Transnational religious movement

Globalization and the communications revolution have allowed vastly increased flows of ideas and people across the Islamic world, generating new social forms. As is well known, these include transnational social movements and organizations originating in the Middle East and now stretching across the globe, as far as East and Southeast Asia. Indonesia, as the country with the largest Muslim majority, has attracted Islamic activists from other parts of the world. What is little known is that some of the most active transnational Islamic movements in Indonesia in recent years originate from Turkey. Unlike Islamic revival movements of Arab and Persian origins, which since the 1970s have been predominantly fundamentalist, the newcomer Turkish-origin movements take a different approach to Islamic revival. They are more ‘moderate’ than many of the movements from the Middle East and are proving to be easily accepted in Southeast Asia, not only by Muslim communities there but by the governments of the region.

This chapter introduces one of the lesser known of the major Turkish Muslim transnational piety renewal movements that have recently reached Indonesia through Germany and Australia: the Süleymanlı. This case study of the Süleymanlı in Indonesia provides an example of how a Turkish Muslim transnational organization comes to project itself into a new cultural environment (a non-Turkish diaspora context) and adapts to that new context. It will argue that transnational religious movement patterns have changed over the time as a result of globalization. The home country still plays a significant role in the establishment of the religious diaspora, although the host country has more significance in the development of the community. This chapter will explore how transnational and global religious groups have ‘glocalized’ themselves to not only adjust to the local situation but also gain support not only from local society but also from the host-country government by utilizing the ‘opportunity space.’ For the Süleymanlı, free Islamic boarding school has been the opportunity space which has allowed them to step into the most populous Muslim country and establish their branches. In the later development, the Süleymanlı also adopted the local Islamic education terminology ‘pesantren,’ which has allowed them to gain important support as well as acknowledgement from the Indonesian authority. As a result, it has boosted the development of the movement in the country.

This chapter builds on ethnographic research in Indonesia—with additional data collection in the Turkish community centers in Turkey, Germany, and Australia. This was originally conducted for my PhD project in Western Sydney University. This chapter shows how the transnational religious movement spread outside its home country to the Turkish diaspora communities in Germany and Australia, but then shifted patterns to spread the movement into the non-Turkish diaspora in Indonesia. This research will shed light on a new pattern of religious transnationalism.