The politics of contending piety: Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Movement and the struggle for Islamic activism in contemporary Indonesia

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.