Religion Unleashed

Building on the previous chapter, this chapter argues that religious innovation among student activists has also been enabled by the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. Unlike life during authoritarianism, democracy meant that religious identity is no longer subject to the same degree of microscopic governmental surveillance. People are able to try on different religious identities as they join various ideological groups at once, or move between them, and pursue different strategies to deal with the enlargement of secular liberal ideals in this context. The flurry of religious improvisation produces the counter-intuitive patterns of Islamists emerging from secular schools and liberal Muslims from madrasas.