Influence of Saudi Arabia on Salafi Pesantrens in Indonesia

Sadly I will not be taking the second half of the course. I've quite enjoyed the first half!

Situation: In order to stem the tide of Arab nationalism in the 1960s and the Iranian revolution in the 70s, the Saudi Arabian government began to export its conservative and intolerant version of Islam, Salafism, to the rest of the Muslim world. This took the form of scholarships for Muslim youth to come study in Saudi Arabia, funding for mosques and Islamic schools, and the distribution of Saudi textbooks, which taught their fundamentalist and intolerant version of Islam. This began to really affect Indonesia in the 1990s, when the first Salafi pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools) were built in the country. This was a noticeable development in a country known for its moderate Islam and history of religious pluralism and relative tolerance. As of 2010, the number of Salafi pesantrens was estimated to be 50, a small percentage of the almost 50,000 pesantrens in Indonesia, but what is worrisome is the ability of these Salafi pesantrens to attract large numbers of students. There seem to be many more today than there were in 2010, as I was able to identify around 40 in Java alone in 2017. Most of the founders of these schools were educated in Yemen or Saudi Arabia and many of the schools themselves are part of networks that are funded by foundations based in various Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia.

The issue of greatest concern in this area to the U.S. government at the moment is the widespread distribution of Saudi textbooks. In 2012, the organization that I interned for over this past summer, The International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) completed an audit of Saudi textbook content and gave it to the State Department to be used as a tool to quietly pressure the Saudi government to reform, and remove references of people of other religions as “cockroaches,” just to give an example. The Saudi government claims to have revised the textbooks, which is being currently assessed by my organization, but many of the old textbooks remain in circulation in countries where they were exported over the years. During the totality of this campaign, the Religious Attaché of the Saudi Embassy in Jakarta has played a significant role in the dissemination of these textbooks, even paying certain preachers to promote the books and other Saudi teachings. Not only have some Salafi schools adopted Saudi textbooks, but some have also adopted Saudi educational curriculums in favor of or in addition to the Indonesian national curriculum. 

The goal of the project I started working on this summer for ICRD was to determine if Salafi schools with Saudi textbooks expressed more intolerant views (that could potentially lead to violence, as Saudi Arabia is believed to be one of the top “exporters” of terrorism) as opposed to Salafi schools without the Saudi textbooks. The study has not been done yet so I do not have these results and also cannot definitively prove whether or not some of the schools I identified as potentially having Saudi textbooks actually have them or not. An additional hurdle is the difficulty of obtaining a full data set of all Salafi pesantrens in Indonesia that have or do not have Saudi textbooks without going in and doing extensive on-the-ground research. I limited my list of data points to the island of Java and still probably do not have a complete list of Salafi pesantrens, let alone information on all of their textbook materials. However, if ICRD is able to finish the work I started and develop a list of 50 or so Salafi pesantrens and is able to determine for sure that some did have Saudi textbooks and other connections while others did not, then I would have enough data to do an effective social network analysis.

Research Question(s): I personally believe that the pernicious influence of Saudi Arabia in Indonesia extends beyond the textbooks. I want to look at the broader issue of teacher training, and all possible connections to Saudi Arabia. While other Gulf countries are involved in financing pesantrens, I focus on Saudi Arabia for the sake of simplicity, its depth of penetration into the country, its popularity among Salafis as a place to study because it is the homeland of Mecca and Medina, and because it is of particular interest to the United States government as an exporter of terrorism. Thus, my research questions are as follows: Does the presence of Saudi textbooks, curriculums, funding, or teacher training correlate with jihadi activity in schools? Are Saudi-heavy schools more connected to one another than schools with less Saudi influence? Is there one factor in particular, just as where the teachers were trained that seems to connect schools better than others and/or produce the most jihadi students? Does the number of Saudi connections (curriculum, plus books, plus teachers trained in Medina) affect the number of jihadi students coming out of a pesantren?

Hypothesis: Schools with Saudi connections will be better connected than those without Saudi links. I don’t think the Jihadi results would be quite as correlated, because funding also comes from many other countries, and because there are many other factors that influence radicalization, but I think that I would find at least some sort of connection.

Data Collection: I already have data on about 40 pesantrens in Java based off the few reports that have been written on the subject, but as mentioned above, I would need to make sure that my data set contained Salafi schools with different amounts of Saudi ties, and preferably some without any Saudi ties, if any such schools exist, which would take extensive on-the-ground research and conversations with the few scholars who specialize in Salafism in Indonesia to confirm. Each of the schools identified would then need to be visited by Indonesian research assistants to assess the presence of Saudi textbooks and to get curriculum and funding details, unless information received from scholars was very up to date. The problem with a lot of the data that I have is that some of it dates back to 2004.

Basic one mode network-

Salafi pesantren connected to Salafi pesantren in Indonesia, with connection established by teacher education (studied at the same school in Medina, for example), teacher connection to disciple who opened another school or a network of schools.

Attributes-

School has proven Saudi textbooks
School has proven Saudi curriculum (valued) 0 = no 1=partially 3= yes

School has proven teachers educated in Saudi Arabia

School has proven financial ties to Saudi Arabia

School has known jihadis students/connections

Methodology:

Looking at degree centrality (undirected) would tell me which pesantrens were the best connected to others. I would then look at the characteristics of these high degree nodes and nodes that scored highly on other centrality measures.

I would also create new files for each attribute and determine the level of homophily. Are pesantrens with Saudi textbooks or funding better connected than pesantrens with different attributes or no Saudi connections at all?

Are pesantrens that share certain attributes such as Saudi-trained teachers highly connected to nodes with any other particular attribute such as Jihadi connections and students?

Are there any identifiable factions? Cliques? What are their characteristics?

I would also look for nodes with many Saudi connections/attributes (i.e. presence of textbooks, curriculum, funding and teacher training). What are their characteristics? Do they score high on centrality measures? Are they in the middle of the network? Do these pesantrens also have jihadi students?

Conclusion and Application:

A network analysis would be an extremely helpful deliverable to give to the State Department to show further connections beyond the textbooks, and potential future variables to study on-the-ground. It could also help identify the pesantrens that seem to be the best connected within the network, either with high degree centrality or high betweenness scores, or a combination of the two. Using supplemental data received from ICRD’s on-the-ground research (assuming it eventually takes place), it could be determined whether or not these particular pesantrens are particularly intolerant and thus potentially prone to violence. This might lead to an initiative to shut down the school, thus weakening connections between the other nodes, and hopefully weakening the network overall.

Sources:

https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/indonesia-backgrounder-why-salafism-and-terrorism-mostly-dont-mix

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23750964.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:4f2fc214e1a30cefbdb61714db1f4690&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/world/meast/obama-saudi-texbooks/index.html 

https://aseas.univie.ac.at/index.php/aseas/article/viewFile/248/142 

http://www.academia.edu/30300862/Din_Wahid_-_Nurturing_Salafi_manhaj_A_study_of_Salafi_pesantren_in_contemporary_Indonesia