Reza Idria is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Ar-Raniry (Ar-Raniry State Islamic University) in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University as well as an MA in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Born and raised in Aceh, the only province adopting Sharia Law in Indonesia, Reza’s research interests are at the intersection of legal anthropology and Islamic law. 

Idria is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at APARC for the 2023 winter quarter. The fellowship, which is hosted jointly by APARC’s Southeast Asia Program (SeAP) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore, raises the visibility, extent, and quality of scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia.

During his LKC NUS-Stanford fellowship, he will turn his doctoral dissertation, “Tales of the Unexpected: Contesting Syari’ah Law in Aceh, Indonesia,” into a book manuscript. This work is an anthropological study that examines a wide range of social and political responses that have emerged with the state implementation of Islamic law. The empirical data for this research project has been gathered in Aceh, the only Indonesian province that has adopted Sharia. Dr. Idria is also embarking on a new research project that focuses on the legal and socio-economic consequences of the local regulation on Islamic banking.

This interview originally appeared on the website of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

What sparked your interest in studying the social and political responses to the state implementation of Sharia law in Aceh, Indonesia?

There are some puzzling conditions in Aceh that sparked my interest to conduct this study. I grew up immersed in Acehnese Muslim culture and have lived through the historical and political transformation of the region since the period of armed conflict. In my view, the government’s efforts to translate Sharia into positive law in Aceh was motivated largely by political needs, rather than the religious ones. Islam has indeed a pronounced role in Aceh society since pre-colonial time, and the province is often called “Verandah of Mecca”, but it was only in 1999 the central government decided to impose Sharia law in the province in an attempt to quell the Free Aceh Movement rebellion.

In fact, it was the tsunami of 2004 that actually helped stop the war and led to the signing of peace agreement. However, it did not prevent the government to apply more aggressive Sharia law in the post-conflict and post-tsunami Aceh. While many Acehnese appeared supportive to the implementation of Sharia, I was also troubled with the impression created by many media outlets that all Acehnese accept Sharia law without question. Despite the aggressive enforcement directed by the state, my study found some elements of Acehnese society have passionately contested and challenged the official understanding of Sharia.

What challenges did you encounter when carrying out your fieldwork in Aceh for your upcoming monograph, Tales of the Unexpected: Contesting Syari’ah Law in Aceh, Indonesia?

I began gathering considerable data for this study in 2011 when I was involved in a joint research project on the Indonesian experience of Islam and politics after the fall of Suharto. Given the sensitivity of this topic conducting fieldwork was challenging. Some people were suspicious of my academic inquiry. People were mostly reluctant to speak on anything related to Sharia Law. Even those who have engaged in activism against Sharia law did not want to be seen as openly antagonistic to it. Many would say that they are not resisting Sharia as such, rather seeking to rescue Sharia from associations with fundamentalism. I think it is because the Acehnese perceived that their identity is deeply entwined with Islam, therefore critical voices to the state-led Sharia implementation are often subdued due to the fear of being labeled anti-Islam. It’s a dangerous stigma and I think no one could survive in Aceh with that stigma. Such condition contributes to people’s ambiguous and ambivalent reactions toward Sharia. To me this also explains why resistance to Sharia has eventually taken many forms and is often performed in unconventional manners. Sometimes so subtle that they might not seem like resistance at all.

How have the diverse range of local groups who have engaged in activism against Sharia law enforcement in Aceh cooperated with each other?

There was some cooperation and mutual support among local groups who share dissenting views concerning the state interpretations of Sharia. For example, in responding to the provisions of Islamic Criminal Code of 2009 (referred locally as Qanun Jinayah), intellectuals from several local universities, cultural activists, and dozens of civil society organizations worked together to criticize many controversial aspects of the proposed law. They formed an advocacy network called Jaringan Masyarakat Sipil Peduli Syariat (the Civil Society’s Network concerning Sharia). JMSPS activists used various strategies, from lobbying to organizing a series of demonstrations. They went to the Aceh Parliament condemning members of the parliament and the governor of Aceh had they not stopped proposing the law. The movement was relatively successful as the Sharia Criminal Code of 2009 was postponed because Governor Irwandi Yusuf eventually refused to sign it. However, conditions have changed in the following years, especially after Irwandi lost the gubernatorial election in 2012. His successor signed the Qanun draft and passed the Sharia criminal law in 2014.

