Missionaries, Modernists and the Origins of Intolerance in Islamic Institutions1

by

Jeremy M. Menchik Shorenstein Post-Doctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia, Stanford University

PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison menchik@wisc.edu

August 2011

Why are some Islamic institutions more tolerant than others? This basic question has far-reaching implications. Islamic movements have considerable sway in the policies of newly democratic Egypt, Tunisia and most other Muslim-majority states. Islamic movements are likewise important for the formation of social trust. Recent scholarship suggests that democratization in Muslim counties is more likely to occur when Islamic institutions are able to build networks of cooperation across religious differences, while scapegoating and sectarian polemics between religious groups increases the likelihood of violence. I answer this basic question by focusing on Islamic institutions in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and one of the most diverse. Against the notion that theology or culture shape interethnic relations, I argue that local politics during the late colonial period can explain the policies of contemporary Islamic institutions. Before the national awakening period (pergerakan, 1880-1930), Javanese society was religiously homogenous with overlapping social identities and indistinct boundaries between them. Yet by 1930, there were deep social cleavages between groups. Archival material suggests that locally specific conditions in West, Central and East Java polarized society differently in each region: in West Java the primary divisions were between Christian/Muslim and Modernist/Traditionalist, in Central Java the divisions were similar but shallow and emerged late in the period, and in East Java only the Modernist/Traditionalist divide was salient. These different modes of polarization were then reflected in the policies of the emergent Islamic institutions Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama and Persatuan Islam. Contemporary survey data demonstrates that regional differences endure in attitudes of elites. These findings suggests that rather than using ideological or theological explanations for patterns of tolerance and intolerance, scholars examine the lived experiences of Islamic leaders within their local and historically rooted contexts.

1 This chapter is taken from my dissertation, Tolerance Without Liberalism: Islamic Institutions and Political Violence in Twentieth Century Indonesia and prepared for presentation at the 2011 APSA meeting. Contact the author for access to the dissertation including the survey questionnaire and protocol. This chapter has benefited from feedback from Yoshiko Herrera, Howard Erlanger, Barry Burden, Lisa Wedeen, Tamir Moustafa, and from participants in the Law, Politics and Society workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Introduction Why are some Islamic institutions more tolerant than others? This basic question has far-reaching implications. Islamic political movements have considerable sway in the policies of Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Iraq, and Lebanon. The Muslim Brotherhood is poised to become one of the most influential parties in newly democratic Egypt and the inclusion of Coptic Christians on their ticket is a hopeful sign of interethnic cooperation. Islamic social movements are likewise important for the formation of social trust; recent scholarship suggests that democratization in Muslim counties is more likely to occur when Islamic institutions are able to build networks of cooperation across class, religious and ideological differences (Kunkler 2008). Conversely, negative stereotypes, scapegoating and sectarian polemics increase the likelihood of violence (Dumitur and Johnson 2011). Yet, despite its obvious significance, the study of tolerance in Islamic institutions remains underdeveloped. In this paper I tackle the origins of tolerance and intolerance in Islamic institutions by focusing on three organizations in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia. Two of the three are the largest Islamic institutions in the world; Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) has between 40-60 million members while Muhammadiyah has around 30 million members. The third, Persatuan Islam (Persis) is smaller but one of the oldest Islamist institutions in the world, predating the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by five years. These three institutions are central to contemporary Indonesian politics as well as being crucial cases for explaining the dynamics of tolerance in the Muslim world. NU is highly tolerant of Christians. They have good day-to-day relations with Christian elites, have organized joint political movements to advance their common interests, host Jesuits in their boarding schools (pesantren), publicly support Christian’s rights when they have been attacked, and have not engaged in polemics regarding Christian involvement in politics. Muhammadiyah is moderately tolerant. They have organized joint political movements to advance their common interests, supported Christian’s rights when they have been attacked, have Christians teaching their schools and universities and even have schools that are majority-Christian. However, Muhammadiyah leaders also have a record of engaging in polemics against Christianity and Christianization in Indonesia: most recently Amien Rais and Din Syamsuddin both used polemics against Christians to advance their own political interests (Hefner 2000, 176-180, 200). Persis, meanwhile, is consistently intolerant of Christians. Their periodicals feature regular polemics against Christians, they partner with organizations that endorse and engage in violence against Christians, they are opposed to having Christians teach in their schools, and they regularly criticize other Muslims who promote religious pluralism. Table 3.1 confirms that these institutional indicators are consistent with micro-level attitudes. In a survey of 1000 leaders of the three organizations that I collected in 2010, elites from NU are the most consistently tolerant of Christians and Persis the least.2

2 The survey protocol, sample weights and response rate are provided in the appendix of this paper.

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Table 1.1. Levels of tolerance toward Christians by leaders of three Islamic institutions (sample size). Should Christians be permitted to do the following:

NU Muhammadiyah Persis

Christians becoming the mayor in Jakarta. 52% (354) 43% (384) 17% (232) Christians demonstrating in Monas (Jakarta) about the price of gasoline.

82% (365) 82% (381) 74% (230)

Christians teaching math at public schools. 90% (365) 92% (383) 74% (232) Christians teaching math in Islamic schools. 71% (367) 63% (386) 47% (233) New Christian church in Jakarta. 48% (357) 42% (380) 19% (230) Live in the same city as a Christian. 77% (355) 80% (379) 64% (229) Live in the same village as a Christian. 63% (355) 66% (379) 55% (230) Live next door to a Christian. 84% (366) 79% (383) 68% (231) Christians teaching in public schools. 85% (366) 85% (379) 63% (230) Christians teaching in Islamic schools. 37% (360) 29% (385) 21% (233) Christians becoming the president of Indonesia.

32% (358) 26% (381) 7% (232)

Christians holding public demonstrations. 76% (364) 73% (379) 61% (231) Christian church to be built in my neighborhood.

23% (362) 18% (382) 10% (230)

My explanation for this variation emphasizes local politics and path dependency. Against the notion

that religious theology or culture shapes the attitudes of Muslims toward Christians, I show that Islamic institutions fight local political battles. Who they embrace or oppose is determined less by than by locally specific struggles over schools and membership. This finding has implications for strategies to reduce interethnic tensions and can help explain patterns of conflict and coexistence among other organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Literature Review: Theories of Tolerance and Intolerance in Islamic Institutions Although Huntington’s legacy still looms large, scholars of religion and politics are quickly moving beyond Islamic exceptionalism on questions of tolerance and intolerance (Huntington 1997, 258). Fish, Jensenius and Miche have shown that there is no evidence of a correlation between the proportion of a country’s population that is made up of Muslims and deaths in episodes of large-scale political violence, nor that Islamist movements are responsible for an inordinate share of the world’s large-scale political violence (2010). Kalyvas demonstrated that the structure of religious institutions, not the underlying ideology, is central to understanding political behavior in new democracies (2000). Hefner and others that Islam is no less compatible with plural democracy than other religions (Hefner 2000; Ciftci 2010; March 2009; Mujani 2003; Tessler 2002). The most recent research, then, goes beyond a homogenous conception of religion to focus on historical variation and structured comparison. Why are some interpretations of sacred texts more popular than others (Schwedler 2006)? Why do parties of the same religion behave differently in politics, interethnic relations, and civil society (Kalyvas 1996)? Why have women made greater progress in obtaining liberal equality in some majority-Muslim countries than others (Ross 2008)? Bellin emphasizes the importance of this move in a recent review article, noting that “the question of which interpretation of a religious tradition predominates, when and why is of paramount political concern” (2008, 345-346). This chapter explains subnational variation in Islamic institution’s interpretation of the Islamic tradition and subsequent behavior toward Christians. The advantages of subnational variation are multiple: it permits selection of cases to test the effect of key independent variables such as theology, organizational structure, and autonomy from the state, and it helps control against the influence of exogenous variables that might shape countries differently such as neighborhood effects. Moreover, by linking process tracing and comparative historical analysis, subnational variation allows scholars to

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examine how independent variables might interact. For example, does democratization influence Islamist, traditionalist, and modernist Muslim institutions differently? What about economic change? In sum, subnational variation between Islamic organizations offers a powerful but underutilized tool for building and testing theories of religious actor’s behavior. Two broad accounts address the variation in tolerance. The first, culture, was in large part developed in studies of Indonesian Islam by Clifford Geertz. Geertz divided Javanese society into three streams or groups (aliran): santri, priyayi and abangan (1960, 5-6). The priyayi were the administrative upper classes of Java. Priyayi were nominally Muslim and practiced a form of “Javanese religion” that combined Islam with mystical practices. Their class status differentiated them from the abangan, the majority of Muslims, who combined Islamic observances with Hindu and animist rituals. Abangan Muslims were then contrasted with santris, who were outwardly orthodox Muslims in their dress, music, prayer, and living arrangements. They were active in self-identified Islamic institutions and purportedly voted for Islamic political parties (Hindley 1970, 25-27). While Geertz’s The Religion of Java is note-worthy for its subtle descriptions of Javanese life, vivid prose, and theoretical account of a complex cultural system, the text has also been criticized on multiple grounds. Anderson critiqued Geertz for overlooking the influence of secularism on all three streams (1977, 29). Bachtiar argued that Geertz conflated divergent class and religious categories (1973). Priyayi, the upper class, were understood by most Javanese to be contrasted with the lower class (wong cilik), a group ignored entirely by Geertz. Abangan and santri, however, were considered distinct from class relations and could therefore be either priyayi or wong cilik. Hodgson (1974) and Woodward (1989) both contend that Geertz radically overstates the influence of Hinduism on religious life on Java. They argue that Islam provides the dominant modality in past and present religious life, even among the “nominally religious” abangan. Ricklefs claims that the term santri was misunderstood by Geertz. Kaum or putihan would have been more accurate terms to describe the professionally religious Javanese (Ricklefs 2006, 9 fn.7; 2007, 49, 85). While these critiques are valuable for describing religion in Indonesia, a second, more theoretically driven set of concerns demands attention for understanding the difference between NU, Muhammadiyah and Persis policies toward Christians. The Geertz framework is problematic in that it treats Javanese culture as coherent and fixed rather than historically situated (Wedeen 2002, 716). Culture and its constituent elements of religion and identity are subject to change over time, yet Geertz’s “system of symbols” presented culture as part of a coherent social structure and in doing gave short shrift to historical contingency. This may help to explain why Geertz overlooked the limitations of his framework. Ricklefs has recently pointed out that that there is no evidence that the abangan-santri split existed prior to the mid-nineteenth century (2007, 263). From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, religious life on Java was characterized by a “mystic synthesis.” The mystic synthesis was based on multiple components: a large number of religious students and leaders who demonstrated their piety by patronizing Qur’anic recitations and personally copying the Qur’an, ritual prayer five times per day, giving alms in the form of food or money (zakat), fasting during the month of Ramadan, pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj), and reciting the confession of faith (shahadat). The final characteristic was the acceptance of local spiritual forces such as spirit-kings and the Goddess of the Southern Ocean. Together, these elements described religious life for both the elite and the commoners as recorded in travelogues by Europeans, colonial lords, and surviving Javanese works of literature (Ricklefs 2006, 2007, 6). Owing to population growth, Dutch colonial policies, and Islamic reform and revival, by the 1950s when Geertz did his field research the “mystic synthesis” had given way to the three streams. By emphasizing the coherence, and enduring categories of religion in Java, Geertz overlooked the temporal limitations of his framework. This theoretical limitation also helps explain why Geertz's framework cannot explain the variation between NU, Muhammadiyah and Persis; the emphasis on coherence glosses over key divisions within the santri/putihan. The membership of NU, Muhammadiyah and Persis is entirely santri yet varies in levels of tolerance. While Geertz’s streams were being born, other cleavages were simultaneously being crafted. Within the santri, the Javanese were divided again into traditionalists (NU), Islamic reformists

