Islam as resistance

Abstract

Increasing frequency and higher intensity of trans-regional contacts across the Indian Ocean in the course of the 19th century also helped turning Islam into a tool of resistance. The account will begin with the challenge of local power structures in South Sumatra by returning Hajjis inspired by the Wahhabi capture of Mecca and Medina in the early 1800s, resulting in the Padri Wars. This foreshadowed a changing of the guards of the leadership of anti-colonial activities after the Java War of the 1830s, when aristocrats were replaced by religious figures as resistance leaders. Coincidental with the high imperialism of the industrial age, technological advances making traffic between Indonesia and the holy places easier, thus accelerating the arrival of ideas associated with Islamic reformism and modernism. The political translation of these ideas into Panislamist ideologies and the hybrid religious nationalism of ‘Islamic nationhood’ were met with fierce repression on the part of the Dutch Indies colonial authorities. The chapter ends by pointing out that in the same period we also find the roots of the separatism in Aceh which would continue into the independence era.