Jokowi’s religious mining rule divides Indonesian’s largest Islamic organization

A widely criticized move by Indonesian President Joko Widodo to reform mining rules to bestow coal mining licenses on an allied religious organization is carving a rift between its executive leadership and Islamic activists in the community, sources told Mongabay Indonesia.

On May 30, the president, commonly known as Jokowi, signed a revision to existing mining rules to allow the country’s religious organizations to operate mining concessions.

The unorthodox reform was spearheaded by the country’s investment minister, Jokowi loyalist Bahlil Lahadalia, who has faced serious allegations of impropriety in the revocation and reissuance of mining permits.

In Jakarta, allowing faith groups to become mining operators has been widely interpreted as part of a quid pro quo for the country’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, for delivering votes to Jokowi ally Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo was elected president in February this year after a court led by Jokowi’s brother-in-law changed age limits to allow Jokowi’s son to run as Prabowo’s vice president.

Prabowo ran for high office in three previous elections over a 15-year period and was rejected by voters in all three contests.

Two-term president Jokowi has long enjoyed extraordinary popularity, according to surveys of Indonesian voters dating back a decade.

The ploy to hitch Jokowi’s 36-year-old inexperienced son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to the Prabowo ticket transformed opinion polls and propelled Prabowo to a landslide election win.

Civil society groups told Mongabay that the change was fraught with procedural and practical pitfalls.

“It’s nonsense,” Muhammad Jamil, head of the legal desk at the National Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam), a watchdog group, told Mongabay Indonesia on May 1.

With a claimed 100 million followers, Nahdlatul Ulama is by far the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia. The decision on religious mining permits came as Islamic organizations were winning domestic and international praise for increased attention to biodiversity loss and climate change.

Many young Islamic activists inspired by this pivot to the environment have responded to Jokowi’s policymaking with dismay, interviews showed.

“This is fraught with conflicts of interest,” Asman Aziz, the deputy of an NU chapter in East Kalimantan province, told Mongabay Indonesia.

Six former concessions are set to be handed over to religious organizations, four in East Kalimantan and two in South Kalimantan province.

“When NU becomes joined up with the miners, all NU can do is sit back and reap the rewards,” said Asman in East Kalimantan. “It won’t be able to criticize any damage caused by mining.”

A NU low

The country’s largest Islamic organization applied for a coal mining permit in East Kalimantan shortly after Jokowi’s office published Presidential Regulation No. 25 of this year (the rule that has enabled religious groups to obtain mining concessions).

In 2015, however, NU leaders issued an edict against the exploitation of natural resources at the organization’s Bahtsul Masail, a plenary in which Islamic scholars interrogate scripture to decide contemporary policy.

In recent years, civil society organizations and young people within the NU and Muhammadiyah organizations have sought to give environmental action greater centrality. That has sparked changes such as clerical bodies issuing fatwa, a Muslim religious edict, against some forms of environmental damage, as well as grassroots initiatives to foster sustainability.

“I urge the ulama and Muslim leaders to take an active role in conveying issues related to environmental damage — then we will take more concrete actions,” Indonesia’s vice president, Ma’ruf Amin, himself an Islamic cleric, told a gathering of Islamic leaders at the Congress of Muslims for Sustainable Indonesia at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque in 2022.

Roy Murtadho, an NU member who also founded an Islamic boarding school in Bogor, a city just south of the…