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(Muhammadiyah), and “hard-line reformists” or Islamists (Persis). When Geertz did his fieldwork, the differences among the santri had been papered over due to electoral interests. While he recognized differences between NU and Muhammadiyah (1960, 148-161), he presented them as having a unified front in relations with non-santri: “The relation between the two groups being only somewhat hostile, the sense of difference only rarely gets intense enough to blot out the sense of commonality of religious belief throughout the whole ummat, a sense strengthened by the nearly universal animosity borne toward santris by non-santris” (1960, 176). Yet just like the emergent abangan-santri divisions, the splits between traditionalists, reformists and Islamists varied over time. While the divisions were not salient during Geertz’s fieldwork, they were highly significant from 1880-1930, the 1980s, 1990s, and today continue to shape political cleavages.3 As table 3.2 illustrates, because all three institutions are part of the same “stream,” Geertz’s conception of culture cannot explain the variation. Table 1.2. Culture compared Institution Aliran (Religious Stream) Nahdlatul Ulama Santri Muhammadiyah Santri Persis Santri Nor can the other standard explanations for the behavior of religious institutions, theology or political theology, explain levels of tolerance (Juergensmeyer 2000; Philpott 2007, 509). As table 3.3 illustrates, theological explanations cannot explain the variation. All three institutions share of the same source texts although Nahdlatul Ulama places more emphasis on the mazhabs. According to an theological explanation, Muhammadiyah and Persis should behave the same since they are both Salafi, while Nahdlatul Ulama should behave differently since they are traditionalists who largely follow Shaafi. Muhammadiyah and Persis also share the same methods (ijtihad, independent reasoning). Similarly, an emphasis on political theology cannot explain the variation since Muhammadiyah and NU share the same vision for the role of religious belief in political life. Table 1.3. Ideology compared Institution Source Texts Methods Political Goal Nahdlatul Ulama Qur’an, Sunna, Mazhabs (Shaafi) Taqlid Religious Nationalism Muhammadiyah Qur’an and Sunna (Salafi) Ijtihad Religious Nationalism Persis Qur’an and Sunna (Salafi) Ijtihad Pan-Islam (Anti-Nationalist) Theology is a poor guide to understanding attitudes toward non-Muslims. Within any religious tradition, including Islam, there are texts that support interethnic conflict (Qur’an 2:120, 3:28, 4:58; 42:1) and texts that support interethnic cooperation (Qur’an 2:62, 2:213, 4:163, 5:43, 5:47). Similarly, within Sunni, Shi’ite, modernist, traditionalist, Islamist theology, there are valid arguments for embracing non-Muslims as political and social equals (March 2009, Chapter 7; Kamal et. al 2007; Qaradawi 1997) and valid arguments for embracing only Muslims (Federspiel 1977; Qutb 1964). Moreover, theology is flexible. Islamist groups may change their platforms to embrace secular government and social pluralism (Mecham 2004; Rutherford 2006) while moderate Muslims may change their policies to call for war on non-Muslims (Fealy 1998). Both changes have occurred in Indonesia. The predominantly moderate NU called for war on Communists in 1965, while the Islamist Persis actively embraced Christians in 1955. Given the potential for change, and the heterogeneous interpretations of sacred texts, theological explanations for religious actor’s behavior are of limited utility.

3 On the intra-santri cleavages in the 1920s and early 30s in Sumatra see Abdulah 1971, Federspiel 1970, Bowen 1992. On the 1980s and 1990s see Bush 2009 and Federspiel 1998. On intra-santri differences in political parties since democratization see Baswedan 2004.

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One final explanation, size of the Christian population, deserves brief mention as a similarly poor predictor of attitudes. The size of the Christian population in East, Central and West Java in 1930, the period when the divergent policies was made apparent, was less than one-half of one percent in each region: .31% in West Java, .27% in Central Java and .20% in East Java. Such a miniscule population cannot explain the variation. Similarly, there were differences in the number of Christian and Catholic missionaries—189 in West Java, 713 in Central Java, and 564 in East Java—but these differences do not explain the variation in tolerance. If a crude scale of missionary activity was a predictor of intolerance, then Central Java would be the most intolerant followed by East and West (Indische Verslag 1931, 15, 109-124). Instead, the organization from West Java is the most intolerant, followed by Central Java and East Java. To explain the variation, I focus on the emergence of social cleavages during the period when the organizations were founded. I argue that the relationship between Christians and Muslims is a direct consequence of local politics during the late colonial or popular awakening (pergerakan) period from 1912-1930 when discursive attacks and counterattacks by modernists, missionaries, and colonial rulers shaped divergent perceptions of threat. Where previously, group identities were uniform and characterized by the mystic synthesis, during this period group identities became polarized with strong boundaries between them. These boundaries were then made manifest in the institution’s jurisprudence (fiqh) delineating appropriate behavior for Muslims. Fiqh and institutional memory ensured that patterns of tolerance and intolerance endured over time. By the early 1930s, the social tensions had resulted in fiqh delineating “insiders” and “outsiders,” “us” and “them.” For Persis, the outsiders were the Christians who invaded Sundanese society and the Traditionalists of Surabaya. For Muhammadiyah, the outsiders were similar but less severe; missionary colonialists rather than Christians were deemed problematic, and Traditionalists. For NU, only the modernists Muslims were salient as “outsiders.” The implications of this argument are two-fold. First and foremost, this historically situated argument helps to explain why Islamic institutions vary in their relations with Christians. Local politics during the period of institutional formation are key to explaining both attitudes and behavior. Second, the chapter suggests that path dependency is a powerful force in driving the behavior of religious institutions and can help explain variation elsewhere. Methodology While survey data helped to establish variation in the dependent variable, the backbone of this paper is historical research from the Indonesian National Archives, Indonesian National Library, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah archives in Jakarta and the Persis archives in Bangil, East Java. In describing the conditions that gave rise to three distinct institutions and policies toward non-Muslims, I focus on the micro-practices that created and sustained group difference. These practices helped shape political relations in the sense that Arendt defined the political: being based on the activities of ordinary citizens who, through the exercise of agency and within the context of interaction shaped their collective existence (Arendt 1958). At the end of the chapter, I employ an ordered logistic regression model to verify that region is still a valid predictor of intolerance toward Christians. Muhammadiyah: Central Java Muhammadiyah was founded on Nov 12, 1912 by Kiyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan and a group of friends in Kauman, Yogyakarta, Central Java (Alfian 1989, 152). The village where Dahlan grew up was located next to the palace (kraton) of the Sultan, alongside the Sultan Mosque and surrounded by homes of other santri. Dahlan's parents belonged to an elite circle. His father was appointed religious scholar (chatib) of the Sultan Mosque while his mother, Siti Aminah, was the daughter of Kitai Haji Ibrahim, a high level civil servant for Islamic affairs (penghulu) of the kraton. The initial membership of Muhammadiyah thus reflected both Dahlan’s religious ideals and class (Alfian 1989, 166). The motivation to establish Muhammadiyah stemmed from Dahlan’s frustration with the religious practices at the Sultan Mosque and his support for Islamic reform movements. After his elementary school education in Yogyakarta and the surrounding area, he went to Mecca in 1890 for one year, then

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again for two years around 1902 (Alfian 1989, 145; Noer 1978,74). There he was exposed to Sjech Ahmad Chatib, the famous scholar of the Shaafi school (mazhab) who taught many elites including Muhammadiyah’s Haji Rasul and the founder of NU, Kiai Hadji Hasjim Asj’ari (Noer 1978, 31-32).4 Other teachers included Kiyai Djambek, himself a student of Chatib. Neither Chatib nor Djambek were reformist scholars, which is why biographers of Dahlan speculate that his support for reformist ideas stemmed from his own self-study (Alfian 1989, 146 fn 14). By 1912 it was thought that he was well acquainted and sympathetic to the ideas of the reformist Muhammed Abduh though the magazine Tafsir Al-Manar (Noer 1978, 76 fn. 132). He brought these ideas from Mecca to Yogyakarta. In the historiography of Dahlan, an often-repeated story demonstrates the difficulty he encountered in promoting reformist practices. In 1896 he discovered that the Sultan Mosque was not facing the correct direction for prayer. As a result, Dahlan painted lines on the floor in order to redirect people. When the Chief civil servant for Islamic affairs, Kiai Hadji Muhammed Chalil, discovered this, he ordered the lines erased. Dahlan responded by building his own prayer house (langgar) facing Mecca. The Chief Penghulu reciprocated by burning down Dahlan’s prayer house. Dahlan at that point threatened to leave Yogyakarta and only relented when his brother-in-law promised to rebuild the prayer house. He did, but not toward Mecca, so Dahlan again painted lines on the floor and was left alone with his own prayer house (Alfian 1989, 146-147; Noer 1978, 74). During the early years of Muhammadiyah from 1912-1923, under Dahlan’s leadership, the organization developed a coherent ideology, set of religious practices and gradually expanded their membership. At the core of the mission was religious propagation (dakwah) through education, public discussions of religious questions, publishing the writings of reformists from Singapore and the Middle East, and distribution of alms (zakat) in order to build a stronger community. Dahlan was active in teaching (tabligh), collecting funds for the poor, and leading Islamic rituals (Noer 1978, 75). During these formative years, the behavior of Dahlan and Muhammadiyah were strongly tolerant of the fledgling Christian community. Alfian notes that, “Dahlan himself took an uncommon, and probably unprecedented attitude toward the Christians by successfully establishing close friendships with many of their clergymen as Fathers van Dress an (sic) van Lies, Reverend Baker, as well as with their foremost strategists in Indonesia such as Dr. Zwemmer,5 Dr. Laberton, and Dr. Hendrik Kraemer” (1989, 160). Dahlan invited them to meet, exchange ideas, and he established a friendly dialogue between the two communities. Historians of both Muhammadiyah and the Christian missionaries report that Dahlan, Reverend Baker and Dr Kraemer had regular meetings in public and private. Kraemer even regarded Dahlan as a friend (Alfian 1989, 161 fn 42 and 43, citing Bousquet 1940, 3; Hallencreutz 1966, 159-162). These relations were maintained as the Christian presence grew. In 1918, Christian missionaries began building a Bible school in Yogyakarta with support from the government. Dahlan’s protégé, Hadji Fachruddin, wrote in Sri Diponegoro that Muslims were falling behind Christian efforts to educate their children. Fachruddin argued that, “If the Muslims failed to act as fast as the Christians in this field, these was a very good possibility that their future grandchildren would eventually become Christians as could easily be seen from the rapid growth of their educational system which would soon penetrate the entire society” (Alfian 1989,162 citing Sri Diponegoro, No. 17, 28 October 1918). Unlike in later writings, Muhammadiyah leaders exhibited no sign of animus toward the Christians. That said, there is good reason to be skeptical of some of this research. The writings of Muslim reformists and Muhammadiyah historians tend to glorify Dahlan’s tolerance. Likewise, it is not surprising that Christian missionaries, who were at pains to demonstrate to the Dutch government that they were not disrupting social order, would claim to have an amicable with Muhammadiyah. Moreover, Dahlan openly copied the curriculum of Christian missionary schools in order to build Muhammadiyah’s educational system the Muhammadiyah’s scouts, The Army of the Fatherland (Hizbul Wathan) (Alfian 1989, 161). A skeptic might argue that Dahlan’s behavior reflected intelligence gathering more than tolerance toward

4 This overlap provides a nice reminder that even while boundaries between social identity groups are being constructed, the flow of personnel across those boundaries continues (Barth 1979, 10). 5 Samuel Zwemer (b.1867-d.1952) was a famous Calvinist missionary.

