boarding schools (pesantren) sprang

boarding schools (pesantren) sprang up in cities and towns
across the country. In a few places, the militants got into pitched street
fights with Christians, democracy activists, and the local police. Several
dozen Islamic boarding schools also initiated campaigns to dispatch
mujahidin fighters from Java and Sumatra to the eastern Indonesian
provinces of Maluku and north Maluku, where, from 1999 to 2003,
almost ten thousand people died in fierce Christian-Muslim violence.3
56 ROBERT W. HEFNER
Concerns about the political disposition of the country’s Islamic
schools were further heightened with the 2002 bombings of a beachfront
pub in south Bali, in which more than two hundred people
perished, most of them Western tourists. The youths eventually convicted
of the attack were members of the terrorist Jemaah Islamiyah
and were discovered to have ties to an Islamic boarding school in
Lamongan, East Java. Several of that school’s administrators were, in
turn, found to be former students of Abu Bakar Ba‘asyir, the director
of the al-Mukmin boarding school in south-central Java, and a man
widely regarded as having been the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah
(JI). In October 2005, suicide bombers with ties to the JI launched
three bomb attacks on tourist sites in south Bali, killing twenty-five
people, most of them Indonesians.
Some Western observers saw these incidents as proof that at
least some among Indonesia’s Islamic schools had become training
camps for al-Qa‘ida militants intent on opening a “second front”
against Western interests.4 It was not just Western analysts, however,
who harbored these concerns. A few days after the second Bali
bombing, the Indonesian vice president, Jusuf Kalla, blamed the attack
on individuals from an Islamic boarding school, which he declined to
identify by name. The vice president emphasized that the government
understood that the great majority of Islamic schools have nothing to
do with terrorism. Nonetheless, he insisted, it was obliged to carry out
heightened surveillance of the few schools inclined toward “irresponsible”
behavior. A few days later, Kalla startled Muslim educators further
by his announcement that the government planned to fingerprint all
boarding school students (santri). Kalla’s declaration was greeted with
a storm of protest as well as a terse disclaimer from the national chief
of police, who made it clear that his department had no intention of
fingerprinting santri.5
The chief’s opposition to fingerprinting notwithstanding, in the
weeks following the second Bali bombing, police blanketed neighborhoods
and towns across Indonesia with banners calling for citizens to
report any activity that might be linked to terrorism. Those weeks also
witnessed a dramatic increase in Muslim scholars’ condemnation of
terrorist acts, statements interpreted by many observers as part of a
campaign to support the government’s efforts. The period also saw the
publication of books by prominent Muslim scholars emphasizing that
Schools, Social Movements & Democracy in Indonesia 57
a terrorist network exists in Indonesia and is a threat to Muslims and
Muslim schooling. Prior to this time, government officials and Muslim
leaders had hesitated to make such statements for fear of sounding
as if they were aligning themselves with the United States, whose
military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were widely unpopular.6
As my research visits in December 2005, July–August 2006, and
December 2006 revealed, these efforts to isolate violent elements in
the Muslim community reverberated in even the most isolated Islamic
schools. Educators protested that their schools were being wrongly
singled out for blame. They reminded the public of the courageous role
that Islamic schools had played in Indonesia’s independence struggle;
the large number of pesantren- and madrasa-educated politicians active
in multireligious parties; and the pluralist commitments demonstrated
by Muslim students and teachers in the democracy struggles of the
1990s. Notwithstanding these protestations, the violent acts of a few
cast a shadow over the Islamic school system, raising questions, not
just about schools and politics, but about the place of Islamic education
in Indonesian society as a whole.
In this chapter, I want to step back from these events and examine
several trends in Indonesia’s Islamic schools. The schools with which I
am primarily concerned include the country’s 11,000 Islamic boarding
schools (pesantrens) and its 36,000 modern Islamic day schools (madrasas).
