Introduction

Like many other women her age, Juliah Indah, an urban girl studying at Al-Azhar University in Jakarta, is active on Instagram (a social media platform). Yet, unlike many others, she is a “micro-celebrity” with 95,100 followers online. I first met her when she took an internship at the Research Center for Regional Resources at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (PSDR-LIPI) as part of the mandatory requirements for her study in International Relations in October 2017. She introduced me to a young Islamic preacher, Ustadz Hanan Attaki, whom she and many of her friends were fans, and who is also known by his acronym UHA. For her, most Islamic preachers tend to deliver Islamic sermons and doctrine in a patronizing manner by expecting their followers to agree with them. She also regards their messages as missing many essential points. Juliah, however, regards UHA differently. In only a matter of one minute, he can make her understand the essence of his lectures uploaded to his Instagram. UHA's sermons leave a strong imprint in her memory. She can clearly recall his words, which at times bring her to tears. She often listens to the sermons while driving in Jakarta. For Juliah, he is the coolest ustadz (Interview, 4 October 2017).

The Islamic preaching scene in Indonesia has evolved significantly. Decades ago, there was a preacher by the name of Zainuddin MZ, who held the title of a preacher for One Million Ummah (Dai Sejuta Umat) through the circulation of his cassettes, and that he signed a contract with Virgo Record during Suharto regime. He transformed Islamic preaching from the traditional way into a pop culture and reached out to a mass audience (Zainuddin 1997). Following this, the change of the television landscape from having only one state channel to a few private television stations at the beginning of the 1990s opened up opportunities for Islamic televangelists (Muzakki 2012; Rakhmani 2016). Furthermore, unlike the one-directional media of television and radio, social media has changed the pattern and form of communication. Social media is highly fluid and multi-directional. Social media, which has a democratic and egalitarian character, is able to access information on specific events in real-time and is faster in transmission than both radio and television broadcasts.

Introduction

In 2017, the Jakarta Governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), was sentenced to two years in prison with a blasphemy charge against Islam. Ahok has become an “easy” target by conservative Muslim groups because he is a Christian of Chinese descent. On the Jakarta gubernatorial campaign trail in 2016, Ahok cited the Quran saying that Muslims should not be duped by religious leaders using the verse to justify the claim that Muslims should not be led by non- Muslims. When this incident was known to the public, conservative Islamic groups held rallies against Ahok several times pushing for a blasphemy charge on him. These anti-Ahok rallies have attracted about 500,000 Muslims although moderate Islamic organizations like Nahdlatul Ulama (The Rise of Islamic Scholars) and Muhammadiyah (The Followers of Muhammad) dissuaded their members from joining the rallies. His blasphemy charge affected an election outcome by favouring his opponent. Some scholars argue that the influence of conservative Islamic movements on the Jakarta gubernatorial election in 2017 signals an illiberal turn in Indonesian politics (Jones 2017; Hadiz 2017). Other scholars argue that Islam and identity politics have been aggressively politicized. The commonality behind these claims is that the influence of conservative Islamic movements on politics encourages politicians to utilize religious cards to win in elections as the voices of conservative Islamic movements are becoming stronger.

This chapter aims to analyse how conservative movements shape policies in contemporary Indonesia. While Indonesia is home to longexisting, mass-based, and moderate Muslim organizations like NU and Muhammadiyah, many new Islamic organizations have emerged since Indonesia's democratization in 1998. Conservative Islamic movements are pushing for the Islamization of Indonesian society by supporting laws and regulations that are in line with their interpretations of Quran and Hadith. The term conservative is defined as “the rejection of a progressive re-interpretation of Islamic teachings and it refers to an adherence to established doctrines and a social order” (van Bruinessen 2015). Conservatives also object to the modern established authority. For example, although democratization provided opportunities for these movements to emerge, they tend to be critical of or are in opposition to democratization and liberalization.Equally importantly, conservative movements are in competition with institutionalized and moderate Islamic movements in terms of Islamic authority as well as political and social influence, resulting in a diverse and fragmented Islamic civil society.

Over the last decades, Indonesia has seen the growing impact of Saudi transnational proselytization and religious funding. Owing to the generous support by Saudi Arabia, dakwah activities focusing on promoting Salafism proliferated, and this is followed by the establishment of Salafi-oriented foundations and madrasahs in Indonesia. During the shifting political stance in the 1990s, the Salafis succeeded in establishing an exclusivist version of Islamic activism in Indonesia within the religious authorities. Due to the intensified Salafi campaign, Indonesian Muslims have been increasingly susceptible to the influences of rigid purification of faith that hardly accepts the diversity of religious expression and culture. This new type of Islamic activism also posed a challenge not only to existing religious authority but also to the legitimacy of established Muslim organizations.