How has Komunitas Tikar Pandan, the cultural organization you co-founded in Aceh in 2002, played a role in the responses to Sharia law implementation?

Komunitas Tikar Pandan continues to organize various culturally oriented activities such as creating writing workshops, painting exhibitions, film screenings and discussions. The organization’s mission from the very beginning is to generate critical awareness, especially for the young, about the dangers of cultural hegemony and structural oppression in the name of identity politics and religion. One example, in responding to the absence of public cinema in Banda Aceh which has been considered by Aceh’s Ulama Council incompatible to the spirit of Sharia, Komunitas Tikar Pandan provides a mini-cinema and hosts a series of film screenings and discussions as a rebuke. Tikar Pandan’s office occasionally became sanctuary for some members of marginalized groups in Banda Aceh.

How do activist groups based outside of Aceh provide assistance to local Aceh activists whose resistance to Sharia law enforcement has met with opposition from local authorities?

For some cases such as the anti-punk crackdown in 2011 and the persecution of Aceh queers in 2018, support and assistance from people outside Aceh were helpful and forceful imposing pressure upon the Sharia authorities to evaluate their actions. Legal Aid Foundation (LBH) from Jakarta offered legal assistance to release the arrested punks. International expressions support for Aceh’s punks also took place across the globe, from Moscow to San Francisco, under the slogan “Punk is Not Crime” condemning the crackdown. Some international human rights organizations also provided aid advocacy and financial support to LGBTQ activists in Aceh.

How has local public opinion of Sharia law changed since it was implemented in Aceh, and what factors have been most influential in shaping this change?

At the beginning, there was a tremendous hope that the Sharia law would restore justice in the region affected by decades of bloody armed conflict. The conflict period was the period of profound lawlessness for the Acehnese. They were killed, tortured, and raped but no perpetrators had been brought to trial. That’s why I think people in Aceh were enthusiasts when the central government offered Sharia law to the province in 1999. Gradually the implementation has given rise to its own issues and resulted in the creation of multiple injustice and many forms of violence too. I think there are two factors that have been most influential in shaping and creating the negative image of the current Sharia implementation in the province, first morality policing through the special unit known as Sharia police. Second, the enactment of spectacle punishment, namely hukum cambuk (public caning). While Sharia promises to be a comprehensive guidance in all aspects of life, the Aceh government has been criticized by many ordinary Acehnese to focus merely on symbolic aspects of Islam, while neglecting what they viewed as more “substantial” concerns.

What developments do you anticipate happening in Aceh’s political and social scene in the near future that could affect the enforcement of Sharia law?

Aceh has been the poorest province in Sumatra within the last five years according to official survey. Despite receiving tremendous financial assistances from international agencies during the tsunami recovery and from the central government (so far more than $7.9 billion) Aceh’s economic growth continues to be the lowest in Sumatra. Following the Helsinki peace accord, the Aceh province is entitled to receive special autonomy funds from its central government for twenty years, from 2008 to 2027. So, it is only a few years left and with the rampant corruption and lack of interest from investors it is hard to imagine any changes for a better condition will occur in Aceh. I think poor and disempowered Acehnese Muslims will likely continue to see more perplexing regulations in the region promulgated in the name of Sharia.

China is encountering a religious resurgence. Its revival symbolizes tension between the past and the present, as people search for purpose in a country that’s been shaken by expansive reforms and modernization efforts over the past four decades.

That was the message shared by veteran journalist Ian Johnson, the 2016 winner of the Shorenstein Journalism Award, who gave a keynote speech followed by panel discussion titled “Religion after Mao,” part of the Award’s 15th anniversary ceremony at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on Monday.

Johnson, who has spent 30 years as a journalist, has written extensively about Chinese history, religion and culture, and is also a teacher and published author, most recently releasing the book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.

“Ian is maybe one of the most remarkable awardees we’ve had in recent years,” said Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC associate director for research, who introduced the event by talking about Johnson’s distinguished career, which has included writing for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Review of Books and led to a Pulitzer Prize win in 2001.

Xueguang Zhou, a Stanford professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, joined Johnson on the panel, while Sneider moderated the discussion.

