This book offers an original reflection on the factors that have contributed to the faces of Islam in Indonesia today. It is fascinating, and brilliant in the lines of argument and interplay of themes that it develops, and despite the liveliness, at times playfulness of style, is dense and closely argued in its texture.
Michael Laffan first outlines the global position of the great archipelago of Southeast Asia, and the first evidences there of Islam. They proved to be seeds of a religious, social and intellectual culture in the region that in a millennium was to interact with and transform its societies, and their relations with the wider world, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
Individuals and the roles they play are a major part of the work. The preface at once establishes this human dimension, juxtaposing two figures with almost legendary status in the study of Indonesian Islam, Snouck Hurgronje: an Islamologist and ethnographer; and Clifford Geertz: an anthropologist-observer with a genius for theory, but not significantly informed on Islam as a religion.
The range of sources the author has excavated, among them Dutch, Arabic and Malay, is wide. And out of them, from the late sixteenth century on, he has distilled a narrative that situates the diverse participants in a complex, shifting world. It was one the Dutch did not understand, and they were ill-equipped to cope with the tensions and dislocations resulting from their intrusion in it. The consequences were revealed in the evolving policies of the VOC — later the Dutch government — and the relations between the Dutch authorities and missionaries and vice versa; between missionaries and Muslims, and the responses of Muslims to both; and those of Muslims with each other, and to Muslims elsewhere, either as close as Singapore, or as distant as Mecca and Cairo.
Laffan's narrative, based on local religious and literary works, and the correspondence, diaries, and government reports of the participants in these ensuing processes, reveals their personalities, thought worlds, and responses to the situations they inherited or created. There are lovely accounts of their early attempts to prepare textbooks for the study of Malay, and their bewilderment at some Muslim devotional practices — incense, beads, ceremonies at graves and prayers for the dead — which to the Calvinist Dutch appeared ‘Papist’.
From the seventeenth century on, the personalities of Dutch administrators, scholars and missionaries and the many-sided roles they played come clearly into view. None rivals Snouck Hurgronje, and Laffan presents a striking portrait of this giant of colonial history. He comes across as part scholar, part idealist and part shyster, successfully leading a double life in his avatars as a Dutch official and as the Muslim Abd al-Ghaffar. As a rationalist with a Calvinist background, he had a normative understanding of Islam. He regarded the Reformism of Muhammad Abduh as representing an ‘orthodoxy’, and believed that such an understanding of Islam would ultimately qualify the Indonesians to be equal associates with their Dutch rulers in the West. By contrast, he had little sympathy for the theosophy of the Sufi tariqa, dismissing their theosophy as heretical and pantheistic, and believed them to be sources of anarchy and opposition to enlightened Dutch rule (p. 195).
There is a tendency to equate ‘Sufism’ with a disregard for legal obligation, a fortiori as if its theosophy embraces the concept of wahdat al-wujud. This is by no means the case, and polemical generalisations on all sides when the issue is raised need to be examined with care. So Laffan's remark that eighteenth-century Jawi scholars reaaffirmed the ‘Ghazalian norms that segregated law and mysticism’, may be based on a polemical misrepresentation. ‘Ghazalian norms’ (p. 40) do not segregate, rather they integrate law and mysticism. For al-Ghazali, obedience to the Law was an essential foundation for progress along the mystical path.
There are a few slips in the handling of words and etymologies, both in the body of the text and the glossary. The Javanese word kaji, to study, is not derived from hajj the pilgrimage (p. 75), but another derivative of the same root, meaning to argue or reason. The book title Tuhfat al-muhtaj (p. 96) is not ‘Gift of the needy’, but ‘Gift to the one in need’ — the idafa construction is not reducible to an English genitive. The glossary needs fine-tuning. Abangan is a portmanteau term: it includes the ‘red ones’, i.e. ethnic Javanese, peasantry, and laxity in religious observance. All three components are implicit in the word. The definition of Wahdat al-wujud as unity of being between God and Creation is oxymoronic!
Petty carping aside, this is a wonderful book. Laffan shows how active, and indeed proactive were Muslims in the region that is now Indonesia, how firmly established and long-standing were their relations with Muslims in the Indian sub-continent, and ‘heartlands’ of the Muslim world, effectively exposing the vacuity of generalisations about ‘heartland’ and ‘periphery’.
Perhaps the last word may rest with Snouck Hurgronje. He wrote to Noldeke of his ‘absolute conviction’ that Indonesia would prove the most likely site of a rapprochement between Islam and humanism (p. 194). Today this conviction seems to have been remarkably prescient! Even so, it was a prescience without foreknowledge of the tortuous path history would follow, or a realisation that the ‘orthodox’ — in Snouck Hurgronje's view, the ‘rational’ aspect of Islam rather than the tariqa tradition — might provide soil for the seeds of anarchy and terror to be cultivated by al-Qa‘ida.
