Islam and Its History in Indonesia

7/30/2019 Islam and Its History in Indonesia

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MICHAEL FEENER:

ISLAM AND ITS HISTORY IN INDONESIA

http://crcs.ugm.ac.id/interview/29/Michael-Feener-Islam-And-Its-History-In-Indonesia.html

Talking about Islam in Indonesia, we have to put this huge discourse into some boxes of specific

issues that we try to figure out deeply. As we know, Islam has been seen as a very important

subject of study for the past decade. Many people started re-examining and questioning again

about what we actually mean by Islam. Are there any critical shifts in the history of Islam itself?

What kind of perspectives or approaches should we use to understand it? Here, we discuss

about some general issues that often asked by scholars in understanding Islam especially in

Indonesia.

In a special occasion, Jimmy Marcos Immanuel had a great chance to interview A/P Michael

Feener, an expert on Islamic studies in Indonesia. In this interview they talked about Islam inthe colonial and postcolonial contexts, some contemporary issues of Islam in Indonesia, the

development of Islamic education, and, as the conversation draws to a close, about

approaches to understand shariah andfiqh nowadays.

Michael Feener is an Associate Professor at Department of History of National University of

Singapore (NUS). He is also the research leader at Asian Research Institute of NUS for Religion

and Globalization Cluster. His expertise in Islam discourse has produced some fascinating

publications on Islam, including: 1) Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives

(ABC-CLIO, 2004), 2) Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia (Cambridge University Press,

2007), 3) Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas and Institutions (Harvard UniversityPress, 2001), co-edited with Mark Cammack, and 4) Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies and

South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS Press, 2009), with Terenjit Sevea.

Below is the interview between Jimmy (CRCS) and A/P Michael Feener (MF).

CRCS : Based on a long study of Islam that you have been working on, I saw you also pay so

much attention on the discussion about the history of Islam in Indonesia, in colonial

and postcolonial era. It seems that we need to consider frameworks of colonial and

post-colonial of Indonesia. How do you see these frameworks in understanding

Indonesian Islam?

MF : Yes, we talk about the Islam and its situation in colonial and the post-colonial Indonesia

and I think that in terms of understanding the historical transformation of Indonesia

from the colonial period onward. We really have to realize that the ways colonialism

affected Islam during this period are much more complex than what we usually hear in
http://crcs.ugm.ac.id/interview/29/Michael-Feener-Islam-And-Its-History-In-Indonesia.htmlhttp://crcs.ugm.ac.id/interview/29/Michael-Feener-Islam-And-Its-History-In-Indonesia.htmlhttp://crcs.ugm.ac.id/interview/29/Michael-Feener-Islam-And-Its-History-In-Indonesia.html


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Indonesia. Theres a dominant narrative in Indonesia about the history of colonialism,

and its a story about local independent mostly Muslim sultanates who dont get

attacked and occupied by a foreign non-Muslim power, and then in the Indonesian

nationalist historiography. There are great struggles of these groups to try to fight

against this non-Muslim occupation and establishes Islam new independence.

Now that is a story that has proved powerful and very important for Indonesian

nationalism. But if we actually look at the impacts of colonization on Islam we find

sometimes uncomfortably that theres much more complex than that. That we do not

only see colonialism as something that came in as a potential threat to Islam but in

many ways we can argue that Islam as we know it today not just in Indonesia but all

across the Muslim world is a product, to a certain extent, of the social transformations

of colonialism. And we could see this in a number of ways. We can see this for example

in the ways in which non-Muslims experience a lot of their forms of religiosity today.

A classic example is the hajj. On today's hajj, people have to go through this elaborate

government ministries, the quarantine checks, the quotas per countries, there are all

kind of regulations that determine important aspects of their hajj experience. Theres a

huge bureaucratic apparatus that manages this, and this is the direct legacy of

European colonial governments trying to manage the movement of the population

during the 19th

to 20th

century, with the impacts of steamships and other

transportation technologies developed in the Middle East. Numbers of hajj went from

being a very very small percent of the population for a thousand years to suddenly

being a huge aspect of faith that many Muslims could for the first time in their life

actually do. They didnt realize that for most of Islamic history, alt hough the hajj is

considered the fifth pillar of Islam, very few Muslims (percentage-wise) actually ever

did it. It was largely a very elite phenomenon. Because its very hard to get to the hajj,

especially from Southeast Asia. It took a lot of time and not everybody who had a job

and had a family and had children or had parents to look over could do the hajj. That is

why people get the origin of all these social rituals that you have in many parts of

Indonesia. People basically have an elaborate farewell for the hajj because the idea

was that in many cases people who go to the hajj in the pre-modern period would

never come back. But after technological advances broth to the region during the

colonial period, Southeast Asians have come to make up the largest group of pilgrimseach year despite the distance from Makkah.


