Carool Kersten

Islam in Indonesia: The Contest for Society, Ideas and Values

Indonesias Muslims are still pondering the role of religion in public life. Although the religious violence marring the transition towards democratic reform has ebbed, the Muslim community has polarised into reactionary and progressive camps with increasingly antagonistic views on the place of Islam in society. Debates over the underlying principles of democratisation have further heated up after a fatwa issued by conservative religious scholars condemned secularism, pluralism and liberalism as un-Islamic. With a hesitant government dominated by Indonesias eternal political elites failing to take a clear stance, supporters of the decision are pursuing their Islamisation agendas with renewed vigour, displaying growing intolerance towards other religions and what they consider deviant Muslim minorities. Extremist and radical exponents of this Islamist bloc receive more international media coverage and scholarly attention than their progressive opponents who are defiantly challenging this reactionary trend. Calling for a true transformation of Indonesian society based on democratic principles and respect for human rights, they insist that this depends on secularisation, religious toleration and freethinking. Conceived as a contemporary history of ideas, this book aims to tell the story of these open-minded intellectuals and activists in the worlds largest Muslim country.

Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present by M. C. Ricklefs

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Ethnographies of Islam: ritual performances and everyday practices

This slim volume containing 18 very brief essays has the ambition to act as a corrective to a dominant trend in anthropology where a tradition of detailed description of social and cultural praxis has been replaced with a tendency towards introspection and epistemic relativity. The result of this theorising approach comes at the expense of the actual object of interest. The editors of Ethnographies of Islam desire to fill that ‘descriptive gap’ by restoring the appreciation for ethnographic description and draw attention to the conditions under which the data at hand are produced (p. 1). They also note that with a shift in attention from structures to the role of people that is also affecting other social sciences, sociologists and political scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the merits of ethnography to their respective fields. This results in an extension of the scope of ethnography to the ‘literate’, ‘urban’ and ‘upper class’ aspects of Islam, which – due to an implicit but persistent division of academic labour – hitherto had been the domain of Orientalist scholarship in the original meaning of the word; a historical–philological engagement with texts. As a result of these shifts, the editors have redefined ethnography as ‘the description and analysis of practices from the perspective of the social context in which they were produced’, because this will enable scholars studying Islam and the Muslim world to use ethnography also for examining the practice of writing texts, scrutinising

Shari'a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World

military discipline’ (p. 108) and hence resented by the students. Among other books, The Founder of Modern Egypt, A Study of Muhammad Ali was published in 1935 by Professor Henry Dodwell of London University, and soon became a classic (pp. 116–17). It was MA’s great-grandson, King Fouad (1917–36), who launched an ‘historiographical project’, whereby historical archives originating in Europe were hand-copied, and sent to Cairo. They were then ‘translated and arranged chronologically, under the auspices of the Palace they were then published in eighty seven lavish volumes’. The newly created archive was housed in the Cairo Citadel, where it was catalogued by European archivists. Its main purpose was ‘to depict Mehmed Ali, Ibrahim and Ismail as striving . . . to found a modern Egyptian nation state’ (pp. 116–17). A significant boost to the Pasha’s image was the publication of ‘Asr Muhammad Ali by Abd al-Rahman al-Rafii. Its author was both a professional politician and a prolific writer. ‘Al-Rafii takes the national movement as his principal unit of analysis; accordingly the Ottoman Empire comes across as an alien, oppressive colonizer’, whereas MA is depicted as the proto-nationalist liberator (p. 117). The last pages of this informative slim volume deal with: What Went Wrong? (pp. 119–27). In it Fahmi examines the Egyptian experiment against the background of the Japanese. It is an often quoted experiment, in which Japan always emerges victorious. Egyptians, according to Khaled Fahmi, always believe that nothing went wrong . . . The Pasha actually succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, while the mass of the people suffered. He might have benefited from Bankers and Pashas by David Landes, one of the best books on that period. To sum up my view of Khaled Fahmi’s biographical study of Mehmed Ali Pasha’s rule in Egypt: it is precise, accurate and well-written. However, as a student and scholar of the Nile Valley, I cannot say that I discovered in it any new information.

Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam

Since its publication in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism has brought about a whole literature in itself; a virtual industry of critiques both in favour and against the case he made about scholarship on non-Western cultures being implicated in the imperialist project. When the book approached its thirtieth anniversary there was again a flurry of publications taking stock of the impact of Said’s passionate attack on Western intellectual hegemony. Much was made of the accuracy – or rather inaccuracies – in his account, in particular the cavalier way he selected his material and treated facts in order to write what became a lop-sided contribution to an important aspect of modern western intellectual history. So why write yet another book on orientalism? In this latest addition, Dietrich Jung makes the seemingly contrarian argument that there is much more that unites than divides the essentialized image of Islam jointly held by modern-day Muslim and western intellectuals, and which was subsequently disseminated in their respective societies through what he calls a ‘process of trivialization and popularization’ (p.20). This paradox was first articulated by the Syrian philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm in a 1981 essay entitled ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, which holds centre stage in the second chapter because it ‘is perfectly suited to complement the onesided analysis of Said’ (p.29). It offers a counterpoint (itself a distinctly Saidian term derived from the latter’s affinity with music) to the implicit ‘historical continuity thesis’ that underlies Orientalism. According to Jung, this has obscured ‘fundamental cognitive and normative changes in European societies’ (p.30) which through a hitherto insufficiently recognized interactive process and intercultural exchange had created a common discursive formation of which Orientalists, Arab nationalists and Islamists are all part. This forms the point of departure for Jung’s sketch of this shared intellectual space emerging in the nineteenth century as the site for the essentialist image of Islam held by Muslim and non-Muslim intelligentsias alike. His account is grounded in a very detailed prolegomena which actually takes up half the book. Jung takes the reader on a lengthy excursion of social theory, in particular the sociologies of knowledge and religion. In order to provide his own synthesized theoretical framework, the resulting findings are combined with borrowings from philosophical hermeneutics, which all come together in an interesting explanatory Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 48, No. 5, 831–853, September 2012

New Directions in Islamic Thought: Exploring Reform and Muslim Tradition

find it almost impossible to look after it properly. Cutting it in half could well be the best thing that could happen to it, but we warned you that it wasn’t likely to agree. [T]his is the 15 May we’re off’ (pp.216–17). Lord Peel had suggested Partition in 1937. It was however, refused, he had pronounced the British Mandate in Palestine as ‘unworkable’, in the ‘Chaotic situation which had evolved by May 1948, Peel’s remained (and still remains) the best out of all possible options’ (p.216). When Jewish leaders attempted to approach Arab rulers whom they believed to be reconcilable, they received from Azzam Pasha the following response: ‘Nations never conceded, they fight . . . The Arab world regards you as invaders and is ready to fight you’ (p.181). One of the most tragic outcomes of this war was that for the Palestinian refugees, who partly left the country with a promise from their leaders that they would return to their homes following Arab victory, and were partly expelled by victorious Jewish fighters; Rose deals with this problem as follows: ‘Refugees are a tragic result of war in recorded history’, dealing with refugee problems in the Indian sub-continent, Greece, Turkey and many others, all of which had been solved over the years.

Postcolonial philosophy of religion

individuals, exploring spiritual tourism and pilgrimage led by Korean shamans to sacred mountains throughout their land, through which rituals ‘bespeak a global moment when gods and shamans travel routes that override national division’ (p. 319). In Chapter 1, Otávio Velho argues that the term mission ‘has acquired such scope and diversity that it is a moot point whether it may in fact implode’ (p. 51). Within this volume, it might also be possible to say the same about the terms globalisation, transnationalism and religion. Whilst the volume raises many interesting questions about the theorisation of religion in relation to globalisation, the great diversity of approaches and positions taken by the contributors makes it difficult to define a precise contribution that the volume as a whole makes. Despite Csordas’s timely call for greater analysis of modalities of religious intersubjectivity in relation to globalisation, this remains under-explored in the book. Perhaps this is because of the breadth of ambition of the collection of articles. A narrower thematic focus on particular religious issues related to globalisation, exemplified perhaps by Peter van der Veer’s Conversion to modernities: The globalization of christianity (1996), might allow for a more cohesive overall investigation of the ways in which religious subjectivities are created in relation to specific processes of globalisation. However, despite the somewhat disparate understandings of ‘transnational transcendence’ explored, the book raises original and provocative questions that are of interest to all researchers seeking to theorise differing interrelations of religion, transnationalism and globalisation.

Shari‘a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context

The ten essays in this slim volume are the outcome of a workshop held at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, sponsored by the university’s Council on Middle East Studies. Both workshop and book are a response to the debates on the nature, interpretation, reform and application of Shari‘a, lying at the core of Islamist revivalist ideologies past and present. The collection contains contributions addressing abstract philosophical questions pertaining to justice, democracy and natural law in Islamic contexts, and more topical discussions and concrete case studies. Harvard history professor Roy Mottahedeh closes with brief responses to the various essays. Co-editor Frank Griffel’s introduction sets the volume’s tone by pointing out how ethical imperatives governing the moral issues surrounding such contemporary questions as stem-cell research, abortion, and minority rights gravitate around the content of Shari‘a, which he suggests ‘can be roughly translated as Islamic religious law’ (p.1). A rough and only approximate translation indeed, and luckily Griffel goes on to explain how this rather illusive term is fleshed out in the academic discipline of fiqh or jurisprudence. Even then it is difficult to speak of Shari‘a as an ‘abstract code’ before the nineteenth century (p.4). Moreover, fiqh is also not a legal science in a conventional sense of the word, but should rather be understood as ‘rules for legal discourse’. Consequently, Muslims developed: