Disagreement over the nature of religion in China - a civilization that has long confounded the vocabulary of religious and secular - is nothing new. With an imperial institution that eclipsed confessional structures, and bound Heaven and Earth in ritual cosmology, China was what John Lagerwey called a “religious state.” When native notions of religion were forced into European-derived categories, the result was either a clash of interests, particularly with Christian missionaries, or dreadful mistranslations, such as the still pervasive idea of “emperor worship.” Religion in the twentieth century was been punctuated by periods of intense persecution, but the more longstanding policy of the People’s Republic has been to allow organized religion to exist, and even thrive, albeit at the cost of being coopted or transformed into a museum piece, its teaching is reduced to moral platitudes. The ideological wave under Xi Jinping is something new. Combining nationalism, personal advancement, economic welfare, and an unprecedented level of surveillance of public and virtual spaces, this wave has made the state more ideologically pervasive than it has been in half a century. It has tamed the independent charitable organizations that grew up over the previous decade, but even this is just a symptom of the larger reorientation of ideology to public spaces to become what I call the “Chinese secular.”

In the first half of the 17th century, three major Buddhist governments that combined a twofold religious and political structure under a Buddhist ruler were established in the Tibetan cultural area (hereafter: Joint Twofold System of Governance).1 In 1625/26,2 Bhutan was united under the rule of a charismatic Tibetan Buddhist master, Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594– ca. 1651; hereafter: Zhabdrung); Tibet and Sikkim followed, both in 1642 – although with significant differences in their respective institutionalisation. The Bhutanese government as a constitutional monarchy with a Buddhist king is the only one among the three still in existence today. Bhutan’s transformation into a modern society along the lines of this Joint Twofold System of Governance under the conditions of non-colonialisation but with crucial and intense encounters of its societal elites with Western and Asian forms of modernity and secularity represents, therefore, a unique case in point.

This article aims to analyse the relationship between state and religion (in this case, Islam) in political and legal developments in Indonesia from colonial times to the present, and to determine the model of Indonesian secularity within the multiple secularities approach. The legal and political developments relating to the relationship between the state and Islam in Indonesia are understood to be the products of societal debate as well as instruments for solving particular societal problems, guided by certain guiding ideas1 that shape Indonesian secularity. The paper first describes Indonesia’s evolving socio-political conditions, noting in particular the emergence of two distinct groups: Islamic groups calling for Islam to be made the foundation of the Indonesian state and for Islamic law to be enforced for Muslims in Indonesia, and nationalist groups that support the idea of a secular nation-state based on Pancasila, a set of five founding principles. In the second part, the paper outlines the development of Pancasila as a national agreement and state ideology. The third part analyses the state’s legal policy on Islamic law. The fourth part analyses the relationship between the character of the contemporaneous regime and its attitude towards the aspirations of Islamic law. The fifth part analyses some state laws in Indonesia that relate to Islamic law in order to establish whether they constitute a legalisation of Islamic law and to what end the laws were created. The sixth part determines the model of Indonesian secularity based on the societal problems to be solved by the legal and political developments and the guiding ideas referred to. The final part defines the general boundaries between the state and Islam.

Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906 is arguably the most significant turn toward the secular in its modern history.1 I start this investigation by making a conceptual distinction between secularism and secularity.2 Here, secularism is defined as the ideologically-driven separation of religion and state according to an agenda, a blueprint, a model, that could be indigenously, or externally informed and is achieved with the assistance of the modern state and explicit political motivations. Secularity, on the other hand, is expressed in terms of a non-ideological separation that comes about unintentionally. In some accounts, this separation may take on evolutionary connotations in terms of the natural separation of functions as a result of the growing complexity of a natural organism or social system. What I have in mind here is a separation of functions that is agent-driven but the secularity that emerges is both unintentional and unideological.