Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

38 STATE MANAGEMENT OF MUSLIM ASSOCIATIONAL LIFEreorient students’ activities and education to development priorities. As part ofmono-loyalty provisions aimed at cutting the ties of civil servants to politicalparties, academics were obliged to join the sole public service union, Korpri, andteachers had to join the compulsory teachers’ union. Eventually, as part of depoliticisationof campuses, students were required to channel their activitiesthrough student co-ordinating bodies and through the university hierarchy inplace of independent student organisations. Islamic student organisations were amajor target of this reorganisation.Third, the chapter considers how religious organisation, in many respects,assumed the form of corporatist mergers. That is, in pursuit of harmonising interreligiousrelations and state-religious relations, Suharto gave recognition to statecharteredinstitutions representing the five officially sanctioned religions. Thenhe created a peak inter-religious council, which was intended as the soleconsultation body between representatives of the religious institutions and thestate. This part of the analysis also looks at the regime’s initiatives tocircumscribe what constituted religious orthodoxy and practice, to increase itsregulatory control over Islam’s community/religious affairs, and to discourageand eliminate unmediated religious movements, splinter groups and sects thatthreatened to disrupt economic development and cause instability. As a result,religious tendencies that fell outside of official definitions of religiousinterpretation and practice either were persuaded to join the mainstreamreligions, and find representation in the state-sanctioned institutions, or riskprohibition. In short, they were ‘harmonised’, through merger, into organisationalstructures representing mainstream religions to ensure that they did not becomesources of political instability or opposition to the regime. 1The analysis also considers that, as a concomitant to the restructuring, Suhartoprogressively enforced ideological conformity of Islamic political parties,organisations, and the state-chartered religious institutions to the state’s‘organicist’ ideology of Pancasila. It is important to bear in mind that Pancasilawas an ideology of containment and exclusion, which was antithetical toMarxism and Islamic political ideology. 2 Compulsory Pancasila coursesemphasised the virtues of respect for authority, harmony of social relations,hierarchical order, patriotism and commitment to economic development. Acommon thread runs through each of these target areas discussed. That is,Suharto was concerned to establish political control over unmediated political,social, and religious organisation and to enforce ideological conformity either toPancasila or to mainstream religious belief, as acknowledged by Pancasila. Inother words, political-religious practice was brought into state-delineatedparameters, and corporatist structuring played a role in the capture of unmediatedorganisation.A final point needs to be made before proceeding with the analysis. That is,efforts to restructure Muslim interests spanned a thirty-year period, in which therelationship between the ruling coalition of state officials and independentMuslim groups shifted from an antagonistic one (1968–1987), to one