them the Nur and Gülen movements and the Süleymancı congregation.
The Gülen congregation is now believed to be the most powerful force in Turkish society,
although it appears to completely lack any kind of formal, centralized organization. It
consists of a dense network of foundations that run schools, dormitories, hospitals, financial
institutions, newspapers, television stations, dialogue associations and charitable services.
The chains of authority connecting them remain informal and invisible to outsiders. Although
the Gülen community engages in some of the same activities as Muhammadiyah –
establishing schools, charitable associations, hospitals, banks – it is an organization of a very
different type; notably it does not have periodical congresses at which policies are discussed
and leaders elected. Nor does it have transparent specialized bodies such as the Majelis
Tabligh and the Majelis Tarjih dan Tajdid. All activities are supervised by councils that meet
regularly (istişare), but the members of these councils are only known to real insiders; they
are not elected and may not even been known to ordinary followers. 24

23

Brian Silverstein, 'Sufism and modernity in Turkey: from the authenticity of experience to the practice of
discipline', in: M. van Bruinessen and J. D. Howell (ed.), Sufism and the 'modern' in Islam, London: I.B.Tauris,
2007, pp. 39-60.
24

There are numerous studies of the public activities of the Gulen movement, but even the best-informed of
them remain silent on the internal organization of the cemaat. See Berna Turam, Between Islam and the state:
the politics of engagement, Stanford University Press, 2007; M. Hakan Yavuz, Toward an Islamic
enlightenment: the Gülen movement, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

13

The contrast between the highly bureaucratized Muhammadiyah and the highly informal
structure of the Gülen movement is fascinating and raises questions about the difference of
state-Islam relations in Indonesia and Turkey. The Gülen movement is very modern in its use
of communication media and its emphasis on the modern science and technology in
education, but it has retained – like the other cemaat in Turkey – a structure of organization
that is informal and seems even pre-modern, informed by the charisma of its leader. That
informal character is at least in part a response to the legal situation: Turkish law does not
organizations based on religion, and in order to avoid confiscation of property, the movement
has arranged for all its assets to be officially owned by individuals or foundations. The formal
structure of Muhammadiyah, as well as Indonesia’s other Ormas, is similarly at least in part
based on Indonesia’s laws of association (which go back to Dutch legislation), which
proscribe a bureaucratized structure with periodical congresses, elections, and a regional
structure (pusat—wilayah—cabang—ranting) paralleling that of the state.
Another striking difference between Muhammadiyah and the Gülen movement is in their
international orientations. The Gülen movement is active in some 140 countries, and not just
among Turks living there but among people of other ethnic and religious backgrounds (but
the pride in Turkish identity, Turkish culture and Turkish history remains an important aspect
of its activities). Muhammadiyah also has some activities abroad, but these are exclusively
directed at fellow Indonesians. Muhammadiyah seems not to have the sense of mission, the
belief it has something to offer to the world, that the Gülen movement displays. Prominent
Muhammadiyah members may send their children to a Gülen school in Indonesia, because
they are convinced of the quality of education offered. Young men and women of the Gülen
movement are studying at various universities in Indonesia (as well as many other countries),
not because they are convinced of the superiority of education at these institutions but – I
believe – as a form of networking that will serve the movement’s further expansion.
These differences seem to reflect a more general difference in attitude that may have to do
with the contrasting histories of Turkey and Indonesia before they became independent
republics. Whereas Indonesia was part of a colonial empire, Turkey was itself the heartland
of the last great Muslim empire, which comprised most of the Arab world and large parts of
South-eastern Europe. Both the AKP and the Gülen movement consciously seek to reconnect
with the Ottoman past and share an urge to project Turkish influence into the world around
them. 25

Islamic thought
As said before, Turkey and Indonesia may be the only two major countries of the (Sunni)
Muslim-majority world where modern hermeneutic approaches and other contributions to
25

I develop this argument further in an earlier publication, trying to explain why Indonesian Islam has made so
little impact on other Muslim-majority societies. See: Martin van Bruinessen, 'Indonesian Muslims and their
place in the larger world of Islam', in: A. Reid (ed.), Indonesia rising: the repositioning of Asia's third giant,
Singapore: ISEAS, 2012, pp. 117-140.

Bruinessen, Turkey and Indonesia

14

theological thought flourish. 26 But it was neither Muhammadiyah nor the Gülen movement
that provided the most stimulating environment for the development of Muslim
intellectualism. Both pride themselves in skills and professionalism but have little
appreciation for critical thought. Several prominent Muslim intellectuals had in fact a
Muhammadiyah background, but their contributions to public debate mostly took place
outside the Muhammadiyah environment. Especially the Gülen movement has very few
theologians and philosophers in its ranks, and what its followers have had to say on religious
questions has rarely been more than a repetition of some of Gülen’s statements. The
interesting thinkers are to be found elsewhere, and surprisingly (at least to me) it proved to be
the academic institutions established by the secular state for training ‘enlightened’ and
government-friendly religious personnel – i.e., Turkey’s Faculties of Theology and
Indonesia’s IAINs – that constituted a favourable environment for the flourishing of modern
hermeneutic approaches and critical studies in theology.
With the emergence of a prosperous Muslim middle class, which became conspicuous in both
countries in the 1980s, there was a growing audience for more sophisticated views on the
relevance of Islam for contemporary social issues. Muslim intellectuals began playing a
highly visible role in the public sphere; new publishers found an expanding market for books
on religion and history, mysticism, philosophy, and the social and political teachings of
religions; new foundations such as Paramadina and the Lembaga Studi Agama dan Filsafat
(LSAF) in Indonesia