RSSTout Entries Atenn Avèk: "Endonezi"

zealous democrats : ISLAMISM AND DEMOCRACY IN EGYPT, INDONESIA AND TURKEY

Anthony Bubalo
Greg Fealy
Whit Mason

The fear of Islamists coming to power through elections has long been an obstacle to democratisation in authoritarian states of the Muslim world. Islamists have been, and continue to be, the best organised and most credible opposition movements in many of these countries.

They are also commonly, if not always correctly, assumed to be in the best position to capitalise on any democratic opening of their political systems. At the same time, the commitment of Islamists to democracy is often questioned. Vreman vre, when it comes to democracy, Islamism’s intellectual heritage and historical record (in terms of the few examples of Islamist-led states, such as Sudan and Iran) have not been reassuring. The apparent strength of Islamist movements, combined with suspicions about Islamism’s democratic compatibility, has been used by authoritarian governments as an argument to defl ect both domestic and international calls for political reform and democratisation.

Domestically, secular liberals have preferred to settle for nominally secular dictatorships over potentially religious ones. Internationally, Western governments have preferred friendly autocrats to democratically elected, but potentially hostile, Islamist-led governments.

The goal of this paper is to re-examine some of the assumptions about the risks of democratisation in authoritarian countries of the Muslim world (and not just in the Middle East) where strong Islamist movements or parties exist.

INDONESIA’S ELECTIONS

Bernhard Platzdasch

AS INDONESIA gears up for its elections next April, making sense of developments can be a challenge.
Take, for example, the latest election forecasts. In a recent opinion poll, the Indonesian Survey Institute named President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s DemocratsParty (PD) as the leading contender with an approval rating of 16.8 per cent. The party was followed by Vice-President Jusuf Kalla’s Golkar Party with 15.9 per cent and Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democratic Party-Struggle (PDI-P) with 14.2 per cent. But several surveys had earlier this year put PDI-P and
Golkar first and second, with PD taking third or fourth place. Another noteworthy difference in the latest survey is the meagre 4.9 per cent for the Islamist Justice and Welfare Party (PKS). Earlier surveys put the PKSshare a few points higher and the party has even claimed that it can achieve some 20 per cent of the total vote.
Without forgetting that the forecasts have limited credibility due to the large number of undecided voters, what conclusions can be drawn from the varying results of these surveys?
Premye, it is almost certain that no party will secure an outright victory, thus paving the way for yet anotherand again potentially brittlecoalition government. With no party gaining an absolute majority, contenders for the presidential elections in July
will need the endorsement of other parties. As for Dr Yudhoyono, he and Golkar will probably continue their partnership. But Ms Megawati has already made it clear that she is not willing to serve as vice-president. This means a coalition made up of Golkar
and the PDI-P is unlikely.

BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

ANTHONY BUBALO

GREG FEALY

Against the background of the ‘war on terror’,many people have come to view Islamism as amonolithic ideological movement spreading from thecenter of the Muslim world, the Middle East, toMuslim countries around the globe. To borrow aphrase from Abdullah Azzam, the legendary jihadistwho fought to expel the Soviet Union fromAfghanistan in the 1980s, many today see all Islamistsas fellow travellers in a global fundamentalist caravan.This paper evaluates the truth of that perception. Itdoes so by examining the spread of two broad categoriesof Islamic thinking and activism — the morepolitically focused Islamism and more religiouslyfocused ‘neo-fundamentalism’ — from the MiddleEast to Indonesia, a country often cited as an exampleof a formerly peaceful Muslim community radicalizedby external influences.Islamism is a term familiar to many.Most commonly itis used to categorize ideas and forms of activism thatconceive of Islam as a political ideology. Jodi a, a widerange of groups are classified as Islamist, from theEgyptian Muslim Brotherhood to al-qa‘ida.While sucha categorization remains appropriate in many cases,Islamism seems less useful as a label for those groupsthat do not see Islam as a political ideology and largelyeschew political activism — even if their activism sometimeshas political implications. Included in this categoryare groups concerned primarily with Islamic mission-IV Be t w e e n t h e G l o b a l a n d t h e L o c a l : Islamis, the Mi d d l e E a s t , a n d Indonesiaary activity, but it would also include a group such asal-qa‘ida whose acts of terrorism are arguably drivenless by concrete political objectives than religious inspiration,albeit of a misguided form. This paper thereforeuses the term ‘neo-fundamentalist’, developed by theFrench scholar Olivier Roy, to describe these groups andwill study the transmission of both Islamist and neofundamentalistideas to Indonesia.

Pwogresis Islamik panse, sosyete sivil la ak mouvman Gulen nan kontèks nasyonal la

Greg Barton

Fethullah Gulen (born 1941), or Hodjaeffendi as he is known affectionately by hundreds of thousands of people in his native Turkey and abroad, is one of the most significant Islamic thinkers and activists to have emerged in the twentieth century. His optimistic and forward-looking thought, with its emphasis on self development of both heart and mind through education, of engaging proactively and positively with the modern world and of reaching out in dialogue and a spirit of cooperation between religious communities, social strata and nations can be read as a contemporary reformulation of the teachings of Jalaluddin Rumi, Yunus Emre, and other classic Sufi teachers (Michel, 2005a, 2005b; Saritoprak, 2003; 2005a; 2005b; Unal and Williams, 2005). Plis espesyalman, Gulen can be seen to be carrying on where Said Nursi (1876-1960), another great Anatolian Islamic intellectual, left off: chartinga way for Muslim activists in Turkey and beyond to effectively contribute to the development of modern society that avoids the pitfalls and compromises of party-political activism and replaces the narrowness of Islamist thought with a genuinely inclusive and humanitarian understanding of religion’s role in the modern world (Abu-Rabi, 1995; Markham and Ozdemir, 2005; Vahide, 2005, Yavuz, 2005a).