Oratorical Innovation and Audience Heterogeneity in Islamic West Java

Abstract

Recent writing about Islamic orators in Indonesia has highlighted an important if rather obvious aspect of their activity: social change creates audiences in new combinations with diverse needs for religious mediations by preachers with competencies that match the audiences' novel preferences and requirements.James Hoesterey, for example, has highlighted the "innovative claims to religious authority" of the Bandung-based orator Aa Gym.The mediation of religious authority in Indonesia has conventionally been the domain of people formally trained primarily in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and against this background Aa Gym has appeared as a new type of celebrity preacher who signifies a shift away from that tradition.1In her writings about novel articulations of Sufism in Indonesia, Julia Day Howell has noted a growing urban audience for Sufism that recognizes "televangelists and professors" as credible religious mediators, despite their lack of formal religious qualifications.These "new-media," "entertainer-preachers" break the mold of the classic or old-style religious scholar (ulama).2Akh Muzzaki has noted the rising public demand for sermons by Surabaya's university-based preachers, a class of expert mediators he contrasts with the leaders based in East Java's traditional pesantren.By responding to changes in the "preacher's social landscape," the campus-based preachers break from Indonesia 93 (April 2012)3 Akh Muzakki, "Islam as a Symbolic Commodity: Transmitting and Consuming Islam through Public Sermons in Indonesia," in Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods, ed.

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