1 Revised edition Paper presented at South-South Symposium on ‘Constitutional Design for Diversity and Conflict in Asia’ International IDEA and NAM CSSTC Four Seasons Hotel, Jakarta, Indonesia 12-15 October 2009 CONSTITUTIONAL AGENCY AND THE TRANSMISSION OF FAITH : The Indonesian Experience Azyumardi Azra* Indonesia is neither an Islamic state, nor is Islam the official religion of the state. However, given the fact that the vast majority of Indonesian population is Muslim, one could love to assume that the Indonesian 1945 Constitution gives only a limited room for diversity, particularly in religion - Islam could be perceived as having hegemony on the state. In contrast, the Constitution that is in effect today - despite four amendments in the post Soeharto period - recognizes the importance of all religion - not only Islam - as well as diversity of the faiths. This can be seen for instance in the Preamble of the 1945 Constitution, which in the very first paragraph states that the independence of Indonesia is a blessing of God Almighty. The Indonesian people had struggled to gain freedom during the Dutch and Japanese colonial periods, but it is only in the aftermath of World War Two, after a series of bloody wars for independence, that Indonesia, with the blessing of God Almighty finally achieved its long-fought independence. 2 This paper is an attempt to discuss the politics of constitutional recognition of religious diversity in the Indonesian context. The paper will also discuss political processes that influenced the Constitution in the course of Indonesian history, as well the constitutional agencies responsible for formulating and amending the Constitution. Finally, this paper will discuss some consequences of the constitutional arrangements of religious life in the country. Diversity within Unity Indonesia is perhaps one of the most pluralistic societies in many aspects of life. There is a great deal of differences when it comes to ethnicity, language, socio-culture, and religion. The Indonesian archipelago - the largest one in the world, which consists of more than 17,800 island, isles, and islets - and various ethnic groups make Indonesia an extremely pluralistic society. Many of these ethnic groups have their distinctive socio- cultural tradition that enriches Indonesia life. It is important to mention that many of ethnic groups have a body of customary laws ( adat laws) that become one of the sources of national law. Therefore, the customary laws to a certain degree have their place in the Indonesian legal system. But of course not all the customary laws are compatible with the basic principles and spirit of the national laws. That is why, as a rule, there should be some changes and adjustment of customary laws in order for them to be adopted in certain national laws and regulation. The existence of adat laws is a part and parcel of Indonesian diversity. Recognizing ethnic diversity of the nation, since the time of independence, the Indonesian state officially adopts the principle of ‘ bhinneka tunggal ika ’, meaning ‘diversity within unity’—a multi-cultural principle. Soekarno, the 3 first President of Indonesia was one of the most important proponents of this multi-cultural principle. Even though he always appealed for the unity of the young nation-state of Indonesia, at the same time he emphasized the importance of bhinneka tunggal ika that recognizes differences among the Indonesian people. However, various efforts were made by President Soeharto’s regime in the late 1980s to 1990s to impose a kind of mono-cultural policy to no avail. He tried to make the Javanese culture the basic paradigm in the political and cultural development on the country. With the fall of President Soeharto in May 1998, the principle of bhinneka tunggal ika has been revived as one of very important principles in the life of the Indonesian people. Religious Diversity In the context of religious diversity, it is important to give some ideas on the composition of the Indonesian population in terms of religious following. According to some latest estimates, 88.2 percent of the 235 million Indonesians are Muslim; 5.87 Protestant; 3.05 percent Catholics; 1.81 percent Hindu; 0.84 percent Buddhist; and the remaining 0.20 percent are of other religions and animists. It must also be kept in mind that none of these religions is monolithic; in the case of Islam, Protestanism and Hinduism, for instance, there is a variety of schools of thought or denominations that lead to some different understanding and practices of Islam among the believers; even worse, the differences sometimes lead to conflict and even violence among the faithful. In the last two decades, religious diversity has been gaining momentum with the improvement in transportation, migration and 4 information. New forms of religion and spiritual tendencies are introduced from within and without, challenging mainstream and established religions. Therefore, some of these new tendencies are regarded by