It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and center in his new book The Battle for the Soul of Islam.
Dorsey’s book is a granular, detailed and (by the standard of these things) up-to-date discussion of developments at the intersection of Islam and politics in, primarily, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and UAE—the three countries he considers as prime contenders for leadership—while also covering Qatar, Turkey and Iran.
The battle in question is not the more commonly discussed one between Sunnis and Shi‘as, nor even between fundamentalists and moderates, but rather
the struggle to define what constitutes ‘moderate’ Islam, about which little has been written, rather than the divide between moderates and militants.
This battle in particular has
pitted self-serving autocrats against proponents of a truly inclusive and pluralistic form of the faith based on reform of religious law and precepts rather than a tightly controlled top-down projection of Islam anchored in a ruler’s decree or changes to national law.
In the former group, he puts the UAE and Saudi Arabia:
Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s vision is that it is tailored to suit the two countries’ rulers. It advocates autocracy and absolute obedience to the ruler without reform of Islamic jurisprudence while allowing for degrees of religious and pluralism required for economic diversification, development, and growth.
The latter is epitomized by Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (the world’s largest Muslim civil society movement), which
argues, in a radical break with tradition, that Islam needs to reform Sharia to remove outdated, obsolete, and problematic legal concepts.
Dorsey is pretty clear about which side he takes.
Dorsey is pretty clear about which side he takes. He approvingly quotes Nahdlatul Ulama chairman Yahya Cholil Staquf:
“Preserving Indonesia’s unique civilizational heritage and multi-religious and pluralistic nation-state requires the successful implementation of a global strategy to develop a new Islamic orthodoxy that reflects the actual circumstances of the modern world in which Muslims must live and practice their faith… ”
This goes by the name of “Humanitarian Islam”:
an alternative to state-backed, less tolerant, and less pluralistic notions of moderate Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as expressions of political Islam represented by Turkey, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
He goes on to write that
Nahdlatul Ulama envisions the re-emergence of South and Southeast Asia as a cohesive, vital, and proactive civilisational sphere, which functions as a powerful, independent pillar of support for a rules-based international order founded upon shared civilisational values.
Inside the plethora of names, meetings, publications and speeches, Dorsey includes information on events that passed beneath at least my radar, one of which is the Religion Forum 20 or R20, a planned annual summit of religious leaders that kicked off in Bali in 2022 just before the Indonesia-chaired G20 meeting. This created a bit of a tussle with India, the next chair of the G20, who wasn’t very keen on the way Nahdlatul Ulama and Indonesia were configuring things.
Turkey appears in the book as something of a wild card, its attempt at parlaying the legacy of the Ottoman Empire into influence falling somewhat flat in the Arab World, but working rather better in the Turkic Central Asian States, for example.
The overall impression, however, is that (somewhat contrary to the book’s subtitle “Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century”) this is all more about politics than religion per se. The two have often gone together, of course, but the struggle seems focused on jockeying for influence and, as far as leaders in the Gulf are concerned, strengthening the regime and seeing off threats.
One is left wondering whether Islam has in fact a single “soul” to struggle over. It doesn’t seem, at least in this telling, that any one country will be willing to cede leadership in religion to any other and, if anything, tying views of Islam to national objectives is more likely to segment than unify.
In this well-documented book, Dorsey’s origins as a journalist show through in that some material is footnoted as private communications with the author; he also cites his own work to a great extent (including a blog with a url containing “mideastsoccer”)—as well he might, one might say, but it makes it hard to check all the sources. And a note to the editor: “antidote” is not normally hyphenated as it is here.
The Battle for the Soul of Islam is not for the casual reader: it is dense and assumes that the reader is already reasonably familiar with the developments since, say, 9/11. But Dorsey is careful to define the Islamic terms he deploys and to place people, events and organizations in enough context that external forays to Wikipedia are, for the most part, unnecessary. Developments in the Islamic world, which can seem very opaque, may seem less so after reading this book.