Search

In the final decades of the twentieth century, a new strand of Islamic intellectualism began inserting itself into contemporary Muslim discourses on politics, law, and human rights. Not fitting into existing neat categories such as traditionalist, revivalist, and modernist-liberal Islam, its promoters operate on the interstices of established traditions and practices within the Muslim world, as well as the liminal spaces between cultures and civilizations. With the advent of the new millennium, the impact of their alternative, cosmopolitan or culturally hybrid ways of engaging with the Islamic heritage, or turath, is receiving increasing recognition. In his latest book, Religion and Politics in the Middle East, which examines whether religion has primacy over politics or the other way around, Robert D. Lee’s focus has shifted from individuals (Muhammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb, Ali Shariati, and Mohammed Arkoun) to a quartet of countries (Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Iran). At the same time, he continues to acknowledge the significance of maverick thinkers such as the Egyptian Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Turkey’s Said Nursi and Fethullah Gülen, and the Iranian Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar in questioning, challenging, and transforming the intellectual and political scenes in their respective countries and beyond—although often forced to do so from abroad as exilic intellectuals ...

As part of a growing interest in global and transnational patterns connecting different parts of the Muslim world, scholarship on Islam in Southeast Asia, which has long suffered from what Robert Hefner once called a “double marginalisation” in the work of both Islamicists and Asianists, has made considerable progress in mapping the networks connecting Dar al-Islam’s eastern geographical peripheries with its perceived Middle Eastern “heartland.” And while Cornell historian Eric Tagliacozzo notes that several studies deal with the history of the commercial, educational, and religious exchanges between the Hijaz and insular Southeast Asia, making good for the “paucity of historiography of this particular transregional dialogue,” he sees his edited volume as filling the lacuna on “what the parameters of this long-distance dialogue between civilizations have meant over the centuries” (p. 1). Using Fernand Braudel’s notion of longue durée as a rubric, he has grouped the collected essays under the respective headings of “The Early Dimensions of Contacts,” “The Colonial Age,” “The First Half of the 20th Century,” and “Into Modernity.” ...

Few people in North American academia are more knowledgeable about Islam in Southeast Asia, and especially in Indonesia, than Howard Federspiel. The forte of his own research contributions lays not so much in innovative analyses as in presenting comprehensive and useful overviews for specialists and novice students alike. As a political scientist, he made his name with his study of Indonesia’s Persatuan Islam (PERSIS), a modernist Islamic organization active from the 1920s until the 1950s – the critical time frame during which the Dutch colony gained its independence. This was followed by further contributions to the country’s contemporary intellectual history. With Sultans, Shamans & Saints, Federspiel has now tried his hand at producing a general overview of Islam in Southeast Asia ...

This collection of essays consists primarily of the output of Australia’s first major conference on SouthAsian Islam, held in 1996.Most of the contributions to this somewhat delayed volume, then, were written by scholars working in the Australian and New Zealand academe. Editor Asim Roy has tried to close the intervening decade with an at times polemical introduction focusing on the Islamophobia that has been rising steadily since the conference was held. The book opens with Francis Robinson’s conference keynote address. A professor at Royal Holloway in London and former president of the Royal Asiatic Society, Robinson is one of the most prominent scholars on (early) modern Islam in South Asia. His presentation discusses the shift from an “other-worldly” to a “this-world Islam” and the consequences that this inward turn had for the individual Muslim’s sense of responsibility. As the ulama lost their monopoly on the interpretation of Islam in this process, reformists and modernists – and Muslim women in particular – were all thrown back on their own devices for re-evaluating the role of religion in what had become, to a large extent, a disenchanted world ...

Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia is partly the outcome of a trend in the scholarship on Southeast Asian Islam that has gained momentum from the mid-1980s onwards: namely, a corrective of the tendency to regard Islam as a “thin veneer” (as the Dutch historian van Leur had described it) over much older and supposedly more profound cultural deposits from the Indian subcontinent. The tremendous influence of the late Clifford Geertz’s characterizations in his The Religion of Java (University of Chicago Press: 1976 [new ed.]) only seemed to confirm this. However, a younger generation of American anthropologists, among them John Bowen, Robert Hefner, and Mark Woodward, explicitly challenged that view when they began publishing their findings in the 1980s. These writings showed that there was a vibrant and truly “Islamic” cultural legacy in Indonesia and elsewhere. The present volume also demonstrates the significance of the Australian academe’s role in furthering our understanding of Islam in Southeast Asia. Both editors are associated with the Australian National University (ANU), one of “Downunder’s” epicentres of Southeast Asian studies. Greg Fealy is a recognized authority on the Nahdlatul Ulama, the mass organization uniting more than 20 million of Indonesia’s traditionalist Muslims, while Virginia Hooker is a leading scholar in the field of Malay-Muslim literature and history. In fact, the pioneering research of two former ANU academics, Anthony Johns and his student Peter Riddell, provided important evidence of the close, long-standing, and sustained contacts of Muslim scholars from the “Lands below the Winds” with centers of Islamic learning in the Middle East ...

In the introduction, the editors explain that the main motivation for producing this volume is that, in the course of the last century or so, the Muslim world has experienced unprecedented change to its societies and cultures that, in turn, has had a tremendous impact upon its intellectual life. The Muslim world’s encounter with modernity has been a source of tension that has turned “Islamic discourse in the twentieth century into a crisis” (p. 3). In devising a framework for what they call the “dialectical relationship” between twentieth-century Islamic thought and modernity, Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer Nafi have resolved to construct their account around three themes: the emergence of new spokespersons, the diversity of twentieth-century Muslim discourse, and the connections and disruptions between Islamic thought and the rest of “the global intellectual arena” (p. 5). With regards to the first theme, the key observation is that a new type of intellectual, one who is not part of the ulama’ class, has taken center stage. The lack of consensus and almost “complete fragmentation” of present-day Islamic thought is attributed to the external challenges that the Muslim world has faced for the last 200 years. In fact, contemporary Islamic thought mirrors the very nature of modernity: the loss of certainty, challenged values, relativism, and an Islamdom – formerly assumed to be invincible – that has been shaken to its inner core. An interesting observation made in this respect is “the blurring of the contours between expressions of Islamic intellectualism and the academic study of Islam” (p. 11). As a result of their encounter with western scholarship, Muslim intellectuals felt increasingly compelled to respond to what they saw as Orientalist distortions. However, as area study experts, social scientists, and specialists from the humanities – among them increasing numbers of Muslim scholars – began to study Islam, it became possible to discern a “meeting of the minds.” ...

Since its first release in 1977 by Oxford University Press, Quranic Studies has become part of a wider body of published scholarship that is taking a fresh look at the traditional renditions of early Islamic history. Apart from this book, John Wansbrough (1928-2002), who was professor of Semitic Studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), also wrote The Sectarian Milieu (Oxford University Press: 1978). Others have since continued to research the formative period of Islam in a similar fashion. Among the most controversial contributions in this genre was Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Oxford University Press: 1977), a joint project of Patricia Crone (who did her Ph.D. under Wansbrough) and Michael Cook (who also taught at SOAS until 1986).The scholars belonging to this “school” of history writing have been characterized as representatives of a “renewed scepticism” (Mohammed Arkoun), “revisionists” (R. Stephen Humphreys), and even practitioners of “bad Orientalism” (Leonard Binder). This last characterization is indicative of the direction in which the discussions have moved. Rather than having a continued exchange of views informed by scholarly arguments, which this highly specialist and arcane subject matter would certainly merit, the debate was, regrettably, soon dominated by ideological overtones. Due to new communication technologies, it became part of a discourse that went far beyond what would have been its normal readership. Now, Quranic Studies has been released again, enhanced with a foreword, new annotations, and a glossary by Andrew Rippin, a Qur’anic studies expert from Victoria University in Canada. Rippin undertook this venture in order to counter some of the ideological and non-scholarly ways in which the book has been used during the first twenty-five years of its existence. In fact, the editor even questions whether all of those voicing the strongest opinions about this book have actually ever read it. That would indeed be most remarkable, because Wansbrough’s study is at a level of erudition that few can hope to master. Unfortunately, that is also its main drawback: For the non-specialist, and by that I mean the Islamicist whose interests lie outside scriptural exegesis, this erudite book poses a ...

