Saskia Schäfer, a scholar of democracy and religion at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, explores a critical question in contemporary democratic theory in her book, Mobilizing Mainstream Islam: The Politics of Orthodoxy in Indonesia in Comparative Perspective (Cornell University Press, 2025, 264 pp.): Can electoral competition lead to religious exclusion? Through extensive fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia, along with a systematic analysis of media, fatwas, and legal documents, Schäfer argues that Indonesia’s democratic opening after 1998 did not safeguard the country’s renowned religious pluralism; instead, it ultimately undermined it. She identifies a process she calls the construction of “Mainstream Islam,” in which the post-Suharto reform era initiated a gradual bureaucratization and homogenization of a once-diverse religious landscape into a controlled, orthodox center, primarily defined by what it excluded.
At the heart of the book is Schäfer’s concept of the “Islamist Conservative Majoritarian Synthesis.” This idea describes a persistent realignment of Indonesian nationalism around a socially conservative Sunni Muslim identity. This alignment was not orchestrated by a single dominant figure but emerged from an unlikely coalition of politicians, religious authorities, vigilante organizations, and popular preachers. The combined influence of these groups has lasted beyond any specific political moment.
Schäfer argues that this synthesis was driven by what she terms “fourfold decentralization.” This process involved the simultaneous liberalization of elections, civil society, media, and religious authority, which created competitive pressures that encouraged increasingly exclusionary religious claims. One of the book’s most provocative arguments is that even well-meaning human rights defenders inadvertently contributed to this exclusionary trend. By framing Ahmadis and Shi’a Muslims as “minorities,” they unintentionally reinforced these groups’ differences from a mainstream that should have been contested.
The book sharpens its theoretical perspective through a sustained comparison with Malaysia. Schäfer illustrates that a similarly exclusivist Islamic mainstream emerged under Malaysian authoritarianism, characterized by limited free speech and a lack of competitive civil society. This challenges the comforting liberal narrative that equates more democracy with more pluralism. Instead, it is the competitive pressure over state resources and public legitimacy, rather than the form of government, that drives mainstreaming in both Indonesia and Malaysia.
In our following conversation, we will explore the key arguments of the book, including the construction of Mainstream Islam, the paradox surrounding the defense of minority rights, the fourfold decentralization framework, and the comparative lessons from Malaysia. After that, we will discuss the implications of these insights for Indonesia today and for scholars studying religious nationalism beyond the Muslim world. I hope this discussion will be as enlightening for our readers as it has been for us during its preparation.
Muhammad Afdillah: Dr. Schäfer, it is both a privilege and an honor to conduct this interview with you at the invitation of the Political Theology Network. So, your book begins with the Istiqlal Mosque, a monument representing Indonesia’s pluralist nationalism. It was designed by a Protestant architect and is intentionally located next to the Jakarta Cathedral. By the end of the book, this same mosque becomes the site of the 2016 mass protests against Ahok. How did you come to view this image as the central symbol of your book, and what does it reveal about the fate of the pluralist vision that the founding generation aimed to establish?
Saskia Schäfer: The Istiqlal Mosque is a remarkable object for a political scientist to think with. It embodies the ambitions of Indonesia’s founding generation: a multicultural and multireligious nationalism, deliberately constructed that way—partly to counter the Dutch, partly to accommodate the reality that Indonesia is not a majority-Muslim country everywhere, that the outer islands and many regions are shaped by other religious identities and traditions. In that sense, early Indonesian nationalism in its ambition to embrace, even celebrate diversity resembles post-independence India far more than it does the homogenizing European nation-states.
What makes the mosque such a powerful organizing image is that it holds both moments: the founding vision and its transformation. By December 2016, the same grounds that were built as a symbol of inter-religious harmony had become the focal point for one of the largest protests in Indonesia’s postwar history—a coalition of Islamist hardliners, socially conservative Muslims, and political opportunists mobilizing to topple a Christian governor. Members of the Islamic Defenders Front carried the red-and-white Indonesian flag combined with Islamic symbols; others carried flags bearing large Arabic lettering. This combination shows Indonesian-ness and Muslim-ness have fused in a way the founding generation deliberately tried to prevent.
Indonesia is the world’s largest democracy with a Muslim majority, yet it is rarely included in scholarly or public discussions about democratic backsliding, which often focus on leaders like Erdoğan, Modi, Trump, or Orbán. In your conclusion, you highlight a significant contrast between Indonesia’s grassroots, decentralized religious nationalism and the strongman-led, top-down approaches seen in other countries. What implications does this distinction have for our understanding of the relationship between democracy and pluralism more broadly?
There’s a lesson to learn from the case of Indonesia. The cases that dominate our comparative imagination—Erdoğan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Trump’s USA, Orbán’s Hungary—all feature a powerful central actor consolidating control over religious identity from the top down. That architecture, as troubling as it is, at least has a certain legibility: you can identify the strongman, the party, the institutional bottlenecks. Indonesia shows something harder to see and harder to reverse. The marginalization of Ahmadis, Shia Muslims, LGBTQI Indonesians, and others was not orchestrated by one movement or one leader, but emerged from the interaction of competitive elections, fragmented religious authority, a media landscape regulated entirely by the logic of profit and the attention economy, and a civil society boom—none of which, taken alone, looks like the engine of exclusion. That’s what makes Indonesia’s experience so instructive and so unsettling.