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CRCS : Do you mean the paradigm of the pilgrimage or to be a hajj shifted because of some

economic agenda and some other changes in colonial context?

MF : Now of course, people set the journey on a plane at Cengkareng and people get to

Jeddah and they change into their Ihram and they do their hajj and they come back,

and maybe do some duty-free shopping in Jeddah and they come home. That idea that

almost all anyone can make the hajj, at least they who have money in the bank,

revolutionized the way the Muslims the way Muslims understand the five pillars of

Islam. For most of Islam history, the hajj was a very distant dream and if we manage to

go to the hajj and come back well have a very elevated social status. Now, so many

people in your office, in your neighborhood, in your school, they are all hajjis - so it

changed the way which the hajj configures authority and because you get more and

more people going to the hajj first after steamships and now specially after the jet age,

the elaborate government ministries that were first put in place by colonial

governments that were quickly adapted by independent governments like Indonesian

government, which is why the hajj represent such a big part of department of religious

affairs.

So, we see this side of colonialism. Also, if we look, for example at the modern dakwah

movement, both in Indonesia and all over the world. Many people see dakwah

activists as very opposed to Christian forms of mission, and indeed, they very much see

themselves fighting a battle against what they perceive the Christianization of

Indonesia. But nearly every aspect of the modern dakwah movement is in a sense a

direct response to, and imitation of certain Christian missionary tactics that were firstintroduced during the colonial period. So, the ways in which for example the dakwah

movement has been very successful in using the media, first print and now digital, the

way in which they set up network of schools, they ways they set up charitable

organizations like orphanages, and hospitals, they ways in which they conduct public

debates about religion, all the way back to Ahmad Hassan in Persis, the way they set

up public forums where Ahmad Hassan could debate with Christian missionaries, that

in many ways the whole dakwah movement moderned itself on the Christian

missionary movement. And so modern Christian forms of the religious expression of

the religious mission, that were brought under colonialism did not simply oppose Islam

but also have actually influenced the ways that Islam re-shaped itself in the 20th

century.

The idea of a dakwah movement that we have today would have been unimaginable in

Islam before the colonial period. But after the colonial period, this form of religious

expression taken from the Christian missionaries has become very very important in


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the way in which modern Muslim groups have formed themselves in Indonesia. But of

course, this would be very controversial; many people in these movements would say

no, of course, were not imitating Christians. But the fact of the matter is, these

colonial interventions of technology, of social organization and of ways of thinking

about how religion works in society are really brought by Europeans and even thoughthe Europeans did not intend to say give new missionary strategies to the Muslims or

give new technologies to increase the number ofhajjs, it did, however, give them new

models about religious education and ways of spreading and defining their religious

message. This is not what the colonialists thought that they were doing but once these

elements were introduced under Western colonialism, Muslims in Southeast Asia

picked them up and used them for their own purposes. And the adaptation of the

Muslims, created appropriation of all these legacies of colonialism have actually made

a situation in which the Islam of today looks in many ways very very different from

the Islam of two hundred years ago and one very important piece of the historical

development of Islam of this period are the ways in which the Muslims have adapted

and reacted to and appropriated many of the aspects the European style of modernity

brought by colonialism.

CRCS : So, what about the typologies or labels that appeared since the colonial era and then

also the post-colonial era in Moslem communities? Some people call them Indonesian

Muslim, and national Islam and then also Islam progressive. They define themselves.

And, does it also have something to do with the post-Suharto era?

MF : Not just post-Suharto but again its an aspect of modernization and the way in whichwe began to have, the way in which the people dealt with religion being much more a

factor of individual choice and the choice to join or to ascribe to a certain forms of

Islam that modernity brought with it, if we will, a set of, a new range of options.