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Christianity as an idea or Christians as a minority. Lacking from the existing record are primary source documents from Muhammadiyah that discuss the organization’s views of the Christian community. With that goal in mind, this next section describes Muhammadiyah folder 28 from the Indonesian National Archives, which contains bi-monthly meeting notes from August 11, 1922 through November 22, 1924. To my knowledge, no other scholars have utilized these materials. I will describe relevant content of these meetings in order to illustrate the tolerance of Muhammadiyah during the formative period. Crucially, these notes contain summaries of discussions both before and after Dahlan’s death in 1923. This is important to show that the shift toward intolerance toward Christians occurred not due to a leadership change but as a result of local missionary activity and colonial policy. The most significant interaction between Muhammadiyah and the Yogyakarta Christian community occurred in August and September 1922 in reaction to the publication of an article in the newspaper Mataram, “The Strengths and Weaknesses of Islam and Christianity.” In their meeting of 11-12 August in Dahlan’s home, the fourth item on the agenda was a summary of the article, speech and a proposal for Muhammadiyah’s response.6 M Djojosoemorto presented a summary of the visit, noting that Dr. Samuel Zwemer came to visit Java in order to spread Christian missionary material in Javanese and gave a presentation at a Yogyakarta Protestant church. Zwemer is well known among historians of missions for his criticism of Islam and aggressive missionary tactics (Beck 2005, 18; Steenbrink 2007, 154).7 In his speech, Zwemer claimed that Islam as a religion contained both strengths and weaknesses. The strengths came from Islam’s large population with around 240 million Muslim worldwide, a strong system of propagation,8 faith, Sufism or mysticism, and democratic equality among fellow-Muslims. The weaknesses were those often repeated in polemical literature on Islam. 1) Islam is intended only for men, 2) while the women of Islam are beautiful, they are treated poorly and Muhammad himself had thirteen wives, 3) although there maybe equality in the mosque, non-Muslim are excluded from such egalitarian practices, 4) unlike faith in the Christian tradition of Calvin and Luther, Islam contains no freedom of thought but only submission, 5) Islam does not believe in the crucifixion of the prophet Jesus, and does not believe that Jesus went [to heaven] with God. In his conclusion, Zwemer called on Muslim to come to the truth and to follow Jesus. Muhammadiyah’s response was consistent with descriptions by other writers and emblematic of their tolerance toward the Christians. The polemic by Zwemer was taken as a challenge to Muhammadiyah. Muhammadiyah invited the local and national Muhammadiyah leaders, local and national Jesuit leaders, the Chinese organization Centraal Tiong Hoa, the city Regent, prominent businessmen, the director of local school, and other elites to a public debate between Zwemer and Dahlan. According to notes from the following week, the debate proceeded as planned although other sources suggest that Zwemer lacked “the courage to enter into a discussion with Dahlan” (Boland 1982, 213 fn 102).9 Regardless of whether the debate occurred, the meeting notes suggest a respectful response by Muhammadiyah. There is no evidence of polemic toward Christians, nor toward Zwemer himself.10

6 Muhammadiyah meeting notes, 11-12 August, 1922, Muhammadiyah folder 28, Arsip Nasional (AN). 7 Zwemer spoke in Yogyakarta on the 24th and 26th of July, 1922. Zwemer’s biographer reports that despite the polemical character of his speech, the audience was respectful. “In a public meeting at a large church in Djokjakarta, Zwemer spoke for a full sixty minutes on The Strength and Weaknesses of Islam. The attention was very good and at the close a Moslem leader who had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca arose and stated that he wished to thank the speaker for pointing out the weakness of Islam and stated that he would like to have a similar meeting to point out the weakness of Christianity! On many occasions the friendly spirit of Moslems in the East Indies was quite in contrast to conditions in Arabia, Egypt and other predominantly Moslem areas” (Wilson 1952, 121). 8 The report uses the Indonesian “propogandnya” which is closer to the English “propagation” than the Arabic term for propagation (dakwah). 9 Muhammadiyah meeting notes, 18 August, 1922, Muhammadiyah folder 28, AN. 10 Muhammadiyah’s response was even more remarkable because Zwemer’s speech was in Javanese. A Dutch-speaking audience would have been primarily Europeans, and it would have been common for a preacher to favorably compare Christianity to Islam. Targeting the Javanese public, in both the church and the newspaper,

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By 1922 when Zwemer visited Yogyakarta, Muhammadiyah was acutely aware of the Christians’ growing presence. In an article in the March 5/6 1922 issue of Suara Moehammadijah, the author asks rhetorically, “are there really no Muslims on Java?” The author notes that while there were 18 schools for Christian teachers in Yogyakarta, there were none for Muslims.11 This increase stemmed from changes in government policy dating back to the early 1900s. In 1901 the head of the Christian Revolutionary Party, the Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, become Prime Minister in Holland. Thereafter, and through the administration of Colonial Minister Alexander William Frederick Idenberg, churches and missionaries were except from duties and taxes and had their salaries and passage to and from Indonesia paid by the state, which also provided subsidies to missionary schools, hospitals and orphanages (Noer 1978, 168-169). While the effects were only felt in the 1920s, the roots of the change in relations between the colonial government and missionaries were in 1909 when Idenberg became representative of the Crown in Indonesia (1909-1916). Dubbed “the first Christian on the throne of Buitenzorg,” Idenberg supported the missions with both funding and political maneuvers in order to help them to Christianize the archipelago (Noer 1978, 173; Steenbrink 1993, 109; van Niel 1960, 83.) Two articles in the August 1922 issue of Soewara Moehammadijah illustrate the pressure on Muhammadiyah. The first was a Malay translation of an article written by Idenberg in the Neratja newspaper dated 30 May 1922. Idenberg wrote that the Netherlands must continue to colonize the East Indies both socially (Maatschappelijk) and spiritually (Geestelijke). Spiritual colonialism was done through missionaries. “If the Netherlands gave only the cultural fruits to the East Indies, it won't be enough. It should [also] be the cultural seeds planted in the East Indies through an intermediary. Christian Missionaries should be deeply inserted into the world of the Eastern people, the people of Muhammad.... So that the Eastern people would be Christianized.”12 In an accompanying commentary and response, H. Fachruddin of Muhammadiyah reminded the readers of Idenberg’s influence as the Minister of the Colonies. “What is being said above should be thought of deeply by people of the East Indies.” He said the collaboration of Christian missionaries and the government could threaten the independence of Indonesian Muslims. The Muslim people had to respond though unity. “In truth, the destruction and the endurance of the independence of Islam in the East Indies, will depend on the power of the Muslim people... To fight against the destruction of Islam would mean unifying the Muslim people in Harmony, reinforcing the obligations of Islam and staying away from that which is forbidden.” He ended by calling on all Muslim people to unite to fight against this threat, “Brothers! Remember, that the Islamism of Muslim people, particularly in the East Indies, has been very long disturbed. Not easy for us to make it right if we don't work together, to fight against the threat to our religion Islam.”13 Yet this pressure did not manifest itself with intolerance or polemic just yet. Even while Zwemer attacked Islam, Muhammadiyah remained respectful of other faiths. In the August 1 issue of Soewara Moehammadijah, Nilie Poetri wrote that Muslims offered their condolences to the Catholics for the passing of Pope Benedictus XV. The Pope was recognized as a spiritual guide and his passing a great sadness. The rest of the article details that non-Muslims could benefit from learning about Islam and mentioned specifically that Catholic priests in Europe should better understand the tenets of Islam.14 That said, as Christian missionary activity increased, with the backing of the colonial state, Muhammadiyah’s attitudes toward Christians began to turn sour. In 1902 there were 52 Christians in Yogyakarta and no schools. Between 1913 and 1933 membership in Yogyakarta grew from 587 members to 2498 (Sumartana 1993, 103). The growth was propelled by government support for hospitals, schools,

however, signaled an uncommon shift in missionary tactics. Beck notes that Zwemer’s mission to Java marked the beginning of an increase in missionary work targeting the Javanese (2005, 12). 11 Soewara Moehammadijah vol. 3, 5, 11-14. See Muhammadiyah Sekretariat, “Vergadering jang kedoewa, pada hari minggoe sore,” March 5/6, 1922, Muhammadiyah folder 28, AN. 12 G.G. Idenburg, “Christen dan Mohammedanen,” Soewara Moehammadijah, 1922, vol. 3, 8, 9-10. 13 H Fachruddin, “Christen dan Mohammedanen,” Soewara Moehammadijah, 1922, vol. 3, 8, 9-10. 14 Nilie Poetri, “Sampoen halit manah,” Soewara Moehammadijah, 1922, vol. 3, 8, 1-3.

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and the distribution of missionary materials. The Committee for the Support of Christian Education in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, a commission chaired by Idenberg along with missionary leaders, sought to build elementary schools in the two towns (Sumartana 1993, 113 fn 91). By 1931 the broader region of South Central Java had 131 missionary schools with 15,284 students (Sumartana 1993, 106). And while Protestant and Catholic mission schools received government subsidies, Islamic boarding schools were either denied government support or received substantially less funding than their counterparts.15 Furthermore, bias against Muslim was manifest within the colonial administration as well as society. Civil servants were overwhelmingly chosen from the European and Christian communities. Ropi notes that, “The unfair manner in which civil servants were recruited, and the differing salaries paid to Europeans and Europeans for the same profession, further raised the ire of the Muslim community. Of one thousand prospective employees accepted, not a single Muslim was among them. Moreover, the salary of a European clergyman was ten times higher than that of a Muslim penghulu [judge]” (1999, 84). The first sign of deepened polarization took place in 1925 at the 14th Annual Congress of Muhammadiyah, held in Yogyakarta from March 12-17. By then Muhammadiyah had discovered that the Dutch resident of Yogyakarta from 1924-1927, Louis Frederik Dingemans, had cut the subsidies to Muhammadiyah hospitals and poor houses while increasing those for the Christians. Fachruddin’s brother Hadji Sudjak, a Central board member and chair of the poor relief fund, delivered a scathing criticism of Dingemans and the Sultan of Yogyakarta who administered the subsidy.16 Dingeman called Muhammadiyah into his office to rebut the criticisms but in a follow-up letter, Muhammadiyah Central board noted, “This matter is considered [sic] by Muhammadijah as an obstacle which might hamper Muhammadijah activities, while assisting in the works of the Christians...We as Muslims who live in a Muslim country feel disheartened to observe such a situation.”17 A similar speech by Muhammadiyah secretary Djojosoegito claimed that Muslim children attending missionary schools might become Christians: the Christian mission thus constituted a danger for all Muslims and for Muhammadiyah in particular (Beck 2005, 17). In a more scathing speech, Hadji Hadjid said that Islam was the best religion while Christianity the lowest. He claimed that Christians used a Bible that had been tampered with, and then tried to have their bogus book adopted all over the world in order to spread their corrupted religion. Hadjid continued by saying that Muslim children in Christian schools were being poisoned by Christian books all over the world. Beck notes, “Consequently, Hadjid urged the Muhammadiyah to write, publish, and spread books on Islam to counterbalance the Christian activities. Hadjid’s argumentation can be seen as one answer to the Christian activities among the people which had been stepped up at Zwemer’s advice” (2005, 18). Like Sudjak’s response to the cut in subsidies and Djojosoegito’s worry about missionary schools, Hadjid was responding to the onslaught of Christian missionary tracts. By 1927 the pages of Suara Muhammadiyah were littered with polemical tracts about Christians, Christianity, and Catholics. An article appearing July 1927 summarizes a report from Lahore saying that a Hindu King, Narsullah Chan, converted to Islam and convinced 550,000 Hindus to follow him. The article likens missionary efforts in British Indies with those in the Near East Indies. In each, huge financial resources were been spent on conversion with little success. Islam, however, has succeeded in attracting others because of the truth of the Qur'an.

