The doctor and politician Abu Hanifah, writing in Sukabumi, West Java, roughly six months after the proclamation of independence, made a very optimistic prediction: “The Indonesian nation, as a nation that believes in the justice and truth of God, will not have all the sharp and vicious ideological clashes between ourselves of a social revolution, not like France or Russia.”1 In fact, not only did belief in God not preserve Indonesia from the internal upheaval of a social revolution, but in some cases religious faith was used as an element of instigating or heightening social conflict. The understanding that the Indonesian revolution was about promoting the Islamic faith was among the many incendiary ingredients fueling horizontal conflict and social violence in the worst of Indonesia’s so-called social revolution, a loose category that was applied, sometimes retroactively, to various conflicts between Indonesians. At the very least, Islam was often used as a cover for attacks by Indonesians on other Indonesians.