For much of Indonesian Islamic history, we had a kind of modern civilization that was

very culturally grounded, and it tended to be upheld by, the forms of Islamic in certain

locations tended to be upheld by pretty much everyone in the community. And that

involve in a sense some kind of general adherence to broad principles of Shafiifish. It

meant that generally you have a set of populations who whether they know it or not

were more or less Ash`ari in their theology. And when we look at the formation of

different Sufi tarekat in different parts of Indonesia, very often we see the part of the

tarekatsimply because that was the dominant tarekatin the region. And the modes of

transportation and communication in place meant that the vast majority of Muslims

knew of Islam in the place they grew up and didnt know too much of the other forms

of Islam in other communities.


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Modernization did two things, one the transportation and communication made it

possible for people to participate in the much wider vision of Islam. That is the way

they travel more, they were able to read different things, oh the people who live that

island they do this different thing, they began to get more of a sense of diversity. But

also the modern period also begin to inculcate a kind of an individualist subjectivity,where people now thought its not enough that everybody in my community does that.

But increasingly, I have to decide I have to have this kind of personal faith of

commitment that is about individual choice. And in a sense, it is really general but

again it began to have generated in the 19th

century if we look at the development of

new kinds of tarekat, new kinds of Sufi groups that began to break themselves

throughout of Indonesia about time that in Indonesia in the 19th

century we have a

new kind of Sufi order (tarekat) which spread like various of different model of what it

meant to be a member of a tarekat. It was a new, exclusive model, in which those who

accepted a new order, could no longer also participate in other forms of Islam.

CRCS : So, there is a kind of exclusivity in the tarekatitself?

MF : There is some kind of exclusivity in the new type tarekatthat spread in the 19 and the

early 20th

centuries. But beyond that when we start to look at the rise of modernist

movement like Persis, like Muhammadiyah, for example, that in the early generations

of Muhammadiyah it was not like today, when someone is born into a Muhammadiyah

family. But to make that break, to become a member of the Muhammadiyah people

have a kind of personal choice that people would go and distance themselves from one

of Islam that they grew up with, to another and move to a new form of Islam that theythought it better. And once they begin to have this idea that their form of Islam was a

matter of personal choice, its not just because I got this from my grandparents, but I

think that I should kembali kepada Al-Quran dan sunnah, then they begin to have a

way of thinking about religion. Its not something that is a part of their community but

something that is a part of your individual choice. And if we look from the history of

Muhammadiyah onwards the 20th

century you got not just one big break but many

breaks after that, you begin to get once in the sense the kind of homogenous

background community of Islam of traditionalism is challenged, its not the fact that

you just have old traditional summon of new, modern Islam but the simple idea that

you have a choice means that other ideas proliferate and suddenly you have not just

Muhammadiyah but youve got Persis, youve gotAhmadiyah.

There all kinds of things that show that again at first they arent things that you are

born into but things that individual believers choose. And so you have a kind of

individualism if you will that comes to inform the way Indonesians think about Islam.


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And even if you have some strong reactions that say individualism is a modern

decadent western concept we dont get into that sort of things like salafimovements

today, that say individualism is a modern concept, in fact their whole movement

depends on the idea of a modern western notion of individuality. That these are

people, man and women, who choose to leave whatever form of Islam that they grewup with and become salafis, to show up in their shortened pant legs and grow a goatee

or don a nib, that they make these personal choices. Now, in that case their choice is to

say I used radical choice to get out of what I see a modern decadent framework but

the whole existence and the growth of the movement depends on the modern notion

of individualism.

CRCS : Do you mean we need to see them in the historical context and also to see them in the

etic and emic approaches, something like that?

MF : Well, not just the etic and emic, one of the things I argued in one of my earlier works(Muslim Legal Thought in Modern Indonesia, 2007) is that quite frankly when we look

at the situation like modern Indonesia the tight boxes ofemic and etic no longer really

work. Because what you end up having very often now is the fact that the old emic and

etic discourses have merged together in complex ways. Increasingly now, academics

from 'outside' are learning more from the writings of Muslim intellectuals, and the

work that is done by outside scholars and outside observers about Islam are part of the

emic conversations of Muslims themselves. If we look even to people who are seen as

the great pioneers of Indonesian Islamic revival, look at people like Muhammad Natsir,

for example, and you look at his early writings especially Capita Selecta, hes writing allof this articles about classic figures from Islamic history, so hes writing his essays like

on Ibn Rusyd. If we look at the first editions of this text, Natsir does not cite any Arabic

sources for his knowledge of classical Islam. Because he was brought through a colonial

school system in a member Indonesian European western educated elite, all his

sources for understanding classical Islam come from French, Germany and Dutch

Orientalism. Now, today people read Natsir, to find out what 'real Islam' is - but Natsir

himself was getting his own understandings of Islam from reading French, German and

Dutch Orientalist. See you see the whole idea of a clear etic and emic approach has

become completely clouded. So that when you read, say contemporary Islamic studies

whether its in Indonesian, Arabic or other languages that you see that people like

Clifford Geertz, people like Samuel Huntington, have become part of the conversation -

while at the same time, for example, Western sociologists refer to the work of Ibn

Khaldun.


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All of these figures become important to the parts of the conversation and as the

scholarship develops I think that youre going to realize that in contemporary global

conversations its almost impossible now to create a distinct emic spheres and this is

not just in Islam but anywhere. The globalization of communication meant that we no

longer have this sort of 'pure' self-contained small circle but theres ways in whichthese two circles now interact to such a point that its impossible to pull them apart.

CRCS : In the beginning you said that the transportation and media have been growing fast in

that context. What about the emergence of the Islamic education? As we know, the

Muhammadiyah and Nahdatul Ulama have been developed in their education since

many decades, like madrasas and boarding schools or pesantrens, and we know that

PKS is also growing so fast now. How do you see this phenomenon?

MF : Well, the madrasa in Indonesia, now this is one thing I think sometimes when people

talk more globally about comparative conversations, they realize that what is taken asa madrasa in Indonesia is actually very different from any madrasa in pretty much any

part of the world. And if we look back to the 11th

century, to Bagdad, to the Abbassid

period, the formation of these madrasas. The madrasa were very specific kinds of

schools. They were first of non-state institutions for the most of part. They were

funded not by the government but by wakaf, by private individuals and that they are

really colleges of only one subject. There were colleges of law, these colleges of law

were headed by one professor, or sometimes one professor per mazhab. And that

these professors had the equivalent of what really has the root of modern tenure. That

once these professors were appointed, they were paid by the wakaf. And even if thegovernment didnt like what they said, they could not be fired, they couldnt be

dismissed, they could not be disciplined, they were supported independently by this

wakaf.

In the modern period in Indonesia, however, the type of institution known as the

madras really becomes a fundamentally different and very modern institution.

Madrasas get really introduced at the turn of the 20th

century in Indonesia. Whats

meant by madrasa in Indonesia is very different kind of school, its a modern school.

Its not primarily founded by wakaf. Its not only about law. And it does not sort of

work in the same social dynamics that traditional madrasa did. Traditional madrasas

worked more like traditional models of pesantren, surau, or dayah in parts of

Indonesia, that is you dont have graduated classes, you didnt have any sort of exams,

but you will study with one particular teacher until you have proved that you have

mastered one particular text and you would get a certificate.


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The modern madrasa system again very closely mirrors the new kinds of government

but especially missionary schools established under European influence in Southeast

Asia. So madrasas look very much like missionary schools. They have separate rooms

with separate classes, where people sat in rows, not in the circle around the teacher.

They also had this separate notion of ranking in class by examination system. So youpass an exam from one level up to another. And you have textbooks that were printed

on the new printing press so all the technologies work together. So before if you were

in a madrasa and you had, you know, your teacher up there sort of reading whatever

text and youre supposed writing it down as he speaks. Now everybody has textbooks

and textbooks could be standardized. So you have on one hand the potential of gaining

uniformity, print all the textbooks, all students get textbooks, but then again you also

have this movement that I was talking about before where you have more than one

kind ofmadrasa so then you also have a sort of competing curricula.

You had first, Muhammadiyah curricula, Irshyad curricula, Persis curricula, and you

already had other institutions coming in and so again you have a proliferation of

different ways about thinking about Islam. But I think that most importantly, that the

madrasa system sort of created a new model of bringing together education about

Islam, about selected aspects of Islam and selected aspects of what were generally

considered 'secular' subjects and that really became the new kind of revolution,

because they basically started training more and more of the population with a

combination of some Islamic knowledge and some other knowledge that allowed them

to sort of move up, upward in the new colonial and post-colonial elite.

