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During the final decade of the Dutch colonial era, Indonesia witnessed a heated conflict over the relationship between Islam and nationalism. This paper examines several opinions within the Indonesian Islamic movement during the conflict, considering the influence of the Arab Middle East. Around 1930, behind the conflict with secular nationalists, a movement of Islamic groups sympathetic to nationalism emerged, resulting in a fierce debate from the latter half of the 1930s. At the end, those who accepted nationalism while demanding an Islamic movement and an Islamic state became the mainstream position. The rise of Indonesian Islamic nationalism was influenced by the Arab Middle East via Cairo-educated Indonesians and the writings of Arab Middle Eastern intellectuals. However, the acceptance of the influence depended on regional factors. It took some time before those writings became a contentious issue in Indonesia, and Indonesian Muslims selectively utilized the writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recalling the Crusades emerges as a very signficant aspect of the image of the West in the Arab thought of the second half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries. This article explores the roots of the this modern anti-Crusader rhetoric in the period between the world wars, both of which drastically altered the imaginary and self-perception of the populations of the Middle East and North Africa. It traces the main patterns of using the Crusades in Arab social thought and politics in this period, analyses why such references were used in various contexts and demonstrates their connections with the heritage of the major intellectuals, littérateurs, and public figures of the Arab cultural revival (al-nahḍa). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]