the mainstream as being splinter religious groups that would lead the faithful astray. In this context, it is not unusual that mainstream leadership of particular religions put a lot of pressure on the government to ban ‘religious splinter groups’ it considers as having gone astray. Despite those kinds of cases, recognition of religious diversity is order of the day; peaceful co-existence, mutual respect and tolerance have been practiced by the Indonesian people for centuries. This long history of Indonesian religious diversity is mainly due to the fact that Indonesia has long been a country where practically all great world religions meet, find followings and develop in peaceful co-existence. Even though in certain course of history—not only in the past, but even also today—there were rivalries and conflict among the faithful in the efforts to gain more following of each religion. Therefore, this religious diversity needs to be constitutionally, politically and socially arranged, in order to maintain and strengthen healthy and harmonious intra- and inter-religious relations. The earliest world major religion that came to the Indonesian archipelago was Hinduism. According to some archeological evidence, Hinduism was introduced around second and third centuries CE. In the period between eighth and fifteenth centuries, Hindu kingdoms appeared in Java, namely the old Mataram, Singasari and followed by the Majapahit - one of the greatest kingdoms in the history of the archipelago. Around the same period, particularly in the seventh to fourteenth centuries, Buddhism also found fertile grounds in the archipelago, and led to the rise of the 5 Srivijaya kingdom in South Sumatra, another great kingdom in the archipelago. The influence of the two religions in the archipelago can be observed to this day in the forms of the great Buddhist Borobudur temple and Hindu Prambanan temples in Central Java. Existing in the sea of Muslims who form the single largest majority of the population, these historical monuments symbolize religious tolerance in today’s Indonesia. Hinduism and Buddhism were soon followed by the coming of two other major world religions—Islam and Christianity. The early history of the spread of Islam and Christianity in the archipelago had also been largely peaceful, though bitter contests and struggles took place in certain areas such as the Straits of Melaka in the West and the Maluku islands in the East of the archipelago. Conversion to and consolidation of Islam and Christianity which took place in much of the period of the twelfth to seventeenth centuries produced clear boundaries among the adherents of these religions (Reid 1993; Azra 2000b). It is important to point out that although most of the population of archipelago converted to Islam, the region remains one of the least Islamized areas throughout the Muslim world. This has a lot to do with the nature of the spread of Islam in the archipelago which was mainly peaceful; there was a lot of accommodation and acculturation between Islam on the one hand and local beliefs and practices on the other. Wandering preachers of Islam introduced Islam to local populations in a very compromising and accommodative way; what was important for them was that local people pronounced the two pronouncements of Islamic faith, e.g. belief in God (Allah) and in Muhammad as the prophet of God. This nature of the 6 propagation of Islam in the end contributes to some distinctive features of Indonesian Islam that have some mixture with local beliefs and practices. Geographically the archipelago is also one of the farthest Muslim areas from the Arabian Peninsula, or more precisely Mecca and Medina where Islam was originally revealed and developed. Therefore, Islam in the archipelago was sometime regarded by some outsiders as “marginal” or “peripheral” Islam, as “impure” or “syncretic” Islam. As a result, Islam in the archipelago was regarded as having little to do with Islamic orthodoxy attributed to Islam in Arabia, or the region which is known today as the Middle East. The most important proponent of this perception is the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Having a great reluctance to recognize the deep influence of Islam in the Java in particular, he called his work “religion of Java” (1960) rather than, for instance, “religion of Islam in Java”. In this seminal work, he proposed that there are three variants of Islam in Java particularly and, by extension, in the archipelago generally. The three variants were; priyayi (aristocrat Muslims), santri (strict and practicing Muslims), and abangan (nominal or ID card Muslims). According to Geertz, the priyayi variant was heavily influenced by Indic-Sanskrit culture, whereas the abangan variant was too indigenous, syncretic, and even animistic. Therefore, in his judgment, it is only the santri variant, with its heavy orientation to Middle Eastern Islam, is the real Islam; and members of this variant are numerically few amongst the population.