This collection of essays is a spin-off of a workshop held in December 1997, which was jointly organized by the venerable Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology) and the more recently established International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. Both are important resource centers for the study of Islam in Southeast Asia and are closely connected with Leiden University, which has a formidable reputation as a centuries-old center of learning in Islamic and Asian studies. Publications like the present one show that academic institutions with roots in the colonial past and which were once part of the now much-criticized scholarly tradition of “Orientalism” can reinvent themselves and continue to make valuable contributions to the study of non-western cultures. Transcending Borders focuses on the phenomenon of Arab settlement in Southeast Asia. Although the role of these migrants in the Islamization of the Malay–Indonesian archipelago has long been acknowledged, questions pertaining to their integration into Southeast Asian society and the resulting impact on their ethnic identity have received far less attention. In fact, the upsurge in research into these aspects is barely a decade old. However, the most recent developments in Muslim Southeast Asia will certainly keep that interest alive, because some of the more militant key players in Southeast Asian Islamic revivalism are themselves of Hadrami or southern Arabian descent. The book’s 10 articles approach the study of Arab migration and settlement from historical, sociological, anthropological, and Islamological perspectives. However, the editors have taken care to ensure that these different approaches provide intersecting images of the Arab presence in ...

The author of this brief study on the political aspects of Southeast Asian Islam is a former State and Defense Department official who originally specialized in Latin American affairs before turning his attention to Southeast Asia. Rabasa now works for the RAND Corporation, a think tank with close links to the American national security community. The publisher’s target audience is security policy makers. Therefore, the studies it commissions are part analysis and part policy recommendations, whereby the former is often reduced to the bare essentials. It must be said that, in this case, Rabasa has succeeded in presenting a reasonably balanced picture in the space of a mere 80 pages. Already in his introduction the author observes that, apart from a sharpening divide between militant Islam and the West, the antagonism between radicals and moderates within the Muslim world has increased as well, and that strengthening moderate and tolerant tendencies within Islam should be supported. Rabasa sees both external and internal influences contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism. In response to the intrusion of western culture, a heightened sense of Muslim self-awareness has found expression in identity- driven politics. A further polarizing element in Southeast Asian Islam is the Arabization process carried out by Wahhabi-inspired movements and with financial support from the Middle East. Other auxiliary factors to the formation of transnational networks connecting Muslim radicals are the Iranian revolution, the Afghan war, disillusion over the lack of progress in solving the Palestinian issue, and the eruption of ethnic conflicts involving Muslims in such areas as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Kashmir. Shifting to internal factors, Rabasa identifies different sets of causes for each Muslim country and Muslim-dominated region in Southeast Asia. In the case of Indonesia, the vacuum left by an imploding state structure following Suharto's fall led to a sharpened political competition in which some saw Islam as a suitable vehicle to power. Malaysia witnessed increased rivalry between the ruling UMNO coalition and the Pan- Malay Islamic Party (PAS) for the vote of rural Malays, while in the Muslim-dominated southern regions of Thailand and the Philippines ...

Recent events in Southeast Asia have revived interest in the role of political Islam in the region. This article examines the position of Muslims in Thailand’s four southern border provinces. It addresses the historical background of the area’s relationship with forms of centralized government by Thai political centers, the relevant elements of ethnicity and their significance for cultural (religious) self-identification, and how this may be translated in the political use of Islam. In a wider context, the study can be considered as illustrative of the problematic relationship between centers and peripheries, particularly those on the frontiers of culture zones.