Saiful Mujani

Piety and Public Opinion presents a fresh perspective on how religious revivalism affects political beliefs in Muslim majority countries. In contrast to most research on Islam and politics, which focuses narrowly on the Middle East or the Arab world, it argues that Indonesia—the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, with a thriving democratic government, an emerging middle-income economy, and flourishing Islamist movement—is an ideal context in which to study how politics, markets, globalization, and Islamic revivalism interact. Drawing on original data and employing innovative methodological techniques, Piety and Public Opinion uncovers the surprising irrelevance of piety for issues from democratic values to support for the United States to Islamic banking.

Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties’ popular support. This chapter demonstrates that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and confer a political advantage only when voters are uncertain about parties’ economic policies. Using experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non-Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. This relationship is driven by the most pious Muslims. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non-Islamic parties, regardless of how pious they are. Islam’s political advantage is real, but circumscribed by parties’ economic platforms and voters’ knowledge of them.

The resurgence of Islam in private and public life, in Indonesia and elsewhere, is one of the most important phenomena of our time. Its implications for politics and society are also widely misunderstood. Piety among Indonesian Muslims is essentially unrelated to most of the basic problems of political and economic life that analysts of religion and public life have addressed. Instead, the social and economic transformations that are co-occurring alongside the resurgence of Islam in Indonesia are the best predictors of how Muslims think and behave. These findings reorient our understanding of Islam and democracy in contemporary Indonesia. They should also inform policymakers interested in Islam, religious revitalization, democracy, and relations between the West and the Muslim world.

This chapter develops a new way to measure piety among Indonesian Muslims. It begins by arguing that piety is a property of individuals that is unobservable, multifaceted, and apolitical, and then draws on an original survey of Indonesians to create a new index of piety that can be used to study how piety relates to other political attitudes and beliefs. The chapter shows that piety in Indonesia is unrelated to beliefs about religion and politics. It also discusses various alternative ways to conceptualize and measure piety in the Muslim world, and shows how conventional measures of piety can be misleading.

Recent scholarship on Islam and world politics asks how Muslims relate with the United States, but has conceived of foreign policy preferences in simplistic, pro- or anti-US terms. This chapter examines how Islamic revivalism shapes foreign policy attitudes in Indonesia, introducing a flexible methodology for capturing both the multidimensionality and nonexclusivity of Indonesian Muslims’ views of the West, the Muslim World, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. It shows that pious Muslims in Indonesia are not more likely to be anti-US; they are, rather, more likely to hold cosmopolitan worldviews. These findings are inconsistent with a “clash of civilizations” view of Islamic revivalism in Indonesia. Instead, they support an alternative perspective of Islamic revivalism as marked by modernity and cosmopolitanism rather than fundamentalism or particularism.

Newly elected President Yudhoyono and Vice President Kalla scored successes despite initial lack of parliamentary support. Kalla took control of Golkar, the largest party, and a tentative peace was achieved in Aceh. Economic policy was entrusted to a strong team of technocrats. Military relations with the United States were fully restored.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired army officer, became Indonesia's first directly elected president, defeating incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri in a landslide. Key positions in economic ministries were awarded both to pro-market and protectionist groups. A suicide bomb killed nine people and wounded nearly 200, intensifying the nation's search for al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.