ABSTRACT
This final chapter brings together the analyses from the previous historical chapters to explain why and how an electoral democracy that institutionalized Islam and limited or denied certain rights, especially religious freedom, was the political outcome through the liberalization process. The chapter demonstrates that the prior transformations of Islam as a modern institutional and discursive political religion existed as path-dependent parameters within which liberalization took place, constraining the depth or level of democratization. Through a review of some key moments in the broader public sphere since around 2004, and an extensive analysis of 68 key debates of the Constituent Assembly between 2005 and 2008, the chapter shows how exactly the prior discursive and institutional transformations of Islam constrained the debates related to religion and intensified controversy over religion’s place in the polity, leading to a Janus-faced political outcome. In other words, more than any specific shari‘a precepts and recent Islamism or Salafism, the chapter shows it is the modern forms of political Islam that emerged as part of modern nation building by political actors with Islamic modernist orientations, which were more decisive in the final constitutional outcome, including crucially on the question of religious freedom.