Islam was established in 1344 with the light from the land afar (Middle) East, which dazzled the Western world. The Western world is wearing sunglasses [although they] could also accept the benefits [of Islam]. In Europe, America and Australia every mass of people is attracted to and searches for the light of Islam, so that almost the entire world is brightened, and little by little feels happy with the light of Islam. Christianity, which was

15 In 1938-1939, 2016 Protestant schools received government subsidies compared with 728 Catholic schools and only 133 Islamic schools. 16 Alfian 1989, 209-210; Beck 2005, 17-18. Noer reports that in 1925 Muhammadiyah possessed two clinics, one poor house and two orphanages (1978, 83). 17 Alfian 1989, 210, citing Mailrapport 569x/25.

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once a source of pride in the Western world, now has faded (darkened) in the eyes of the Christian people themselves, which is evident in our stories; look at the Christian churches every Sunday, Protestant or Catholics, even more the Orthodox - only a few white people came [to Church]. We understand that the efforts of Christians to attract (impress) white people, who are generally equally highly educated, do not work anymore. So now those tactics are being used for converting our people, Javanese, who are Muslim. Some outcome [conversion] is achieved, but was not worth the massive money spent.18

A 1928 article describes how teachers in missionary schools in Modjowarna taught students to attack Islam. These teachers and anyone insulting Islam would go to hell.

Islam is taught by the priests (Christian teachers) in that [mission] school... But those students were taught to deride or insult Islam and the prophet Muhammad s.a.w... there are a lot of ways that are used to destroy Islam and its surroundings. ...For those who feel that there is the power of Islam in their heart, not only can you strengthen the faith of other Muslim, but also you can, Inshallah, Islamize the Christians, because Islam is the true religion. ...Those who insult Islam and those Muslims who convert to Christians will go to hell and stay there forever.19

Along with irritation at missionaries, there were frequent references to “descent” into Christianity. A 1928 article from Kendal on the northern coast of Central Java lamented how Christian priests manipulated Muslims into conversion.

Meanwhile, Christianity may propagate its religion not only using its billions in prosperity, but also using shrewd tactics... Our dearest brothers in the East Indies who are commonly Muslim, a lot of them have fallen into Christianity. And a lot have been deceived to embrace and been captivated by Christianity. [Christian priests propagate Christianity] not by diving into a discussion at home or in churches, like the Muslim leaders. But with their Christian propaganda, [they] go into and out of kampong, cities, villages [and] valleys. Besides that, they are also using newspapers of pamphlets or brochures that are distributed for free in cities, villages and kampong [a poor neighborhood].20

The report from the 1929 Muhammadiyah congress picked up on the idea that the inferiority of Christianity to Islam meant that converts must have been deceived.

In Menado there is an Islamic group who is attempting to spread Islam to the left and the right: [they have] already progressed to request becoming a branch of Moehammadijah. …If God will’s it (Insya’llah) they will succeed in spreading Muhammadiyah in Manado to the left and right so that it will be known by those groups who are now Christian, since [Christianity] is very much worse than Islam (Muhammadiyah 1929).

The key to these passages is not simply that Islam is considered superior to Christianity. That is not necessarily evidence of a deepening social cleavage. Key is the denigration of Christianity as a religion and those who have converted. Additional polemics appeared with increasing frequency after 1925 in the pages of Bintang Islam, a publication of Sarekat Islam by two prominent leaders of Muhammadiyah, Moechtar-Boechary of Solo and H Fachrodin of Yogyakarta along with O.S. Tjokroaminoto of Sarekat Islam. Major themes included denigrating Christianity as a “pagan” religion,21 arguing that while early Christianity possessed truth the faith has been since corrupted,22 that science and Christianity are incompatible,23 that Christianity is not a

18 Drijowongso, “Masoek Islam” Soeara Moehammadijah, 1927, vol. 9, 1, 59-61. 19 K.S,. “Zendings Modjowarno,” Soeara Moehammadijah, 1928, vol. 9, 8, 233-235. 20 Moenawar. “Betapakah Keadaan Igama Kita Islam di Hindia Timoer,” Soeara Moehammadijah, 1928, vol. 9, 7, 195-200. 21 See the series of articles “Perasaan Paham Baroe Dalam Agama Geredja”, in Bintang Islam, 1925, vol. 1-6, III. 22 Bintang Islam, “Sepongang dari Mecca,” 1925, vol. 1, III, 5. 23 Bintang Islam, “Perasaan Paham Baroe Dalam Agama Geredja II,” 1925, vol. 3, III, 37.

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religion but a political tool for governments,24 that Christianity is an exclusionary religion based on hierarchy are racial difference like Hinduism,25 and that Christianity is bankrupt and churches in Europe empty.26 While Bintang Islam was not, strictly speaking, a Muhammadiyah publication, it was founded by Muhammadiyah leaders and the caliber and intensity of anti-Christian rhetoric is instructive for understanding just how polarized Yogyakarta was in the late colonial period. This polarization was then made manifest in the legal jurisprudence of Muhammadiyah. Muhammadiyah issued ten edicts (fatāwā) during the period from 1926-1936 delineating appropriate practice for Muslims, thereby differentiating Muslim from non-Muslim, and traditional from reformist practices. In doing so, Muhammadiyah worked to produce boundaries between both groups, using language and references salient to producing two types of cleavages. For example, the edict on believing in the holy books takes pains to say that while trusted hadith are to be followed, individuals must also judgment (pertimbangan) for themselves in order to follow the holy books. “In this case, we must only believe in matters which have been clearly explained and not matters which have no clear explanation (based on our own approximation), as Allah says ‘Verily, approximation shall not generate truth!’ (Muhammadiyah 1939,15). The referent was the traditionalist practice of the adherence to precepts of law decided by earlier jurists on matters of law (taqlid). The edict goes onto remind the reader that while it is obligatory to recognize the other books revealed by God and brought by the prophet’s Jesus (‘isa), Moses (Musa) and the psalms of David (zabur kepada Nabi Dawud), the last and final book was brought by the prophet Muhammad. The goal here is differentiating the Muslim community the followers of Moses (Jews) and Jesus (Christians). Muhammadiyah further differentiated traditional and modernist Muslims on the problem of determining the beginning and end of fasting using sighting of the moon (ru’yah) or calculation (ḥisāb). The traditional method used to begin fasting is sighting the new crescent moon (hilal) that signifies the onset of the new month. Hisab (ḥisāb) meanwhile, is based on astronomical calculations and has been used since the first century of the Islamic calendar (Muhammadiyah 2009, 6). In total, of the edicts addressing boundaries between groups in this period, 50% of Muhammadiyah’s fatāwā concerning good and bad practice for Muslims, while 70% delineated boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims. And while these numbers may seem banal on their own, the significance for understanding Muhammadiyah attitudes will become clearer in comparative perspective. Persis: West Java Persatuan Islam (Persis) was founded on September 12, 1923 in Bandung, West Java. 1923 was relatively late for a religious study group to form a formal association; by that time Al-Djamijat al-Chairijah (Djamiat Chair, 1905), Budi Utomo (1908), Sarekat Islam (1911), Muhammadiyah (1912) and Al-Irshjad (1913) were well-established and Sarekat Islam leader Abdoel Moeis already making waves in Bandung by opposing communism and warning Muslims of the threats of Christian missions (Noer 1978, 84-85, 127). In direct contrast to Muhammadiyah, Persis was founded in an atmosphere of sharp polemic and polarization. Their policies on modernists/traditionalist, Muslims/Christian and Communist/Muslim relations reflected this deep polarization for years to come.

Like Muhammadiyah, the ideological background for the creation of Persis was the reformist publications then circulating Sumatra and parts of Java: al-Manār of Cairo and al-Munir of Singapore/Padang. The leading figures were two traders and religious scholars, Hadji Zamzam and Hadji Muhammad Junus. Zamzam had spent three and a half years studying at the Dār al-‘Ulūm school in Mecca, taught at the Darul Muta’allimun school in Bandung in 1910, and was believed connected to Ahmad al-Surkati of Al-Irsjad. Junus had a less formal education in religion but was believed to have mastered Arabic. The idea for Persis originated at a religious gathering (kenduri) organized by families originating from Palembang, Sumatra but residing in the Sundanese area of West Java. 24 Bintang Islam, “Agama Kekasihan,” 1925, vol. 20, III, 309-310. 25 Bintang Islam, “Tjara-kata indjil dan filosofinya,” 1925, vol. 17, III, 272. 26 Bintang Islam, “Perasaan Paham baroe dalam agama geredja III,” 1925, vol. 4, III.

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Unlike NU and Muhammadiyah where the initial membership was ethnic Javanese, the early members of Persis were ethnic Sundanese (Federspiel 1970, 18). Historians of Indonesia and Christian missions have argued that the link between the Sundanese identity and Islamic identity was much closer than for Javanese and Islam. While there was a substantial and growing Christian Javanese community in Java during the pergerakan, there were essentially no Sundanese Christians.27 Lipset (1959) argues that cross cutting identities are important for understanding conflict and coexistence. The fact that Sundanese were uniformly Muslim does not explain intolerance toward Christians, but does help to explain why the missionary activity in the Sundanese area of Bandung was acutely unsuccessful and unwelcome. It also helps explains why West Java became more deeply polarized than Central Java despite similar polemics; an over-arching Javanese identity helped ameliorate the cleavages that emerged by 1925. Missionary activity in the Sunda region began in 1863 when the Dutch missionary organization Nederlandsche Zendingsvereening (NZV) established missions in Bandung, Cianjur, Bogor, Indramau and Cirebon. The missions had no success in direct conversion of Sundanese and turned instead to education, health care, and the conversion of ethnic Chinese where they had considerably more success. Chinese-Christian settlements were established in Cidered (1882), Pangharepan (1887), Palalangon (1902) and Haurgeulis-Rehoboth (1921). A Sundanese-language version of the New Testament was finished in 1879 and a Christian bible in 1891. In 1926, a new missionary, Bernard Arps, sought to use these tools to try again to merge Sundanese identity with Christian identity and between 1927-1931 several churches were established for that purpose (Steenbrink and Aritonang 2008, 656-7). The chief interlocutor with Arps and the missions was Moehammad Natsir, who joined Persis in 1931 but had been active in other Islamic institutions such as the Young Muslims Union (Jong Islam Bond, JIB) since 1929. The most polemical articles in Pembela Islam regarding Christians were sparked due to an article written by J.J. Ten Berge, a priest from Muntilan in the magazine Studiën in April 1931 and followed by an article by Oei Bee Thay in Hokien. Berge’s article calls the Prophet Muhammad a “stupid Arab,” “aspirant self-murderer” who abused women.

One can see that according to Muhammad, Christians conceive of a father and a mother and a son in a sexual sense. How would it have been possible for him, the anthropomorphist, the ignorant Arab, the gross sensualist who was in the habit of sleeping with women, to conceive of a different and more elevated conception of Fatherhood (Ropi 1999, 42; Steenbrink 1993, 118-119)?

