Is Muslim religious culture in Indonesia different? Do Indonesian solutions to Islamic issues in society have anything to contribute to the development of culture and politics in the Muslim world at large? Two generations ago, the most common answer to these questions would have been quickly affirmative on the first but resoundingly negative on the second. At that time, the conventional wisdom among Western and Muslim Middle Eastern scholars was that the Islam professed by most Indonesians was superficial or syncretic, and that the community of religiously educated and observant Muslims (the santri) was a minority, and rather culturally unsophisticated at that. That such a peripheral population might offer lessons for the larger Muslim world seemed presumptuous, to say the least (but see, as an exception, Hodgson 1974).

Whatever the accuracy of this historical characterisation, the situation of Islam in Indonesia today is entirely different. As both ethnographic and survey studies have demonstrated, Indonesia's Muslims tend these days to be quite observant, carrying out religious duties at rates comparable to or higher than Muslims in Morocco or Lebanon, and much higher than in Iran (Mujani & Liddle 2007; cf. Baktiari 2011). Islamic education in Indonesia is now so well institutionalised that, in contrast to the pattern of the 1950s and 1960s, all Muslim citizens receive basic (and state-mandated) training in the tenets of their faith. As a result of these and other changes, Indonesia is today a solidly Sunni sort of place in a way that, with its syncretic abangan, Wetu telu and gargantuan Communist Party, it had not been in the 1950s (see Hefner 2011a).

But the second question remains: does Indonesian Muslim culture offer lessons for other parts of the Muslim world? What I want to suggest here is that Indonesia is richly distinctive with regard to three socio-religious variables: religious education, associational life and constitutional politics. Religious education, I will suggest, has gone from being among the least comprehensive in the early twentieth century to being today among the more forward-looking and dynamic in the Muslim world. Indonesia's Islamic social welfare associations have also undergone a healthy evolution from being fractiously competitive and aliran-ised to being still competitive but, with the exception of a radical fringe, sharing an ‘operating consensus’ on the virtues of civic participation and social welfare as important ends in themselves.