ABSTRACT
Indonesia’s governments have been adept at using the bureaucratic and legal mechanisms of state to assert control over the interpretation of Islam, the religion of at least 80% of the population. They have done this by close management of the administration of Islamic legal traditions, interpreting them to suit their wider political aims, creating what amounts to a kind of state madhhab, or school of law. This chapter offers two case studies to show how the state, though the courts, has responded to the challenges presented by conservative Islam in the two decades since Suharto resigned in 1998: judicial interpretation of the law on freedom of religion and decision making in Indonesia’s Islamic courts. It argues that strategies for and against Islamization in Indonesia are most often expressed in terms of state regulation of Islamic legal traditions, that is, firmly within the framework of the state.
