Islamism and Dakwah in Late Modern Indonesia: Official Discourses and Lived Experiences of Leaders and Members of the Tarbiyah Movement

This thesis contributes to the analysis of the dakwah (Islamic preaching and mission) of contemporary Islamist movements with a case study of the Indonesian Tarbiyah movement. My analysis borrows from aspects of social movement theory and conceptions of lived religion to illuminate both the official discourses and everyday experiences of the movement in a novel way. I begin by providing an historical framework for understanding dakwah and Islamist movements in modernity (Chapter 1) and by locating Islam(ism) and dakwah in terms of the changing social, political and religious dynamics of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia (Chapter 2). To investigate the Tarbiyah movement, I collected qualitative interviews and fieldwork data in Jakarta during 2012–13 (Chapter 3). In the key chapters of this thesis, I focus on three main arguments: i) that the gradual transition of the Tarbiyah movement from a politically repressed network of religious purists in the 1970-80s into a fully-fledged dakwah political party (the Prosperous Justice Party/Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, PKS) was the outcome of new ‘political opportunities’ which emerged during a period of democratisation 1990-97 (Chapter 4); ii) that the movement’s weekly Liqo (circle of religious teaching) illuminates both the synergies and tensions between official, top-down framing by increasingly formal, outward-looking and pragmatic PKS leaders and the more informal and more conservative networks, the latter remaining a key resource for mobilisation (Chapter 5); and, finally, that the lived experiences of female trainees in the Liqo suggest that this is a space where Tarbiyah movement/PKS norms, lifestyles and dispositions are more or less successfully taught, learned and reproduced principally through the disciplined and repeated performances of embodied piety (Chapter 6).