Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia * Edited by GREG FEALY and SALLY WHITE

Muslim culture and politics in Indonesia have always been diverse. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the country endured armed Islamist revolts, while also nurturing the rise of the largest communist party in the non-communist world (destroyed in the bloodshed of 1965–6). In the 1980s and 1990s, the leaders of the country’s largest mass-based Muslim organizations, the Muhammadiyah (25 million supporters) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (35 million), supported efforts to bring about a transition from President Suharto’s authoritarian rule. In the years since Suharto’s ouster in May 1998, the results of three rounds of parliamentary elections have been remarkable for their centre-of-the-road moderation. During the first five years of the post-Suharto transition, however, the country was also racked by terrorist bombings, Muslim–Christian violence, and Islamist vigilantism. These incidents led many foreign observers to wonder whether Indonesia was about to relinquish its reputation as a centre for Islamic moderation. It was against this backdrop that the contributors to this volume came together at the Australian National University (ANU) in September 2007 to examine the ‘myriad ways in which Islam impacts on daily life in Indonesia’ (p. xi). Since the early 1980s, the ANU has held an annual Indonesia Update conference, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to review some aspect of Indonesian development over the prior year. The focus on Islam at the 2007 meeting created a setting for the largest conference on Islam in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto. As the editors explain in their introduction, the conference aimed to go beyond the security concerns of journalistic accounts of Indonesia and highlight the diversity of Islam in the post-Suharto era.