The politics of contending piety: Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Movement and the struggle for Islamic activism in contemporary Indonesia
Date
2015
Authors
Makhasin, Luthfi
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Abstract
This thesis is about Islamic piety movement in contemporary
Indonesia focusing on Naqshbandi-Haqqani (NH), a
transnational Sufi movement with origins in the Middle East
and a large following in the USA and Western Europe. It spread to
Indonesia in the late 1990s and, since then, has attracted
thousands of followers throughout the country. Although certainly
not the largest, it is one of the most active Islamic groups
propagating the Sufi message to the public. Its steady
growth in the last 15 years reveals some important
features of contemporary religious life in Indonesia. By
employing social movement theories, this study attempts to
illuminate the intricate relationship between piety and Islamic
activism in contemporary Indonesia. This thesis reveals that
Sufism still has a strong power to shape the nature of
Muslim piety and influence public morality in Indonesia. The
struggle for Islam is not targeting wide-ranging social reforms
or the secular state, but it is primarily
about the transformation of everyday life and
small-scale changes affecting religious beliefs
and rituals of individual Muslims. In a democratic context,
this transformation contributes to the creation of a cosmopolitan
pietism that potentially promotes a ‘civil Islam’ that is
neither secular nor Islamist in nature. This study also
demonstrates that cosmopolitan pietism is not a given
condition because it is dependent on various external factors.
Indonesian Muslims have been and will likely remain
fragmented along different pious orientations. Sufism
contributes to the growth
of authoritarian pietism characterised by religious and political
conservatism. This conservatism has uncompromising attitude
toward secular virtues and unambiguous political stance over the
political establishment.
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Keywords
Sufism, Naqshbandi-Haqqani, Islam, Activism, Indonesia
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Thesis (PhD)
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DOI
10.25911/5d778875bde1f