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When national governments support homogenising religious programs within plural populations, scholars are called to pay close attention to the subsequent interactions between state power and religious projects/actors. This article responds to this need by providing a sub-national perspective on Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI), a national body seen by some as a state-supported homogenising project. Based on fieldwork in the Indonesian cities of Tasikmalaya and Malang, the article describes the ideological diversity that exists between the central MUI and its regional branches. In the regions, the MUI is supported financially by regional governments, and in this way, its branches are shaped by local political conditions rather than by allegiance to ideological programs promoted from the centre. The authors observe the openness of the Tasikmalaya MUI to a wide range of Islamic movements, and contrast this with the ideological homogeneity of Malang's MUI, where the regional government is intent on restricting Islamic programs that threaten religious and social diversity. The contrasting religio-political positionings of the regional MUI signal the ideological heterogeneity to be found within the Indonesian Islamic Scholars’ Council and shed light on the importance of sub-national factors in shaping Indonesia's institutional responses to religious diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the ways in which evaluations of media forms, and specifically religious oratory, reveal a differentiated Muslim community. Indonesia’s Muslims attend oratorical events (preaching) in great numbers, and frequently do so within routines following the Islamic calendar and other schedules. But, despite their popularity, conventions of Islamic oratory are interpreted by the country’s Muslim progressives as inefficacious and anachronistic. This article explores the models of individual subjectivity that underpin critiques of oratory, noting how the ‘Muslim listener’ is caricatured as lacking in autonomy, incapable of deliberation and passive. It argues that a rival subjectivity, one that constructs listening as a legitimate form of engagement with Islam, emerges from the ideology and preferred communication forms of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, or NU). This legitimisation provides an alternative to the idealised narrative of modernity against which oratory is judged as a form of mediation belonging to Indonesian pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the urban villages of Bandung, the capital city of the Indonesian province of West Java, many Muslim women routinely attend between four and six oratorical and/or pedagogical events per week. This article analyses this participation by observing the forms and patterns of these women's spectatorship, specifically observing their mobility, the interaction between their life-cycles and their participation habits, the gendered embodiment of Islamic knowledge they display, the effect of hegemonic masculinities, and preaching performances which treat them not only as Muslims intent on increasing their Islamic knowledge, but also as pleasure-taking subjects. The article concludes that the conduct and management of preaching events intended for mixed audiences are highly sensitive to women's spectatorship and warns against the assumption that Islamic practice is a punishing sphere of patriarchy. In fact, when the influence of women's spectatorship on the conduct and management of such preaching events is appreciated, West Java's preaching events appear as a feminised domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how common people engage with Islamic boarding school called pesantren in Indonesia. The field of Islamic knowledge appears riven with borders when surveying the materials from a distance. Termed as orang awam in Indonesia, these common folks would appear to value supplication by a community leader more highly than exegesis. It is described that the distribution of Islamic knowledge is something in which people are engaged in an ongoing, complex, multidimensional process of exchange and reproduction. In some cases, the environment of the pesantren is one of inclusiveness where exclusions are actively forestalled. Furthermore, it is noted that pesantren becomes a focal point for religious participation by Indonesian muslims.