Indonesia. Islamisation and its opponents in Java: A political, social, cultural, and religious history, c. 1930 to the present. By M.C. Ricklefs. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 576. Maps, Bibliography, Index.

Islamisation and its opponents in Java: A political, social, cultural, and religious history, c. 1930 to the present By M.C. RICKLEFS Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 576. Maps, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000162 With Islamisation and its opponents in Java, M.C. Ricklefs concludes his sweeping three-volume history of Islam in Java. Over the course of the book's 500 pages, Ricklefs argues that, during the past century, Javanese society has become increasingly and even predominantly Islamic in its cultural forms, politics, and articulations of identity. In order to examine Islam's growing salience, Ricklefs embraces the system of categorisation--first popularised by Clifford Geertz--of Javanese as primarily either devout, practising Muslims (santri) or nominal Muslims who profess more indigenous modes of religious beliefs and cultural belonging (abangan). Based on this framework, the book conveys an intriguing narrative of santri ascent and a corresponding abangan decline in modern Java. In the opening four chapters, Ricklefs traces how the radical polarisation of Javanese society between devout Muslims (santri) and nominally Muslim Javanese (abangan) culminated with the devastating violence of 1965-6. While the santriabangan division had been fomenting since the mid-nineteenth century, Ricklefs identifies the Japanese Occupation and then the Indonesian Revolution as critical moments of popular mobilisation when the santri and abangan labels transformed from cultural-religious identities into high stakes political allegiances. In Ricklefs' assessment, this newly politicised rupture was further exacerbated by fierce ideological competition in the 1950s and 1960s. During these turbulent years, Islamic (Masyumi and Nahdlatul Ulama), Communist (PKI), and nationalist (PNI) parties did not consign themselves to elections and policy debates alone; rather, they came to represent streams of social belonging (aliran), complete with their own youth groups, women's associations, labor unions, and even art collectives. Ricklefs argues that these hardened social divisions laid the foundation for the brutal anti-communist massacres of 1965-6, which were largely perpetrated by an Army-santri alliance against the predominantly abangan PKI. The book's strongest contribution is Ricklefs's striking analysis of Islam under Suharto's New Order (1966-98). Challenging the common academic characterisation of the New Order as an opponent of Islam, Ricklefs instead presents the Suharto government as a complicated partner in and proponent of Islamisation. In the aftermath of 1965, fears of a communist resurgence inspired the New Order to police many abangan institutions such as political parties and religious sects (kebatinan). Consequently, 'when the few institutions which supported abangan life ... were removed from the scene, the abangan side of Javanese society was left vulnerable and disadvantaged in the face of Islamisation projects' (p. 132). Yet, these Islamisation projects were not merely the provenance of politically marginalised modernists; rather, Ricklefs emphasises that Suharto himself threw his hat into the ring, building the New Order into an Islamising force in its own right. From the late 1960s to the 1990s, it constructed mosques, integrated religious education into public schools, and created a vibrant system of Islamic higher education. Although some modernists continued to criticise Suharto's politics, many more Muslim leaders and organisations embraced the New Order as a powerful ally in Islamisation. …