The Saudi campaign impacted schools and university education through the production of Salafi-inspired literature. Translated works by ‘Aid al-Qarni, Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, and Muhammad Salih al-Uthaimin are among the favourite references taught in Islamic schools and colleges. Salafi-oriented publishers are concerned with the production of such literatures, and they work shoulder-to-shoulder with Salafi preachers who have completed their studies in Salafi centres of learning in the Middle East. The Salafis believe that their main mission is to purify Muslim beliefs and practices and to educate them based on “correct” interpretations of the Quran and Sunnah, in accordance with the example set by the pious forefathers (Salaf al-Salih). The first is called tasfiyya (purification) and the second tarbiyya (education).

This chapter explores the practices of knowledge production, religious authority and education among the Salafi circles in Indonesia, and how they have exerted their influence beyond their own circles. More specifically, I will be looking at how doctrinal competition and ideological conflict are reflected in the discourse and literature produced by Salafi authorities. I will also be examining the role played by Salafi preachers and authorities, both in producing literature and in contextualizing and appropriating Salafi messages into the education system. Before tackling these issues, the historical background of Salafism in Indonesia will be examined.

The Efflorescence of Salafism

The efflorescence of Salafism in Indonesia—evident by the growing number of young Muslim men wearing jalabiyya (Arab-style flowing robes) and women wearing niqab (a form of enveloping black veil) in public places—might not be isolated from Saudi Arabia's politics of expanding their geopolitical influence throughout the Muslim world.

As a variant of populist politics, Islamic populism is a response to disillusionment and grievance with the ruling elites that is made distinctive by the use of Islamic rhetoric. Such rhetoric can unite different and contradictory interests within the Muslim community, and forge cross-class alliances—even if such alliances are tenuous in nature (Hadiz 2016; Hadiz and Chryssogelos 2017; Robison and Hadiz 2020). In Indonesia, the phenomenon of Islamic populism found its most dramatic expression during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election when hundreds of thousands of Muslims staged a series of mass rallies known as the Defence of Islam movement (Aksi Bela Islam) against incumbent Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok, who was accused of blaspheming Islam. This movement not only helped defeat Ahok electorally, but it was also instrumental in ensuring Ahok was charged with blasphemy and subsequently jailed, thereby paving the way for the use of Islamic populist narratives in a number of other political contests, including the 2019 presidential election.

Some studies on Indonesian Islamic populism employ actor-centred analysis focusing on the style of populist actors and their effect on democratic quality (Aspinall and Warburton 2018; Lindsey 2017; Mietzner 2018; Power 2018). Others utilise cultural-oriented analysis, explaining Islamic populist mobilisation as a result of increasing intolerance (Arifianto 2019; Assyaukanie 2017; Nuraniyah 2018). While both forms of analyses contribute to understanding facets of the Islamic populist phenomenon, they overlook the structural conditions linked to the broader prevalence of illiberal politics and to the kinds of social bases that make possible the rise of populist politics in the first place. According to Robison and Hadiz (2020), varieties of populist politics, including Islamic populism, ‘must be understood in the context of widespread failure of governments and elites to deal with larger structural crises that threaten their societies and with the disruption of old class or patronage-based politics by the rise of new cross class alliances’. Without attention to these sorts of structural forces, analyses tend to lead to over-anxiety about Islamist threats. Such analyses have also led to the view employed by the Indonesian government to justify its own form of reactionary populist politics. In this chapter I develop three main arguments on the basis of such observations.

There is a growing consensus among scholars that Indonesia's democracy is in decline, although, in fairness, many new and established democracies around the world are suffering the same fate. I am not going to challenge the consensus. Democracy in Indonesia is indeed declining.

The Australian National University appropriately picked democracy as the main theme for its Indonesia Update conference in September 2019. Since Indonesia had just held a general election in April, it was important to reflect on how far the country had come in its march to democracy these past two decades. These were the fifth democratic, free and fair legislative elections in post-Suharto Indonesia, and the fourth direct presidential election, and were widely recognised as remarkable achievements for a nation with a large and diverse population. Indonesia shines when compared to many of its neighbours, including Thailand and the Philippines.

But is Indonesia's democracy following the same path taken by many other democracies in Southeast Asia and beyond? The next few years will tell.

I did have some reservations to the title of the Indonesia Update 2019 ‘From stagnation to regression? Indonesian democracy after twenty years’ and I made my feeling known in an opinion article I wrote for the Jakarta Post in July. Based on my own reading, the title suggested there was only one other possible course for Indonesia's democracy, besides stagnation: regression. Although the title is framed as a question, it stills portrays a bleak future and allows little, if any, possibility for democracy in Indonesia to go in the other direction: progression. This may be true and indeed many analyses, some of which were highlighted in this conference, suggest things are likely to get worse.