For scholars of religious nationalism beyond the Muslim world, the Indonesian case suggests that institutional design at the top—constitutional courts, minority rights provisions, federalism—may be necessary but is nowhere near sufficient. The construction of a majoritarian center can proceed perfectly well without anyone directing it.
The concept of “Mainstream Islam” is crucial to the discussion that follows. Indonesian scholars and policy advisors often use the term descriptively to refer to large civil society organizations, such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, that serve as a bulwark against extremism. However, you are using it to describe a more concerning phenomenon: A process of homogenization that these very organizations have, at least partly, facilitated. How do you navigate this tension, and did you face any resistance from Indonesian scholars when you proposed this interpretation?
The term is indeed already in circulation—it appears in the work of Indonesian policy advisors, religious authorities, and commentators, typically to describe the large organisations NU and Muhammadiyah with millions of members as the moderate “mainstream” standing against fringe extremism. My use of the term is analytically different: I am not describing a set of actors or organizations, but rather a process of homogenization and bureaucratization—the narrowing of what counts as acceptable Islam in Indonesia, and the growing institutional and political power of that narrower center.
What I want to highlight is the constructedness of any mainstream. A mainstream does not exist naturally; actors produce it through othering, at the margins rather than at the core. This homogenization is not unique to Islam or to Indonesia—as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the scholar of Islamic studies Thomas Bauer have both argued from different angles, the drive to reduce ambiguity and plurality is a characteristic feature of modernity itself. Bauer’s work on the premodern Islamic tradition is particularly relevant here: he shows that classical Islamic thought was marked by a remarkably high tolerance for doctrinal and interpretive plurality—what he calls a “culture of ambiguity”—and that modern pressures toward standardization systematically eroded this. The post-reform era in Indonesia is, in that sense, another wave in a longer process.
Every discursive actor—including defenders of pluralism—plays a role in shaping what the center looks like. In navigating resistance from Indonesian colleagues familiar with a different use of the term, I have tried to be careful to emphasize exactly this: I am trying to make visible a process of construction that all actors, including well-intentioned ones, have participated in. The way we as commentators use categories shapes discourse, and I think that tension is actually built into the term “Mainstream Islam” itself—which is part of why I like it.
One of the book’s most provocative arguments is that the human rights framework traditionally used to defend marginalized groups, such as Ahmadis, Shia Muslims, and LGBTQI Indonesians, may have inadvertently deepened their marginalization. By labeling these groups as minorities, advocates have reinforced their distinction from a mainstream society whose authority they should have challenged instead. This argument is challenging to present without seeming to blame the defenders rather than the perpetrators of persecution. What are your thoughts on the ethical implications of making this argument?
I resist framing my analysis in terms of blame. What I tried to do is sharpen our view of how every discursive actor contributes to shaping categories and boundaries. The argument about the “defense paradox” can be stated plainly: from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, the dominant framework for defending Ahmadis, Shia, and LGBTQI Indonesians was the international human rights framework, with its emphasis on minority rights. This framework, I argue, drawing on work done by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, had an unintended consequence: by framing these communities as minorities, defenders inadvertently concretized their difference from a mainstream whose very authority to define Islam they should instead have challenged. As one Ahmadi student put it simply: “I used to just be a normal Indonesian, now I feel different.” That feeling of enforced difference was not caused by the defenders; it was amplified by the categories used in their defense. This is not an issue specific to Indonesia, but part of modernity where numerical majorities and minorities have begun to shape the way we think about societies.
Since the 2010s, in Indonesia, an alternative has re-emerged: the Islam Nusantara discourse, grounded in local Indonesian Islamic traditions and traditions associated with the late president Abdurrahman Wahid, has in my observation proven more productive than frameworks relying entirely on imported categories. It is a defense rooted in what is indigenous rather than what is minority. At the same time, I want to be careful not to allow this argument to become ammunition for those who dismiss all emancipatory efforts on the basis of the categories they use. Every political effort is deeply context-dependent. The human rights framework had its strengths and for many, it was the best tool available. Understanding its limitations is not the same as condemning those who wielded it.
You develop the concept of “fourfold decentralization,” the simultaneous liberalization of elections, civil society, media, and religious authority after 1998, as the structural explanation for why competitive pressures drove the construction of Mainstream Islam. But decentralization is usually celebrated in the democratization literature as a mechanism for accountability and citizen empowerment. What went wrong in the Indonesian case?
The democratization literature on Indonesia is actually more nuanced on this point than the celebratory framing suggests. It is well accepted in Indonesianist scholarship that the post-1998 decentralization caused an increase of patronage politics and clientelism — that is not a point original to my book, but it is an important part of the backdrop.
