Abstract:In contemporary Indonesia, Muslims increasingly define themselves by othering fellow Muslims, including Arab Muslims. This article examines how Indonesian Muslims, who have traveled to and/or resided in the Middle East, construct their social identities in relation to Arab others. Ethnographic research with labor migrants and pilgrims, and a cultural analysis of cinematic representations of Indonesian students in Cairo, show that conceptions of gendered moralities feature strongly in the ways in which these particular Indonesian Muslims define their authentic Muslim selves, as distinct from Arab others. They attribute ideal male and female characteristic features to Asian Islamic identities, while they portray objectionable ones as Arab culture. This implies that self-representations play a crucial role in the ways in which Indonesian Muslims relate to a region, culture and people long viewed as the "center" of Islamic culture. The representations of Arab others and Indonesian selves eventually lead to contestations of religious authenticity and social class.

Studies on tourism and pilgrimage show that spatial mobility, including transregional travel, mostly confirms and strengthens tourists’ and pilgrims’ social identities and symbolic boundaries between Self and Other. However, in guided religious package tours from Indonesia to Israel and Palestine, experiences with spatial boundaries do affect the Muslim and Christian pilgrims, adding more nuances to socio-cultural boundary-making. This complex making and breaching of boundaries relates to inner-Indonesian religious dynamics. Among both Muslim and Christian Indonesians, references to the Middle East express not only transregional solidarity but also multifarious orientations in inter and intra-religious relations within Indonesia. Among Indonesian Muslims, some orthodox Muslims’ orientations towards the Middle East as the birthplace of Islam are contested but also combined with indigenous Islamic traditions. Similar to these intra-Muslim frictions, members of Indonesia's Christian minority experience fissures in the expressions of local and global Christian identities. This article analyses how symbolic, social, and spatial boundaries are maintained and breached in transregional tourism from Indonesia to the Middle East.

Israel and Indonesia share no diplomatic relations, and considering Indonesia’s cordial bonds with the Palestinian Authority, Indonesian society is deemed to be critical of Israel. However, the ways in which Indonesians relate to ‘Others’ in Israel and Palestine are not monolithic. Indonesian perspectives on the Middle East are far more nuanced, as might be assumed from the largest Muslim society in the world, and the idea of ‘taking sides’ is challenged by encounters on the ground and by inter- and intra-religious rivalries. Contemporary pilgrimage tourism from Indonesia to Israel and the Palestinian Territories shows how Christian and Muslim Indonesians engage in conflictive identity politics through contrasting images of Israeli and Palestinian Others. Indonesian pilgrims’ viewpoints on these Others and on the Israel–Palestine conflict mirror the politicization and marketization of religious affiliation. This reveals peculiarities of the local engagement with global politics and the impact of travelling, which can inspire both the manifestation of enemy images and the blurring of identity markers.

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