The Influence of Middle Eastern Islamic Political Thought on Islamic Political Parties in Indonesia: The Case of PKS

This paper primarily focuses on the influence of Middle Eastern Scholars on the Prosperous Justice Party or the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) of Indonesia. By looking into the way the party establishes and develops itself, and its member recruitment style, this paper shows that the influence of Middle Eastern scholars on the party’s ideology is relatively significant. The emergence of what was known in Indonesia as the dakwah or tarbiyah movement, which later came to influence the establishment of PKS, was in fact an extension of the movements promoted by Abu A’la Maududi in Pakistan and Hassan al-Banna in Egypt. For the PKS, books written by Maududi and al-Banna have become main sources for its members’ training activity, known as the liqo activity. The liqo training method, one would argue, is clearly akin to the one used by the Egyptian al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun movement to recruit its members, except that to the Ikhwan group, the liqo is actually termed as usrah. With its systematic method of gathering, each member of the PKS who has attended the liqo for a long period and considered capable enough to translate the knowledge gained, is urged to create another new liqo group and try to recruit new members.