In a wide-ranging conversation, the panelists discussed the varied history of religion in Chinese society during the 20th and 21st centuries, offering stories of their experiences living and working in China.

According to Johnson, religious persecution in China is often thought to be associated with the anti-religious campaigns of Mao Zedong following the Chinese Communist Party’s assumption of power in 1949, but in reality, it existed decades before and has lingered in national memory.

Into the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese government remained superstitious of religion, trying to redefine religious groups as “culture” alone, under the assumption that religion could be desensitized enough to eventually disappear, Johnson said.

But that did not happen, he said, and instead an opposite trend did. Reaching a high point in the 2000s, China’s economic reforms – both sweeping and fast-paced – brought growing angst and anxiety and prompted people across every socioeconomic background to turn to religion as an outlet.

Johnson, who has spent weeks at a time living among religious groups, noted a shift from the time he was in China in the mid-1980s to the past decade, where now “the government sees that religious groups can provide some sort of moral framework for some people.”

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Chinese people today are searching for meaning, the panelists said, and are driven to join religious groups amid resource competition and mass migration that has usurped traditional family structures and disquieted many people who have moved from close-knit rural towns to alienating urban centers.

“Everybody is out there…trying to reify that part of life which isn’t filled by bread alone, by commerce alone,” said Schell, who has written about China since the 1970s as an author and journalist. “It’s a pretty chaotic quest and it’s very hard to know where it will all end.”

At the moment, religious groups in China remain heterogeneous and fragmented, Zhou said, but cohesion is growing in some regions and participation of local government leaders has drawn greater attention to the practice of faith.

“In grassroots China, religion, spiritual life and the Party, really go hand-in-hand – they’re intertwined,” said Zhou, whose research focuses on Chinese bureaucracy and economic development. “Local elites are involved both in the spiritual world and the Party world, and they shift back and forth simultaneously.”

However, the future of the relationship between religion and the government remains to be seen, according to the panelists.

Religious groups could fracture, or the government could continue to favor “native” religious groups, which if exacerbated over time, could lead to quasi-state religions, Johnson said. (Today, China recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam and Protestantism).

While religious groups increasingly provide a service to some people, the Chinese government continues to be wary of them as an alternative source of knowledge and values, Johnson said, which hold the potential to coalesce into a nascent civil society.

“Every dynasty in China knows that one way dynasties usually ended was with some millenarian movement,” Schell added of the government’s apprehension. “They are afraid of religious movements because they do bespeak of higher values, higher loyalties and different organizational structures that don’t owe fealty to the Party.”

A video of the keynote speech is posted at this link.

Ian Johnson, a veteran journalist with a focus on Chinese society, religion and history, is the 2016 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award, given annually by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, is conferred to a journalist who produces outstanding reporting on Asia and has contributed to greater understanding of the complexities of Asia. He will deliver a keynote speech and participate in a panel discussion on May 1, 2017, at Stanford.

“Ian Johnson is one of those rare writers who has not only watched China’s evolution over the long haul, but who is also deeply steeped in the culture and politic of both Europe and the United States as well,” said Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director at the Asia Society of New York’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and jury member for the award. “This cross-cultural grounding has imbued his work on China with a humanistic core that, because it is always implicit rather than explicit, is all the more persuasive.”

Ian Buruma, the Paul W. Williams Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College and jury member for the award, added further praise, “Ian Johnson is one of the finest journalists in the English language. He writes about China with extraordinary insight, deep historical knowledge and a critical spirit tempered by rare human sympathy. His work on China is further enriched by wider interests, such as the problems of Islamist extremism in the West, specifically Germany, where he lives when he is not writing from China.”

The Shorenstein award, now in its 15th year, originally in partnership with the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, was created to honor American journalists who through their writing have helped Americans better understand Asia. In 2011, the award was broadened to encompass Asian journalists who pave the way for press freedom, and have aided in the growth of mutual understanding across the Pacific. Recent recipients of the award include Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun; Jacob Schlesinger of the Wall Street Journal; and Aung Zaw, founder of the Irrawaddy, a Burmese publication.

