Introduction

Indonesia has long been familiar with that Islamic education institution called the madrasa. In the contemporary Indonesian context, the term refers to primary and secondary Islamic schools adopting a modern system of education, in which Islamic subjects are taught alongside general subjects. The main aim of the madrasa is to produce graduates like those from modern-style ‘secular’ schools, called sekolah, but is distinguished by its having a better understanding of Islam. Today there are more than 37,000 madrasas scattered throughout Indonesia. Some of them belong to private Islamic organisations, and another important portion are controlled by the government's Department of Religious Affairs. Another Islamic education institution which operates in Indonesia is the pesantren. Slightly different from the madrasa, the pesantren is a rural-based Islamic educational institution which teaches exclusively Islamic subjects, using kitab kuning (classical Arabic books), with the main aim of producing religious authorities. This institution is overwhelmingly identified with the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). It is an exemplary Islamic teaching centre in which the kyai, the traditional Javanese ᒼalim, serves as the central figure. Spurred on by the emerging modernist discourse at the beginning of the twentieth-century, other Muslim organisations, including Muhammadiyah, Al Irsyad and Persis, have also developed their own pesantrens, which appear to be a strong embodiment of Islamic modernism, combining features of both the madrasa and pesantren systems.

Besides these older madrasas and pesantrens, known for their relatively moderate understanding of Islam, there has more recently emerged a number of conservative, if not exclusivist, Islamic educational institutions of a new type. Some of these have been involved in providing breeding grounds for violent mobilisation conducted by militant Islamic groups that rose in the aftermath of the collapse of Suharto's New Order regime in May 1998. These institutions generally grew out of Indonesia's increasingly closer connections with the dynamics of transnational Muslim politics over the last 20 years. One such example is the Salafi madrasas, Islamic teaching centres associated with those who explicitly identify themselves as Salafis, literally meaning the followers of the pious forefathers, al-salaf al-salih. They believe that to follow the salaf al-salih means to submit to the absolute literal word of the Qur’an and the sunna, and that this submission will determine whether one can be called Muslim or not.