Global and Local in Indonesian Islam (<Special Issue>Islam in Southeast Asia)

Abstract

One important aspect of globalisation is the process of Islamisation of Indonesia. For many centuries this process consisted of a constant stream of ideas and practices from Mecca to Indonesia. Hajis and Arab traders were the carriers of this cultural flow, which was largely one-directional. Cultural practices originating from the Middle East were integrated into local custom and belief. Such well-known cultural and political oppositions as santri and abangan or shari'a and adat did not so much represent Islam versus non-Islam as disjunctions in the process of globalisation and Islamisation. In the course of the twentieth century, the pattern of Islamising influences changed; they no longer flow to the periphery from a single centre at Mecca but emanate from numerous different sources. Their impact has been differential too. Explicitly anticosmopolitan ideas (anti-Semitism) have been adopted and been spread by groups that are internationally oriented and reject all that smells of local adaptations. It has been the most cosmopolitan of Indonesian Muslims, on the other hand, such as the so-called pembaharuan ('renewal') group, who have insisted most clearly on the legitimacy of specifically Indonesian forms of Islam.