The Extremism of Identity

Walking down the streets of Indonesia, it is often difficult to tell who is Muslim and who is not.  The ethnic Chinese (mostly not Muslim) as well as the country's large Christian minority existing from days of Dutch colonialism, mingle easily in the Muslim minority, each dressed so similarly that it is simply impossible to tell their religious background.  Coming from Malaysia, this is by all means a pleasant surprise.  The differences among Malaysia's race is too often visually expressed through different ways of dress, with the Malays, women in particular, following modesty in fashion terms.

Yet, the prevalence of headscarves among Malay Muslim women, covering up their hairs (indeed, complemented with loose dress that cover up everything except their hands and feet), while applicable, is not nearly as common here in the streets of Jakarta.  By same logic, the prominence of mosques and political expressions of Islamic faith that so defines some parts of Malaysia are also largely unseen here in the massive Javan metropolis.  The city seems to pride itself on secular expression of Islam, largely pushing the Muslim identity to the background in the process.

This is, of course, not to say that all parts of Indonesia abide by similar codes of secularism.  In one famed instance, the strictly conservative Islamic province of Aceh has for years fought to preserve its Islamic discipline, enforced through sharia laws, through outright independence from the republic.  But the fact that the remainder of the archipelago have viewed the Acehnese as the "odd one out" instead with sympathetic conformity, serve to illustrate how little support the conservative strains of Muslim thought, even in its current emergence as a violent form, has in Indonesia.

Again, this contrasts well with the Malaysian case, where recent movement to apply Islamic laws to non-Muslims in the conservative state of Kelantan has met with muted acceptance from the national government despite vocal opposition both locally and nationally.  It is all the more interesting than, to explore why conservative Islam has made so much more inroads in Malaysia, where an economically powerful non-Muslim minority exist, as compared to Indonesia, where the non-Muslim is much much smaller as portion of population and consequently has relatively little power to sway social opinions.

While the phenomenon seems paradoxical from a quantitative demographic sense, the case become much more understandable if viewed from the perspective of comparative identity.  As far-fetched as it may sound, the greater diversity of Malaysian society in both race and religion force the Malays to preserve their identity against potential encroachment by the Chinese and the Indians.  With legal definitions of Muslim dominance and forced conversions through marriage, the political establishment cemented the idea that being Muslim is an inseparable part of being Malay.

The same does not apply in Indonesia.  The largely willing assimilation of the archipelago's many ethnic identities (such as the Javanese, Sundanese, the Balinese) into a unified Indonesian racial identity made it largely unnecessary for each to pick out identity markers (such as religion) that would make them unique and different.  The resulting lack of emphasis on religion has made it much easier for aspects of non-Muslim culture to enter the country and be taken up by the majority of the population, in turn making it more difficult for conservative Islam to take root as ideological norm.

In essence, the demand on identity creation for Malays in Malaysia forced cultural Islam to take on a visually more extreme form.  The power of the minorities in Malaysia forced the Malays to hold on harder to the traditional Islamic cultural traits as a counterpoint to the largely secular and materialistic Chinese and Indian populations (although Islam in the more modern parts of urban Malaysia is in itself becoming more and more materialistic).  Without equivalent force of minorities, Indonesian Muslims have not resorted to the same "identity extremism."

As such, the correlation is clear: fear of identity destruction makes the identity more extreme.  Existential threat makes for radicalism, and as seen from a range of political issues today, whether it be North Korean cult of personality or new breed of Islamic extremism coming out of Arab Spring, the implications of mismanaged diversity, as in the case of Malaysia, is perhaps more dangerous in a divisive than any potential costs of not having diversity at all, as in the Indonesian case.  Short of advocating homogeneity, this conclusion is nonetheless something Malaysian leaders, for one, should come in mind as they manage an increasingly obvious gap between its non-Muslim and Muslim populations.