Understanding Indonesian Muslim Middle Class

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Considering its size and potential, the middle-class had become an essential group besides another social factor for socio-political change. Previous studies such as Richard Tanter and Kenneth Young’s 1993 book, Politik Kelas Menengah Indonesia, a compilation of many articles from Jurnal Prisma, have sketched the middle-class as quantitatively and economically prospective future-fate of Indonesia.

However, their works are inseparable from the social context the Suharto’s regime has been made with his economic development obsession during the 1970s-1990s. The job market, industrial and infrastructure expansion, and followed by the military-backed business, directly affected Indonesia’s social posture. To this extend, some trajectories believed that the middle-class could be the new hope for political renewal and economic refreshment.

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Meanwhile, Islam as an alternative socio-economic variable remains in the germinal phase―initiated by Islamic movements such as Lembaga Mujahid Dakwah (LMD) and a similar organization. Parallel to that, Suharto suspicion on Islam is possible to emerge as a latent political thread for his triad-epitome: military, Pancasila, and capitalistic developmentalism.

Soeharto conducted various measures to prevent such risk, ranging from isolating Muslims on the non-political stage to integrating developmentalism on Islamic universities. However, Soeharto seems failed to address the grassroots movement of modernist and trans-nationalist Islam. Thus, what makes Islamic and middle-class power converged in the aftermath of the 1998 Reformation.

Jati’ put this in an entirely different social context. He noticed a two-decade-pause on the middle-class scholarship after Tanter and Young’s. So he added other variables such as mentality, pop culture, consolidation of Ummah, and the perils of late-capitalism to his analysis on the Indonesian Muslim middle-class.

Through Weberian sociology, he addressed the role and evolution of the mentality of middle-class Muslims. He concluded that similar traits of Calvinism, which happened in the Weber era, also occurred in contemporary Indonesian Muslim society. It explains that Islamic doctrine and the spirit of capitalism fit together to some extent and are suitable for urban livelihood.

The striking point is that today’s Indonesian Muslim middle-class was entirely in contrast to the early independents period. The term of middle-class itself, on the Indonesian scholarship, refers to a group with a particular type of wealth ownership as a rival of feudal elites. The very notion of this belonged to the early post-feudal society. In contrast, agriculture and regional trade emerged as competitive power against the political elite.

Nevertheless, it is easy to witness those forces intertwined one to another in the historical monograph. However, before the note, this post-feudal or post-colonial society poses its distinctive layer based on identity and wealth accumulation. The book pointed at the case is Sarekat Islam. The concern against Chinese domination on the trade market has sublimed in the Muslim community. Sarekat Islam seeks market protection. However, since the ideological dissent among its members on their inclination to communism and Islamism, Sarekat Islam failed to attain and consolidate its political agenda.

In contrast to that, Indonesian Muslims tend to be fragmented due to the germinal phase of various Muslim organizations in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation. No cohesion, high ideological and mass contestations. Furthermore, the 2000s as the phase of late capitalism has brought a new face of Islam, culturally and socially.

A critical remark on the juncture between organizational and capital factors is that this created a new form of religiosity where the materialization of the sacred had become the backbone for most urban Muslims. Amid modern lifestyle and highly materialized routine, they articulate their existence through commodities of symbols, reciprocating piety. Thus, hijabs, pop culture, and many sorts of cultural products increased by demand.

Another epitome also occurred by the myriad practices of urban-Sufism, the belief that performative piety could solve all life problems. The view was promoted by most Muslim televangelists, a sort of preacher where their expertise was born from neither pesantren nor trans-national conservatism, as a response to the rise of capital and the modernity expansion in late Indonesia.

The trends mentioned above intertwined and represent themselves in various expressions, from Muslim-urban-pop culture and social piety to Islamic populism. To sum up, Jati’s Politik Kelas Menengah Muslim Indonesia has brought a helpful insight to reflect on ourselves: position, agency, habit, and lifestyle. It showed that perhaps the daily needs on piety are not fully virtue, but drive-by economic and political motives.

Book Data

Tittle                : Politik Kelas Menengah Muslim Indonesia
Author             : Wasisto Raharjo Jati
Year                : 2017
Publisher         : LP3ES

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