As concluding remarks for my observations on the history of the Muhammadiyah in Kotagede from 1972 to 2010, I shall present a review of a number of aspects concerning the achievements of the movement during the period and challenges it currently faces. On the basis of those reviews, I shall discuss the future of the movement.

BACKGROUND FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE MUHAMMADIYAH

The success of the Muhammadiyah in propagation and institution-building occurred mostly during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the objective conditions for this was the drastic change in national political situation after the G30S/PKI Affairs. The military led by General Soeharto took a firm anti-PKI stance, and engaged in violent suppression and persecution of PKI members and supporters. They were removed from the public stage forcibly. In Kotagede, the Muhammadiyah activists took initiatives to arrest and hand them over to the military.

In the aftermath of the G30S/PKI Affairs, the Communists were not only banished as political rebels but also designated as atheists who were antagonistic to Pancasila, the founding philosophy of the nation. Then, religions — the officially recognized ones — were utilized as a means to subjugate and brainwash ex-PKI members and supporters ideologically. For those people, the declaration of affiliation with one of those religions and the participation in religious activities provided a way of survival. In many areas outside Kotagede, this practice seemed to have benefitted Protestant and Catholic churches, which welcomed new converts from the ex-PKI members and supporters. In Kotagede where the number of Christians was negligible, it brought a favourable result for the Muhammadiyah. The local Muhammadiyah branch was actively engaged in propagating for ex-PKI members and sympathizers in cooperation with the government authorities, and thus expanded its influence in the ex-PKI neighbourhoods. In this way, the Muhammadiyah “won” the decades-long confrontation with the PKI and benefitted from the victory. In other words, the Muhammadiyah overwhelmed the PKI after the G30S Affairs not so much through ideological debates but through the coercive situation where few other choices were allowed for the ex-PKI people than to submit to the life-ordeath pressure.

This is a study of ongoing Islamization in urban south Central Java focused on the case of a local branch of the Muhammadiyah movement in the town of Kotagede, the Special Region of Yogyakarta. (See Map 1.) This study attempts to present the argument that the Muhammadiyah movement in the town is a contemporary manifestation of the historically continuing process of Islamization, that its development has been related to changes in the social, economic, political aspects of the town, that it is transmitting and yet transforming local religious traditions so that they approach more closely to the orthodoxy of Islam, and that this process of Islamization in the town is likely to progress in the future.

THE MUHAMMADIYAH IN THE ISLAMIZATION OF JAVA

The Islamization of Java, especially its early history, has been a subject debated by generations of historians of Java. Ramified arguments and counter- The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree arguments have developed among them concerning such questions as when, where, how, and why the Javanese population started to accept Islam as their professed religion and who played what role in the historical process. In spite of considerable scholarly efforts so far devoted to answering these questions, comprehensive and definitive works have yet to appear. Although I have no intention of participating in these arguments, nor do I have expertise to do so, my field observation in the town of Kotagede and my inquiry into its local history have led me to question some of the premises underlying the previous studies on the historical Islamization of Java, as shall be discussed later in this Introduction.

THREE GENERATIONS OF LEADERSHIP

Over the period of forty years (1970–2010) that I have observed on the Muhammadiyah movement in Kotagede, I have witnessed three generations of leadership emerge. The first generation was that of Haji Masjhudi (1888–1972), the “founding fathers”. They were mostly from the families of ulama, or wealthy merchants and industrialists. They were educated at traditional pesantren first but became critical of it later. They also became critical of Javanese Islam (kejawen) embodied by the Mataram Sultanate and advocated its purification and reform. They led the Muhammadiyah movement through the “tiga zaman” (three ages, i.e. the periods of Dutch, Japanese, and Independent Indonesia), 1920s to 1950s. (See Chapters 3 to 5.)

The second generation was mostly from the families of the founding fathers. Their leadership almost paralleled the presidency of General Soeharto (r.1966–98) for the nation. Typical of this second generation was Bashori Anwar (1933–2006) (Figure 10.1), who occupied the chairmanship of the Kotagede Branch of Muhammadiyah for four five-year terms from 1970 to 1990.

After a transitional zig-zagging for fifteen years from 1990 to 2005, the branch leadership of the Kotagede Muhammadiyah is now in the hands of the third generation represented by its current chairman Kaharuddin Noor (b. 1963). He is no longer from the “elite families” of the town. He is the son of a tailor well known for his skills but modest in lifestyle. His chairmanship indicates that the centre of gravity of the Muhammadiyah leadership in the town has moved to the new educated middle class. In this chapter, I shall examine these generational transitions and their implications for the local Muhammadiyah movement.