What I want to add with looking beyond elections is a broader question: Indonesia raises doubts about whether decentralization functions the way liberal democratic theory envisions it in a climate where states invest less and less in citizenship education and where media conglomerates operate via an attention economy built on clickbait and rage.
The fourfold decentralization I analyze works across four simultaneous dimensions: elections (which produced patronage democracy, money politics, and clientelism); religious authority (where the fragmentation of established bodies like MUI gave rise to pop preachers and online fatwas); media (where digitalization and the attention economy rewarded controversy); and civil society (where an NGO boom brought foreign funding and a rights discourse that, as I argued above, also had unintended consequences). These four processes reinforced each other in ways that made competition around religious identity particularly combustible.
Is there something specific to the religious field? Yes and no. Islam in Indonesia still carries significant moral authority—inherited from the anticolonial struggle and from the suppression Muslim movements endured under Suharto’s New Order. This gives religious claims a kind of legitimacy that other forms of political appeal may lack. But beyond that specific historical weight, I think religion can be compared to other forms of collective identity and organizing. The dynamics of competitive outbidding are not unique to religion; religion is simply a particularly potent resource in this context.
The comparison with Malaysia is often viewed by readers as the most intellectually significant aspect of the book. By showing that a similar exclusivist form of Mainstream Islam emerged under Malaysia’s authoritarian regime, characterized by a lack of competitive elections and a free press, you effectively challenge the reassuring liberal narrative that suggests more democracy leads to greater pluralism. However, Malaysia also presents a unique case where ethnicity and religion are closely intertwined in a distinctly Malay-Muslim manner, which has no true counterpart in Indonesia. How confident are you that this comparison achieves the theoretical objectives you intend?
You are right to push back on this, and I will accept the challenge. The comparison could be developed in far more detail than a single chapter allows, and the differences between the two cases are real and significant—different size, different colonial histories, different ethnic configurations. In Malaysia, the fusion of Malay ethnicity and Islam into a single legal and bureaucratic identity category, enforced since independence, has no direct Indonesian counterpart.
But the purpose of the comparison is to question too-easy conclusions. In this case, the comparison counters the simplistic explanation that electoral democracy is itself to blame for Indonesia’s trajectory. If the argument were simply “electoral democratization produces majoritarianism,” Malaysia would refute it immediately—Malaysia has produced a similarly exclusivist, unified majoritarian Islam through top-down authoritarianism, without competitive civil society or a free press. The question the comparison asks is: what do these two very different countries have in common that produces a similar outcome? I think that question is worth posing even if a definitive answer requires more comparative work than one book can do.
What the two cases share is competition along identitarian lines. In Indonesia, that competition was structured by electoral democracy and decentralization; in Malaysia, by intra-elite and inter-party competition within an authoritarian framework. The comparison suggests that competitive pressure—rather than democracy per se—might be the driving mechanism.
The book primarily focuses on the decade from 2005 to 2017. Now that Prabowo Subianto, who has long been associated with the Islamist-nationalist forces described in the book, has taken office as president, how do you interpret the current situation? Does Prabowo’s rise to power support or challenge the arguments made in the book?
I want to be honest about the limits of what I can say here. My research ends in the 2010s, with a cutoff around 2017, and I have not conducted sustained fieldwork in Indonesia since then. I cannot comment authoritatively on the current moment in the way someone who has followed developments closely over the past several years can.
What I would say is that Prabowo’s rise neither confirms nor complicates the book’s argument in any simple sense—rather, it opens a new question. Both Jokowi’s second term and the Prabowo presidency raise the question of how exactly what I analyzed—the emergence of a new Indonesian religious nationalism, the Islamist Conservative Majoritarian Synthesis, the marginalization of particular identities—connects to autocratization. My book is about the construction of Mainstream Islam under conditions of competitive electoral democracy. The relationship between that process and a possible authoritarian turn would be the chapter I would add now.
Finally, you conclude the book with a cautionary rather than prescriptive message. The communities you document, such as Ahmadis who have been displaced from their homes, Shia families living in a sports stadium for years, and LGBTQI Indonesians subjected to conversion therapy camps, are comprised of real people facing urgent situations. Is there a responsibility that comes with writing this kind of scholarship to go beyond merely diagnosing these issues?
Yes — I do think social scientists have a responsibility. But I also have to be honest about what form that responsibility can usefully take. I do not live in Indonesia, and I no longer regularly visit. My diagnosis is most productively used by people in Indonesia who have a far better sense of the current political constellation than I do. Academic books take a long time to come out; what I can offer is a historical and structural perspective, not real-time strategic advice.
An outsider’s perspective can be valuable—it can sometimes see structural patterns that are harder to see from within. But it is always a limited perspective, just as an insider’s perspective is always limited. The best approach is to combine them.
In my new project—on civic education in Germany—I am working much more directly with civil society actors, and I am trying to bring the Indonesian experience into dialogue with questions about pluralism and democratic resilience in Germany. The lessons, I think, travel—not as prescriptions, but as warnings about how competitive pressures, combined with weak investment in civic education and an unregulated attention economy, can narrow the boundaries of who belongs.