The Persis response was immediate. Along with Muhammadiyah and Sarekat Islam, Persis held demonstrations in Bandung and Surabaya. Natsir’s 1931 article, Islam, Catholicism and the Colonial Government called for Muslim unity to defend their religion and criticized the double standard of colonial policy which persecuted Muslims for ‘hate speech’ while Ten Berge was untouched.28 Elsewhere Natsir attacked Christian teaching as distorted.29 His prompt here was not to Ten Berge, but to a book by Dr. Hendrik Kraemer, The Religion of Islam. Kraemer’s text was a controversial Christian textbook that claimed that Muhammad was only a minor religious figure, that attacked Muhammad for having ‘human weakness’, and claimed that political alliances were behind Muhammad’s choice to pray toward Mecca rather than Jerusalem. He equated Islam with fascism, which was similarly backwards, fundamentalist, and lacking a spiritual dimension like Christianity. Without a trace of irony, Kraemer portrayed Islam as lacking respect for other faiths, in contrast to Christianity (Ropi 1999, 86). Natsir was likely familiar with Kraemer before joining Persis. Kraemer had studied Indology in the Netherlands and was sent to the East Indies in 1921 by the Dutch Bible Society (Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap) to be a missionary and to help with the translation of the Bible into Javanese. He became an advisor to the student society the Jong Java and worked to exclude Islamic leaders from the organization, who then broke off and founded JIB. JIB went on to become one of the most influential and

27 Steenbrink and Aritonang report that conversion to Christianity was highly unusual among the Sundanese from 1850-1942 (2008). 28 Mohammad Natsir, Pembela Islam, 1931, vol. 33, 2-7. 29 Mohammad Natsir, “Holy Spirit, Ruh Suci”, Pembela Islam, 1930, vol. 13, 5-10 and Natsir 1969.

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anti-Catholic and Protestant missionary groups in the nationalist movement. Importantly, like Persis, JIB included Natsir as one of its most prominent leaders (Steenbrink 1993, 111-112). In additional to the Christian missionary threat, other local concerns were of paramount importance for Persis, particularly the communist infiltration of the Sarekat Islam (Federspiel 1970, 12-13; Wildan 1995, 28-29) and the mounting clashes between reformists and traditionalists. Communism was a concern for religious circles in Bandung since at least 1921, when the local Sarekat Islam backed the Communist wing of the party while a national Islamic leader from Bandung, Abdoel Moeis, favored expelling the communists. Meanwhile the confrontation with traditionalists was embodied by lectures in Bandung by Pakih Hasjim (Noer 1978, 85). Hasjim was a vocal proponent of Islamic reform in Surabaya (East Java) and critic of traditionalist practices of announcing their intention (niat) to pray (usali) and of following the classical schools of jurisprudence (mazhabs). Hasjim had established a Muhammadiyah branch in Surabaya in 1921, and his lectures on religious issues “had shaken the traditionalist world, because his explanations about religion ran counter to traditional ideas” (Noer 1978, 226). One of Hasjim’s students was Ahmad Hassan, who joined Persis in 1924 and did the most to shape their early policies. Hassan was born in 1887 in Singapore to a Tamil father and a Javanese mother. He received a polyglot education in Malay, English, Arabic and Tamil. He moved to Surabaya in 1921 in order to takeover a textile shop owned by his uncle, Hadji Abdul Latif. At the time, Surabaya was a center of debate between the traditionalist (kaum tua) and modernists (kaum muda) concerning the practice of announcing the intention to pray. Hassan was there exposed to Kijahi Hadji Abdul Wahab, later a prominent leader of NU and Pakih Hasjim. When Hassan moved to Bandung, he brought this debate with him and helped to drive the split in Persis in 1926 between traditionalists and reformists. Unlike NU and Muhammadiyah, Persis was never a mass membership organization. Federspiel reports that through the 1930s membership never reached above 1000 persons (1970, 16). In the early years, the initial membership was less than twenty persons, and included both modernists and traditionalists (Federspiel 1970, 13). Yet given the polarizing debates going on in West Java the organization quickly splintered. Hassan fell on the modernist side: his father had opposed the practice of adherence to the classical schools of jurisprudence (talqin), Hassan opposed both usali and kissing the hand of another person as a sign of respect (taqbil) and the practice of adherence to the classical mazhab (Federspiel 1970, 14; Noer 1979, 87). In 1926 Persis split into two camps: the Traditionalists in Permoefakatan Islam (Islamic Association) and Persis, which declared itself to be officially Modernist. Hassan went on to write repeated polemics against Traditionalists and Christians alike. In contrast to Muhammadiyah, Persis’s fatāwā are both more voluminous (36) and combative. Major themes included the inconsistency of the New Testament30 and the danger of traditional practices,31 with clear boundaries between good and bad Muslims, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims.

Twenty-one Persis fatāwā from 1931-1934 address differences between Muslims. Three deplore the practice of tahlil for dead bodies. Tahlil is the recitation of the phrase “la ilaaha illa ‘llah” [there is no god but God!], and is believed by some Muslims that repeated the phrase will cleanse a person’s failings (sins). Hassan argued that while the phrase itself was correct, the recitation of tahlil in the home of someone who had died, or in other group settings as ceremony was prohibited (haram) (Hassan 1992, 215-219). In the traditional community, when a member of the family died, the family would invite neighbors to a gathering in which they would recite verses of the Qur'an and repeat the remembrance prayer (dhikr). This would be done every night during the first week after the date of burial for about two hours, then again on the fortieth, one hundredth and one-thousandth day after the death. At the end of the gathering the guests would be given some rice or drinks (Chumaidy 1976, 123). Hassan argued against this practice on three grounds: that this prayer was not specified in the Qur’an or the Sunnah and therefore constituted an illegitimate innovation (bid’ah), that the feeding of guests was costly and constituted

30 Al Lisaan 1, 1935. 31 Al Lisaan, “Debat Taqlied,” 1935, 1-7. Pembela Islam, vol. 49, July 1932; vol. 11, 1932; vol. 44, March 1932; Al-Lisaan, vol. 24, April 1938; vol. 2, April 1956.

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charity (sadaqah) at a time when, according to the Sunna, the family should be provided with food by others, and that tahlil may constitute a form of mourning (niyāhah), which is condemned. Other traditionalist practices that Hassan condemned include doing the call to prayer (azan) to announce new births, following the precepts set by earlier jurists of Islamic law (taqlid), celebrating the prophet’s birthday (Maulid) or the ascent of Muhammad to heaven during the Night Journey to meet the other prophets and approach God (Mikraj), following the mystical sect Thariqat Naqsabandiyah, following an Ulama’s teaching’s instead of the Qur'an and Sunnah, ritual shaving of a baby’s head seven days after birth, giving a goat as a religious sacrifice (akekah), and raising hands when praying. Hassan also critiqued the Javanese practice of praying to saints as intermediaries to Allah (Hassan, Ma’sum and Aziz 1992, 325). In sum, Hassan’s edicts both reflected and exacerbated a deep cleavage between Persis and traditionalist Muslims. Equally deep were the divisions between Persis and non-Muslims. In the period 1931-1934, Hassan issued 17 fatāwā differentiating between Muslims and non-Muslims. In a fatwa regarding a question whether polytheists were filth,32 the questioner asked why is it permitted to marry female Jews and Christians? Hassan answered that while polytheists are filth, the meaning should be understood in terms of their convictions and attitudes, not their body. Jewish and Christian women are not filth (Hassan et al. 1992, 31-32). Under the heading “Marriage with Other Peoples,” Hassan delineated the rules for inter-faith marriage.33 Citing Qur’an chapter 5, he noted, “it is obvious to us that women from Jew or Christian are allowed to be married by us (Muslim males), even though they do not convert to Islam. ...On the other hand, the marriage between Non-Muslim males with Muslim women is not correct according to the Qur’an and none of the companions of the Prophet.” In a subsequent note, Hassan’s son Abdul Qadir Hassan supported the fatwa with reference to the sixtieth chapter of the Qur’an (Al Mumtahanah). Hassan uses the same argument in a similar edict stating that the Christian or Jewish wives of Muslim men do not need to convert to Islam (Hassan et al. 1992, 264). In regards to a question of whether it was permissible to reading the Qur’an in the house of Chinese people, Hassan argued that permissibility depends on the goal. If the reading is intended to bring them to Islam, and the listeners understand the content of the speech, then the recitation is very good. If, however, the recitation is meant to ask for blessings for the Chinese, then it is not permitted. The same is true for reading about the history of the Prophet, or if the reading does not have a certain purpose. Furthermore, praying for Chinese people who are non-Muslims, or standing by their graves, is not allowed unless the prayer is for them to convert to Islam (Hassan et al. 1992, 339-340). Hassan also worked to break down boundaries that were used to divide Muslims on the basis of geneology and royalty. In regard to a question about ethnicity, Hassan said, “We are Muslim people, united and with the same status because of the word of Alláh”. Hassan argued that those groups who claimed to be descendent of the prophet Muhammad (Sayyid) should be told that all Muslims are one family. Shiite Muslims and some Hadrami Arabs, including those of the Indonesian organization al-Irshad, claimed special status among Muslims due to their geological connection to the Prophet. Hassan argued that any groups who claim to be elevated because of being Arab should be told that Jews, too, are from the Arabs. Finally, Hassan criticized the Javanese royal families: those who claim to be from a royal family (Raden) should be told that there is only one king, Allah (Hassan et al. 1992, 383). Hassan’s distinctions between religions became particularly salient around Ramadan, when on a question about selling rice during Ramadan (the fasting month), he offered the cautious advice that,

Selling rice and other food in the days of Ramadan is not a mistake, if the food is intended for the six groups34 or to kafirs. However, if someone sells food to those other than the aforementioned

32 The reference is to verse 28 in the second chapter of the Qur’an, Al-Baqarah. 33 Interesting, the heading using the word “bangsa” which is used in contemporary parlance for “nation” in contemporary Indonesia. Here Hassan uses the term as part of a Muslim collective identity instead of the more obvious “agama” denoting non-Muslims as a “religion” (Federspiel 1995, 30). 34 Children, pregnant women, sick persons, travelers, women who are menstruating, and old persons who are weak are not obliged to fast (Hassan et al. 1992, 574-575).

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groups, he/ she is sinful because of helping others committing sins. Generally, we cannot blame people who sell food in the day of Ramadan, but we have to preserve the symbol of Islam, especially in places where the symbols of Islam is almost gone (Hassan et al. 1992, 574-575).

