Islamic State of Indonesia in modern Indonesian memorial culture

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of the perception of the Islamic State of Indonesia (1949–1962) in modern Indonesian memorial culture and historical collective memory. It is assumed that the ideological contradictions and methodological difficulties of localizing the history of Islam in the culture of memory of Indonesia are aggravated by the collective traumas of mutual violence and mistrust between secular nationalists and their Islamic opponents. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of the attempts of the Indonesian society to form a compromise canon of the culture of historical memory as a space for dialogue and development of the images of the Islamic State, which was previously the object of negative mythologization, which led to its marginalization in the collective historical memory. The author analyses 1) the features of the imagination of the Islamic State in the politics of memory, 2) the prospects and contradictions of integrating the history of the Islamic State into the historical imagination of the memorial culture of Indonesia, 3) attempts to revise the history of the Islamic State in the context of the development of the memorial culture of modern Indonesian society. The results of the study suggest that Indonesian society is active in its attempts to use the mechanisms of historical politics to form a new image of the history of the Islamic State, seeking to build a compromise version of the memorial culture, which would include secular and religious versions of historical memory.