Modernity and Islamic Spirituality in Indonesia’s New Sufi Networks

Abstract

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Indonesian Sufi traditions were subject to a dual marginalizanon. This came from within the local Muslim community by Muslim Modernists and, from the outside looking in, by social scientists using the Indonesian case to test theories about how religions fare m the process of modernization. At the turn into the twentieth century, Muslim Modernists in the Dutch East Indies, inspired by reformers in the Islamic heartlands of the Near East, undertook a new kind of revitalization of their religion (Azra, 2004; Noer, 1973). Not only did they seek to expunge local accretions to the pure faith of the Prophet Muhammad, as so many reformers had done in the past, but they sought to reopen Islam's canonical texts, the Qur'an and Hadith, to new interpretations (jjtihad) unprecedented in scope. Teir goal was to free the faith of archaisms and release its potential for spiritual leadership in the modem world.