THE SECOND GENERATION OF THE MUHAMMADIYAH LEADERSHIP

Most of the members of the second generation of the Muhammadiyah leadership in Kotagede were born in the families of the Muhammadiyah founders. They were also mostly the direct products of the Muhammadiyah's “internal breeding”. In other words, they were the first products of the Muhammadiyah's educational system. Many of them went to the Muhammadiyah's local primary school, then to its teachers’ training high schools, Mu'allimin (for boys) or Mu'allimat (for girls), in Yogyakarta. After graduation, some were sent out to other areas for missionary work.

The thesis that has been developed in the foregoing chapters is that orthodox Islam in the form of a reformist movement, Muhammadiyah, has arisen from within the traditional Javanese Islam as its internal transformation rather than as an outright import of a new ideology made complete elsewhere. The reformist version of orthodox Islam has been a vigorously proselytizing religious ideology and has brought, is bringing, and will bring about profound changes in social, cultural, economic and political aspects of Javanese life. To support this thesis, attempts have been made to document, describe and analyse major aspects of this ongoing process of re-Islamization as it occurred in a local town, Kotagede in south Central Java, over the past seventy years or so.

If the thesis can be regarded as having been substantiated sufficiently, at least for one local case, then the view expressed here may appear to come into direct conflict with an assumption widely held among students of contemporary Indonesia that Islam, especially its reformist version, is losing political strength. For example, George Kahin has recently expressed such a view in his preface to Ken Ward's The Foundation of the Partai Muslimin Indonesia (1970). Kahin states:

Another foreign observer of Indonesian politics, studying the results of the 1971 general election, noted a “surprisingly poor showing” of the electoral support the Parmusi obtained (Nishihara 1971, p. 50): the Parmusi votes of 5.36 per cent of the total votes in 1971 are compared to the Masyumi votes of 20.9 per cent of the total in the 1955 general election, and the figures have been regarded as firm evidence for the drastically weakening political strength of reformist Muslims (ibid., passim).

ADMINISTRATIVE RE-DESIGNATION

It must be mentioned in advance when dealing with social changes in Kotagede that the town has undergone administrative re-designation since the original study for this book was conducted in 1970–72. The “Kemantren (Ward) of Kotagede, Jka (Jogjakarta)”, has changed its name to “Kecamatan (Subdistrict) Kotagede” and is one of the fourteen sub-districts constituting the City (Kota) of Yogyakarta. The geographic boundary of Kecamatan Kotagede, however, remains the same as that of former Kemantren Kotagede. The ten Rukun Kampungs (RK or neighbourhood association) which constituted the Kemantren of Kotagede before (see Figure 2.1) are now rearranged into three groups, forming three Kelurahans (Kl. or urban community) as follows: (1) Kl. Rejowinangun consisting of four ex-RKs, i.e., Rejowinangun, Gedongkuning, Pinalan and Tinalan; (2) Kl. Prenggan, of two ex-RKs, i.e. Prenggan and Tegalgendu; and (3) Kl. Purbayan, of four ex-RKs, i.e. Gedongan, Basen, Alun-Alun, and Purbayan. Each Kelurahan is further divided into Rukun Warga (RW or residents association), and the RW further into Rukun Tetangga (RT or neighbours association). There are all together 40 RWs and 164 RTs in the Kecamatan Kotagede. The area of Kecamatan Kotagede is sometimes called “Kotagede Administratip (= administrative Kotagede)”.

Meanwhile, those areas, which were formerly designated as “Kotagede Ska (Surakarta)” belonging to the Kabupaten (Regency) of Bantul, no longer bear the name Kotagede, not to speak of Ska, at all at present. Former Kalurahan Jagalan Kotagede Ska, Kalurahan Singosaren Kotagede Ska and Kalurahan Mutihan Kotagede Ska are now simply called Desa Jagalan and Desa Singosaren, both belonging to Kelurahan Banguntapan, and Desa Mutihan belonging to Kelurahan Wirokerten — all forming part of Kabupaten Bantul. Desa Jagalan, which occupies the core part of the old town of Kotagede, has five RWs divided into fourteen Kampungs (abbreviated as Kp.). In spite of all these new administrative designations, the former core areas of Kotagede (see Figure 2.2) are still regarded by most of the residents as a single socio-cultural entity in terms of geographic proximity, network of family and marriage, closeness in social interaction, cooperation in economic activities, commonness in customs, and a shared local history with a number of prominent remnants from the past. Perhaps for these reasons, those areas of Kotagede are still semi-officially called “Kawasan Kotagede” (= Kotagede Region)1 especially for the promotion of tourism.

