internal dynamics of the prosperous justice party and jamaah tarbiyah 59
the party president took his seat only as a regular member – though
this team did not perform well, as many of its members sided with
Sembiring.⁶⁷
It is this unsolved structural asymmetry that eventually created
irreparable fractures within the jt and pks. To keep the organisation
running well, the jt leadership has to follow two incompatible rules
of the game: the one subjective and symbolic, the other objective
and tangible. This has created double standards for the party: on the
one hand, it takes decisions based on rational political calculations
of cost-benefit risks, while at the same time it maintains the use of
religious language – commonly backed up by quotations from the Qurʾan
and Prophetic Traditions – to communicate them, especially to their
members.
Three cases will suffice to show how this dilemma manifests itself.
The first was the 2004 presidential election, when the party was split
between supporters of Amien Rais, a democratic leading figure with
high Islamic credentials but a poor chance of winning, and supporters of
the former army commander Wiranto, a secular pro-Suharto candidate
with a greater chance of success. What actually occurred was rivalry
between Hilmy Aminuddin (the supreme leader), who had a political
deal with Wiranto, and Hidayat Nur Wahid (the party president), who
was committed to supporting Amien Rais. Yet both of them tailored
religious arguments to support their choices. The second example was
the 2008 pks national congress, held in Bali, at which it was proposed
that the party should drop its exclusively Islamist ideology and declare
itself an ‘open party’. The supreme leader and party general secretary
endorsed this idea, while the party president (Tifatul Sembiring) rejected
it. The arguments were again tailored to religious debates. Yet, in fact,
the leadership disagreed about the best strategy for the 2009 elections:
whether to stay in a narrow niche of conservative Muslim voters or to
move into the wider share of plural voters. The third case involved a
fatwa issued by the pks Shariah Council of Solo, Central Java, in 2010, on
the legality of electing a Christian as a political leader, in order to explain
a political deal made between the party and the pdi-p who nominated a
Catholic, F.X. Rudyatmoko.⁶⁸
Arief Munandar, ‘Antara Jamaah dan Partai Politik’, 93–94.
See Solo pks Sharia Council, ‘Pengangkatan Non Muslim Dalam Pemerintahan:
Sebuah Pandangan Dan Analisa Syar’ (On Electing Non-Muslim Government
Leader: An Islamic Interpretation), January 2010.