Living with God differently: An ethnography of middle-class lay-Muslims in Jakarta in the 2010s

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that modernisation and democratisation have created favourable conditions for the rise of conservative Islam in contemporary Indonesia. As young Muslims increasingly turn to Islamic piety, some find their way to conservative clerics and traditions. For a period of 18-months, I lived among ordinary lay-Muslims to study the different ways they related to Islam as a meaningful part of their lives, and how they made sense of ongoing religious changes in Jakarta's middle-class modernity. Among my interlocutors, there was a divide between those who identified Islam as important but often failed to meet what they understood as its rules, and those whose pious commitment seemingly led them to identify with conservative strands of Islam, engage with boundary making that exclude non-Muslims and Muslims they deemed impious, and advocating for Islamist political causes.

In time, I realised that I initially misinterpreted signs of impiety among some interlocutors and in fact was beholding a different way of living with the divine. Similarly, I initially thought the Islamist beliefs and activism I observed among some interlocutors came from their adherence to conservative Islamic traditions, but it turned out to be rooted in their unique view of what their pious pursuit entails. Thus, the divide that I discerned between my interlocutors reflects more than just different levels of commitment to piety, conflicting understandings of doctrines, or identification with different clerics or traditions. Rather, it stems from fundamental divergences in how they chose to live with God - a decision they made, and continue to make, based on the circumstances of their lives. Such differences, along with the dynamism and creativity characteristic of their religious lives, were obscured and complicated by powerful ideas about Islam, Muslim subjectivity, and religion's place in modernity that my interlocutors and I inadvertently reproduced in our discussions.

By attending to my interlocutors' "religiosity in motion" in the context of living their lives, I aim to shed light on how their religiosity works, where their religious ideas and practices came from and what they meant to them, and how they came to locate each other on opposing sides of a bitter religious and political divide. I argue that although my interlocutors seemed to see themselves as submissive subjects to a scripturalist and legalist conception of Islam, they related to it primarily as autonomous individuals who were largely free to interpret and practice it as they wished. My thesis draws on and contributes to studies of religion and politics in anthropology and Indonesian studies. By shifting the emphasis from organised Islam and politics to the lives of ordinary lay-Muslims, I situate my study as a part of the literature which seeks to complicate the picture of the Islamic Revival and rising Islamic conservatism as an all-encompassing and ever-present force. Show more