For the last ten years, popular and academic books on Islam revolve around various aspects of Islamic radicalism. There seems to be no analysis of Islam unless it is rendered with the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism. Books on Indonesian Islam are no exception. The outbreak of religious conflicts since 1998 and a series of atrocious bombings in Bali and other places, only ensure that writers have nothing more relevant to speak about Islam other than its violent aspects. This book is different. It confronts the current media hype over the phenomenon of radical Islam in Indonesia. It presents a very fundamental inquiry about Indonesian Islam — once described as tolerant, peaceful, and “different from the Middle East” — as to whether it has been absorbed by the global wave of religious fundamentalism.

One argument that I make in this book is that throughout the last fifty years, Indonesian Islam has undergone tremendous development and made progress towards a more pluralist and democratic system of polity. To put it in a comparative historical perspective, Indonesian Muslims are politically more pragmatic and rational. This assumption obviously needs ground on which one can hold its validity. In this book, I argue that there is no better measurement to judge the religio-political attitude of Indonesian Muslims than the general election. Since independence, Indonesian people have gone through several elections, of which three were democratically held: in 1955, 1999, and 2004. Comparing these three general elections, we get a different picture of Indonesian Islam. Instead of becoming more ideological, the religio-political attitude of Indonesian Muslims is increasingly pragmatic. The last two general elections (1999 and 2004) distinctly showed that Islamic political parties have failed to improve on the record that they achieved in 1955 (43 per cent). Together, Islamic parties only obtained 14 per cent (in 1999) and 17 per cent (2004) of the total votes.