See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314449091 Religious Competition and Conflict over the long purée: Christianity and Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago Article · February 2017 CITATIONS READS 3 571 1 author: R. Michael Feener Kyoto University 97 PUBLICATIONS 697 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Maldives Heritage Survey View project Sumatra History View project All content following this page was uploaded by R. Michael Feener on 10 March 2017. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Asian Journal of Religion and Society Vol 5 (No.1, 2017):1-22 (c) Korean Association for the Sociology of Religion Religious competition and conflict over the longue durée: Christianity and Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago R. Michael Feener*1) Abstract This paper examines dynamics of competition between Muslim and Christian communities in the Indonesian Archipelago over the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. This period covers the initial intrusion of Christian missionary and European imperial interests into a maritime world that had become increasingly dominated by Muslim networks over the later medieval period. Looking at these changing cross-confessional interactions over a distended period of time facilitates some deeper perspective on the social, cultural, and political effects of inter-communal religious competition. This, I argue, can in turn help us to move beyond some of the potential analytic pitfalls that are increasingly recognized as compromising the utility of the kind of religious market and choice theories that have largely shaped studies of competition and innovation in the sociology of religion. Keywords: Indonesia, Islam, Christianity, History, Religious Competition The particular examples that I will explore here all come from the history of Islam in the Indonesian Archipelago and the interactions of * He is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. Address correspondence to Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies), Marston Road, Oxford OX3 0EE, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] - 1 - Asian Journal of Religion and Society Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) Muslim communities there with diverse forms of Christianity. Today, the Republic of Indonesia is home to the world’s largest national population of Muslims, with approximately 87% of its 238 million people professing Islam. Adherents of Catholicism and Protestant Christianity combine to account for another ten percent of the population (Badan Pusat Statistik 2010). The national ideology of Pancasila in the Indonesian constitution informs a model of state-managed religious pluralism, wherein no single ‘official religion’ is defined but adherence to one or another from a list of officially recognized religious traditions is mandatory. Contemporary issues of religious identity and competition in the field of proselytization are both framed within, and enabled by, the contours of particular governmental and administrative regulations on religion. In the case of Indonesia, the Pancasila model of state-managed religious pluralism thus makes proselytization possible in the first place. At the same time, however, when heightened religious competition comes to be perceived as a threat to social order, then the state has tended to respond by taking new action to ensure the continuation of established (and/or desired) models of religion in society, restricting both choice and change in religious identities.1) Within this framework, relations between religious groups have shifted along multiple vectors over the 70 years since independence. During the past decade, however, inter-communal tensions have generally been on the rise, as a recent Pew Research Center (2016) study ranks Indonesia as one of the highest in terms of both “government restrictions” on religion, as well as in terms of “social hostilities.” These developments challenge many contemporary observers. Consideration of some longer historical trajectories of relations between Muslims and Christians can, however, contribute useful perspectives for the understanding and interpretation of current dynamics of religious competition in the country. In the early centuries following the rise of Islam in Arabia, Muslim merchant seafarers were sailing eastward in search of the rare and lucrative commodities of Asia, across the Indian Ocean and thence to the profitable ports of the South China Sea. Some of them even made it thence as far north as the Korean peninsula as the ninth century Muslim author Ibn Kurdadhbih described Silla as a country of great wealth and such congenial conditions that the few Muslims who found - 2 - Religious competition and conflict over the longue duree their way there tended to settle down abandon any thoughts of ever leaving (Chung and Hourani 1938: 658-661). While the impact of such medieval Muslim sojourners ultimately had very little historical impact over the longue durée in Korea, things turned out very differently in the Asian islands of the southern seas. By the tenth century, Chinese court chronicles record the arrival of delegations of individuals with markedly Muslim names arriving from the Southeast Asian ports of Sumatra, Champa, Brunei and Java, as well as southern India and “the Arab lands” (Wade 2010). Muslim merchant communities in coastal entrepot scattered across Southeast Asia not only helped to transform the structures of local states, but also served as nodes of networks that expanded to eventually facilitate the conversion of indigenous populations from the interiors to Islam. The first Muslim sultanate in the archipelago was established at Pasai (on the northern coast of Sumatra), by end of the thirteenth century (Feener 2011). In its wake a number of other ports along the same trade routes redefined themselves as Muslim polities. The most prominent of these was Malacca, just opposite the Straits on the Malay peninsula. Malacca quickly became a dominant hub of trade in the region, and shortly after establishing special tributary-trade relationship with China in 1414 the second king of Malacca officially converted to Islam (Wake 1983). This new sultanate at a strategic position between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea attracted traders from all across the expanding maritime Muslim world of the tame, making it one of the world’s most prosperous port polities of the sixteenth century. A century after its founding, it’s merchant community included: Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa ..., Hormuz, Parsees ... Turks, Christian Armenians, Gujaratees, men of ... the kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from ... Ceylon, Bengal, Siam, Malay, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, men of Brunei, Timor, Java, Palembang, [and] the Maldives (Cortesão 1944). The wealth that was commanded there, and across an expanding network of Southeast Asian sultanates attracted not only a diverse range - 3 - Asian Journal of Religion and Society Vol 5 (No.1, 2017) of Asian and Muslim merchants but also a new kind of mariner in the sixteenth century. This description of the multi-ethnic, and predominantly Muslim, population was in fact recorded by one of them: Tomé Pires, a Portuguese traveler who composed an extensive account of the riches to be had, and the trading conditions in, Asia. The arrival of the Portuguese (and their Iberian rivals, the Spanish) into the waters of the Indonesian archipelago in the sixteenth century introduced new dynamics of inter-religious competition. Portuguese ships had found their way to the shores of Southeast Asia, propelled not only by the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, but also by a complex combination of sentiments that included a desire to dominate the lucrative luxury trade of Asia, and to carry forward the Christian crusade for the ‘reconquest’ of the Iberian Peninsula and the expulsion of its Muslim (and Jewish) populations. Recognizing the key role of Malacca as the most prosperous entrepôt of the Straits, the Portuguese attacked and took the city in 1511, hoping thence to wrest control of the regional spice trade from its established Muslim networks and re-direct it toward Europe for great profit. Perhaps predictably, however, many Muslim merchants left the city after it was taken by the Portuguese, and redirected the commerce that they conducted to other ports across the archipelago. This impetus for a de-centralized Muslim merchant diaspora contributed to the rise of a number of new sultanates in the region including the new port polities of the north Java coast, which became beachheads for the gradual conversion to Islam of that island’s large inland populations over the centuries that followed. An expanding number of new Muslim states came to take on a strong stance of opposition to further Portuguese Christian expansion in the archipelago. This has been read by some historians as one of a ‘race’ between Islam and Christianity that fueled the expansion of both religions across the region in the early modern era (Schrieke 1957: 309). Anthony Reid has characterized the period between 1550-1650 as “a remarkable period of conversion” to both Christianity and Islam in Southeast Asia in which the arrival of the Iberians fueled competition by fostering the emergence of “a new political character to religious identity” (Reid 1993: 151-179). In this