Johnson has spent over half of the past 30 years in the Greater China region, first as a student in Beijing from 1984-85, and then in Taipei from 1986-88. He later worked as a newspaper correspondent in China, from 1994-96 with Baltimore's The Sun, and then from 1997-2001 with the Wall Street Journal, covering macroeconomics, China’s social issues and World Trade Organization accession.

Johnson returned to China in 2009, where he now lives and writes for the New York Times and freelances for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and National Geographic. He also teaches and leads a fellowship program at the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies.

Johnson has also worked in Germany, serving as the Wall Street Journal’s Germany bureau chief and senior writer. Early on in his career, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification, and later returned to head coverage on areas including the introduction of the euro and Islamist terrorism.

Johnson has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won in 2001 for his coverage of the Chinese government’s suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and its implications of that campaign for the future. He is also the author of two books, Wild Grass (Pantheon, 2004) which examines China’s civil society and grassroots protest, and A Mosque in Munich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). His next book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao (Pantheon, April 2017) explores the resurgence of religion and value systems in China.

Additional details about the panel discussion and the award are listed below.

About the Panel Discussion and Award Ceremony

A keynote speech will be delivered by Shorenstein Journalism Award winner Ian Johnson, followed by a panel discussion with Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director at the Asia Society of New York’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and Xueguang Zhou, professor of sociology at Stanford; moderated by Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC.

May 1, 2017, from 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. (PDT)

Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305

The keynote speech and panel discussion are open to the public. The award ceremony will take place in the evening for a private audience.

To RSVP for the panel discussion, please visit this page.

About the Shorenstein Journalism Award

The Shorenstein Journalism Award honors a journalist not only for excellence in their field of reporting on Asia, but also for their promotion of a free, vibrant media and for the future of relations between Asia and the United States. Originally created to identify American and Western journalists for their work in and on Asia, the award now also recognizes Asian journalists who have contributed significantly to the development of independent media in Asia. The award is presented annually and includes a prize of $10,000.

The award is named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and the press - the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Past recipients of the award include: Yoichi Funabashi, formerly of the Asahi Shimbun (2015); Jacob Schlesinger of the Wall Street Journal (2014), Aung Zaw of the Irrawaddy (2013), Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times (2012), Caixin Media of China (2011), Barbara Crossette of the New York Times (2010), Seth Mydans of the New York Times (2009), Ian Buruma (2008), John Pomfret of the Washington Post (2007), Melinda Liu of Newsweek (2006), Nayan Chanda of the Far Eastern Economic Review (2005), Don Oberdofer of the Washington Post (2004), Orville Schell (2003), and Stanley Karnow (2002).

A jury selects the award winner. The 2016 jury comprised of:

Ian Buruma, the Paul W. Williams Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, is a noted Asia expert who frequently contributes to publications including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. He is a recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award and the international Erasmus Prize (both in 2008).

Nayan Chanda is the director of publications and the editor of YaleGlobal Online Magazine at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. For nearly thirty years, Chanda was at the Hong Kong-based magazine, Far Eastern Economic Review. He writes the ‘Bound Together’ column in India’s Business World and is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warrior Shaped Globalization. Chanda received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2005.

Susan Chira is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues and former deputy executive editor and foreign editor at the New York Times. Chira has extensive experience in Asia, including serving as Japan correspondent for the Times in the 1980s. During her tenure as foreign editor, the Times won the Pulitzer Prize four times for international reporting on Afghanistan, Russia, Africa and China.

Donald K. Emmerson is a well-respected Indonesia scholar and director of Shorenstein APARC’s Southeast Asia Program and a research fellow for the National Asia Research Program. Frequently cited in international media, Emmerson also contributes to leading publications, such as Asia Times and International Business Times.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director at the Asia Society of New York’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former jury member for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Schell has written extensively on China and was awarded the 1997 George Peabody Award for producing the groundbreaking documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace. He received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2003.

Daniel C. Sneider is the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC, writing on Asian security issues, wartime historical memory and U.S policy in Asia. He also frequently contributes to publications such as Foreign Policy, Asia Policy and Slate. Sneider had three decades of experience as a foreign correspondent serving in India, Japan and Russia for the Christian Science Monitor and as the national and foreign editor of the San Jose Mercury News and a syndicated columnist on foreign affairs for Knight-Ridder.

For more information about the award, please visit this page.