Front Pembela Islam as a Leading Indonesian Far-Right Islamic Organisation in the Second Half of the 2010s

Abstract

The author analyses the Front of Defenders of Islam as the largest legal organisation of Indonesian supporters of political Islam, which existed in Indonesia from 1998 to December 2020, when its activities were stopped by the authorities. It is assumed that the religiously motivated political radicalism develops as a heterogeneous phenomenon, and its secondary character became its main feature. Therefore, the Front is analysed in the context of the recent history of the Islamic alternative to the processes of democratic transition and trends of modernisation and secularization also. The author believes that the radicals of the Front were unable to off er an original political program, and their ideology actualised the fragmentation of Indonesian society and the inability of some traditional groups to integrate into a dynamically changing society. The author analyses various forms of intellectual activities of religiously motivated political radicals, including criticism of liberalism, rejection of secularisation, denial of modernisation in general and its forms imagined as extreme in Indonesia by some intellectuals in particular. The author believes that after the prohibition of the Front in December 2020, far-right political Islam in modern Indonesia entered a new stage of its development. The delegitimation of the Front, on the one hand, could become an incentive for the revitalisation of other similar groups in Indonesia. On the other hand, the legal marginalisation of supporters of far-right political Islam and their displacement to the periphery of the legal space can become an incentive for the growth of extremism, inspiring change new tactics of adherents of extreme currents in Indonesian Islam.