Defend Islam rally action 212 and their reunion: The failure of forming a New ritual

This article examines the 212 Defend Islam Rally Action and the subsequent 212 reunion through the concept of a ritual’s function and meaning. Initiated by action on December 2 (212) in 2016, the rally became a nationwide discourse that was followed by four consecutive 212 reunion rally actions which received mixed public responses. Initially, the 212 action in 2016 was an action demanding legal accountability from Ahok (then incumbent governor of Jakarta), whose statement was considered by some Muslim communities to have insulted the Quran and Islam. The 212 Action in 2016 was the culmination of a series of previous actions with the same goal. There was a desire to remember, preserve, and perform the success of this accumulation of action by the movement agents and their followers in the form of a 212 reunion action, with an objective of maintaining their collective memory and forming a new ritual tradition in some Muslim communities in Indonesia. Based on the background and problems of reading the 212 reunion actions, this article was constructed to examine whether the social agents involved in the 212 reunions successfully formed a new ritual. To provide more insights on the problems of reading 212 reunions, concepts of political memory and collective memory were also utilized. The data for this article were taken from various related references in addition to various news stories in both mass media and social media from 2016–2021. As a qualitative work of research, this article also contains observations of various factors which contributed to the failure of the 212 reunion action from a social science perspective.