Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia

The Indonesian province of Aceh is known as rebellious. The most recent eruption was the civil war between the Indonesian army and the ethno-nationalist separatist movement GAM, which started in 1976 and could only be ended after the destructive Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Aceh is also known as strictly Islamic. When Aceh is featured in the media, the focus is often on the implementation, since 2003, of a local formulation of Shari'a law. Is this a sign that Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, is gradually becoming an 'Islamic state'? Or is Aceh an exception, which tells us little about the rest of the country and the region? Public and scholarly debates often pay little attention to the impact of these developments on Acehnese society. At the same time, little is known about the ways in which these developments are shaped and influenced by the practices and experiences of ordinary Muslims, by which I mean those people who do not have much power, influence or special forms of knowledge. As a result, ordinary Acehnese often seem like passive players in the making of their future. In this dissertation I ask how individual Acehnese Muslims practice and experience their religion, and how they deal with, or try to influence the process through which 'official' norms are established. Put briefly, I argue that people in Aceh rely on their own personal space for action as they negotiate the norms stated 'for them' by state institutions and religious functionaries. This dissertation is based on a combination of archival research and anthropological fieldwork. Between 2008 and 2010 I conducted research about the everyday religious practices and experiences of ordinary Acehnese. Most of the people I came to know in this period were not particularly fanatical, rebellious, or dogmatic. They did, however, take their faith seriously and generally wished or hoped for others to do the same. I was surprised, moreover, by the confidence, patience and eloquence with which many of my interlocutors explained to me that faith (iman) and religious practice (ibadah) should be understood not so much as a given, but rather as a personal, lifelong, 'process', part of a broader, but equally personal, ethical 'project. What I was observing, then, was a particular form of individuality, which revealed itself through the emotional importance attached to a process of continuous, critical reflection on morally defined choices, decisions, and dilemmas. In …