So that you began to get them by the 20th

century. Fewer and fewer Islamic religious

leaders are formally trained as ulama. Many more went to modern-style madrasas and

many of them also had further training as electrical engineers, dentists, journalists, etc.

These people began to be the people who really set themselves up as the new

spokesmen for Islam in the modern period. Whereas, before the 20th

century the

ulama as a class has a certain kind of class and guild identity they are recognized each

other and they became a member of the ulama by following a particular kind of

education, having a particular vision of Islam. But the 20th

century now, journalists,

dentists, you know, whoever, who had a little of Islamic knowledge could suddenly

write in newspapers, could suddenly going on the radios, could suddenly blog the new

visions of Islam that has changed fundamentally the nature if Islamic authority.

And so you began to have, to get to the next subject on your list here we have

conversations about Islamic law that were directed, increasingly since the 20th

century.

Its not by people whose training was in Islamic but by people whose main training was


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some places else but who cared a lot about Islamic law and who wanted to speak on

Islamic law. Even though they werent trained to classical Islamic law the way the

earlier generations of scholars were, and this fundamentally transformed the kind of

conservations that Indonesians have about Islam, Indonesian have about Islamic law in

the course of the 20

th

century. So that you begin to get people some who came fromreligious backgrounds but taking non-traditional career paths, people like Hamka. But

also people like Hazairin, who wasnt trained at all in formal Islamic studies who really

trained under a sort of Dutch ethnographic studies ofadatlaw. But he sort of emerges

as a major figure in the production of Islamic discourse. You begin to have figures again

like Natsir, Western educated, set of colonial schooling, very well in European

languages became the major figures speaking about Islam. Below this generations then

you have people like Amin Rais, Nurcholis Majid, who went to University of Chicago,

who studied western social sciences, they come back and they become voices of Islam

in Indonesia. And so you begin to see the ways in which the whole parameter of

conversations had been radically changed right over the past century and that in this

radical change has actually allowed for a much greater diversity of Islamic thought than

really anytime before.

CRCS : Is it a good news for Indonesian people or the other a way around? Do we need some

approaches to face it?

MF : Some people found this diversity really empowering, saying now look we got a much

more vibrant sphere of Islamic thought and if we actually look at what is happening in

Indonesia over the past century well see that Indonesia has become probably themost dynamic centers of Islam in the contemporary world. For example, when I buy

books in Cairo, for example, compare to when I buy books in Indonesia the modern

stuffs presented in Indonesia is much more diverse and more interesting. Some people

see that a sign of great strength. Others, however, see this same diversity as a

weaknessand who say that oh this is actually a fracture in the ummah, its actually

creating less consensus, its actually creating us weaker, making us prone to attack.

And what we see again in the course the 20th

century then are different ways in which

the debated on shariah, the debates on Islamic law, the debate on Islam to be more

general have been all over the map but in broad terms we can kind of think of two

major camps. We could start to think of a minimalist approach to reform and

maximalist approach to Islamic reform.

The maximalist approach being those who would say, well in order to really

understand the development of Islam, the development of Islamic laws and society,

we not only have to study classical texts but we also have to study economy, we have


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to study history we have to study all kinds of technology and all the other things that

will help us understand the modern world, so that we can properly apply the shariah

to the conditions in the modern world. So theres this people have to start thinking

about contextualization, they begin to have people who would say about Islamic

finances that would some to something like global economics first. If we want to dosomething on Islamic bioethics, we actually have to understand the bioscience first.

That is a kind of maximalist approach - if you want to understand a sort of social

dynamics they have to understand history, anthropology, whatever whoever who

understands social contexts.

On the other hand we have the minimalists, whose reaction to Islamic reform it to not

spread out and try to get as much knowledge of the modern world as we can to use

that to reformulate Islam. But instead Islam is to actually boil it down, to minimize it,

to in a sense circle the wagons, to say: 'Well all of the other stuff is what made Islam

weak. Instead we want to go back to a clear core of what we think is real Islam, the

Quran and Sunnah, and only by going back to that narrow conception of Islam would

we be strong."

If we can use this kind of too broad categories of ways of kind of organizing and

creating a new typologies Islamic reform in the modern period and we can look that

even in the minimalist camp, even in the maximalist camp there are all kinds of

subdivisions once we start to think about it but the basic is that they help us

understand the major transformations.

