Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia by David Kloos

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia by David Kloos Kristina Großmann (bio) David Kloos. Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority and Ethical Improvement in Aceh, Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 240 pp. David Kloos’s book Becoming Better Muslims offers a refreshing new perspective to a topic and region that has already received a great deal of scholarly attention: Islam, politics, and agency in Aceh, the western-most province of Indonesia. Whereas most authors in recent years have tended to focus on classical topics of political Islam, such as Islam and nation building or Islamic law,1 Kloos instead chooses to stress “religious agency,” which includes religious practices as well as ethical improvement and its entanglement with Islamic authorities and the state. He therefore aims to shed light on the intertwinement between the personal space for action—thereby referring to an individual’s pious practices and agency—and norms established by state and religious institutions. Specifically, Kloos asks how “ordinary” Acehnese Muslims experience their daily lives and what religious routines they practice in their attempt to become good or better Muslims. The theoretical approaches that inform Kloos’s study are concepts of agency and practice in combination with ethics and morality. Aceh is a region of multidimensional transformation. Massive reconstruction has been ongoing since the catastrophic tsunami on December 26, 2004. In August 2005, Indonesian government officials and representatives of the Free Aceh Movement signed a Memorandum of Understanding that ended twenty-nine years of armed conflict. Thus, reconstructing the province both physically and ideologically since 2005 has been the overall paradigm. The slogan “Build Aceh Back Better,” used by former US President Bill Clinton after he made his first speech as the United Nations Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, was not just a reference for physical post-tsunami, post-conflict reconstruction. It also encompasses the ideological reconstruction taking place as the provincial government, religious authorities, and ordinary Muslims explore and negotiate new possibilities and incorporate Islam as a political tool as well as a personal belief. Aceh, known as the Veranda of Mecca, is described as the abode of Islam in Indonesia because the first Islamic kingdom in the archipelago was founded in this region. Additionally, Aceh experienced an Islamization of its legal, political, and social spheres after the 2004 Tsunami when Islamic criminal law was rigidly enforced—and thus leading to violence and discrimination against minorities by state officials and individuals. However, Kloos doesn’t want to perpetuate the stereotype of Acehnese [End Page 107] being exceptionally pious and fanatic and aims to deconstruct the picture that Islam in Aceh is predominantly linked to violence. He rather wants to show how people negotiate and react to the increasing range of moral admonitions and pressure instigated by religious authorities legitimized by the state and other public actors. Kloos is looking at how Muslims play out their individual agency in response to normative forces that formulate what is good and bad. He describes religious agency not as a coherent and straightforward process, but rather as an ambivalent and unpredictable path. He thereby reveals that a revitalized Islamic identity and increased attention to religious practices are not the only ways that Muslims respond, since people’s perceptions and reactions are contradictory and guided by feelings of weakness and uncertainty. Thus, as Kloos argues, for many people in Aceh, notions of moral failure are inherently intertwined with ethical improvement and the process of becoming a better Muslim. He illustrates this argument best in the fifth chapter, where he points out the complexity and ambivalence in people’s dedication to Islam. Kloos combines historical analyses with rich ethnographic data. In his book, he first introduces the main political, economic, and religious aspects that have shaped Acehnese history. In chapter two, he describes how, especially during the New Order era, religious and political authority more and more became intertwined. This chapter is based on archival sources as well as on the articles and field notes of Chandra Jayawardena, who lived in the district of Aceh Besar from the 1960s to the 1980s. In chapters three, four, and five, Kloos comes to the present situation in Aceh...