The optimist in me, however, refuses to believe that this is the case. As a journalist who has reported and written about Indonesia's political development over the past 36 years, I cannot accept that this backsliding of democracy is irreversible. Over the course of time, going back to the last decade of the Suharto years, I have seen many setbacks to democracy; but the overall trajectory has always been to move forward.

The path to democracy is rarely steady or linear. Countries can perform well on some indicators of democratic consolidation, while improvements in other areas remain elusive. Indonesia, for example, holds regular and competitive elections, but still confronts real challenges when it comes to protecting the rights of minorities. In other words, democracy is multidimensional. Democratic quality can be evaluated from different perspectives, and the conclusions analysts reach are often contingent on exactly what aspect of democratic consolidation they are analysing.

In this chapter, we focus on the multidimensionality of democracy. Specifically, we study how different dimensions of democracy are understood by Indonesian citizens. Public opinion research has painted a mixed picture of public support for democracy in Indonesia. On one hand, it shows that Indonesians are highly supportive of democracy. Although the results vary depending on how specific survey questions are formulated, scholars have shown that support for and satisfaction with democracy in Indonesia are generally high (Mietzner 2013; Mujani and Liddle 2015). On the other hand, some studies show that Indonesians do not understand democracy in liberal terms, as they equate democracy with good governance and policy outcomes rather than with a system of checks, balances and limited government (Aspinall et al. 2020; Warburton and Aspinall 2019). This is consistent with other cases in East and Southeast Asia (Chu and Huang 2010).

These findings point to the importance of investigating democracy as a concept, in a context where support for democracy is widespread but the meaning of ‘democracy’ is contested. Existing research, however, does not account for some of the important dimensions of democracy, such as deliberation and informal participation. Given Indonesia's long tradition of progressive politics (Dibley and Ford 2019) and relatively high levels of civic participation (Lussier and Fish 2012), this is a potentially important omission.

In this chapter, we draw on the comparative literature to describe and delimit five different dimensions for assessing democratic quality: electoral, liberal, deliberative, participatory and egalitarian. We then develop a new measure of how ordinary Indonesians conceive of democracy, which we use to address a series of research questions. First, we ask to what extent these five dimensions resonate in the minds of ordinary Indonesians as coherent and distinct ideological constructs.

Prior to the third wave of democratisation, regimes considered to be democratic were a minority in the world stage; fast-forward five decades, and more than 50 per cent of today's states are considered democratic (Coppedge et al. 2019). Experience with democratic transition has not been smooth, however. During periods of democratic transition and consolidation, political and economic reforms often stagnate, breeding widespread disappointment. Even where democratic transitions appear relatively successful, the threat of backsliding often remains: the past decade has seen a global decline in the health of democracy (Bermeo 2016; Mounk 2019). Increasingly, democratic regimes have deteriorated under the stewardship of democratically elected leaders—in Hungary, Turkey and the Philippines, to name a few—rather than falling to the types of authoritarian takeover so readily conjured in the popular imagination (Aspinall and Berenschot 2019; Bermeo 2016). As this book demonstrates, Indonesia is quickly catching up to this global trend as it backslides into an increasingly illiberal form of democracy.

Among the many theories that explain why some democracies consolidate while others regress, economic arguments—and especially variants of modernisation theory—have been especially influential. Przeworski et al. (2000), for example, contend that income per capita is the strongest predictor of whether democracy or dictatorship prevails. Indeed, a cursory glance around the world suggests that many authoritarian countries are poorer than the wealthy democracies of Europe and North America. Within democracies, a lack of economic progress can also reduce public satisfaction with the political and institutional status quo. For example, a 2018 poll by Pew Research Center conducted in 24 countries, including Indonesia, revealed that respondents with negative views of the economy are on average 36 per cent points more likely to be dissatisfied with democracy, compared to those with favourable views of the economy (Wike et al. 2019). A large body of research also suggests that a high level of inequality has negative implications for democratic participation and support (e.g. Solt 2008).

This chapter explores the economic dimensions of Indonesia's democratic quality. Our main goal is to analyse how economic conditions—specifically, income per capita, income inequality and unemployment—correlate to variations in democratic quality in Indonesia over the past decade.

This is the caption that accompanies the video released by Prabowo Subianto's camp after all exit polls by reputable pollsters forecast Prabowo's defeat in the 2019 presidential election. The video went viral on social media platforms and WhatsApp group chats under the title ‘Al Jazeera TV broadcast election fraud in Indonesia’. Al Jazeera immediately issued a letter of clarification regarding the viral video, arguing that it had been edited and assigned a caption that was taken out of context and given emphasis not in the original (Ishaq 2019). Although their allegations of electoral fraud were disputed, many of Prabowo's supporters firmly believed they had been cheated, triggering massive protests outside the headquarters of the Elections Supervisory Agency (Badan Pengawas Pemilu, Bawaslu) shortly after the General Elections Commission (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) announced the result of the presidential election. The demonstrations quickly turned violent, leading to the deaths of ten protestors, and hundreds more were injured in Jakarta's worst riots since the 1998 unrest that toppled long-time dictator Suharto (Jakarta Post 2019).

