Mapping Indonesian Muslims Today

Yesterday, three Indonesian Muslim students and I were invited to participate in a class discussion about islam in Indonesia. Dr. Jim, who's giving a lecture on Islam in Southeast Asia in the class, told me that the goal of the discussion is to improve the students' understanding of islam and to break down cultural stereotypes.

One of the students asked about the differences between traditionalist and modernist Muslim, more specifically between NU and Muhammadiyah.

That's an interesting question, yet it's not an easy one to answer today. Thirty or fourty years ago, it could be easy to explain the difference between traditionalis and modernist Muslim in Indonesia.

At that time, we might say that the traditionalist is those who do not wish to adopt modernity, including studying at formal schools, and those who strongly depend on the authority of ulama in their daily lives (more particularly in the religious matters). These characters were commonly attached to the members of Nahdlatul Ulama, which was recognised as a traditional organization.

On the contrary, we would probably say that modernist Muslim is those who are members of Muhammadiyah, which adopt modernity and do not strongly depend on the authority of ulama in the religious matters.

However, the factual conditions of today's members of NU and Muhamamdiyah do not necessarily illustrate such differences. Both Muhammadiyah and NU have adopted modernity. They build modern schools and hospitals, and develop modern structure of organization.

We may even find it difficult to distinguish between members of NU and Muhamamdiyah in the way they are performing praying. Just take Tarawih praying, which used to be one of the standards to differentiate who members of NU and who are not, as an example. Today, we can see some NU members in many urban areas prefer to perform 8 raka'at of tarawih, instead of 20. As a matter of fact, it's usually done by members of Muhammadiyah.

To me, it's not quite relevant any longer to map Muslim groups in Indonesia in terms of traditionalist and modernist. It would be more relevant to do so in terms of fundamentalist, conservative, moderate, and liberal. Such a mapping is likely more represent a current discourse of Islam in Indonesia.

I understand that it is one question to define what fundamentalist, conservative, moderate and liberal are. But if we are going to capture a current picture of today's Indonesian Muslim society, than this would be much more relevant than if we use terminologies such as modernist and traditionlist to map Muslim communities in Indonesia.