BACKGROUND: A BLACK HOLE IN HISTORY

Before reviewing the achievements of the Muhammadiyah in Kotagede, it seems necessary to make a sober reminder for ourselves about one of the starting points of the period which we are looking at. I have already mentioned the point in the section on political diversification in Chapter 8. I am referring to “a black hole” in the history of Kotagede (see Box 9, pp. 239–41) as the background for the subsequent growth of the Muhammadiyah. Communists were undoubtedly the ideological and social force that was the most antagonistic to the Muhammadiyah movement in the town of Kotagede since the pre-war time. They were, however, incapacitated almost overnight in late 1965 by the arrest of a large number of PKI members and its front organizations, and the permanent outlawing of their activities thereafter.

The Muhammadiyah developed its strength since then in a very favourable condition in which there was a void created by the disappearance of the PKI from the public scene. The national government took a policy of staunch anti- Communism. For that, the government launched its propaganda via the P2A (Proyek Pembinaan Agama or Religious Guidance Project) at the local level. The project involved local religious leaders, mostly from the Muhammadiyah in the case of Kotagede, as speakers at a series of pengajian (religious lectures) held in a thirty-five-day cycle. Those pengajian were aimed at gathering the “G30S/Ex-PKI people” for regular roll calls and debriefing of their ideology. As stated by one of its leaders, the immediate task of the Muhammadiyah movement after 1965 was to “‘regain’ the ex-PKI people to its fold”.

It was difficult to gather information on how effective these “brainwashing sessions” were since any topic related to the PKI was to be avoided during my first field stay. But, I became aware that many of the familiar faces at the ex-PKI pengajian, which I was allowed to join in, were also active in such communal Islamic rituals as the collection and distribution of zakat fitrah during Idul Fitri and the slaughtering of sacrificial animals and distribution of their meats during Idul Adha.

The first edition of this book, published by Gadjah Mada University Press in 1983, was a significant landmark in the study of Indonesian — especially Javanese — society. This was originally a Ph.D. thesis in anthropology submitted to Cornell University, one that had been inspired to a considerable degree by Clifford Geertz's path-breaking work The Religion of Java. That was based on fieldwork done in 1953–54 and was published in 1960. Nakamura's fieldwork was done nearly two decades later and, whereas Geertz and his colleagues had worked in the East Javanese town of Pare (dubbed “Modjokuto” in their publications), Nakamura turned to the town of Kotagede, on the edge of the royal capitol of Yogyakarta. This was the site of the Mataram dynasty's earliest royal graves (from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) and an important base for the Islamic Modernist movement Muhammadiyah. It was, in other words, a very different place from Geertz's East Javanese site — an area only settled about a century before, without high royal traditions and far from the centre of Islamic reformism. Moreover, Geertz and his colleagues worked in the first post-Revolutionary years of newly independent Indonesia, whereas Nakamura was at work early in the New Order period of Soeharto. So a different view of the religious and cultural life of the Javanese emerged. Nakamura's work lacked the rhetorical flourishes and institutional fire-power of Geertz's, but it was at least as important as — some would say more important than — Geertz's as a study of social realities in much of Java. Nakamura's work was deeply researched, sympathetic and sensible, challenging many stereotypes and assumptions. But its publication by an Indonesian press with poor distribution networks meant that it was never as widely read or as influential as the work of Geertz, except in specialist circles.

Mitsuo Nakamura's return to this subject to produce an updated account is thus immensely welcome and should be widely read. We know that social, political, economic and religious realities have changed dramatically in Java since the times of Geertz and of Nakamura's own earlier research.

The Muhammadiyah movement was characterized by its non-political stance from the outset as we have seen above (Chapter 3, p. 73). Besides the factor of circumspect avoidance of government repressions of “Muslim fanatics”, the position was a manifestation of the high value placed by the movement on an individual Muslim's personal faith which could uphold self-reliant and independent Muslim life under any political condition. The achievement of religious devotion was regarded as a matter lying within the range of an individual's personal control in whatever situation. A religious community composed of such individuals could transcend any particular forms of secular polity. Throughout the Dutch period, the Muhammadiyah's stance towards the colonial government was rather passive and defensive; if the government interfered with Islamic matters, it certainly reacted to defend its interests with full strength, but otherwise it took no political initiatives of its own. Formation of or affiliation with political organizations was completely left to individual choice. Towards the latter half of the 1930s, an Islamic political party, Partai Islam Indonesia (PII), closely connected with the Muhammadiyah, was formed. However, the party's role was a “diplomatic” representation, i.e., negotiations with the colonial government and other secular political parties for the defence of Islamic interests. The basic non-political position of the Muhammadiyah helped to maintain a stable condition favourable for the steady growth of its membership and the establishment of educational and social welfare institutions.

THE POST-WAR POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Conventionally, the history of Indonesian politics in the next two decades (1940s–1950s) has been viewed as a history of the failure of Muslims’ political attempt at making independent Indonesia an Islamic state. Under the Japanese occupation authorities, Muslim political forces acquired organizational strength and a stature in national politics comparable to that of civil servants and secular nationalists.