Persis recognized the diversity of the Muslim community as well as the existence of non-Muslims, and dealt with that difference by erecting boundaries between non-Muslims and Muslims. The description above shows that while Muhammadiyah had concerns about differentiating Christians and Muslims and appropriate practices within Islam, Persis’s concerns were more exacting and extensive. These fatāwā suggest that the high level of polarization in Bandung were then translated into the institution’s emphaisis within Islamic law. Nahdlatul Ulama: East Java The differences between East Java and Central/West Java during the awakening period could not have been starker. While Muhammadiyah and Persis battled Christian missionaries and a hostile colonial state, the ulama of East Java faced a very different challenge: Islamic reformers. Noer provides a instructive summary of the forces of polarization leading to NU’s creation, “The traditionalists in Java thus felt as if they had been attacked from two directions: in the cradle of Islam by a new regime that had come to power, imbued with ideas which they could not tolerate; at home by reformist ideas, which they considered to be similar to Wahhabism and which had gained substantial ground” (Noer 1978, 228). East Java was polarized along the traditionalist/modernist cleavage rather Muslim/Christian lines. This division shaped NU’s emphasis within the sacred texts, as will be shown in their jurisprudence, and in their long-term relations with other religious groups. The points of pressure were two-fold; in Java from modernist Muslims like Ahmed Dahlan, and abroad after the dissolution of Abdulmejid's caliphate by Turkey's National Assembly. Meanwhile, Christian missionaries in East Java were both inconsequential in their conversion efforts and respectful of the Muslims as demonstrated by patterns of community development and recognition. This respect stems in part from the development of the Christian community of East Java, who were distinctly Javanese and autonomous from the foreign missionaries. This is a sharp contrast to the Christians of Central Java, who were either unwilling or unable to break away from their colonial benefactors. This difference shaped how NU perceived the Christians. As noted above, the growth of Muhammadiyah was marked by confrontation with traditionalist Muslim leaders. The earliest known backlash by traditionalist leaders occurred before Muhammadiyah’s founding, when Dahlan tried to reorient prayer northwest toward Mecca and had his prayer house destroyed. In later years Muhammadiyah advocated other controversial reforms including preaching the Friday sermon in the local vernacular rather than Arabic and that astronomical calculation (hisāb) or seeing the moon with the naked eye (ru’ya) be used to decide when Islamic holidays occurred rather than the aboge system which merged the Javanese calendar with the Islamic calendar (Hisyam 2001, 170). Additional reforms included the rejection of sacrificial meals (selamatan), visits to the graves of saints (ziarah kubur), the recitation of the phrase “la ilaaha illa ‘llah” (there is no god but God) at life cycle ceremonies (tahlil), and the defense of independent interpretation of the Qur'an and sayings of the prophet (ijtihad). Traditionalists mounted a profound objection to these reforms. The August 24, 1922 Muhammadiyah meeting notes report that Kiyai Hadji Asnawi of Kudus, who later went onto form NU, lambasted Dahlan and Muhammadiyah in Kadjangan (East Java). He accused Dahlan of creating his own religious scripture (kitab), and said, “Dahlan considers himself God, when in fact after the hijrah [the flight of Muhammaed from Mecca to Medina in 622CE] there are no more mujahid.”35 Against Muhammadiyah’s belief that all persons should seek religious knowledge, Asnawi argued that the teaching of Islamic science anywhere is not obligatory, that only some persons are obliged to seek such knowledge. Kyai Asnawi forbid the name “Muhammadiyah” by any school in Kadjangan if indeed the school purported to be an Islamic one.36

35 Mujahid is a scholar who defines Islamic law for new situations. 36 “H.B. Vergedering 24/8 ’22 dirumah Presiden”, Muhammadiyah folder 28, AN.

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Alfian notes that traditionalists called Dahlan a “Christian Kiai” and accused Muhammadiyah of being made up of non-Muslims (orang kafir) (1989, 162-163). The first recorded public confrontation took place at the 1922 meeting of the Indies All Islam Congress (Kongres Al-Islam Hindia) between October 31st and November 2nd.37 The reformers—Muhammadiyah, Sarekat Islam and Ahmad Surkatti from Al-Irsjad—were denounced by Asnawi and Kyai Abdul Wahab of Surabaya as non-Muslim (kafir) and polytheists (musyrik). Asnawi and Wahab attacked Muhammadiyah’s teaching methodology, teaching materials, and their repudiation of texts other than the Qur'an and Hadiths (Noer 1978, 227). The divisions deepened at a special meeting of the Al-Islam congress in 24-26 December 1924 in Surabaya (East Java). The meeting was organized by the Central Caliphate Committee (Centraal Comité Chilafat), which was dominated by modernist organizations: R. Wondosoedirdjo (Sarekat Islam), A.M. Sangadji (Sarekat Islam), R. Simun (Sarekat Islam) Shaikh Usman Ba-Abud al-Amudi (Al-Irshad), Sayyid al-Aidarus al-Masjhur (editor of an Arab weekly), Haji Mas Mansur (Muhammadiyah), Shaikh Mansur Yamani, Saleh Surati (a British Indian merchant), six Javanese private persons and Haji Abdul Wahab Chasbullah, the single traditionalist and later chair of NU (van Bruinessen 1995, 9-10 fn 20). In the opening speech, Salim hailed Ibn Sa`ud’s conquest of Mecca and derided the Sharif Husain. “As was to become clearer during the following year, in his enthusiasm about Ibn Sa`ud, Salim sowed the seeds of discord in the Congress, for traditionalist Muslims saw many of their religious beliefs and practices under threat from Wahhabis ruling in Mecca” (van Bruinessen 1995, 10). The outcome of the meeting was the decision to send a delegation of Muslims to attend the Cairo conference that would attempt to resolve the future of the Caliphate. Muhammadiyah leader Haji Fakhruddin, Sarekat Islam leader Soerjopranoto, and Haji Abdul Wahab Chasbullah (the traditionalist), were elected to represent Indonesian Muslims. Before their departure, however, the fourth Al-Islam congress in August 1925 marked the climax of polarization between the modernists and traditionalists. Debates over the reform of economic, cultural and social life based on Islamic principles divided the traditionalists and reformists (van Bruinessen 1995, 11 fn 25). Salim again trumpeted support for Ibn Sa’ud despite traditionalist’s unease; after his victory, traditionalists received reports that Ibn Sa’ud destroyed tombs of holy graves and had prohibited the reading of a collection of prayers by the mystic Abū Ḥāmid Muhammad al-Ghazālī (the text Dalâ'il al-khairât) (Noer 1978, 223-224 fn. 26). Abdul Wahab proposed that the delegation visit Ibn Saud after the Cairo conference in order to appeal that the new king respect the erection of tombs, the reading of certain prayers, and the teaching of the classical schools of jurisprudence. His appeals fell on deaf ears (van Bruinessen 1995, 12; Noer 1978, 223). By January 1926 that polarization was institutionalized. The modernists decided to send Tjokroaminoto of Sarekat Islam and Kyai Haji Mas Mansur of Muhammadiyah to Mecca without any traditionalist representation. Abdul Wahab convened an alternative committee, the Committee for the Consultation about Hijaz Questions (Comite Merembuk Hidjaz), which was transformed into Jami’ah Nahdlatoel Oelama at a meeting in Surabaya on January 31, 1926 by H Abdul Wahab, K Asnawi, and K Bisri Sjansuri. Asnawi and Sjansuri were chosen to as the new delegates to Ibn Saud. NU’s goals reflected their station: to counteract the rise of the modernists in Java and Mecca, and remedy the exclusion of the traditionalists from the mission of the Hijaz. Counteracting the Muslim reformists is today a priority for NU. One of the most recent analyses of NU, Robin’s Bush’s 2009 book, Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power in Indonesia, is centered on the notion that NU’s behavior during the 1980s and 1990s was driven in large part by its relationship with the modernists (Bush 2009, 17).38

37 “Verslag oetoesan ke Cheribon perloe mengoendjoengi Al Islam congres,” Soewara Moehammadijah, 1922, vol. 3, 12, 1-29. 38 NU’s distaste for Salafis has proven useful for US foreign policy since 9/11. In tours of Europe and the US, NU leaders Ulil Absar Abdalla and Kiai Haji Mustofa Bisri have recycled polemics against Ibn Wahab and the Muslim Brotherhood which were originally developed in the 1920s.

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The first available primary source records of NU’s relations with Christians and modernist Muslims can be found in the Pego magazine Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, which began publishing in 1927/1346.39 The content from these first recorded years of NU, 1927/1346-1932/1351, covered a range of topics; music and abortion (Vol 5), discussion of prayers asking for rain (niat salat isisqa) (Vol. 6), Arabic grammar, discussion of taking and painting pictures (Vol 8), news from Turkey, Egypt and Mecca (Vol 9), faith matters (tawhid), and frequently concerned marriage. Just as often as articles about marriage, however, were articles about the modernists and the defense of practices under attack by the modernists. In Issue 1, number 5 of Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, the author responded to a fatwa by Ahmad Dahlan in his Risala Nihaya al-Zayn where he rejected ritual meals (selamatan) as un-Islamic. NU cited I’ana al-Thaibin, al Fatawa al-Kubra of Ibn Hajar in saying that gatherings at the 3rd, 7th and 40th days after the death of a family member were only detested (makruh) for the gathering. Moreover, since selamatan provided meals to the people, it would actually be praised as charity given to the poor (sedakah). Such an act of charity would be rewarded with benefit to both the donors and the deceased. Other articles defend the practice of following the practices of past jurists (taqlid). Issue 1 number 6 features an article saying that the religious deeds of common people (‘awam) were valid as along as they were in accordance with the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence.40 NU later used this same distinction between common people and religious leaders in reference to prayer.41 Issue 1 number 9 contained an extended polemic against Mustafa Kemal for neglecting Islam by: repudiating legal regulation based the hanafi school and replacing it with laws from Switzerland, changing inheritance regulations from one male receiving the amount of two females to equal portions for male and female, allowing the Muslim women to act as though they were European women and allowing Muslim men to marry a non-Muslim (kafir).42 NU’s defense of taqlid extended to attacks on those who sought to undertake ijtihad, particularly modernists including Mohammad Abduh, Rashid Ridha, and Muhammah Ibn al-Wahab. NU pejoratively referred to reformists as Wahabi:

NU sees that Muslims have religious knowledge such as the Qur’an, the Sunna, fiqh, etc. due to the merit of previous ulama from the period of the Companions through the period of the four Imams of fiqh schools up until the ulama who live today. And Muslims obey their fatāwā. As a result, any knowledge which is not based of the fatāwā of the aforementioned ulama is considered new model of knowledge; innovation or bidah [unwarranted newness]. And this is the [type of] knowledge of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab together with his “two thumbs,” namely Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Ridha as well as their colleagues; they consider ziyaratu al-qobr (visiting graveyard) haram. However, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him, his families and companions) made a devotional visit to Baqi’. In addition, other religious people such as Christians, Jews, and Majusi also conducted such deeds. There is only a [single] group that virulently hates visiting graveyards. The group is called the religion of Samin Ibn Sura Surantika. Therefore, NU regards that any people who consider visiting graveyard haram as the people who stray from the right path, and they adhere to Samin’s religion.43

NU’s linking of modernists to Samin is highly pejorative. Samin Surantika was a West Javanese leader of a syncretic sect called Elmu Nabi Adam which had some Islamic features but was primarily pre-Islamic and mystical (Federspiel 1995, 231). The article prompting NU’s polemic was by Muhammadiyah, who claimed that Muslims who visit graves as sacred places were renouncing their religion, “Muslim people who visit the grave of the dead as a sacred place will be categorized apostate (murtad). And in the time of Islamic organization growth, an organization’s leaders [Muhammadiyah] went around the places to

39 Pego is the Javanese language written in Arabic script. Translations of Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama by Nur Hidayat Wakhidudin. 40 “Min al-Faqir Tirtorejo,” Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1346, Issue 1, No. 6, 10. 41 “Al-Majlis al-Thalith” [The Third Committee], Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1347, Issue 2, Number 10, 199-200. 42 “Musthafa Kamal kaliyan agami Islam,” Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama 1346, Issue 1, No. 9, 17-18. 43 “Akhbar Mutanawwi’a,” Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1347, Issue 2, Number 4, 80.

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correct the lost Muslims, but then other people [NU] blocked and insulted them, and so these people are also categorized as apostates.”44 While the bulwark of NU’s early writing regarding relations between religious groups focused on modernists, NU was also aware of the growing non-Muslim community. Islamic magazines with international reach tied NU into events around the globe. Yet, unlike Muhammadiyah after 1925, the differences between Muslim and non-Muslim was marked by the circulation of information and the delineating of boundaries rather than by polemic. In response to a question about the wearing of perfume mixed with alcohol, NU delineated a clear boundary between appropriate behavior for Muslims and non-Muslims.