CRCS : In relation to your previous statement, what kind of methodological perspectives do

we need in understanding shariah and fiqh in the contemporary world, especially in

Indonesia?

MF : Well, I would just sort of highlight again the ways in which to understand fiqh in the

contemporary world, we need to understand something about the contemporary

world that is we need to understand the history of how it is that we got here. And that

means for example understanding the same kinds of modern colonial transformations

that I talked to you about beforehand. That we can say that Islam, Islamic law rests on

the Quran and Sunnah. And the Quran is a text that we can date back to the 7th

century, the Sunnah has a longer period of genesis but again represents another fact of

the classical Islamic world. Now, we have some people who imagine that if we are able

to jump back to the time of the prophet Muhammad, well be able to understand the

Quran and the Sunnahand well be able to understand Islam.


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The problem is there is such a social and epistemological distance between

contemporary people in the world whether you are Indonesian, Arab or whatever and

7th

century Arabia. Its impossible for us to jump in a time machine back to the time of

the Prophet. Its simply impossible. In order to understand that we have to be

self-conscious and careful about the way we negotiate this historical and culturaldistance. That is we have to understand that the Quran and Sunnah even if we get

them in Indonesian translation in front of us, but its not a clear representation of what

those text meant in the context of the 7th

century Arabia. And the only way that we

can know about the context of Muhammad is by working back through complex steps,

working back through the colonial period, through the early modern period, through

the medieval period, back to the time of the prophet. And people also get to move

some geographical distance, instead of judging the geographical distance from the

Indonesian Archipelago through India through China through all kinds of other places

that in a sense would have roots by which Islam spread to Indonesia.

So, one of the methods or perspectives that we really need to have is one that realizes

that historical changes have transformed the ways by which the Muslims understood

Islam for the past 1400 years. And therefore to understand that we actually have to

work very careful with these changes not simply push all these history away so that we

can jump from 21th

century Indonesia to 7th

century hijrah. That is impossible. What we

have to do is rather than pretending that there is no distance between 7th

century

Arabia and 21st

century Indonesia, what we actually have to do is develop much more

careful critical skills that were able to negotiate that history, will be able to navigate

that history, to trace those changes and see at the different steps what was going on

with the development of Islam, so we can understand how it is that we got from here

from the kind of Islam that was lived by the community of Muhammad, to the way

which Islam is understood today.

CRCS : Its a kind of hermeneutic also that we need to have, you mean?

MF : Yeah, its a kind of hermeneutic also, but in Indonesia hermeneutic has become a dirty

word in some sentences. But again, if we look at the way in which classical Islamic

scholarship look before the modern period, they had their own model of

hermeneutics. But when people go through a commentary say word of tafsiran

Quran, people would have their Mufahzin, their interpreter saying, well you know

here is the Quranic verse, here is a hadith about that Quranic verses, and here is

another hadith about the Quranic verse, and then they would say, and then one

Syeikh had said that the second hadith is more appropriate because it means, it says

that the Quran means this, but another Syeikh had a different view, and that in


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those classical texts oftafsiryou would have in a sense different scholars looking back

to early generations of scholars in evaluating what they thought is the strongest

argument that is traditional Islamic learning was like a hermeneutic and thats the kind

of thing that formed the basis of the classicalist madrasa education, to be able to

understand all the links on the chain going back. Now when we get to the modernperiod we have people who are dentists, or who are engineers or who are, we know,

journalists talking about Islam. They did not take 20 years to study that kind of

hermeneutics, they imagine they can just jump from here to the time of Muhammad.

But because they dont have the training of the classical period they dont realize just

how complex those developments were. Whereas, the traditionalist scholars knew

very well that in order to get from there to here we have to work through a very, very

complex chain of transmissions and interpretations.

CRCS : Okay, thank you for the insights, they are so helpful for new scholars who are starting

to study Islamic studies in Indonesia and probably social theories at the same time.

MF : I think its important to have a knowledge of both Islam and of social theories. We

should not push classical learning away because that material is very important. But

what we have to do is to use them with contemporary approaches as well to begin to

think more carefully about how Islamic texts produce meaning in different social

contexts. That is we can begin to use the tools of history, anthropology, literature and

other approaches, to deal with ancient materials.

Islam and Its History in Indonesia

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