The madrasa wing of the network educates some 5.7 million
students or 13 percent of Indonesia’s primary and secondary school
student body. The pesantren wing educates an additional 2.9 million
students, most after they have completed primary or middle school. In
an earlier publication written with Azyumardi Azra and Dina Afrianty
from the Hidaytatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, I provided
an overview of the development of Islamic education in this, the largest
Muslim-majority country in the world.7 That essay also discussed the
transformative role played by Islamic higher education in Indonesia’s
Muslim schools, so here I will touch only in passing on that segment of
the Islamic school system. The present chapter aims to go beyond the
earlier essay and address the question of how one of the most forwardlooking
Islamic educational systems in the world has also given rise
to a small but militant fringe. More generally, the chapter asks what
developments in the Islamic educational system imply for Indonesia’s
continuing transition from thirty-two years of authoritarian rule.
58 ROBERT W. HEFNER
I begin this chapter, then, with a brief overview of the variety
of Islamic schools in Indonesia. This section also addresses the question
of how it came to be that, unlike their counterparts in so many
Muslim nations, the majority of Islamic schools volunteered to open
their curricula to general or “secular” education in addition to religious
study. The chapter then turns to examine the recent appearance
of a new breed of Islamic schools of a “social-movement” nature. By
social-movement schools, I refer to educational institutions that aim,
not merely to impart knowledge and values to children, but to use the
networks and perceptual frames that religious education provides to
challenge the existing organization of state and society. As I explain,
with its appeal for a deeper Islamization of self and society, Islamic
education in Indonesia has long displayed some of the characteristics
that political sociologists identify with social movements. However,
it was only in the 1980s and 1990s that a significant number of
schools began to interpret this mission in an activist and nationally
organized way. A minority among a minority, only a tiny proportion
of the movement schools have in turn interpreted their activist mission
in a politically radical manner. However, the dedication and
militancy of these few schools have allowed them to exercise an
influence on Muslim politics—if not education—disproportionate
to their numbers in Indonesian society.
Meanwhile, as I discuss in the final section of this chapter, the
mainstream educational landscape has been swept by a development
that dwarfs the activities of the radical fringe. It is the fact that the
overwhelming majority of Muslim educators have concluded that constitutional
democracy is compatible with Islam, and is the best form
of government for Indonesia. This is a great transformation of Islamic
educational culture indeed. But the change has proved complicated.
Even as they say they subscribe to democratic values, most educators
also opine that divine law (shari‘a) should serve as the basis of the state.
As the concluding section of this chapter explains, the coexistence
of democratic and shari‘a-minded commitments in Muslim
educational circles is not as paradoxical as it first appears, since most
educators have an ethically abstract and procedurally gradualist understanding
of just how the law should be implemented. Nonetheless,
the interplay of democratic and shari‘a idealisms continues to
raise questions and generate tensions. My conclusion suggests that
Schools, Social Movements & Democracy in Indonesia 59
the primary question with which mainstream Muslim educators will
grapple in years to come is not radicalization, but how to balance the
ideals of democracy with the ethical imperatives of God’s law.
Varietie s of Islamic Educ ation
For the better part of a century, Islamic education in Indonesia
has had three primary institutional channels: (1) pengajian Qur’an,
basic instruction in learning to read and recite but not literally understand
the Qur’an; (2) study at a pesantren or pondok, an Islamic
boarding school for students aspiring to intermediate or advanced
facility in Islamic traditions of knowledge; and (3) enrollment in
a madrasa, a (in Indonesia) modern day school that uses graded
classes, textbooks, and salaried instructors to provide a mix of religious
and general education.
As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, pengajian Qur’an is the oldest
and most elementary form of Islamic schooling, and for most students
it remains the foundation on which their religious education is
built today. Often only lightly institutionalized, Qur’anic study usually
takes place, not in a freestanding school building, but in village
mosques, prayer houses (langgar, musholla), and the private homes
of community religious teachers. Classes are usually held in the late
afternoon or evening, at a time when young children of six to eleven
years of age are not otherwise busy attending a regular school. As this
staggered schedule suggests, Qur’anic study is not a substitute for
general education but a complement to it. This was not always the
case. In the nineteenth century, when only a few children of native
aristocrats and employees of Dutch estates were provided with a formal
education,