Democratization, Islamic thought and social movements: Coalitional success and failure in Indonesia and Iran

The dissertation examines the conditions under which social movements were able to successfully campaign for democratic change with recourse to progressive Islamic discourses in one case, Indonesia, and not the other, Iran.;While both societies have generated over the past half century sophisticated discourses in which local religious intellectuals and religious scholars have developed notions of government that present pro-democratic alternatives to that of the Indonesian New Order and that of the Iranian Islamic Republic, only in Indonesia were social movements able to advocate democratic change on the basis of these discourses. What explains the difference?;In Indonesia, a variety of social movement actors were able to forge pro-democratic coalitions across religious, professional and cultural boundaries that had the crucial impact of not only unifying the anti-Suharto movements and thereby raising the costs of repression on part of the government, but also in generating trust and legitimacy among diverse local constituencies. Citizens with vastly different worldviews would find themselves in support of the same anti-government coalitions, because elite cooperation in the opposition had certified them as trustworthy political leaders in the eyes of the public. In addition, throughout the New Order, citizens had been able to discuss and debate models of a possible post-Suharto political order through the channels of the large Islamic organizations that facilitated the rapid dissemination of political and new religious ideas. Over time, this created relative conversion on the question of the nature of a post-Suharto state.;In Iran, by contrast, the regime could successfully eliminate one oppositional movement after the other, as different actors remained divided over their visions of a post-revolutionary order. No comparable network to that of the Indonesian Islamic organizations was in place that could have connected actors of diverging worldviews and could have created a relatively protected realm in which to debate political and religious ideas on the grassroots level. As a consequence, the Iranian reform movement remained a fragmented, and predominantly urban and middle-class affair.;In dealing with the larger question of conditions for democratization in the Muslim-majority world, the dissertation brings together four literatures: the literature on social movements and contentious politics, that on elite bargaining and negotiated transitions, the literature on Islamic law and human rights, and the literature on models of democratic religion-state relations.