Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world. It is important as exporter of petroleum, natural gas, and manufactured goods, as consumer of Western and Japanese aid and investment funds, and as the world’s largest Muslim nation. It is an archipelago country, made up of 17,506 islands, populated by 230 million people speaking more than three hundred languages.

It has been an independent republic for more than fifty years, before that a colony of the Dutch and a zone of Islamic monarchies. The world’s largest Buddhist temple survives from the ninth century in the heart of Java,and a form of Hinduism lives on in Bali. A fringe of Christian communities encircles Java. Indonesia is a modern idea, conceived first in the minds of the Dutch military around 1850, adopted by Dutch civilian politicians in the 1890s, and realized by 1914. Indonesian youth who lived in the principal cities of the Dutch colonial state and studied in Dutch-language schools conceived the goal of making the colonial state the chief focus for everyone’s identity but under selfrule. When they took up this ambitious project peoples’ minds were already informed with the identity of Islam.

This self-understanding had evolved in stages from identity as subjects of a Muslim king, to a conception of self as Muslims in a land ruled by an aristocracy of Muslims united in alliance with Christian Europeans. Promoters of Indonesian identity competed with other youths who wanted to arouse in Muslims an objection to rule by Christians. Some also wanted to wrest Islam from its local roots, to shed the distinctive features of Indonesian cultures celebrated by nationalists, and align Islam with Arabness.

Modern Indonesia’s presidents have ruled a state that has existed longer than the Dutch colony did in its final form. They have drawn on technologies available to the modern world to generate a profound identity of Indonesian through the state ideology of Panca Sila, whose ideal followers believe in one God, in one Indonesian identity, in a place in the world for Indonesia, in a homegrown solution to political organization, and in a just and prosperous society. This state philosophy competes with Islam and its commitment to Allah, Muhammad, Islamic law, and a place for Indonesia within the world Islamic community.

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