ABSTRACT

In the last few years, gated communities at the peri-urban fringes of Jakarta have become increasingly popular. Families tend to move from the kampongs, informal settlements (kampung), to formal housing complexes (perumahan, often gated). They are getting increasingly popular among middle-class Indonesians. Targeting pious Muslim families, some developers label their gated communities as ‘Muslim housing complexes’, perumahan Muslim. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in such Muslim gated communities, this chapter deploys the concept of religious gentrification to explore how the developers and residents justify religion and class, to pursue a ‘Modern Islamic lifestyle’; as well as how pious middle-class Muslims make use of religious idioms to claim space and right in the outskirts of Jakarta.