Islamic Scripturalism, Morality and Everyday Life in a Kampung Tsunami

This chapter deals with the relationship between Eri, a young Acehnese man living in a tsunami affected neighborhood in the city of Banda Aceh, and his parents. I came to know Eri’s family well during my field research in the Indonesian province of Aceh in 20092010. Eri was then 24 years old. Not long before that, he spent two years at an Islamic school in Jakarta. There he felt attracted to the Islamist ideology of the political party PKS (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, or Justice and Prosperity Party). Back in Aceh, he adopted a strong ‘outwardly’ pious life-style, as well as a moralistic attitude toward the behavior of his family. In this chapter I will investigate how this influence was accommodated as part of his parents’ daily life. I choose the term ‘accommodation’ because Eri’s ideas about the observance of scriptural norms was neither rejected nor fully accepted by his family. At the same time, his parents’ reactions and explanations constitute a demonstration of the kind of ‘personal piety’ which, in the study of Aceh and Muslim Southeast Asia more generally, has been largely neglected. Aceh is commonly seen as a place where, compared to other regions in Indonesia, the forces of the global Islamic revival have been less influential. To some extent this is true, at least in the sense that the conflict made it difficult for (trans)national, revivalist or radically Islamist groups to establish themselves here.1 At the same time, however, these comments often seem to reproduce, at least to an extent, older (colonial) stereotypical