Papers by Martin van Bruinessen
One important aspect of globalisation is the process of Islamisation of Indonesia. For many centu... more One important aspect of globalisation is the process of Islamisation of Indonesia. For many centuries this process consisted of a constant stream of ideas and practices from Mecca to Indonesia. Hajis and Arab traders were the carriers of this cultural flow, which was largely one-directional. Cultural practices originating from the Middle East were integrated into local custom and belief. Such well-known cultural and political oppositions as santri and abangan or shari'a and adat did not so much represent Islam versus non-Islam as disjunctions in the process of globalisation and Islamisation. In the course of the twentieth century, the pattern of Islamising influences changed; they no longer flow to the periphery from a single centre at Mecca but emanate from numerous different sources. Their impact has been differential too. Explicitly anticosmopolitan ideas (anti-Semitism) have been adopted and been spread by groups that are internationally oriented and reject all that smells of local adaptations. It has been the most cosmopolitan of Indonesian Muslims, on the other hand, such as the so-called pembaharuan ('renewal') group, who have insisted most clearly on the legitimacy of specifically Indonesian forms of Islam. To foreign observers as well as to many Indonesians themselves, Indonesian Islam has always appeared to be very different from Islam at most other places, especially from the way it is practised in the Arabian peninsula. From Raffles to Van Leur, it has been claimed by colonial civil servants and missionaries that, especially in Java, Islam was not more than a thin veneer, underneath which one could easily discern an oriental world view that differed in essential respects from the transcendentalism and legal orientation of Middle Eastern Islam. The religious attitudes of the Indonesians, it was often said, were more influenced by the Indian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) that had long been established in the Archipelago and the even older indigenous religions with their ancestor cults and veneration of earth gods and a plethora of spirits. Two categories of residents of the Archipelago were singled out as exceptions to the syncretistic rule and as a security risk: the Arab traders and religious teachers (especially
Producing Islamic Knowledge
If you no longer want to receive RSIS Working Papers, please click on "Unsubscribe." to be remove... more If you no longer want to receive RSIS Working Papers, please click on "Unsubscribe." to be removed from the list.
Al-jamiah, Jun 17, 2015
In this autobiographical essay, Martin van Bruinessen looks back at the diverse intellectual infl... more In this autobiographical essay, Martin van Bruinessen looks back at the diverse intellectual influences that contributed to his formation as a scholar of Indonesian Islam. He was never trained as an Indonesianist or a scholar of Islam, and came to the subject through a series of unplanned changes in his life trajectory. His first acquaintance with Indonesia was through late colonial and post-colonial Dutch literature. It was followed in his student days by critical reporting on the massacres of 1965-66 and a re-reading of Indonesian history from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. His formal academic training was in entirely different disciplines, and his first experience with anthropological fieldwork took place in a different part of the world. A fortuitous post-doctoral appointment at KITLV, followed by four years at LIPI as a consultant for research methods, enabled him to acquaint himself directly with contemporary Muslim discourses and movements. He had the good fortune of working with leading Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, who became his major teachers. Only when he became a teacher and thesis supervisor himself, at the IAIN Sunan Kalijaga and later at Utrecht University, did he feel the need to reflect on how his own research relates to established academic traditions. The essay documents his growing appreciation of, and lasting critical distance from, the Leiden school of Oriental studies and his relationship with the French tradition of Islamic and Indonesian studies. It also attempts to be the story of the rise and decline of Leiden's tradition of Indonesian Islamic studies, from the perspective of a critical reader who wishes to remain an outsider. [Dalam tulisan biografis ini, Martin van Buinessen melihat kembali beberapa
New Middle Eastern Studies, 2014
Disclaimer and Copyright The NMES editors and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies make... more Disclaimer and Copyright The NMES editors and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies make every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information contained in the e-journal. However, the editors and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness or suitability for any purpose of the content and disclaim all such representations and warranties whether express or implied to the maximum extent permitted by law. Any views expressed in this publication are the views of the authors and not the views of the Editors or the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license at ... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license at the time of publication. Melissa Crouch (ed.) Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. xix + 345 pp. isbn 9780199461202, price gbp 31.99 (hardback).
Islam and Modernity
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Aug 18, 2009
© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009 © in the individual contributions is retained ... more © in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11 /13pt Monotype Baskerville by Servis Filmsetting ...
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1987
Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia
2. "The Kurds and Islam
Gorgias Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2011
5. Sufism, ‘Popular’ Islam and the Encounter with Modernity
Islam and Modernity, 2009
Indonesia Rising, 2012
Indonesian Muslims and Their Place in the Larger World of Islam Martin van Bruinessen* With over ... more Indonesian Muslims and Their Place in the Larger World of Islam Martin van Bruinessen* With over 220 million Muslims, Indonesia has the largest community of Muslims in the world. Nevertheless, Indonesian Muslims do not play a role in global Muslim thought and action that is commensurate with their numbers. Indonesian Muslims have been eager to learn from Arab as well as Indian, Turkish and Persian thinkers, but do not seem to think they may have something valuable to offer in return. In Indonesian bookshops one finds the translated works of classical and modern Arabic authors, as well as studies of and by major Indian, Pakistani, Iranian and Turkish authors. But Malaysia is the only other country where one can find works by Indonesian Muslim authors, and there are virtually no serious studies of Indonesian Islam by scholars of other Muslim nations. The Arab world has shown a remarkable lack of interest in Asia in general, let alone in the social and cultural forms of Islam in Southeast Asia. Though more outward looking, other Muslim regions of Asia have not taken a serious interest in their Southeast Asian co-religionists either. 2 Indonesians are pursuing Islamic studies in India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, as well as in the Arab world and in the West. Indian and Turkish Muslims travelling to Indonesia, on the other hand, are not going there as students but as teachers and missionaries. Missionary movements such as the Ahmadiyya and the Tablighi Jama'at (both originating in India) and the Nur and Gülen movements (which started in Turkey) are active all over the world, as are the various * The author wishes to thank Martin Slama, Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, Mona Abaza and Tony Reid for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. The sole Egyptian academic to have published serious studies on Malaysian and Indonesian Islam, as well as on the relationship between the Middle East and Indonesia, is the Germantrained sociologist Mona Abaza. Her overview of Arabic writing on Asia reveals how shallow and uninformative most of the existing literature is (Abaza 2011; see also Abaza 2007). She makes an exception for an encyclopaedic work on Islam among non-Arabic speakers by Ahmad Shalabi (1983), who spent many years teaching in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 One exception is Göksoy's (1995) work on Islam in Indonesia under the Dutch. Originally a dissertation submitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the book was later published in Turkish by a publishing house associated with Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs. 8 Natsir appears in various roles in a major study of the Muslim World League by Schulze (1990). See also Schulze (1983).
