Since its appearance on the Western landscape three centuries ago, modern capitalism has given rise to a mythology that, unlike previous socio-economic orders, is so powerful that it can function without an ethical embedding – or simply create one in its own image. This essay argues that this end-of-ethics talk is premature, and only obscures the fact that capitalism is plural in its political and ethical forms, and equally varied in its social organizations and relation to the state. Rather than capitalism everywhere creating a homogeneous ethical landscape by bulldozing intermediary institutions and extra-market value spheres, capitalist societies have given rise to an agonistic plurality of political and moral embeddings and contentions. The essay explores this diversity through a comparison of modern capitalisms in Western, East Asian, and Islamic world areas.

Although better known for his foundational writings in the sociology of religion, modernity, and capitalism, Peter L. Berger was for his entire life preoccupied with the challenge of modern pluralism. He understood the latter as involving, not just the growing diversity of religious traditions in society, but the deeper question of how human beings can co-exist in peace in an age when a shared experience of both everyday realities and ultimate meanings gives way to social worlds in which individuals with deeply different world views live side by side in society. In this chapter, I provide an overview of Berger’s evolving understanding of modern pluralism. In the final and larger part of this chapter, I review and assess the ideas he developed in the last years of his life, during which time I had the pleasure of being his colleague.

Pluralism as an Emergent Effect of Modernity

In his early works, including The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967), and his no less monumental The Social Construction of Reality (1966; co-authored with his life-long friend, Thomas Luckmann), Berger linked the problem of modern plurality to what he described as the dialectics of social life. According to the latter model, social worlds are products of an ongoing interaction between the individual, social structures, and the institutions of society as a whole. The interaction begins when an individual “externalizes” meanings through cognitive and physical activity, thereby contributing to the creation of broader social structures which, in a third phase of the dialectic, are then “reappropriated” or internalized as “structures of consciousness” (Berger 1967, 14). Seen from this ever-evolving perspective, “subjective reality is […] always dependent upon specific plausibility structures […] without which the definition of reality in question cannot be maintained in consciousness” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 174–75).

Drawing on such early twentieth-century scholars as Emile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto, Berger argued that religion often has a privileged place in the construction of this social reality. “Religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation” for a particular world view or social reality, providing an overarching “social canopy” for meaningful human experience.

Since the Taliban seizure of Kabul in September 1996, scholars and policy analysts have grappled with the question of the relation of madrasa education to Islamist extremism. The fact that madrasa-based students played a role in the Taliban's rise to power seemed sufficient proof for many observers that the institution is a platform for anti-democratic and anti-intellectual indoctrination. The Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists who carried out the Indonesian Bali bombings in October 2002 were also found to have ties to madrasa-based networks of militants operating in Malaysia and Indonesia.

More recent studies have confirmed that even in state-sponsored public schools in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, religious portions of the curriculum promote harshly intolerant viewpoints with regard to Shi’a, Sufis, Christians, Jews, and those deemed ‘unbelievers’. With their violent attacks on all institutions of modern learning, Daesh in the Middle East and Boko Haram in West Africa have confirmed once again that, for some radical extremists, modern schooling and intellectualism are antithetical to Islam.

There is and never was any single type of madrasa or Islamic schooling, and, as this chapter will attempt to explain, the Taliban, Daesh, and Boko Haram are the exception rather than the rule in most of today's Muslim world. In fact, and to introduce a theme at the centre of this study, over the course of the past century, and especially over the past thirty years, Islamic education has experienced an intellectual renewal as far-reaching as any since the early Abbasid dynasty in the eighth to ten centuries.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

With a population of almost 250 million people, 87.2 percent of whom are Muslim, Indonesia is today the largest Muslim majority society in the world. Some 9.9 percent of the population is Christian, 7 percent Protestant; 2.9 percent Catholic. Indonesia is also third largest and one of the younger among the world's democracies, having undergone a transition from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy in May 1998.

Christian leaders interviewed in 2013 for this report were of the opinion that Christians enjoyed a freer and more socially favorable situation prior to the events of 1998 and that the country's transition to a more open political system has heightened social and religious tensions. Christian interviewees pointed to a heightened frequency of attacks on church buildings, greater difficulty in securing permits for the construction of churches and schools, and pressures to restrict the number of Christians in the higher levels of state administration, among other obstacles, as evidence of a relative deterioration in interreligious relations. However, these same Christian officials were unhesitant in affirming that the transition to democracy is necessary and important and that the best way to address current deficiencies is by working with Muslims and others to promote the rule of law and multireligious tolerance. Some officials criticized earlier generations of Christian leaders for being too accommodating to the Indonesian state. Most felt that the resources for pluralist coexistence, including those in the Muslim community, were still strong but had yet to be fully mobilized or backed up by an effective legal system.

The Indonesian case importantly illustrates that although Christians have made signal contributions to Indonesian politics, culture, and education, Dutch colonialism and the mission system it promoted were premised on a corporatist and consociational rather than liberal model of religious freedom. For most of their 350 years in the archipelago, the Dutch prioritized their commercial and political interests and discouraged missionization in all but a few regions. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch gave the green light to missionaries, their policies set aside specific territories for individual denominations, encouraging a close identification of region, ethnicity, and denomination rather than religious liberty or individualistic voluntarism.

Since independence, most Indonesian Christians have advocated policies supportive of religious freedom. But they have done so in a framework that accepts the broadly consociational patterns of religious governance inherited from the Dutch.

Is Muslim religious culture in Indonesia different? Do Indonesian solutions to Islamic issues in society have anything to contribute to the development of culture and politics in the Muslim world at large? Two generations ago, the most common answer to these questions would have been quickly affirmative on the first but resoundingly negative on the second. At that time, the conventional wisdom among Western and Muslim Middle Eastern scholars was that the Islam professed by most Indonesians was superficial or syncretic, and that the community of religiously educated and observant Muslims (the santri) was a minority, and rather culturally unsophisticated at that. That such a peripheral population might offer lessons for the larger Muslim world seemed presumptuous, to say the least (but see, as an exception, Hodgson 1974).

Whatever the accuracy of this historical characterisation, the situation of Islam in Indonesia today is entirely different. As both ethnographic and survey studies have demonstrated, Indonesia's Muslims tend these days to be quite observant, carrying out religious duties at rates comparable to or higher than Muslims in Morocco or Lebanon, and much higher than in Iran (Mujani & Liddle 2007; cf. Baktiari 2011). Islamic education in Indonesia is now so well institutionalised that, in contrast to the pattern of the 1950s and 1960s, all Muslim citizens receive basic (and state-mandated) training in the tenets of their faith. As a result of these and other changes, Indonesia is today a solidly Sunni sort of place in a way that, with its syncretic abangan, Wetu telu and gargantuan Communist Party, it had not been in the 1950s (see Hefner 2011a).

But the second question remains: does Indonesian Muslim culture offer lessons for other parts of the Muslim world? What I want to suggest here is that Indonesia is richly distinctive with regard to three socio-religious variables: religious education, associational life and constitutional politics. Religious education, I will suggest, has gone from being among the least comprehensive in the early twentieth century to being today among the more forward-looking and dynamic in the Muslim world. Indonesia's Islamic social welfare associations have also undergone a healthy evolution from being fractiously competitive and aliran-ised to being still competitive but, with the exception of a radical fringe, sharing an ‘operating consensus’ on the virtues of civic participation and social welfare as important ends in themselves.