Indonesian Islam

Abstract

Detailed, extensive, and provocative, this book presents and assesses twentieth-century Indonesian fatawa (legal rulings) on a range of issues. Over thecourse of his well-documented discussion of decisions rendered by fourmain Indonesian fatwa-issuing bodies, Hooker highlights their methods ofreasoning and the authorities they heed. He argues “that only the fatawa cantell us what Islam is on” the continuum of merging state and religiousauthorities in Indonesia at the beginning of the twenty-first century (p. ix).Confronting the question of secularism and revelation, as well as tensionsbetween new and old authorities, Hooker posits the authority of God,revealed Islamic knowledge, and 1,400 years of intellectual tradition intertwinedwith colonial and postcolonial state authority in complex ways.This book consists of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue andappendix of Indonesian fatawa sources. The substantial introduction beginsby reviewing the ideas of several Middle Eastern reformers who had aninfluence on “defining” Indonesian Islam, especially in the early twentieth century. However, underscoring the distinctiveness of indigenous IndonesianIslam, Hooker describes its particular characteristics, such as itsemphasis on the Shafi`i madhhab (legal school), local legal texts, sixteenthtoeighteenth-century tasawwuf literature, royal court literature, and thediverse translation of Islamic prescriptions into daily life. Despite this diffuselocalization of Islam, the Dutch colonial state and the subsequent Republic ofIndonesia severely limited Islam’s public presence until the recent passage oftwo legal initiatives.Finally, Hooker discusses the “new scholasticism” in Indonesia, thecrux of his introduction, in which he stresses four Indonesian intellectuals:Hazairin, Harun Nasution, Nurcholish Madjid, and Abdurrahman Wahid. Heasserts that they represent a “creative” rather than a “responsive scholasticism,”first emerging in the 1960s, that is “self-confident enough to proposeserious change, alteration,” and “adaptation of classic scholasticism” (p. 45).This section, which takes an optimistic tone toward these four intellectuals,appears to be disconnected from the rest of the book. None of them areclosely related to the four fatwa-issuing bodies, except for AbdurrahmanWahid, a former leader of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and president of Indonesiawho has become increasingly isolated from mainstream Indonesian Islamdue to his perceived commitment to liberal democratic values over Revelation.On the other hand, a discussion of scholars prominent at significanthistorical junctures mentioned later in the text would have been moreinsightful and would have contributed to the author’s overall argument ...