It has been widely known that perfume produced by unbeliever people (the Dutch people) is mixed with alcohol. However, if a Muslim does not know by himself the process of mixing, then the perfume is considered suci (sterile) and he/she is allowed to use it. If s/he sees directly... or the factory’s owner tells him/her that the perfume is mixed with alcohol, then the perfume is unclean (najis) and it must not be used for any purpose.”45

NU refrained from deriding the Dutch for wearing perfume or urging Muslims to avoid contact with a group that might lead Muslims to inappropriate behavior. This extended to matters of prayer and burial as well:

It is not mandatory (wajib) to Muslims to take care of the children of unbelievers, such as children of the Dutch and Chinese children, when they die, even if these children had good relation to Muslims’ children and even if they were familiar to such Islamic teachings as salat and reciting of the Qur’an. Moreover, it is even prohibited (haram) to perform prayer for the dead (salat mayit) for these children, since their “Islam” is considered null and void.46

Again, the distinction drawn was one of difference and separation, rather than derision. This boundary-demarcation extended to matters of language. As noted previously, Muhammadiyah relations with Christians were damaged by the missionary’s use of Javanese rather than Dutch and the translation of the Christian bible into Javanese. NU, meanwhile, was considerably more comfortable with non-Muslims and Muslims sharing languages.

Indonesian Muslims who speak Dutch language are not considered murtad (apostate) and speaking the Dutch language is not haram, since the Prophet Muhammad, for an instance, used to have discussion with Jews and Christians and he used some words and terms of these people. Moreover, the Prophet Musa (Moses) was sent to King Fir’aun [Pharaoh] and King Namrudz and he also used their language. Therefore, when a Muslim speaks unbelievers’ language, like the Dutch, it does not make him a part of them and it also does not mean that he is an unbeliever (kafir) like them.”47

In this case, the distinction was drawn between interaction and abandonment of one’s religion. Using the language of non-Muslims was acceptable as part of interaction. One of the most difficult tests for interfaith relations is in matters of conversion and politics. Yet here, too, NU displayed remarkable patience even for converts in positions of political power. “Whenever a Muslim converts into Christianity he then becomes an apostate and he should not take care of Muslims’ affairs. In addition, the Muslims people have the right to ask from the Governor General (waliyyu al-bilad al-a’zham) to replace such person with another person who is Muslim.48 NU made no calls for the convert to be punished, or killed, or exiled from the community. NU did not deride the convert as “below” Muslims as Muhammadiyah had done earlier. Rather, NU called for members of their own faith to represent them in government offices rather than Christians.

44 “Fatsal Berhoeboengan Hidoep Dengan Jang Mati”, Soeara Moehammadijah, 1927, vol. 8, 198-201. 45 “Surat soal saking Banyuwangi,” Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1347, Issue 2, Number 4, 70. 46 “Masalah tanah tilas masjid lan awlad al-kuffar” [Problems of land that used to be for a mosque and children of unbelievers], Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1347 AH, Issue 2, Number 10, 400-401. 47 “Al-I’lan—Wara-wara” [Notification], Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1348 AH, Issue 3, Number 9, 186. 48 “Khilqa al-As’ila wa Khilqa al-Ajwiba” [Questions and Answers], Swara Nahdhatoe’l ‘Oelama, 1348 AH, Issue 3, Number 11, 218.

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NU’s primary concern with Muslim modernists in Java and abroad continued in the late 1920s. In a letter to the King of Sa’udi Arabia, Ibn Saud, NU pleaded for tolerance of the mazhabs, visits to graves of ancestors, respect for past scholars like Imam Ghozali and Imam Sanusi, and recognition for the legitimacy of traditionalist practices.

We request the independence (freedom) in the Hijaz for the four mazhab: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali. The independence of the mazhab includes [freedom] for those faithful who pray in the great mosque in Mecca where the Kaaba sits (Masjid-Harom Jum'at). And we seek that those books based on the mazhab, whether concerning mysticism (tashawwuf), belief (ʼaqoid), or jurisprudence (fiqh) into the Hijaz such as the work of Hijaz Ghozali Imam, the Imam Sanusi and others who had known the truth should also not be prohibited. Our intention is only to strengthen communication and brotherhood among Muslims who follow the mazhab, so that Muslims become united as one body, so that in truth the ummat Muhammad does not go astray.49

The letter suggests that concerns regarding the protection of traditionalist practices remained of foremost concern to NU. No mention was made of Christians. Meanwhile the criticism of traditionalist practices continued. In the report, The Religion of Islam and the Muslim Community at the 1929 Muhammadiyah congress in Yogyakarta, Muhammadiyah reported, “Nahdlatul Ulama was established and their Congress organized... With eagerness they held their conference with many kinds of products, so they will perhaps not be old fashioned [kolot] or be blind anymore as they were in the past. Now it is the young leaders who are brave and clearing the way forward... It is possible that they [NU] may wind up being defenders of Muhammadiyah” (Muhammadiyah 1929, 53). Such polemics did little to quell the tensions between the emerging groups. The colonial government picked up on the tension as well. The government’s advisor for Islamic and indigenous affairs, E. Gobée, wrote to the resident of Kědiri, East Java in 1928 and mentioned the conflicts between teachers of mysticism (tarekat) and scripture (kitab). The tarekat gurus were followers of the Sufi brotherhoods, mystically inclined, and known as kiai. Tarekat leaders were closely associated with NU. The kitab teachers were more orientated to the Middle Eastern movements of Islamic reform and to the Qur’an and Sunna, like those teachers of Muhammadiyah. “In many areas conflict is prevalent between the tarekat gurus and the kitab gurus” (Ricklefs 2007, 69). In the coming years these cleavages crystallized. Leaders of NU debated with Persis leaders in 1932 in Tjileduk by H Abul Chair and H Abdul Wahab versus Ahmad Hassan, 27 December 193550, and 1936 in Gebang between Maqsudi and Hassan (Noer 1978, 90 fn.164). NU interactions with Christians, meanwhile, were radically different. Nahdlatul Ulama’s Interactions with Javanese Christians The Christians of Central and West Java were largely missionary colonialists, that is, they worked within the political and economic structures of the colonial government to promote their faith. Their funding came from abroad, their political alliances were to the Dutch, and their agenda worked in collaboration with the law and order (rust en orde) policies designed to pacify the growing nationalist and Islamic movements. They did so by planting the seeds of missions in the heart of Muslim communities and building schools and hospitals that catered to potential converts. In East Java, however, the Christians were missionaries but not colonialists. Their communities were built apart from the Muslim ones. Their practices were coterminous with local beliefs, rather than hostile to them. Sumartana captures this difference in his history of missionaries in Java: “In the beginning the formation of a Christian congregation in East Java did not involve the role of a mission body, as happened in Central Java. The rather conspicuous difference was that the growth of the Christian community in East Java came at the same time as the establishment of villages that were led by Javanese Christians. They built the Christian villages on their own initiative. Forests were cleared to make way for new villages, and newcomers flocked to these new havens seeking a better life” (Sumartana 1993, 117). The forests mentioned were cleared by followers of Coenraas Laurens Coolen (1773-1873), an Indonesian of mixed European descent 49 “Surat Delegasi NU Kepada Raja Sa’udi Arabia,” 5 Syawal 1346, NU Archive. 50 Cited as “Veslag Debat Taqlied,” Al-Lisan 1, 27 Dec 1935, 28-29.

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who established the first Christian village in East Java in 1827, Ngoro, near Mojoagung. Coolen’s father was Russian and his mother of Javanese nobility (van Akkeren 1969, 53). The land he settled in 1827 grew in size and population to 986 people in 1844 due to economic opportunities and success in cultivation. Coolen became, therefore, a landlord and preacher. He was also a dissenter from the colonial cultivation system. In 1942 he denied repeated requests by the assistant district commissioner of Modjokerto to make his tenants perform statute-labor, the cultivation of crops of the government as well as the construction of roads and infrastructure (van Akkeren 1969, 57). In his services, which Javanese villagers were obliged to attend every Sunday, Coolen mixed local culture with Christianity and Islam. After services, villagers gathered in front of Coolen’s house for music (gamelan) and theatre (wayang) performances. He created Christian expressions using wayang and used the stories to compare with those from the Christian bible. He even created a Christian version of the Muslim confession of faith (sahadat): “I believe that Allah is one. There is no God but Allah. Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Allah have power over everything. There is no God but Allah. Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Allah” (van Akkeran 1969, 66). And while Ngoro was established apart from the Muslim communities, it was not exclusively Christian. Coolen had an imam installed to ensure that the Muslims observed their rites while he was pastor to the Christians (van Akkeren 1969, 61). Coolen’s model of a Christian community in Ngoro spread to other areas. Mojowarno split off from Ngoro in 1840 and received funding from the government to build a storehouse in 1871 and a hospital to serve Christians in 1894. In another illustration of the difference between East and Central Java, the leading Dutch Orientalist and colonial advisor Snouck Hurgronje protested the funding of the Mojowarno hospital because, “the European administration abused its authority by supporting the Christian missionary activities though contributions that were taken from specific Muslim sources” (Steenbrink 2008, 715: citing Hurgronje 1959, 806-807). By 1880 there were 20 small rural Christian communities in East Java, and a total population of 13,000 by 1910 (Sumartana 1993, 124). In 1932 the first Synod of East Java Christian Church (GKJM, Geraja Kristen Jawi Wetan) was created, based in Mojowarno and made up of independent congregations. Christians arrived late to the cities of East Java: 1923 for Malang and 1930 for Surabaya. From 1808-1927 there were only a few priests in Surabaya and they concentrated on Europeans and Eurasians rather than on colonial missionary work. By 1926 there were only 100 Catholics in all of Surabaya. It is not surprising then that once the political awakening began, the Christians of East Java were marginal figures. In 1913 the nationalist group Sarekat Islam held a congress in Surabaya, and grew to become a powerful force in political and social life. The Javanese Christians formed a rival body in 1913, Mardi Pracoyo. Yet the organization amounted to little due to lack of support by the colonial authorities (Sumartana 1993, 130). To conclude, the social tensions of East Java were radically different from those of West and Central Java. The social polarization behind NU’s creation lay in Muslim reform in the Hijaz and its echoes on Java. Ibn Saud’s limitation on traditionalist practices, the growing presence of reformists, and the exclusion of traditionalists in the 1925 mission to the Hijaz sparked the creation of NU, while relations with Christians were either non-existent or collegial. As a result, NU fatāwā overwhelmingly focus on defending religious practices under attack by the reformists. Of the 28 fatāwā relating to boundaries, 23 (82%) address reformist concerns while only 8 (29%) address differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. NU defends a range of traditional practices: adhering to fatāwā of the Shafi school of jurisprudence, the importance of the classical schools, defending a mystical sect (Thariqat Tijaniyah), and attacking modernist behavior including the practice of referring only to Al-Qur’an and Hadith but ignoring the mazhab. In short, the social tensions present in East Java were manifest in the fatāwā of the subsequent period and shaped NU’s future perceptions about the relative threat of reformists and Christians. Ordered logit regression of tolerance toward Christians with regional and ethnic variables The above discussion makes clear than divergent modes of polarization shaped the policies of Islamic organizations in the 1930s. Institutional indicators from the contemporary period suggest that those

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policies endured over time. But what about elite attitudes? How important is regional origin for shaping contemporary attitudes of Muslim elites? How important is local ethnic identity? Based on the history of the regions, I expect elites from East Java to be consistently the most tolerant of Christians, Central Java the second, and West Java the least. I expect Javanese identity to be associated with tolerance as well. The survey data described in the appendix includes regional variables that can help assess whether policies developed in the 1930s affect contemporary attitudes. Table 1.4 demonstrates that region is a strong and reliable predictor of tolerance. Elites from East Java are the most tolerant of Christians, Central Java the second, and West Java the least. The scale of variation differs between questions with the most consensus on living arrangements and the greatest gap between regions on building churches. Table 1.4. Tolerance toward Christians by region

