ABSTRACT
On 17 August 1945, the nationalist politicians Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in a brief ceremony in the front yard of Sukarno’s private home in Jakarta (Anderson 1990: 99). Feith (1962: 27) called this new republic a ‘pluralist society’, a ‘mosaic society’ and a ‘multi-group society’. One can easily agree with him. First, a sharp division existed between the pribumi (indigenous) and the Chinese, Arabs, Eurasians and Europeans. Second, the pribumi segment was itself divided into around 366 self-conscious ethnic groups, the largest of which were the Javanese, Sundanese, Malay, Minangkabau, Batak, Buginese, Madurese and Balinese (Feith 1962: 28; Dahm 1971: 143). Third, a high degree of religious conflict which began as early as the 1940s when Muslim leaders drew up a draft preamble to the constitution according to which the state would be based on belief in God with ‘the obligation to carry out the laws of Islam (syariah) for the adherents of Islam’. This draft, also known as Piagam Jakarta (the Jakarta Charter), was refused by secularists and non-Muslims. For radical Islamic groups, the failure to enact the draft became a painful reminder of the Muslim’s defeat (Emmerson 1976: 57; Vatikiotis 1993: 121; Schwarz 1994: 12-14). Fourth, the Muslims (particularly in Java) were divided into a group of abangan (nominal Muslims) who share syncretic beliefs combining animism, Islam and Hinduism and santri (devout Muslims), namely those who execute all the basic rituals of Islam – the prayers, the Fast, the Pilgrimage and the whole complex of Islamic social and charitable activities; and another group called priyayi (the aristocracy), that is, those who share neither the animistic beliefs as do the abangan, nor the Islamic doctrine as do the santri, but embrace Javanese mysticism (Geertz 1960: 4-6). There was also a division between traditionalist (represented by an organisation called Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)) and modernist groups (represented by Masyumi and Muhammadiyah) (Samson 1978: 198-9; Nakamura 1983: 103). While traditionalists insisted on the domestication of Islam and Arabic into the local (Javanese) culture, the modernists asserted that the Koran means what it says, just that and only that, and that Arabic is the language of truth and rationality and must be directly understood as it is (Anderson 1990: 127-9).
