8 - CONCLUSION: Findings and Theoretical Reflection

Summary

This study has found that the Islamists’ discourses and counter-discourses on democracy in post-New Order Indonesia are as wide-ranging as Islamism itself. With regard to democracy, Indonesian Islamism falls into two identifiable streams of thought. The first stream is represented by groups that operate outside the formal political system. These groups reject democracy and do not participate in formal party politics, but are politically active, if only informally. This utopian variant of Islamism, as this study has named it, is represented by the Islamists of HTI and MMI. At a rhetorical level, their reason for not immersing themselves in the political party system has to do with the struggle to maintain the purity of their faith in fulfilling the holy duty of “commanding good and forbidding wrong”. At a practical level, however, their attitude has a lot to do with strategic choices. Having recognized their failure to Islamize the state as manifested in the abortive attempts to incorporate the Jakarta Charter (Piagam Jakarta) and Islamic Shari‘ah law into the state Constitution (UUD 1945), both Islamist groups from this end of the spectrum have shifted their strategies from the state to society as the main target of their political struggles. The second stream comprises a group that operates within the formal political party system and who formally accept procedural democracy in order to participate in it. This meliorist variant, as this study identifies it, is mainly represented by the Islamists of PKS.

On the surface, the differing strategies adopted by the two streams of Islamism might reflect internal cleavages among Indonesian Islamists. The differences between these groups are, however, largely superficial, because at a deeper level even the Islamists of PKS have failed to genuinely reconcile democracy and Islam. Although they have successfully reconciled democracy and Islam in an electoral sense by participating in general elections, the extent to which they subscribe to democracy in a more substantive sense remains questionable. It is doubtful that PKS activists would advocate democratic values such as civic liberties — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality, and the like. Rather, it seems as if tolerance and pluralism are the only two democratic values that PKS activists uphold, but even those values are mainly adhered to externally and not internally.