Event Information Lecture: Indonesian Muslims and their Place in the Larger World of Islam When: December 7, 2011 - December 7, 2011 | 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM Where: 210 Euston Road, Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, UK, United Kingdom Contact Person: Ms Anne Czambor
At over 200 million, Indonesia’s Muslims constitute a nation with the largest population of Muslims in the world. However, they have never played a significant role in global Muslim thought and action corresponding to their numbers. Given the unique, and in many ways attractive, features of Indonesian Islam, this calls for an explanation. A comparison with Turkey, another non-Arab Muslim civilisation, will highlight some relevant factors.
The uniqueness of Indonesian Islam, in its liberal and progressive as well its radical varieties, owes much to the willingness and even eagerness to learn from authoritative others and reshape ideas and practices under their influence. Fundamentalist and Islamist currents from Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been conspicuous among these global influences. However, liberal and progressive thinkers such as the Pakistani Fazlur Rahman, the Sudanese Mahmud Taha and Abdullahi An-Na’im, the Egyptian Nasr Abu Zayd and the Moroccan Muhammad al-Jabri, have also found a much wider following in Indonesia than in their own countries.
The increasing international visibility of Indonesia since the demise of the New Order has made it an attractive ‘market’ for missionary movements as diverse as the Ahmadiyah and the Tablighi Jama’at from South Asia, the Gülen movement from Turkey, and the Naqshbandiyya Haqqaniyya Sufi order from North America.
Speaker Details
Martin van Bruinessen is Emeritus Professor of the Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Originally trained as a theoretical physicist, he later switched to social anthropology and in the mid-1970s carried out extensive fieldwork among the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Between 1982 and 1994 he spent altogether nine years in Indonesia, as a researcher, a consultant for research methods at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and as a lecturer at the State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN) in Yogyakarta. He returned to the Netherlands in 1994 where he has continued his research on Indonesian Islam and on Turkey and the Kurds. His published research on Indonesia concerns various aspects of Islam: Sufi orders, traditional Islamic education, the religious association Nahdlatul Ulama, and Islamic radicalism.
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