Democratic stability is determined not only by the conduct of electoral winners, but also by the responses of electoral losers. When election losers become disillusioned with democracy, and then fail to subscribe to democracy as the only game in town, this can ultimately lead to democratic deconsolidation (Rich and Treece 2018). The problem gets worse if they also incite ‘violence, encourage a coup, or support the revival of the former regime’ (Grewal and Monroe 2019: 497). In this chapter, I bring the Indonesian case into conversation with a rich comparative literature on the relationship between electoral outcomes and democratic support. While Indonesia regularly holds multi-level elections, spanning local and national legislatures and direct presidential elections, surprisingly little work has been done to investigate how electoral losers react to defeat, and whether they remain committed to democracy after having cast a vote for the losing side. Studies of electoral losers typically measure support for the political system using surveys, in which respondents are asked whether they are satisfied with the way democracy works.

A free and robust media is central to any democracy. Traditionally, the media's role is as a ‘fourth estate’: an institution that can comment on and objectively criticise other ‘estates’ such as the government, judiciary and religious organisations (Bulla 2008). There are, of course, problems with this definition and much to debate about the precise power journalists and editors should be given, but as a general rule in any functioning democracy the media plays a vital role in enhancing the transparency and accountability of powerful actors and institutions (ibid.).

Indonesia's transition from authoritarian rule to democracy in 1998 saw its media landscape become significantly more free than it had been under Suharto's authoritarian rule. Janet Steele (2012: 2) described this immediate post-reformasi period as one in which the media moved ‘from darkness into light’. Among the political and economic chaos that accompanied the collapse of the New Order, media owners, press freedom activists and ordinary Indonesians began to produce and enjoy a wider diversity of news and views. The lasting exceptions in this story of transformation are the provinces of Papua and West Papua, where, due to a simmering separatist movement, the local media operates under a subnational authoritarian regime and international journalists face stringent regulatory restrictions (Tapsell 2015).

The Papua exception aside, many scholars and observers frame Indonesia's current media landscape by comparing it to the previous New Order period (Kitley 2008; Steele 2010). If seen through this prism, the Indonesian media operates in a largely free environment. News outlets publish stories of government corruption, and journalists comment on and criticise government policies. The media can now report on certain topics that were ‘taboo’ under Suharto, including race and religion. The emergence of social media as a prominent form of communication in Indonesia has undoubtedly played a significant role in allowing greater freedom of expression for individuals to air their grievances; in some cases, social media activism has helped bring about important changes to laws and issues that affect civil society (Fortuna Anwar 2015: 28). Thus, when compared with the New Order, Indonesia's contemporary media landscape looks vibrant and free.

Yet this chapter will show how the declining quality of Indonesia's media has contributed to a broader decline in the quality of democracy in the country.

The rapid expansion of internet services in Indonesia and in many other developing countries over the past decade has bolstered the circulation of online information. Today Indonesia boasts one of the largest and most active communities of social media users in the world (Jakarta Post 2018). While improvements to telecommunications technology have provided many social, economic and educational benefits, the global digital revolution is widely seen as something of a doubleedged sword. In particular, scholars have identified the expansion of social media technology as allowing for the far more rampant and widespread manipulation and falsification of information (Bradshaw and Howard 2019).

Over the past decade, increasing analytical attention has been paid to the propagation through social media of rumours, misinformation and disinformation, and the profound effects this can have on public opinion and political polarisation. Rumours are unverified stories and uncertain accounts of people, events and occurrences. They may or may not be constructed and deployed with a political agenda, and can take on a life of their own, spreading and evolving in sometimes organic ways. Misinformation is, similarly, unintentionally misleading or unverified content. On the other hand, disinformation—often also described as fake news—is systematically designed and maliciously deployed with an intention to mislead. It is often deployed in service to specific political objectives, such as attempts to influence a voting public.

Rumours and disinformation are longstanding features of electoral politics in Indonesia. However, research on the ways in which these patterns have been affected by the digital revolution—particularly the spread of smartphones, growing use of social media and expansion of internet connectivity—remains in its relative infancy. A burgeoning body of evidence suggests that evolving communications technology has f acilitated r apid, c ost-effective d issemination o f r umour a nd disinformation, producing serious and unpredictable consequences. In recent Indonesian elections, we have seen the emergence of ‘cyber troops’ and political social media campaigners, known locally as ‘buzzers’, who produce disinformation to orchestrate smear campaigns against political opponents, generate and manipulate communal anxieties, and even challenge the legitimacy of democratic processes in a systematic and organised manner (CIPG 2019; Lamb 2018; Potkin and Da Costa 2019).