Transnational religion : a case study of the Turkish United Islamic Cultural Centre of Indonesia (UICCI)

Abstract

Globalization and the communications revolution have allowed vastly increased flows of ideas and people across the Islamic world, generating new social forms. As is well known, these include transnational social movements and organizations originating in the Middle East and now stretching across the globe, as far as East and Southeast Asia. Indonesia, as the country with the largest Muslim majority, has attracted Islamic activists from other parts of the world. What is little known is that some of the most active transnational Islamic movements in Indonesia in recent years originate from Turkey. Unlike Islamic revival movements of Arab and Persian origins, which since the 1970s have been predominantly fundamentalist, the new-comer Turkish-origin movements take a different approach to Islamic revival. They are more 'moderate' than many of the movements from the Middle East and are proving to be easily accepted in Southeast Asia, not only by Muslim communities there but by the governments of the region. This thesis introduces one of the lesser known of the major Turkish transnational piety renewal movements that have recently reached Indonesia: the Süleymancıs. This case study of the Süleymancıs in Indonesia, founded there in the form of an organization called the United Islamic Cultural Centre of Indonesia (UICCI), provides an example of how a Turkish Muslim transnational organization comes to project itself into a new cultural environment (a non-Turkish diaspora context) and adapts to that new context. The thesis is based on ethnographic research conducted in Indonesia over twelve months in 2012 and 2013 and on additional interviews conducted and observations made in Turkey over three weeks in 2013. The study undertakes the following tasks: (1) construction of a theoretical framework to study this movement from the perspective of the social sciences; (2) review, as background for the Indonesian case study, of the history of the Süleymancı movement in Turkey and its initial transformation into a transnational organization extending into Europe and other Turkish diaspora regions; (3) documentation of the arrival of the Süleymancıs in Indonesia and their progress over ten years since their establishment; (4) exposition of the way in which the Süleymancıs promote Islamic piety in Indonesia through study and memorization of the Qur'an and the practice of qurban (religiously prescribed sacrifice of farm animals for food distribution); (5) identification of Sufi elements within Süleymancı Islamic practice; and (6) examination of the Süleymancı movement as an alternative provider of free boarding school-based religious education. Building on the work of Hakan Yavuz and others who have shown how the Süleymancı movement developed initially in Turkey by taking advantage of 'opportunity spaces' emerging in the 1950s within the secularist Kemalist state, this thesis shows how the movement spread outside Turkey and beyond regions with Turkish diaspora communities to Muslim majority Indonesia. In so doing it demonstrates the utility of the concept of 'opportunity spaces' for analysing the viability of a transnational Islamic movement in new cultural and social environments. Further, it shows how the Süleymancıs entered Indonesia's already crowded Islamic revival market via a particular type of 'opportunity space', offering low cost, modern, high quality religious education, and adapted that product to the local cultural environment of Indonesian Islam by modestly re-badging their dormitory-based education in local cultural terms, as 'pesantren'.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English