% Tolerate Christian in

same city Christians

demonstrating Christian mayor in Jakarta

Church in Jakarta

Christian teaching

East Java (n = 182) 83% 89% 48% 49% 95% Central Java (n=131) 79% 80% 45% 30% 92% West Java (n = 293) 70% 79% 25% 24% 80% Since Jakarta is located in West Java, are the differences a product of elites not wanting Christians in their backyard, rather than their general intolerance to Christians?51 If this is the case, then questions about Christians in other areas should not feature the same gap. Yet as table 1.5 demonstrates, this relationship is also present for questions about Aceh and Manado, as well as for Christians living next door. The only question departing from this pattern is Christians living in the same village. Elites from West Java are still the most intolerant (54% tolerate) but East and Central Java are switched, with East Java the second most tolerant (69%) followed by Central Java (73%). This is consistent with interviews in East Java where respondents stated that tolerance is maintained in part by village autonomy. “It is no problem to live in the same city as them [Christians or Muhammadiyah] because that is an area that is mixed. But the village is homogenous and so more difficult. Like in my village, it would be hard for them to move there because the people are all NU.”52 Table 1.5. Tolerance toward Christians beyond Java

% Tolerate Mayor in Aceh

Church in Aceh

Mayor in Manado

Church in Manado

Christian neighbor

Christian in same village

East Java (n=182) 23% 24% 77% 67% 84% 69% Central Java (n=131) 16% 18% 74% 67% 84% 73% West Java (n=293) 9% 11% 60% 46% 74% 54% To assess whether local ethnic identity predicts levels of tolerance toward Christians, I used an open-ended question on the survey where respondents self-identified their local ethnic group (suku). Based on the above discussion, Javanese should be more tolerant toward Christians than Sundanese. The results confirm my expectations. Table 3.6 describes individual indicators of tolerance by Javanese and Sundanese, with the former consistently more tolerant. Table 1.6. Tolerance toward Christians by Javanese and Sundanese

% Tolerate Live in the same city

Mayor of Jakarta

New church in Jakarta

Teach math in a school

Demonstrate against gas prices

Javanese (n=263) 83% 51% 51% 96% 88% 51 Thanks to Shahirah Mahmood for pushing me on this question. 52 Drs. K. H. Syamsul Maarif (Ketua PCNU Bangil), interview by the author, Bangil, July 29, 2010.

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Sundanese (n=185) 72% 20% 22% 79% 81% In order to control for other factors that might explain the varying levels of tolerance, I created three ordered logit regression models with an outcome variable based on an aggregate of three questions: respondent’s willingness to allow Christians to undertake a demonstration against gas prices, hold political office in Jakarta, and live in their city. Key independent variables include region and ethnicity. I expect that West Java will be strongly associated with intolerance and Central Java either neutral or slightly intolerant. East Java is the reference group. I expect Javanese identity to be associated with tolerance and Sundanese identity correlated with either neutral or intolerant. Control variables are derived from the literature on tolerance and include feeling threatened by Christians, Indonesian identity, age group, income, and frequency of contact with non-Muslims. Based on the above discussion I also included a control variable for rural residence (in contrast to urban residence), which I expect to be associated with intolerance. Based on the central role that Hassan played in creating the Persis curriculum and his public polemics with Christians, I expect Persis education to be associated with intolerance. Muhammadiyah education should reflect its mixed experience and be associated with slight intolerance. Like East Java, NU education is the reference group. The first model includes all the controls, while the second and third models contain fewer controls. Results are reported in table 1.7.

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Table 1.7. Three logit models of tolerance toward Christians with regional and ethnic variables (1) (2) (3) West Java -0.359** -0.385** -0.564*** (0.181) (0.181) (0.174) Central Java -0.0649 -0.0638 -0.0755 (0.189) (0.189) (0.187) Javanese 0.549*** 0.529*** 0.611*** (0.151) (0.151) (0.149) Sundanese 0.241 0.251 0.165 (0.193) (0.193) (0.191) Threatened by Christians -1.562*** -1.574*** -1.620*** (0.168) (0.168) (0.167) Frequent contact with non-Muslims 0.314** 0.274** 0.217 (0.141) (0.139) (0.135) No contact with non-Muslims -0.541** -0.635*** -0.745*** (0.229) (0.224) (0.221) Age: Under 40 0.595*** 0.638*** 0.539*** (0.206) (0.205) (0.203) Age: 40-50 0.310** 0.332** 0.328** (0.155) (0.154) (0.153) Age 60+ -0.474** -0.464** -0.490*** (0.191) (0.191) (0.189) Indonesian identity 0.791*** 0.806*** (0.217) (0.217) Persis education -0.577*** -0.637*** (0.193) (0.191) Muhammadiyah education 0.0947 0.0511 (0.189) (0.188) Rural resident -0.289** (0.147) N 907 907 907 Standard errors in parentheses * p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01 The results confirm my expectations. West Java is strongly associated with intolerance in all three models. Central Java has a negative relationship with tolerance but the relationship is not statistically significant. Javanese ethnicity is strongly related to tolerance in all three models, while Sundanese ethnicity is not associated with either tolerance or intolerance. As the historical material suggests, Persis, born in West Java, is strongly intolerant while Muhammadiyah’s intolerance seems to be ameliorated by their predominantly Javanese membership. As the literature on tolerance suggests, threat is a strong and consistent predictor of intolerance, frequent contact with non-Muslims is associated with tolerance, while never or rarely having contact with non-Muslims is associated with intolerance. Old age is negatively associated with tolerance, Indonesian identity with tolerance, and rural residence with intolerance. As expected, Persis education is associated with intolerance, and Muhammadiyah education is positively associated with tolerance but not statistically significant. Conclusion This paper traced the origins of Islamic institution’s relations with Christians and other Muslims to social polarization that developed in the late nationalist period. In the three regions of Java, differing

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types of colonial, missionary, and modernist Muslim activity led to varying social cleavages. In other words, local political and historical context is crucial for explaining the emergence of intolerance in Islamic organizations. Theological, ideological explanations, and pure demographic explanations are poor predictors of policies toward non-Muslims. This finding also has implications for Islamic organizations outside of Indonesia. An unexplained puzzle in studies of Islamist movements is why the chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, Egypt and Palestine differ in terms their relations with non-Muslims, other political parties, and with the state despite their common roots in the ideas of Hassan al-Banna. On one end, Hamas is in the midst of a civil war with the Palestinian Fatah, has a virulently anti-Jewish charter, and since winning election in 2006, has used the office to route out potential competitors. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, is gearing up to take part in democratic elections and has partnered with secular and liberal political parties repeatedly in the past thirty years. The Jordanian is somewhere in between, entirely passive in military terms but not particularly supportive of democracy.

What explains the different behavior of the MB branches? As in Indonesia, theology is poor guides to policies. The local context, however, is clearly salient. Hamas was born in 1987 in the midst of bloodshed, and has maintained their militancy ever since (Mishal and Sela 2006). The Egyptian’s MB has also had more militant periods, such as under Sayyid Qutb, but since the early 1970s has returned to their roots in dawa and tarbiyya (Rutherford 2006). The Jordan MB, meanwhile, has maintained a cooperative relation with the state and other social movements sine their founding (Wiktorowicz 2001). Even in an age of globalization, this paper suggests that Islamic institutions form their policies toward non-Muslims on the basis of local politics and past interactions more than national or international factors. The move to local politics for scholars of religion is long overdue; studies of comparative political violence have already moved to the local level with strong results (Kalyvas 2006; King 2004; Straus 2006; Wood 2006) and some of the most influential work on religion is being done by political anthropologists based on theoretically informed ethnographies (Asad 1993, 2003; Hirshkind 2001; Mahmood 2005). As research on religion moves into its new, post-Huntington phase, scholars have a great deal to gain by studying local politics. Bibliography Abdulah, T. 1971. “Schools and Politics: The Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra (1927-1933).” Akkeren, Philip van. 1969. Sri and Christ: A Study of the Indigenous Church in East Java. London:

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University Press. Appendix: Survey Protocol In March, July, and September 2010, I collected survey data from a stratified random sample of cabang (branch) leaders from Persis, NU and Muhammadiyah. The cabang are the leaders of the institutions on the ground. They elect the leaders, implement the programs, raise funding, shape relations with political parties, and govern interfaith/intrafaith relations at the local and national level. The sample includes 1000 observations (n), representing a total population (N) of 6550 leaders; there are 2300 Muhammadiyah cabang leaders, 3500 for NU, and 750 for Persis. The population also roughly maps onto the size of the organizations. NU is the largest with approximately 40—60 million members and makes up 53% of the survey population, Muhammadiyah is second with approximately 30 million members and 35% of the survey population. Persis is considerably smaller with only 500,000 thousand members. The survey population includes 11% from Persis in order to represent the broader population of Islamists who are active in other organizations like Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah in addition to Persis. The sample includes 387 Muhammadiyah leaders, 379 from NU and 234 from Persis. Their responses are weighted in order to reflect the survey population of cabang leaders. In other words, NU leader’s responses are weighted up and Persis’s weighted down in order to better reflect the population. The response rate is 96.6% using the AAPOR definition of answering 80% or more of the questions. The sample is not completely random in that only leaders who attended the 2010 meetings (muktamar) of their respective institutions were surveyed. These meetings take place every five years and are attended by upwards of 10,000 elites from all over the country. The meetings took place within a 6-month period from March-September 2010 and the lag time between meetings should not have biased the results in any theoretically relevant way. At the meetings, exact respondents were selected randomly by approaching every third person walking in a central area of the meeting. The NU meeting was in Makassar, the Muhammadiyah meeting in Yogayakarta and the Persis meeting in Tasikmalaya. The primary goal in the survey is to describe the attitudes toward individuals of other faiths. The questions were based on other surveys measuring levels of tolerance, particularly Gibson 1992, 2006 although specifying the five target groups rather than using the least-liked method. The major concern shaping the survey instrument was avoiding three types of response bias based on social desirability (DeMaio 1984; Grice 1975). The first type of bias is the desire to appear tolerant to the researcher. Maintaining the appearance of tolerance in Indonesia is a longstanding priority for the state. In order to minimize this concern, the survey used four techniques: assurances of anonymity and scientific importance, the use of self-administered forms with sealable envelopes that provided more privacy than phone or face-to-face interviews, professional, non-native administrators, and statements that sanctioned less desirable responses (de Vaus 1998, 110; Singleton and Straights 2005, 270-273). The assurance of anonymity and scientific importance were read to each interviewee and printed on a letter attached to the survey. The survey was self-administered and upon completion, sealed in an envelope. The statements that sanctioned

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less desirable responses were written above each set of questions. The second bias is the desire to appear consistent with organizational policy. Non-Indonesian survey administrators were used to avoid the perception that administrators were members of the organization triggering a response that “sounds like our policy.” The administrators were professionally dressed since professional clothing and background characteristics are known to invoke the authority of a scientific research study (Cialdini 1984; Dillman 2008, 248). The third type of possible bias is the pressure to not oppose government policy (different from supporting it). The state has historically controlled the activities of religious groups by banning certain groups, proscribing the tenets of the organization’s ideology, and by co-opting the leadership into the state’s patronage networks. In interviews, elites have been particularly reluctant to oppose the state’s policy allowing minority religious groups to build a house of worship anywhere with a significant minority community. As with the first type of bias, this was addressed using statements sanctioning less desirable responses. The final concern shaping the survey instrument was redundancy that could lead respondents to engage in satisficing. Since the survey used questions developed in previous research on tolerance as well as new questions, respondents could perceive some questions to be repetitive. To address this concern, questions were ordered from the most general to the most specific with a break between sections (Tourangeau 1999, 113-115). Questions #1-6 were the most general, followed by a breaking based on questions on identity and the activity of non-Muslim groups, then the questionnaire returned to tolerance of political protest, education, representation, and other issues. All respondents were given a small incentive (a keychain carabineer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison) to encourage them to take the survey seriously.