Muslims, the New Age and Marginal Religions in Indonesia: Changing Meanings of Religious Pluralism

Abstract

The author examines the changing meanings of religious pluralism in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia. She demonstrates the paradoxical viability of three new organizations - Salamullah, the Brahma Kumaris and the Anand Ashram - that challenge normative conceptions of 'religion' embodied in national law since the 1960s but nonetheless attract substantial numbers of cosmopolitan Indonesians, including religiously well-educated Muslims. The high modern construction of 'religions' that underpins existing law is being reworked in the actual religious practice of cosmopolitan Indonesians. With their patronage they are expanding the sphere of internal dialogue within Indonesia's Muslim community, effecting a new permeability in the boundaries of the nation's official religions, and contributing to the emergence of an arena of unregulated 'spiritual' groups that now exists alongside the highly regulated, rigidly denominational religious market structured by the New Order Government (1966-1998).