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A POPULAR INDONESIAN PREACHER:
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AA GYMNASTIAR
C.W.Watson
*University of Kent***
* *
* **Conclusion*
The year 1998 was clearly critical for Indonesia in a number of ways.
Suharto's
fall opened up the way for a new wave of democratization for which
the
opposition had been pressing for a number of years.With the new
possibilities
for communication opened up came a sudden expansion of the public
sphere and of the roles played there by secular and religious
groups.Technological
sophistication was already in existence before that, but it was only
in
the new political climate of freedom of _expression_ which emerged as a
consequence of the liberalization swiftly announced by Habibie,
Suharto's
successor, that this know-how could demonstrate its potential. Not
only were
new TV channels quickly established which were not under the direct
control of the government but there was a sudden flowering of the
press. Old
newspapers and journals formerly banned under Suharto re-emerged,
and new
ones flooded the market. A new range of publications appeared too at
this
time, including a new genre, the Indonesian romantic Muslim novel
(*Koran*
*Tempo*, 21 March 2005: 11).18 Independent of political developments
the
internet, which had always been less susceptible to government
interference,
grew in strength with the spread of internet cafés and the linking
up of new
communities of politically aware netters. As Hefner (2003) has
described, it
was also in 1998 that one of the first groups to make effective use
of this
new technology was a militant Muslim organization. It was in this
year too
that Aa Gym began to be known beyond the neighbourhood of north
Bandung.
In relation to the rest of the Muslim world there is at first sight
nothing
unusual in the emergence of a person like Aa Gym. He is, it would
seem,
simply another representative of what has become a fairly common
phenomenon,
an influential Muslim figure whom the tide of modernization and the
availability of new technology have allowed to communicate with a
mass
audience,
and who has thus displaced the traditional figure of religious
authority
whom the *umat *(Muslim community) would have looked to in the past
as
the sole source of religious wisdom. Even within Indonesia, a
country where
the state control of Islam has never been as strong as in other
Muslim
countries, there might be grounds for seeing As Gym as simply in
continuity
with a line of influential twentieth-century national religious
figures.
Looked at more closely, however, one sees a marked qualitative
difference
in the manner in which Aa Gym exercises his influence. This is not
simply a
matter of scale, though that too is significant as Aa Gym is
reaching a far
greater and more disparate audience than any of his predecessors.
Rather it
is
a question of having created new spaces for religious dialogue while
at the
same time having not forsaken the local sermon's traditional means of
immediate
contact. In this respect Aa Gym's aims demonstrate what Eickelman and
Anderson, borrowing from Schutz, call the creation of new
communities of
'contemporaries beyond one's face-to-face consociates' (2003: 15).
In the
interaction of the members of these communities, where it sometimes
becomes difficult to distinguish form from content, new
understandings of
the
significance of Islam in the practicalities of daily life and in
solving, or
at
least coming to terms with, domestic and professional problems are
being
exchanged.Aa Gym's is very much an interstitial space between the
traditional
preaching of religious authorities, who have emphasized and continue
to
emphasize with ever-increasing vigilance Efor example in relation
to the
consumption
of *halal *foods Ethe proper observance of religious ritual, and the
sophisticated dialogues of Muslim intellectuals who debate the
appropriateness
of hermeneutic approaches to the interpretation of the Qur'an.
>From outside Indonesia Gym's novelty appears to lie in the astute
way in
which he reaches an extraordinarily wide spectrum of the population
and
seems able to so without appearing in any way threatening to
established
interests, excepting perhaps some traditional and anti-Sufistic
religious
authorities.
In addition, and this is perhaps where he differs most from his
counterparts
in other areas of the Muslim world, he appears to be incorporating a
new strand of global outreach into religious understanding. Homespun
moral
advice is combined with immediate practical instruction on good
management
practice. The situating of business management and practice within a
moral and theologically inspired code of conduct has long been a
familiar
element in discussions of the practice of everyday life in the
Western
Christian
world.What we are seeing in Indonesia in the person of Gym is the
contextualization
of an idea of religious praxis designed to infuse Muslim personal
and professional life in Indonesia. Hand in hand with the verbal
advice
comes
the spectacular demonstration through his own business empire that
the
system works.
Gym's success, then, is attributable to the conjuncture of a number
of
different
circumstances. His mastery of the resources of the new media, from
comic books to videos and from television to the press, in addition
to his
command of the *mimbar *(pulpit) in the mosque, was his principal
asset in
the rise to celebrity status. Over the past few years it has been
his skills
in
business and management which seem to have been responsible for
increasing
his range of influence and sustaining it so dramatically.
Observing Gym's career, then, prompts one to reflect more closely on
the
nature of the global Muslim community. What is happening in Indonesia
seems closely aligned to what is occurring elsewhere in the Muslim
world. A
new sense of what it is to be religious is being forged. To believe,
as we
are
frequently being encouraged to do by the popular media, that this
new sense
of being a Muslim is leading to implacable and dangerous hostility to
Western
civilization is simply wrong. As we have seen, Gym and his
counterparts in
the Muslim world are using the opportunities provided by the
expansion of
new technologies in ways very different from the militants.
Developing new
forms of identification with Islam, they are responsibly bringing
religion
into
the practicalities of everyday social encounters. In the long term
this
move,
combined with other developments in the public sphere, can only
enhance
support for the institutions of civil society.
( Dikutip dari:
THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL
ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE
VOLUME 11, Number 4 (December 2005) )
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