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This introduction considers two developments that have hitherto occupied separate realms of scholarship: the increasing visibility of pious consumption, and the proliferation in Indonesia of Muslim authorities and the associated fragmentation of Muslim publics. We identify three significant themes that connect these developments. First, the borders that separate religion and consumerism have become increasingly porous. Indonesian Muslims' uptake of new technologies and non-religious cultural forms has broadened the range of possibilities for practice and faith, which in turn has facilitated the emergence of new figures of Islamic authority. Second, online platforms for Islamic experience and participation have intensified religious identity politics. Visibility is needed for success in the world of social media, and claimants to authority in online spaces frequently exploit differences in religious and intra-religious segments to achieve this. Third, the concept of the 'middle class' has been useful for understanding the adoption of new technologies and media forms by Muslims, yet we suggest that Islamic consumerism should be decoupled from the concept of the Muslim middle class. We conclude by suggesting that the debate about consumerism would be enhanced by a renewed focus on materiality and its social meanings in Islamic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pious practices of contemporary Indonesian Muslims frequently take form as consumer commodification and material display. The article adds to knowledge of the role of materiality in religion and spirituality by describing and analysing the critique of consumerist piety cultivated by reformist Muslims in Indonesia. We trace the evolution of the 'emancipation-based' critique in the ideas of two significant reformist intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Kuntowijoyo (1943–2005) and Moeslim Abdurrahman (1948–2012), both of whom are associated with the civil society organisation known as Muhammadiyah. Their objections to material religion are not concerned with the individual morality of consumers but are based on their rejection of Islamic particularity. Noting that Islamic particularity frequently manifests in material practices, they argue that such practices are signs of fragmenting processes that prevent social and political progress. Consumptive displays of piety are also objectionable because they succeed through a material-based sign system that asserts economic differences between people, when the authentic Islamic mission, according to these thinkers, is to work against the social exclusion brought about by those differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of state institutions for the management and administration of Islam has enriched the range of Islamic authorities in Indonesia, with distinctive effects for public Islam. The article examines the effects of an Indonesian policy decision of 1975 that was intended to develop specific graduate attributes – 'modernity, openness and critical thought' – in graduates of Islamic post-graduate study. It was decreed that Islamic graduates would be sent to post-graduate programmes at universities in the West, altering a policy setting that had previously favoured venerable sites of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The Ministry of Religion associated sites of post-graduate learning in the West with graduate attributes of openness and critical thought, and perceived that these attributes were necessary for the development of a cohort of technical experts with competency to observe and analyse Islam in Indonesian populations. Article problematizes this notion of graduate attributes in the religious sphere, noting their novelty in comparison with competencies required of Islamic leaders in Indonesian communities (connectedness, affirmation of tradition, ritual expertise, etc). Attributes of 'openness and critical thought' position technical experts as critical observers of other segments in Indonesian Islamic society, such as Indonesia's popular preachers, many of whom are trained in sites of Islamic learning in the Middle East. In Indonesia's contemporary Islamic public sphere, such technical experts, many of whom were trained in Western social science departments, maintain a critical distance from Indonesia's popular preachers, the majority of whom (ironically) received religious training in sites of learning in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indonesian Muslim community includes segments dedicated to contrasting pious projects and doctrinal positions, yet the nation's Ministry of Religion (MORA) manages aspects of Islamic life while purporting to more or less transcend such contrasts. This tension recently emerged in Indonesian public life when a state Islamic university defended the autonomy of its research practices against a challenge by scholars from outside the university who claimed that the doctoral project of Jalaluddin Rakhmat (1949–2021) offended doctrinal positions of the Sunni majority and gave priority to Shiite historiography and doctrine. This dispute shows how questions concerning academic method become disputes about public interest, and further, its resolution attests to the emergence of free inquiry as an Islamic value in the environment of MORA's universities. Academics cited the example of earlier generations of scholars as supporting precedent for an Islamic principle of free inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When national governments support homogenising religious programs within plural populations, scholars are called to pay close attention to the subsequent interactions between state power and religious projects/actors. This article responds to this need by providing a sub-national perspective on Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars (MUI), a national body seen by some as a state-supported homogenising project. Based on fieldwork in the Indonesian cities of Tasikmalaya and Malang, the article describes the ideological diversity that exists between the central MUI and its regional branches. In the regions, the MUI is supported financially by regional governments, and in this way, its branches are shaped by local political conditions rather than by allegiance to ideological programs promoted from the centre. The authors observe the openness of the Tasikmalaya MUI to a wide range of Islamic movements, and contrast this with the ideological homogeneity of Malang's MUI, where the regional government is intent on restricting Islamic programs that threaten religious and social diversity. The contrasting religio-political positionings of the regional MUI signal the ideological heterogeneity to be found within the Indonesian Islamic Scholars’ Council and shed light on the importance of sub-national factors in shaping Indonesia's institutional responses to religious diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various articles within the issue on topics including contemporary Indonesian media and politics, cultural studies and Islamic scholars and activists in Indonesia.

