Jihad Against the Ghazwul Fikri: Actors and Mobilization Strategies of the Islamic Underground Movement

Abstract

<p>Born from the processes of neoliberal globalization and the strengthening opposition to the New Order regime in the late 1990s, the underground rock music movement (<i>gerakan musik rock bawah tanah</i>) in Indonesia emerged as a bastion of progressive politics (Wallach 2005) and the radical Left (Pickles 2001 and 2007; Saefullah 2017a). The movement participants, called "underground youths" (<i>pemuda underground</i>), protested against social and cultural orthodoxies, capitalist economic system, and state authoritarianism. After taking part in toppling General Suharto through democratic mobilizations in the late 1990s, their activism went through a period of decline. This was followed by the emergence of a new subcultural movement that, unlike their predecessors who tended to regard religiosity as a private matter, displays religious piety as necessity and uses right-wing Islamism as a political ideology. The founders called their movement the "Islamic underground" (<i>Underground Islam</i>), the name was chosen to distinguish themselves from the existing underground movement which they considered "too secular" and "too liberal". Overlooked by scholars of Indonesian Islam, this stream of underground movement played an important role in disseminating conservative and even "radical" narratives of Islam to marginalized youths through ways that were never carried out by mainstream Islamic organizations.</p>