Producing Islamic Knowledge In Western Europe: Discipline, Authority, And Personal Quest
Liberal and Progressive Voices in Indonesian Islam
Indonesian Muslims in a Globalising World : Westernisation, Arabisation and Indigenising Responses
In the two decades since the fall of the Suharto regime, one of the most conspicuous developments... more In the two decades since the fall of the Suharto regime, one of the most conspicuous developments has been the rapidly increasing influence of religious interpretations and practices emanating from the Middle East and more specifically the Gulf states, leading observers to speak of the “Arabisation” of Indonesian Islam. In the preceding decades, the state had strongly endorsed liberal and development-oriented Muslim discourses widely perceived as “Westernised” and associated with secularism and Western education. Indonesia’s unique Muslim traditions have in fact been shaped by many centuries of global flows of people and ideas, connecting the region not just with the Arab heartlands of Islam and Europe but South Asia and China. What is relatively new, however, is the presence of transnational Islamist and fundamentalist movements, which weakened the established nation-wide Muslim organisations (Muhammadiyah, NU) that had been providing religious guidance for most of the 20th century...
Comparing the Governance of Islam in Turkey and Indonesia : Diyanet and the Ministry of Religious Affairs
In spite of their overwhelmingly Muslim populations, Indonesia and Turkey are formally secular st... more In spite of their overwhelmingly Muslim populations, Indonesia and Turkey are formally secular states though of different kind. However, both allocate a surprisingly high proportion of the state budget to the administration of Islam, considerably higher than most countries where Islam is the state religion. In Turkey during the years 1950-2000 and in Indonesia during the New Order period (1966-1998), the state invested heavily in the education of “enlightened” religious personnel and the dissemination of religious views that were compatible with the drive for modernisation and development. Turkey’s Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet) controls a huge bureaucracy through which the state interacts with the pious conservative part of the population. Schools for the training of prayer leaders addressed the needs of the same segment of the population and were intended to facilitate the integration of these conservatives into the project of secular modernisation. However, these ins...
Controversies and Polemics Involving the Sufi Orders in Twentieth-Century Indonesia
Islamic Mysticism Contested, 1999
... His writings were at once countered with apologetic tracts by the Minangkabau Naqshbandi shay... more ... His writings were at once countered with apologetic tracts by the Minangkabau Naqshbandi shaykhs Muhammad Sa`d bin Tanta' of Mungka and Ahmad Khatib's own student Khatib Ali (Muhammad `Ali b. `Abd al-Muttalib). These ...
Kurdish Studies, 2020
Review of Zeki Sarigil, Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics
The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran, 2020
This series seeks to provide a unique and dedicated outlet for the publication of theoretically i... more This series seeks to provide a unique and dedicated outlet for the publication of theoretically informed, historically grounded and empirically governed research on minorities and 'minoritization' processes in the regions of West Asia and North Africa (WANA). In WANA, from Morocco to Afghanistan and from Turkey to the Sudan almost every country has substantial religious, ethnic or linguistic minorities. Their changing character and dynamic evolution notwithstanding, minorities have played key roles in social, economic, political and cultural life of WANA societies from the antiquity and been at the center of the modern history of the region. WANA's experience of modernity, processes of state formation and economic development, the problems of domestic and interstate conflict and security, and instances of state failure, civil war, and secession are all closely intertwined with the history and politics of minorities, and with how different socio-political categories related to the idea of minority have informed or underpinned historical processes unfolding in the region. WANA minorities have also played a decisive role in the rapid and crisisridden transformation of the geopolitics of WANA in the aftermath of the Cold War and the commencement of globalization. Past and contemporary histories, and the future shape and trajectory of WANA countries are therefore intrinsically tied to the dynamics of minorities. Intellectual, political, and practical significance of minorities in WANA therefore cannot be overstated. The overarching rationale for this series is the absence of specialized series devoted to minorities in WANA. Books on this topic are often included in area, country or theme-specific series that are not amenable to theoretically more rigorous and empirically wider and multi-dimensional approaches and therefore impose certain intellectual constraints on the books especially in terms of geographical scope, theoretical depth, and disciplinary orientation. This series addresses this problem by providing a dedicated space for books on minorities in WANA. It encourages inter-and multidisciplinary approaches to minorities in WANA with a view to promote the combination of analytical rigor with empirical richness. As such the series is intended to bridge a significant gap on the subject in the academic books market, increase the visibility of research on minorities in WANA, and meets the demand of academics, students, and policy makers working on, or interested in, the region alike. The editorial team of the series will adopt a proactive and supportive approach through soliciting original and innovative works, closer engagement with the authors, providing feedback on draft monographs prior to publication, and ensuring the high quality of the output.
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Papers by Martin van Bruinessen