Last week came the big test: our son entered school and promptly—even enthusiastically—put on his brightly colored Central Asian kippah. I was relieved, but also a little worried, since it seemed he was motivated by fact that all the other boys were doing the same thing. Is this the slippery slope to faith by osmosis? And if it is, so what? After all, what else can religion be for a four-year-old? We certainly don't expect him to pose critical questions at this stage—maybe soon, but not now!
Still, it is worth pondering how people come to faith. For children, religious symbols are part of the cognitive roadmap they absorb spontaneously. It is only later that young people are supposed to interrogate and even doubt this roadmap. When faith survives such skepticism, it is often tempered by the deceptively simple realization that religions are not immutable: instead, they are constantly being rewritten by historical forces, big and small, local, national and global.
One of these forces is culture. Grounded in local realities, cultures sometime have a contentious relationship with the universal claims of any one religion. This tension is especially visible in the "Islamic world," a vast arena of diverse societies whose indigenous customs and cultural practices have both resisted and shaped what Muslims consider "Islamic." Because local cultures are heterogeneous, even the most pious will disagree -and sometimes fight—over what is truly "Islamic."
Consider Indonesia. The largest majority Muslim state (85% Muslim in a population of 237 million), Indonesia is made up of more than four thousand islands and hundreds of local cultures and languages. These cultures were never subject to a conquering Islam. Instead, they absorbed the Islam of Muslim traders, producing a patchwork of Islamic practices, some of which reflect Hindu traditions. Anyone who has attended a so-called traditional Muslim wedding in Central or East Java, or who has heard the loud ringing of the gongs that call Muslims to prayer in rural village mosques, will appreciate such pluralism, as well as the resentment of many Indonesian Muslims toward what they call "Arab" Islam.
Such resentment has grown with the spread of Saudi-financed madrassas, and the expanding influence of a new generation of Islamists, some of whom received religious training in the Arab world. But opposition to the more austere Islam that many Indonesians associate with the Arab world is not new. Indeed, the now 40-million-strong organization Nahdlatul Ulema (or NU), was created in the mid-twenties to oppose the efforts of the Mohamadiyya movement to discredit local religious practices deemed un-Islamic. Fearing for their religious freedom, NU resisted Mohamadiyya's bid to "reform" Islam, thus setting the stage for a clash of Islams that endures today.
Since the rebirth of democracy in 1999, this clash has been channeled through the party system. As a result, Indonesia boasts an ideologically pluralistic political arena whose contending parties forge and re-forge alliances in a process that, however chaotic, has limited the sway of fundamentalist Islamist parties.
That is the good news. The bad news is that, in an environment of growing corruption and escalating poverty, fundamentalist parties are gaining ground. Leaders of the traditional Muslim parties linked to NU fear that their declining influence could set the stage for a two-way conflict between Islamist and secular-nationalist parties. Such a polarized contest, some fear, could invite violence and even a return to military rule.
For the moment these concerns are alarmist. Islamist parties collectively command some 15% of the vote. Yet their influence is spreading, not merely in familiar arenas such as urban universities, but in the once isolated rural villages and towns of central and east Java, where local versions of Islamic law have been proposed against the wishes of the national government, and in defiance of the constitution itself.
We should not be complacent about such developments. Contrary to the belief of some U.S. policy makers and not a few scholars of Southeast Asia, there is no coherent, "Indonesian Islam" whose supposedly indelible features preclude the rise of illiberal Islamism. Those Islamists who seek to "clean up" Indonesian Islam have fired the imaginations of many young people. Although their political influence is still limited, their promise to bring a pristine Islam to Indonesia is a growing concern.
In response, Indonesia's liberal Islamic thinkers argue that the very notion of a purified Islam, shorn of the cultural forces that shaped the religion, is ideological bunk. Indeed, they further argue, many of the most outward signs of Islamic "authenticity" in the Arab world-such as the wearing of the full length abaya by women in the Gulf—are rooted at least partly (and sometimes greatly), in local traditions.
Whether good or bad, such traditions animate religions. The greater challenge we all face is to recognize the ways in which customs are sanctified and their historical origins obscured. This is a point that I hope our son's teachers will respect as they consider the multitude of religious interpretations regarding the "proper" place to wear and display the kippah.
Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World.
