In Ramadan 1994, I went to Jakarta to get my visa from the Australian Embassy. When the time for afternoon prayer came, I went to the Musholla ^[1] of a private bank, located in the basement of a car park. I was struck by the scene there. The basement usually used for a car park was crowded by approximately 800 people. Men and women, most of them employees of the bank, were sitting on plastic mats waiting for the afternoon (zhuhur) prayer. There were rows of men at the front and women at the back. In between the men and the women was a green curtain about one meter high. (On Fridays at this musholla, however, women do not pray at the same time as men). After praying, a bank employee gave a fluent Arabic introduction, announcing the speaker for that day, Imaduddin Abdurrahim. After Imaduddin's sermon, all employees returned to their offices and resumed working. According to the bank employee beside me, this activity had been conducted every day since the first day of Ramadan in 1994.

This quite new activity emerged only during the 1990s, and is only one phenomenon in a new wave of religious consciousness among the Indonesian Muslim middle class, and Indonesian Muslims in general. Along with the emergence of this new wave there have been some changes in social, political and economic life. These changes, according to Indonesian and foreign observers, are the result of the relation between the government and Islam, which has become much more intimate. This new wave cannot be separated from the development of the Islamic resurgence movement among young people which emerged in the 1970s. Many ex-activists of the resurgent youth movement have moved into various sectors of life, including into bureaucratic positions.

This chapter focuses on three important themes that have emerged since the late 1980s: 1) the extent of the social, economic and political changes, and the extent to which government is paying more attention to the Muslim community; 2) the Islamic resurgence movement's responses to those changes, particularly changes to their teachings and views about Islam and to the social and political situation; 3) trends among young people in the Islamic movement in 1990s, and their future prospects.