Islamic Leadership in Indonesia: Changes and Challenges

Islamic Leadership in Indonesia: Changes and Challenges Seminar & Book Launch: Religious Authority and Local Governance in Eastern Indonesia by Dr Jeremy Kingsley.

Indonesian Islam’s ‘conservative turn’ and a rise in the politics of religious and ethnic identity means religious leadership is being recontested in different ways, right across the country. Once-dominant Muslim organisations like Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah now face real challenges from a wide range of rivals including the Indonesian Council of Ulama, celebrity preachers, hardliners adept at manipulating new media, and women, among others. With elections ahead in early 2019, elites are looking to exploit this competition for their own benefit, while the government seems uncertain how to respond.

In this seminar, leading scholars of Islam in Indonesia discussed changing patterns of religious authority in that country and their implications for social and political change. A new book dealing with these themes was also launched.

SPEAKERS

Dina Afrianty is a Research Fellow at La Trobe University’s Law School. She is also President of the Australia-Indonesia Disability Research and Advocacy Network. Dina is also the editor of Studia Islamika, an international journal of Islam in Southeast Asia, published by PPIM. Before her current appointment, Dina was a researcher at the Institute for Religion, Politics and Society, Australian Catholic University, and affiliated with the International Relations Department at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP) and International Cooperation and Institutional Development at the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM), both at the State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta. Dina completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2010, on the work of local women’s NGOs in reforming Islamic Law, introduced in 1999 in Aceh.

Greg Fealy is Associate Professor and Senior Fellow, Indonesian Politics, Department of Political and Social Change, Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He gained his PhD from Monash University in 1998 with a study of the history of Nahdlatul Ulama, published in Indonesian under the title Ijtihad Politik Ulama: Sejarah NU, 1952-1967. More recently, he has examined terrorism, transnational Islamist movements and religious commodification in Indonesia, as well as broader trends in contemporary Islamic politics in Southeast Asia. He was the C.V. Starr Visiting Professor in Indonesian Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington DC, in 2003, and has been a consultant to AusAID, USAID, The Asia Foundation and BP. From 1997 to 1999 he was an Indonesia analyst at the Australian Government's Office of National Assessments. Among his many publications, Greg is the coauthor of Joining the Caravan? The Middle East, Islamism and Indonesia (2005); Radical Islam and Terrorism in Indonesia (2005); and Zealous Democrats: Islamism in Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey (2008).

Dr Jeremy Kingsley is a legal scholar and anthropologist. He is a Senior Lecturer (tenure-track) at Swinburne Law School and holds a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Fellowship. Dr Kingsley received his LLM and PhD degrees in Law at the University of Melbourne and his BA and LLB from Deakin University. He has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellows at the Asia Research Institute and then a Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute, both at the National University of Singapore (NUS). While at NUS, he lectured at Tembusu Residential College and within the Comparative Asian Studies PhD Program. Jeremy’s research has focused upon religious and political authority in Indonesia and how this affects local governance. Dr Kingsley is currently undertaking a research project titled: “Inter-Asian Legalities”, which examines transnational corporate lawyers in Jakarta, Dubai and Singapore. He has undertaken extensive field research primarily on the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, as well as in Jakarta, Morocco and Dubai. His work has been published in academic and public affairs journals.

Julian Millie is associate professor and ARC future fellow in the anthropology program of the Monash School of Social Sciences. His PhD from Leiden University focused on Islamic practice and observance in Indonesia, especially on ritual performance and religious communication. Julian is currently working on an ARC-funded research project entitled ‘Deliberation and Publicness in Indonesia’s Regional Islamic Spheres’, together with colleagues at Bandung’s UIN Sunan Gunung Djati. He is also the convenor for the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at Monash University. Julian’s publications include Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam, Cornell University Press (2017).