Robert Hefner’s Civil Islam is a landmark attempt to read a century of Islamic participation in Indonesian politics. Combining historical rigor, cultural insight, and a keen commitment to social justice, Hefner succeeds in demonstrating the deep and enduring roots of pluralism and democratic ideals among Indonesian Muslims.

Hefner begins by tracing the “civil precedents” of Indonesian Islam back to the precolonial era, when political power was dispersed across a diverse, multiethnic array of city-states and kingdoms whose influence was kept in check by merchants, religious leaders, and external rivals. He describes how Dutch colonialism encouraged a new political absolutism by reifying a distinction between a universal “Islam” and local “custom,” marginalizing the former and transforming the latter into a rigid prescriptive code. He then turns to the nationalist era, when Islamic groups sought to reestablish political influence within Sukarno’s fledgling republic—jockeying for power with the military, the communist party, and the secular nationalists. Targeted by efforts to reform land tenure, while simultaneously feeling themselves sidelined by Sukarno’s 1960 disbanding of Parliament and the country’s largest Muslim organization, many Muslims were drawn into participation in the 1965 massacres of those accused of communism, a complicity Hefner interprets evenly and perceptively.

It is in his discussion of the 32 years of Suharto’s New Order regime, however, that Hefner makes his most important contributions, contextualizing Indonesian Islam within shifting relations of power. Whereas other scholars of recent Indonesian history have tended to attribute the intensification of Islamic activities that began in the 1980s to a revival of premodern beliefs or to the import of ideas from the Middle East, Hefner argues that Indonesian Islam must be seen in relation to the postcolonial state’s strategic concern with controlling and channeling religious expression. Without reducing religion to a tactical move, Hefner illustrates how Suharto’s attempts to sever Islamic piety from Islamic politics, encouraging the former while stifling the latter, ironically, led to a surge in democratic Islamic discourse. In an effort to placate Muslims excluded from political participation and construct a new moral order that would bolster state authority, the New Order regime introduced a mandatory religious curriculum into the public schools, financed the building of thousands of mosques, and placed the hajj under rigorous state supervision. What occurred, however, was not a standardization of Indonesian Islam in the service of the state but, rather, a multiplication of points of protest as the divide between conservative, proregime Muslims and liberal, critical Muslims grew more pronounced. When other channels for democratic expression were blocked, mosques and Islamic groups provided space to articulate political aspirations and to imagine new forms of governance, leading to vibrant dialogue among Muslim intellectuals.

Hefner’s finely textured narrative lends convincing support to his main argument: Islam can be a powerful force for democratization. His sympathetic reading of the struggles of liberal Muslims to create tolerant and pluralist communities in a climate of state surveillance, strict censorship, and backroom political intrigue is both compelling and timely. His analysis offers an important counterweight to “culturalist” descriptions of Indonesia that pose a static Javanist tradition as the guiding force behind government policy and describes how Suharto, his cronies, and his generals were willing to indulge almost any ideology as long as it proved useful to their goals of amassing and exerting power. Hefner also challenges simplistic understandings of civil society that see it as a bounded, independent entity, demonstrating how in postcolonial Indonesia, civil Islamic groups and the state have allied, broken apart, and forged new coalitions to serve changing strategic ends. It is this last point that leads Hefner to his cautious conclusion: that “the culture of civility remains vulnerable and incomplete if it is not accompanied by a transformation of state. This is to say … that civil society is not opposed to the state but deeply dependent on its civilization” (p. 215).

An easy critique of Hefner’s book would take issue with its claim to be “a social anthropology of democratization in a majority Muslim society” (p. xviii). In contrast with Hefner’s previous ethnographic works on religious modernities and contemporary conversions in Java, Civil Islam pays little attention to how Indonesians (Muslim or otherwise), outside of a minority elite, have responded to the assertions of prodemocracy Islam or imagined democracies of their own. Although Hefner generously highlights the diversity of Islamic perspectives in Indonesia, he is less concerned with exploring how the members of mass Islamic organizations like Masyumi, Nadhuatl Ulama (NU), Muhammadiyah, or Himpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia (HMI) interpreted the claims and tactics of their leaders. Hefner hints at the occurrence of contestation within organizations, as when he attributes Abdurrahman Wahid’s 1996 détente with Suharto as an attempt to safeguard the rank and file of his NU organization, but he gives little indication of how popular piety articulated with the positions of public intellectuals. And although Hefner notes the appearance in the late 1980s and 1990s of inexpensive Islamic mass media and “pop revivalists,” he does not address the emergence of informal and fluid Muslim networks, such as Qur’anic study groups (pengajian), women’s gatherings, university discussion groups, or even communities of Internet users or Islamic commodity consumers that, without claims to fixed organizations, mass membership, or a coherent discourse on the relationship between Islam and politics, nevertheless have had extraordinarily political impact. Perhaps most importantly for those reading Civil Islam with an eye toward current conditions in Indonesia, Hefner’s sympathy with his liberal interlocutors frequently leads him to a caricatured view of those he calls “ultraconservative” Muslims and to an oversimplistic reading of contemporary calls for an “Islamic state,” leaving us unable to understand the positions of those nonregimist intellectuals and activists who have come to hope—rightly or wrongly—that a fixed and unyielding reading of syariah can undo decades of harm wrought by corruption, nepotism, and the callow manipulation of state power.

These are easy critiques, ones arguably outweighed by Hefner’s important challenge to the excesses perpetrated in the name of cultural relativism by conservatives ranging from Samuel Huntington to Suharto, who found common ground by claiming that a respect for political pluralism and human rights was incompatible with the Muslim societies of Asia. And although they raise difficult questions for scholars of Indonesia and elsewhere, including how we might frame “civil society” to make it a useful and inclusive category of ethnographic analysis, they do not detract from the power of this book to speak across disciplines and refute rigid views of Islam’s political potential.