This article explores the ways in which evaluations of media forms, and specifically religious oratory, reveal a differentiated Muslim community. Indonesia’s Muslims attend oratorical events (preaching) in great numbers, and frequently do so within routines following the Islamic calendar and other schedules. But, despite their popularity, conventions of Islamic oratory are interpreted by the country’s Muslim progressives as inefficacious and anachronistic. This article explores the models of individual subjectivity that underpin critiques of oratory, noting how the ‘Muslim listener’ is caricatured as lacking in autonomy, incapable of deliberation and passive. It argues that a rival subjectivity, one that constructs listening as a legitimate form of engagement with Islam, emerges from the ideology and preferred communication forms of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (Rising of the Scholars, or NU). This legitimisation provides an alternative to the idealised narrative of modernity against which oratory is judged as a form of mediation belonging to Indonesian pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do Sundanese Muslims of West Java in certain situations prefer Islamic oratory in their regional language, Sundanese, and in others prefer the national standard, Indonesian? This article answers this question by firstly exploring different preaching outcomes that are recognised and generally accepted by Sundanese Muslims. Some preaching events are oriented pre-eminently to the communication of affect within the temporal frame of co-presence. In others, preacher and audience unite around a transformative ethos. These outcomes bear contrasting implications for code selection. Where the first outcome is desired, preachers display multivocal, heterogeneous preaching styles in which the regional language offers functional benefits. In the second, Indonesian preachers and audiences respond to the national language's indexing of transformation. The social value of transformation is a situational factor for which Indonesian is the appropriate code. In this way, code selection signals the diversity of ways of being Islamic in the West Javanese public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the oratory techniques of Islamic preachers and religious leaders, focusing on the Sudanese preachers Ajengan Al-Jauhari and E. Z. Muttaqien as well as their adaptation of oratory styles before heterogeneous audiences in various speaking contexts in West Java, Indonesia. Topics include oration events in villages and workplace settings, sermons delivered at the Bandung Water Board municipal utility, and the use of humor in persuasive orations. According to the author Al-Jauhari uses multiple languages in his performances.

In the urban villages of Bandung, the capital city of the Indonesian province of West Java, many Muslim women routinely attend between four and six oratorical and/or pedagogical events per week. This article analyses this participation by observing the forms and patterns of these women's spectatorship, specifically observing their mobility, the interaction between their life-cycles and their participation habits, the gendered embodiment of Islamic knowledge they display, the effect of hegemonic masculinities, and preaching performances which treat them not only as Muslims intent on increasing their Islamic knowledge, but also as pleasure-taking subjects. The article concludes that the conduct and management of preaching events intended for mixed audiences are highly sensitive to women's spectatorship and warns against the assumption that Islamic practice is a punishing sphere of patriarchy. In fact, when the influence of women's spectatorship on the conduct and management of such preaching events is appreciated, West Java's preaching events appear as a feminised domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the views of Julian Millie, one of the speakers of the event focusing on "we are playing relative: a survey of Malay writing," by Henk Maier, which was held at the Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria. She pointed out that the subtitle of the book indicates that the book aspires to completeness and states implicitly that there is a benefit to be gained by treating five centuries of writing as a unity because it has been written in the Malay language. She finds the book problematic because of the difficulty they have in making justifications on the broad coverage they attempt. She remarked that the author has made a great risk by attempting the format of the lengthy literary chronology.