ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the monopolization of violence by the state. Violence has often been discussed as the motive or consequence of a religiously-coded repertoire of words and deeds, rhetoric and ritual merging, then unfolding in myriad ways into the lived experience of religious actors. Anthony Giddens has written the most challenging book on the interface of the nation state and violence. The chapter argues that few Muslim nation states have inspired conflicting estimates of what Islamic identity or Islamic loyalty might mean as does Indonesia. Most political histories stress that the shift from Sukarno to Suharto introduced a major fault-line into modern, post-independence Indonesia. The most significant action, however, was the attempt to reconstruct Indonesian history in the aftermath of the Tanjung Priok incident. Government censorship monitors all print and television reports within the archipelago, and subtly it may also shape the image of Indonesian Islamic dissidents that is projected abroad.
